Quelle semaine!

Just in case anyone is imagining that spending a year in France is all foie gras and vin rouge, here's how this week has gone... on Tuesday, our boiler stopped working. We're getting frosts now, so heat isn't exactly a luxury. Chris has been studying the boiler manual, calling our landlords, calling the fuel company, calling the boiler repairman. There's some hope that simply topping up the tank, which is low but not empty, will magically fix the boiler.

In the meantime we're scavenging wood from the yard and huddling around the fireplace. We have one hot water bottle to fight over.

 

Finally, this morning, the fuel truck arrives. Boiler does not magically begin working. Fuel guy and Chris determine that something is wrong with the fuel filter, which is sucking in too much air. Fuel guy tells Chris to stop calling the boiler guy, and to go over to his house at lunchtime and beg for mercy. So Chris drove over to the next village and roamed around looking for a Boiler Guy Van, banged on his kitchen door, and convinced him to come over later this afternoon. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, I'm waging war with USAirways. When I made the plane reservations last April, the agent told me I was not allowed to make a return reservation so far in the future, and that I would have to make a phony return date and change it later on. (Paying the change fee, of course.) Waiting to make the reservations was not an option, he agreed, because trying to get four tickets in late July to fly to Paris in August is impossible, all the seats would be booked.

 

But yesterday when I tried to make this change, the USAirways agent told me that since I had chosen to make the reservations in April, the returns were only valid through the following April, and our tickets were useless. After much desperate explaining that I had only followed the first agent's recommendations, she got busy with the supervisor and poof! the tickets were valid again.

 

Except. Chris and I used dividend miles for our tickets, and there are no award tickets available for our return date, or anywhere near it. "You'll have to buy new tickets for you and your husband," she said. All we need are one-way tickets. No problem. They're only $3500. Apiece.

 

The other alternative is to buy new round-trip tickets, for $1450 apiece (what a deal!). Then we end up with a return trip to Paris we can't use -- even if we did, we end up on the other side of the pond again with no way to get back. And we lose the dividend miles even though we wouldn't be using a travel award ticket.

 

Following this? No need to bother with the details -- the conclusion is, that on USAirways at least, it's impossible to fly to France for a year without buying an extra set of tickets. I declined to buy an extra set and am going to check the website every day hoping some dividend miles tickets become available. If not, we'll stay here and eat foie gras indefinitely.

I'm going to skip the story of the USAirways agent at the Charlottesville airport who knew nothing about visas and told us we weren't allowed to board. USAirways? They stink. (And so do we, after four days of no hot water.)

 

We were warned about the implacable French bureaucracy and how difficult getting the necessary papers would be. But so far all our dealings with both the Embassy at home and the préfecture here have been quick, easy, and friendly. USAirways, not so much.

Café de la Place

Villamblard is not a touristy village. A bank, a bakery, a butcher, a little market, a distillery, and the Café de la Place -- that's it for commerce. Last Friday we had run out of groceries and strolled over for dinner. Inside a few men were having beers. I asked the propriétaire if they were open for dinner (well, what I said was "Dîner?") and she nodded, trotted back to speak to the chef, came back out and said something we didn't understand, and showed us to the dining room, turning on the lights on her way.

Pizza for the kids. Chris and I ordered from the prix fixe menu, 15 euros. The first course was a salade aux gébiers. I hesitated about telling Chris what gébiers are, as he has just become adventurous enough to eat olives. And there was that mix-up over the rognons de veau (veal kidneys) many years ago that he hasn't forgotten. But he wanted to know. All right then, they're gizzards. He blanched slightly, but overall was a picture of bon courage. 

It was past seven, and we were the only ones in the dining room. Curious. Two little scruffy dogs came over to see if we had anything for them. The room had an air of having looked exactly the same way for thirty or forty years -- there were old bullfighting posters on the walls, some aged curtains, rectangular discolored places where some pictures had hung for a long time and been taken down. 

