House and family

So I probably should have done this for one of the the first posts, but here is a little bit about my host house and family:

This is the entrance.  You can see the coats on the rack and part of the door, as well as some of the kitchen. The floor is beautiful clean white tile.  Dirt just can't hide at all.  I will never have this floor, because even if I put white tile on my floor, I'll never have the initiative to sweep or vacuum it every couple of days.  There are also a lot of plants throughout the house (another beautiful home item I would never be able to maintain.  At least a floor can't die).  This is another sneaky part of French culture that isn't at all obvious.  When the French invite guests over for an aperetif, meal, or other such visit, the conventional gift is a bouquet of flowers or a small plant.  For a larger gift, perhaps for family you don't see often or a special occasion, you would give a house plant that can be maintained.  In France the weather is generally quite mild, so temperature is not a limiting factor.  It is common to receive small cacti and palm trees.  Over time, and if you're good at repotting and maintaining plants, your house may have plants all over the place, in every room.  Like this one.  There are flower shops everywhere selling all kinds of flowers and plants all year round.  Sophie even commented that they couldn't find a flower shop in Canada when they went to visit her cousin in Quebec.  I think it's a temperature thing, It's hard to generate a culture around flowers when you can only have them outside 3 months a year.

This is the dining table, a cupboard and the start of the living room:

A view of outside, in the summertime the family eats on the deck seen here.

Here is the living room, there is a fireplace and sofas:

Here is the veranda, on warm days in October and September we sometimes ate dinner here:

My Host Family  :)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention: I do hope I get a chance to take a picture for you, but Olivier has a mustang. He bought it here from someone who imported it from the States.  He's rather proud of it and likes to drive it on weekends and holidays when it's nice outside.