Northern Hemisphere 2006 -
Part 4 - Gye sur Seine - Bucks/Hens party.

So, with the last days of freedom at hand for our happy couple, it was time for some serious letting loose on the night of the Bucks and Hens parties. Would Jem be sat in a chair stripped naked, drunk, and be tarred and feathered with Vegemite and cornichons? Would Arielle for her part be subjected to a strip-o-gram (look but don't touch) and sing karaoke Nancy Sinatra songs and bawl with her friends wearing cheap tiaras with eye makeup running everywhere? Well, no.

Actually it wasn't a traditional bucks and hens night for many reasons, the most startling to me was that both were held in the same place at the same time, organised by the same people. Little chance of vegemite strippers here... But we gathered at the large and rustic winery shed not knowing what to expect. On meeting many of j&a's mates, shaking hands and getting acquainted, a plan for the night was starting to emerge. The couple were to be set a series of challenges, like some reality TV show, except real.
First off they had to wear the overalls of the vigneron, helmets, big gloves, wellington boots, a la mode oh yeah...



My brother is the one with the long hair.

Challenge #1 was to run in this astronaut-garb on a foot race down the steep sloping driveway up to the house, then around and back up an even steeper laneway. Rather them than me. A crew of 20 friends and family too cheered on the racers sweating and tromping around... Jem was clearly in the lead, even with all those cigarettes he smoked, but what was this - he's stopped, grabbed his fiance's hand and is dragging her up the laneway! Some competition! Anyway the whole damn sweetness of it overcame the bloodthirsty-for-results crowd, and it was declared a tie.

Dexterity next... in the champagne caper, there is a mad process where the champagne bottles must be undone, somehow with minimal spillage, and recorked, with removal of something from the immature wine. I think it's called riddling and disgorging, or maybe that's what we did after we drank it, I can't remember.

So this challenge #2 was for the guys to uncork a half-dozen each in the quickest time, losing the least precious bubbly. A crowd pleaser, this one, though the anglos were on one side and the frogs were on the other. Jem seemed to have the measure of this one I think, but he spilled more. Anyway whatever happened, there was far too little spray and splatter for my liking, despite the perennial enjoyment of corks popping. This was a bucks party for god's sake. I jumped in and grabbed a bottle, and in true F1 McLaren style, shook the cleanskin all over the astronauts and onlookers, and a spray-battle was in flight. I'd always wanted to do that, I'll never win any road races.

That was what I think we could have called an icebreaker, and started more conversations between us all, this lovely bunch of friends here and antipodean visitors eager to try out some vocabulaire. Time for challenge #3 which was far more refined and was a good old blind tasting contest of regional wines. At least they would start to get a head start in the drinking stakes, and the mob were happy. I'm going to do injustices to people by forgetting names, even our lovely hosts, but they poured from the cloaked bottles and our heroes shoved their noses in the drink to try to ascertain region, year and grape. This was hilarious - some of the first wines were fine, they showed glimmers of recognition and enjoyed the whites. Then came the dogs... There were a couple of retch-inducing sewagey specials from somewhere under the house, and it was impossible to determine if these were even wine!

Suddenly we didn't envy the couple, as they had to drink all of their serves, and one of the bottles wasn't even wine but was an off cider! I should mention that the winner of this contest avoided waiting on the entire party pouring wine at beck and call for the whole night. Arielle won, which was great, immediately we called for Jem to fill our glasses, which remained the chorus for the long night.

The champagne was now flowing, with mercifully small glasses in France, such a great idea, apart from encouraging sobriety, it meant Jem was used to his utmost with us calling for refills constantly. The poor lad, we were merciless, as soon as he sat down someone would call for more, he would obey unquestioning. The night was getting noisier, and parents decided that they should leave us to the fun, with protests from us all (real protests!) but they had better things to do so left us to it.

Then the national anthems started up. All the Aussies sang the Skippy song, the weetbix song, the aeroplane jelly song, waltzing matilda (which was great because Pierre's girl is called Mathilde!) Whereas the French sang their Marseillase and many other hilarious tunes. Jem and Jordan impressed with some dialogue from Skippy too, and all this proved absolutely nothing about the superior musicality and cultural superiority of either nation...

But we were having a ball nonetheless. It was 10pm and I think we started to feel like it was time to eat dinner. An hour later, some cheese, bread, and intestine sausages came out, and we started to eat. Luckily all the food was cold, because it would have been blacker than hell if it were cooked, so we settled in at the tressle table and ate. Yum, what a lovely selection it was, the blue cheese, and the very stinky garbagedump cheese, even the intestine sausage (andouillettes) found their way into my heart and my belly. (My normally fish+vegetarian menu was out the window on this trip.)

So the meal swerved on, and we found our way at dessert, which was to be the biggest surprise - ice cream is fine, but we had never had 50 year old champagne liqueur with a kick like a mule around the ice cream! Whoa! This caused my sister to reassess how drunk she was, and the rest of us... strong gear indeed. Certainly it made for good conversation, and I loved chatting to Alain, Laurence, Arnaud, Pierre, Arielle, lovely company, and soon the music was pumping from the rather flimsy stereo system quite loud and encouraging us to get out there on the (concrete) dance floor and shake it! This is where cultural differences started to really kick in, and the French were soon laughing at my dancing, which of course only encouraged me.