The salade aux gébiers came, and it was surpassingly good. The gébiers were warm, very tasty little nuggets on a heap of lettuce, all sprinkled with a raspberry vinaigrette. For the next course we both had duck breast, mine grilled and Chris's in a green peppercorn sauce. Ohh. Blindingly fantastic. Perfect. Julian began poaching pieces off my plate. A pile of diced zucchini, loaded with olive oil and garlic, perched on one side of the plate, next to a mound of potatoes sauteéd with shallots and mushrooms that may be the best thing I have ever eaten. Ever. Just writing about it now is making me feel faint.

I had a moment of horror -- now that I'm back to being gluten and casein-free, I thought, well of course the potatoes are delicious, they must be drowning in butter! But we inspected them closely. No, it was something else.... duck fat. I am going to be daydreaming about those potatoes for the rest of my life.

I passed my fig tart dripping in cream to Chris, who also had genoise with peaches and pears. Julian and Nellie had chocolate ice cream with little balls of whipped cream on the sides.

Ours was the only dinner the Café de la Place served that night. I weep for the chef. We'll have to do our best to keep him busy.

Le Marché d'automne

Yesterday Julian's school had its annual Fall Market, a fundraiser organized by the parents' association. Notices had hinted at the possibility of wild mushrooms, but even though it's been quite rainy, there were none by the time we got there. For sale at tables arranged in the schoolyard was anything anyone could find at home that someone else might buy. A table of books and small stuffed animals. A table of turnips, black radishes, and leeks, along with a few jars of pureé de carrottes. A table of chestnuts and walnuts gathered from someone's orchard. The woman who's in charge of cantine tickets was making waffles sprinkled with sugar, which Nellie and Julian dove into with abandon.

There was an old woman who had brought a dozen eggs, a fuschia, and a three pigeons in a small cage. Julian saw one of his classmates buy one of the pigeons and take it away in a plastic bag. Julian reports that this classmate gets into fights more than anyone else.

While Chris was buying a cake, I was inspecting the jars of jam covering one table. "It looks like chutney," I said to him in English.

  "Non, c'est la figue," said the woman next to me. We both picked up a jar and looked closely. "Non," she said, "Pas figue. Je ne sais pas ce qu'elle est." 

"Moi non plus," I answered. She laughed at hearing me speak French. Then she found me a jar of fig preserves.

"Merci," I said.

"You're welcome," she answered, and then we both cracked up laughing. I know, it's not actually funny, but there's something about using another language that's funny before you even say anything. It was like we had just met and were trying on each other's clothes.

École d'Issac

Because people are leaving the countryside for big cities, where the work is, village schools here in the Dordogne are having trouble rounding up enough kids. So to consolidate classes, Nellie does not go to the school in our village, Villamblard, where Julian goes. Instead she takes a small bus a few miles away to Issac. Above are some snaps of her school and schoolyard.

Yesterday I had a meeting with her teacher, who proclaimed Nellie to be très très formidable, serious about her work, participating in class, and beginning to say some French words in class. 

Nellie herself was more excited to have a visit from the little French mouse, who takes the place of the tooth fairy over here. Plus a snap of Chris walking the kids to school in the morning...

Untranslatable

I keep encountering words and phrases in French that can't be translated into English. For a mundane example, when Nellie's French teacher hands her a worksheet, she says, "Oup!" (I'm spelling phonetically.) When my French teacher started class, she'd say, "Oup!" It means something like, "Here we go!" but that isn't quite it. You could say it getting into your car. You could say it giving money to the woman in the pâtiserrie, if you did that sort of thing. In English there is nothing equivalent.

Eh bien is similar, as fans of Agatha Christie are well aware. 

People here often say, "Bon courage!" to each other. It's kind of translatable -- it means something like "Have fortitude!" But when's the last time you heard that?

My examples are minor ones but nevertheless they are expressions of ideas. And what's interesting to me is that those ideas are not being expressed in American English. There's an empty space there.

It's a staggering thought really, that venturing into a different language does not simply mean replacing thoughts in one language with the same thoughts in another. It means having opportunities for entirely new thoughts, and new ways to talk to other people.