Bordeaux and Palmiers

Even though we take a lot of field trips, with a group of 20 kids, we almost always eat at home. The one exception is the restaurant at the campground in Tuchan: La Peirière. Known for its pizza, it also sometimes throws themed evenings complete with a dinner, such as this Soirée Africaine with paella from a few weeks ago.

While the paella was mediocre (this really is a pizza joint), the night itself was a lot of fun. We started off with a swim in the campground’s pool, which is free both for people who are eating at the restaurant and people who are staying at the campground. When the pool closed at 7:30, we moved on to the festivities.

During dinner, which consisted of paella and an ice cream dessert, there were women doing African-style hair braiding, which one of our counselors and one of our campers took advantage of.

Afterwards was the real show: an African band that played music and danced. It took only a few songs before the kids got into it, and fairly soon, the small dance floor between the stage and the bar was flooded with our Americans. As the sun went down, everyone else joined us, and the band began to teach us some of the words to their songs.

I have no idea if we sang them properly. It almost felt like Club Med, the way that they repeated one or two words over and over to allow our challenged, foreign ears to try to latch on to the African language. But everyone had a blast, even if we had no idea what we were singing.

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