Jem and Arielle were not excessively drunk, but Jem and Jodie did manage some pretty funny dancing, up there, while the CD player skipped mercilessly like a vicious and dyslexic breakbeat DJ, we managed to find moments of rhythm to string some moves together. I vaguely remember doing some sort of guitar moves with a broom which I think I broke. Ah, shameless alcohol.

So we danced to crap 1980's music, which we all loved, and ignored the skipping, I remember Duran Duran and Men at Work, and Madonna, among others, but it blurs into a 2manyDJ's set, and I only have photos to fall back on.

The night blurred on, and I think we retired upstairs to drink coffee, and talk on couches, and there was the beginnings of real cameraderie between the foreigners and the frenchies. Fun was had by all. Jodie swears that at this stage of the night I answered a question in my sleep, which may or may not have occurred.

Somehow we made it back down to our beds and slept, but in the end, enough debauchery, booze, and surprises to make up a successful bucks and hens night, was had by all.

Northern Hemisphere 2006 - Part 3 - Troyes, Champagne

After grungy, lovely Paris (a taste, un peu, it's not enough!) we headed on the train out to the East, away from the sea, away from the charm of Paris which we had barely scratched-and-sniffed.

We said goodbye to Hotel Regent, and scored a friendly, direct, and cheap cab to the railway station!!! Yes, I know, we all win the lottery sometime. Noni and I were on our own after Michael's journey would take him over to another cosmo metro centre, New York. I had introduced him to the aural madness and joys of Jamie Lidell and Michael was going to be lucky enough to catch him in concert over there...

So, into the train station and onto our train, which was a rather formal affair, with special booth seats, and that wonderful train announcement system sold and maintained by Shit PA dot com, but we settled in our seats finally and enjoyed the high speed trip out east. We filmed blurry racing bushes and farmhouses, practiced some more Francaise, and ate our hotel food booty stash from breakfast.

Troyes approached fast, and we had a while before the bus left for Gye sur Seine, so we headed off in search of. Something. The bookshop (Librarie) we stumbled across was just surreal and rustic, and though the price was right, the range of books were just all wrong. We couldn't find anything in French at the right level of informative, twee, or artsy-fartsy... Finally I found a book of Kafka letters, and tried to engage the owner in polite chat, which was impeded by the dialect of Troyes, and his lack of English. Suddenly the prospect of a wedding full of non english speakers wasn't looking appealing...

After almost missing our bus writing postcards and eating extravagant and silly ice-cream concoctions at the Crocodile Cafe, we were en route to Champagne. The bus slowed to a jog at one stage when we were stuck behind a cyclist with iPod firmly entrenched in ears, who did not hear the bus up his derriere for a kilometre! The countryside got lovely with sunflowers and
vines starting to appear. I felt at home when we went past the big Cork, very Australian to have a Big Champers Cork, I thought.

So we arrived at the little villiage Gye sur Seine, which was full of flowers and streets with the same name - Rue des Vignes, Rue des Vannes, easy to get lost! We were well met off the bus by Arielle, Jem, parents and Bogart, the ubiquitous collie cross dog of the happy couple. In fact Bogart would be jealous unless I referred to them as the happy trio. His presence would be felt in the week to come as he stamped his belonging on all ceremonies and gatherings.

It's funny when you travel and see your friends and family, often they seem much more grown-up, responsible but in a good way.

So we continued the invasion of Jem and Arielle's house, which was becoming very Aussie-fied. The couple somehow welcomed us all and there were always croissants hot, cheeses stinky, and/or beers cold, depending on the position of the sun around the sky.

My sis, Jodie, was so happy her little bro was tying the knot, and was in great mood. Actually it was probably a procrastination tactic from her PhD come to think of it... (heh heh) and we stayed around the house chatting on the first afternoon, catching up. Suddenly we were accosted by a wizened and homely old visitor, a hugely enthusiastic French man who came trundling up to the door looking for... anyone.... We would do, it seemed, as he put arms around our shoulders and spoke in that throaty dialect again - oh dear... What is he saying, something about a letter... he smells like he's been drinking... yes, frere, et soeur de Jem... oui, ah, the hugs increased, and we were entrusted with some sort of letter for him. Suddenly after bouts of laughter and lots of physical contact, he headed off, and we embarrasingly realised we had had a visit from the priest!

He'd left some sort of acceptance from the Catholic diocese in the region, and we hoped he would be as good value during the ceremony. We weren't disappointed.

How could we not be charmed by the region, Arielle's home, simple life, shops shut for siestas in the afternoon, flowers seemed to grow more colours there, trout fisherman stood in the Seine, the Town Hall and Church had been standing for longer than our country had been settled by whiteys, and there was Champagne to go round.