Countdown, trying to keep my head, and Cointreau

It is easy to say that it is countdown time at CIDEF. Yet, I don't know if I can say I'm feeling that things are getting any livelier around here. We have two and a half weeks until finals but this weekend is a four day weekend due to the Ascension and the next weekend is three days due to Pentecost. As a result, there is this mixed and confused sense of not having much time and yet a lot simultaneously. As a heads up, I'll been heading off on Friday to the seaside Atlantic town of La Rochelle. It isn't well known by the foreigners but it would seem to be a French favorite. I reason that if it inspires French sighs of envy when I mention going there, it has got to be worth my time. The forecast does call for rain which inspires no shock or sadness in me as the weather has been miserable for the past week and a half. The natives are as disappointed with the weather as the foreign students. This May has been exceptionally cold and wet. Thankfully La Rochelle is more than just the beach. It has one of France's best maritime museums and one of its largest aquariums. I don't swim all the great anyway and my skin's so pale I'd probably burn before I getting a decent tan.

Both of these future long weekends are French national holidays with obligatory paid vacation with they fall on a working day as with all others. These past two Saturdays were national holidays as well. Meaning? France is as closed down on those days as if it were Sunday. Needless to say perhaps, I didn't use the train yet again this past Saturday but my good luck landed me an invite to the Cointreau distillery with AHA (American Heritage Association in association with the University of Oregon. This whole time I've forgotten to explain that.)


Cointreau is a French hard liquor and is made only in Angers. The tour ended with a taste test and here myself and other female Americans who have gone to the French bars had a good comparison talk between of a French girl's and an American girl's attitude to hard liquor. For almost all of us, we found Cointreau to definitely be a hard liquor but an incredibly sweet and rather feminine in taste because of it. That is not to say that that is a bad thing. In fact, I fell in love with it. In contrast though to our reaction, while drunk by both sexes in France Cointreau has traditionally been more popular with French men than women. Currently, the Cointreau PR people have explained, they are studying the ad campaigns of American liquor companies to try and attract a more feminine group of buyers.



The building of the distillery itself is deceptive on the outside. It looks incredibly small for what it houses. Unfortunately, you'll have to either take my word for it or go to Angers yourself because photography the majority of the tour is forbidden. I still have the distillers themselves to put up!