Where has the month gone? Our life has changed with the sunny weather -- now, instead of being huddled inside, on the computer or reading, we're outside chatting with whoever has dropped by or going to what seems like a million different festivities of one kind or another.

 

On Saturday we move to a gîte in Issac for our final week in France. We're all very, very sad.

 

I don't think I'll be blogging life in Charlottesville, but who knows, maybe it will look different after having been away for a year.

 

Thanks for reading.

La Randonnée

On Tuesday both schools had a day-long randonnée, which consisted of biking, walking, and picnicking (of course), with some cultural/historical learning thrown in. Chris and I went along with Julian's class. I was a bit unsure how I would handle the 10K but quickly found my role as nudger and prodder of stragglers, and managed just fine.

All the students in the Dordogne were out on randonnées that day, and so it felt -- and this happens a lot in France -- like we were not just a little group doing its activity and going about its business, but were part of something larger, something shared. The children in my group sang as we walked down the road and the path that wound through the fields, and held hands, and boys walked with their arms around each other's shoulders. One of my stragglers confessed that he was starving and offered to share a hunk of cake he had hidden in his jacket. The whole group were avid pickers and pluckers of anything at all, and we had to stay on top of them so they didn't decimate the cornfields. Here they are lunging at poppies...

Our first stop was the Chateau Montréal, which is in the distance here...

Of course the picnic involved sandwiches, the usual and scrumptious butter-and-ham-on-baguette, but also there were half-tomatoes and little quiches. The longer part of the walk came after, as we wound through the woods and past houses that had me faint with envy. The children were yanking up the newly sprouted fern fronds and chasing, poking, and fanning each other with them. We stopped to see a dolmen, a kind of prehistoric table made of big stones, thought to have been part of a burial ritual. We stopped at a prehistoric forge, where we could find hunks of rock with iron ore, and hunks of rock that were the leftover bits after smelting, or at least you could, en principe, find these things; at that point in the hike I could no longer bend over, and I'm not sure many of the adults could. And my dogs were barking. My stragglers had gotten a second wind after lunch and were no longer straggling, and not a whine was heard from any of the children, even as we approached our 10th K.

Now that we're practically in our last month here, we've discovered the absolutely fantastic map series that shows not just the roads, not just the back roads, but all the houses and footpaths, so, en principe, we're ready for all manner of randonnées ourselves. Next year.

La Fête des Fraises

I was all excited to go to Vergt yesterday to celebrate strawberries, and celebrate we did, which means we stuffed ourselves silly. The Dordogne is the strawberry capital of France, at least that's what the flyers say, and the best part is that we don't just have strawberries when the season comes around, we get at least five different varieties to choose from, varieties that don't necessarily travel well, although I bet you can get them in Paris anyway. 

There was a table for rating the different varieties; you took a pen and a slip of paper that had spaces for notations as well as your ranking for each kind, then sampled from the five boxes of lettered but unnamed strawberries. After handing in our slips, we got another paper telling us which was which. From best to least best (but still good), mine went Charlotte, Darselect, Cirafine, Mara des Bois, and Gariguette. All of us participated enthusiastically and all of us had wildly different rankings. We weren't sure whether our tastes were that different or whether the strawberries varied quite a lot from berry to berry. Obviously a distinction that requires more investigation at home, possibly with whipped cream and lots of it.

Tucked away in a side street we found some organic Mara des Bois, which I've already had with both crème fraîche and whipped cream (equally good).

There were chefs-in-training making strawberry concoctions for the crowd. And there was a gigantic tart for which each village of the commune contributed a section, but we didn't stay long enough to get a taste. Because unfortunately we were afflicted by the Curse of Vergt. Vergt is a nice enough village deep in the countryside, big enough to have an ATM and a few restaurants. But every time we go there, bad humor descends on all of us and we end up snapping, crying, arguing, snarling, and sulking and generally falling apart. How, you may ask, could anyone be in a bad mood when grown men are dressed up as strawberries?

When there are strawberry tarts to be eaten along with saucisse and frîtes with mayonnaise? I do not know. But we had to hurry home to get away from the Curse before somebody got hurt.

In Bourrou

We got a flyer announcing some kind of celebration in Bourrou, a nearby village for which we'd passed the turn-off many times but never been to. So we went, taking Nellie's friend Pauline with us. It was gloriously, finally sunny, and the first thing we saw after getting our tickets was a homemade beach, complete with many pails and shovels and umbrellas. Nellie and Pauline pulled off their shoes and went to work. In a grassy area there were frisbees and tetherball. Everyone was walking around smiling and looking a bit dazed by the sun after so many months of rain.

