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.