As usual we only partly understood what was going on, but like sheep we managed to follow the crowd over to the lovely churchyard, and settled in to hear a story, a kind of funny fairy tale. After that the whole group walked to another spot, in front of an old stone house down a lane, and we heard another story, this time with a woman -- who must be a professional opera singer -- dramatizing parts of it and singing like an angel. That story was about a beautiful princess who farted in public, and wished the ground to swallow her up, which it did. 

By this time we got the picture -- it was a sort of Walk With Stories. Each place was stunningly beautiful in a medieval, pastoral kind of way. The old mossy stone walls had ferns with tiny round leaves cascading down, and bright blue flowers on top. As we passed a small meadow in the middle of the village, a donkey brayed at us, clearly not used to seeing several hundred people walking in his territory (even though generally the French are so quiet that all those people hardly made any noise at all). Roses scrambled up the sides of stone buildings, their branches weighed down with flowers the size of dessert plates. I wish I could describe the smell in a way that would make it real -- it was the smell of growth, of sprouting, flowering plant life, of light breezes and things being warmed up for the first time in many months. With a little tang of donkey manure underneath.

For the final story, about a branch that comes to life and starts eating people, we had followed a trail into the woods and stood under some chestnuts and oaks. Rain started to fall but no one moved since the canopy was as good as an umbrella. An old lady propped herself against a stump, and a mother sat in the leaves while her young son wrapped his arms and legs around her like a bear cub. We made our way out of the forest on a muddy path, sometimes walking with our arms stretched out, balancing on boards laid down over the really wet spots.

More playing on the beach, more frisbee, some homemade popcorn with sweet stuff on it and some Orangina (made with sugar and not corn syrup), and over the sound system came old French songs with accordions, Ella Fitzgerald, and The Doors. Nellie and Pauline fished plastic floating things from the fountain with makeshift hooks while I sat on a curb listening to "Riders on the Storm".

The finale was Cinderella in the churchyard, with the opera singer as the lead. The girls sat up front on a blanket, Julian had found a friend for tetherball, and Chris and I leaned against a stone wall to watch. I kept looking at the gothic church spire stretching up, with a mossy Virgin tucked into a niche, and feeling practically religious, I was so moved by her age and mossiness. The pollarded trees had leafed out in a dazzling green, and there was a palm tree leaning to one side the way palm trees do. As for the singer, it was like the churchyard had been built for singing. She seemed to be spending almost no effort but her voice sailed out so strong and clear and playful; it was intimate, sitting there with my back against the stone, listening to her sing. Her voice was like water, like a river, and everyone in the audience was swept, astonished, downstream along with her.

But oh no! Suddenly the clouds got black, lightning started flashing, and the wind got up, all while the singer was singing an aria while doing a tricky yoga pose. The girls appeared at my side and we ran for the car, the wind nearly pushing us backwards, the rain slamming down and turning to hail, the girls screaming that scream of joy and fear mixed up together.

There's nothing in Bourrou but a convent; there are no shops, not even a bakery, so we have no excuse to return. But how can we not?

Forest of the Squirrels

It's easy in France to satisfy the traveling desires of everyone in the family. Especially during ice cream season. With Hoppy, Jean, and Dan, we drove to Domme, ate sandwiches and admired the view, and just when admiring the view and the lovely town got to be too much for the children, we found ice cream. The peach-gooseberry combination was really really good.

After Domme we split up and Chris and I took the kids to La Forêt des Ecureuils for the rest of the afternoon. Everyone seemed to catch on to the carabiner clipping-on and -off without problems, and away they went into the treetops along with the other climbers. The sounds of German and Scandinavian languages I couldn't identify floated through the leaves.

Of course I'd have been up there myself swinging from platform to platform like a happy baboon, but someone had to take pictures. Tant pis for me.

Touring the Dordogne

For anyone who doesn't know the story, in 1940 four boys were walking in the woods and their dog fell down a hole. When they went in to save him, they found a cave -- not unusual, since there are over 130 Paleolothic caves in this region. But when they came back to explore, with lights, they found a series of chambers filled with paintings. They were quickly opened to the public and became very popular, so popular that the effects from people's breathing and warming up the caves began to cause calcification and ruin the paintings, so they were closed, and a replica made.

That's what we went to see, on a drippy wet day last week, Lascaux II in nearby Montignac. It's true that you miss being able to say to yourself, "A caveman actually painted that!" but it's impressive all the same. It's dark in there. The paintings loom up on the walls of the cave and it's easy to imagine the nomads stuck in there on a cold day with nothing to do but paint. The fact that the artists used perspective, which disappeared until practically the Renaissance, is astonishing. The animals have a sense of movement -- they aren't simply stick figures, not at all. The artists integrated the cracks and bulges of the wall into the figures,  and it's a bit like being in the woods surrounded by beasts, romping and dashing all around you.

After culture comes lunch, which we found in Sarlat, along with the house of Montaigne's best friend:

Lunch was as good as ever. The potage was very plain, just chicken broth with big chunks of carrot, potato, and parsnip. But the simplicity is a virtue.  Nothing canned, no ingredients except....food. Ahh. The confit de canard that followed was falling off the bone and full of flavor as well, and I had too much food to poach from the Périgourdine platters that Hoppy and Dan ordered, or the stuffed cabbage Jean had. Everyone had the satisfied smiles that come from a terrific lunch in a cozy dry place after walking in the rain. And the crème caramel is worth another trip to Sarlat, even if the children whine the entire way and fight like cats. 

On the way home we passed the chateau in Beynac, and considered being a soldier, standing on the plain, in the valley, and looking up at what you were going to attack. Eventually we'll drive up to the chateau and imagine looking down from the ramparts at the approaching army. This region has a long, bloody history, but when you eat confit de canard and crème caramel at least you have some idea of what they were fighting over.

Les Invitées

What a pleasure to have visitors -- it reminds me of the years I lived in New York, when my mother would come and I'd get to Broadway and the Met for the first time since her last visit. On their first day, though, in deference to jet lag, we took a walk around Montclard and then had a long lunch at the auberge. It was Sunday, and it felt a bit like going over to Grandmother's for Sunday dinner; the furniture was heavy and dark and looming, the decoration was Lacy Antimaccassar, the other guests were somewhat aged, the food old-fashioned.

Old-fashioned food in France is spectacular. The children had rare hamburgers, heaps of crispy frites, and a mountain each of creamed spinach and some sort of purée (squash and potato?). Butter was involved. The non-children kept dipping their spoons into the creamed spinach pretending to need another taste to identify the seasonings. "Nutmeg?" "Oh, maybe, let me see..."

White asparagus soup to begin, creamy but not too, the rich chicken broth shining through. There were seconds. Next a plate of monkfish in a cream sauce, tender little bundles of fish with some odd pieces of bone that we swept to the side with our fish forks, and more creamed spinach. By this time the kids had finished and off they went to play outside on the swing set, while the platter of lamb with roasted tomatoes and copper saucepans with beans and thinly sliced carrots appeared. 

One problem with this kind of meal is that conversation is often reduced to murmurings about the food and sighs of happiness. Who can talk about anything complicated when the creamed spinach is that good? 

At some point during the meal we realized that Grandmother didn't take credit cards and we were all low on cash. So Chris drove to Vergt in search of a cash machine while the rest of us attacked the dish of flan. Julian didn't think he liked it so he had three servings to make sure. I think we all came home and had naps after, in my mind the perfect end to Sunday dinner.

The Aude, III

I am a big whiny baby. Many of the roads in the Aude, the ones that go to the most spectacular sites such as ruined fortresses on mountaintops, are very twisty. Twisty and steep. Twisty, steep, and extremely narrow. Twisty, steep, extremely narrow, and just not worth it. One bit of road in particular, which hadn't looked so bad on the map, put me in a flop sweat, and I was ramming my foot down on the pretend brake on the passenger's side the entire time. And moaning a little, since I'm a big fat baby.

 

That road was on the way to Nébias, population 228. We had a map for a short hike with a labyrinth of stones, and we made our way up the path, which first wound through someone's farm. Heather was blooming, and the path was covered in chamomile and marigolds.

I was having sciatica again so the others went ahead while I perched on a mossy rock and read. Every so often some children would tear through the little glade I was in, and shout, "Bonjour Madame!" which pleased me immensely. From the reports, the labyrinth was wonderful, hard to navigate in a good way, and apparently exhausting.

With gigantic black clouds barrelling toward us, we scampered back to Nébias to look for a café and some coffee and chocolat. The owner was Vietnamese, a former electrical engineer, his wife Indian, and they raised their children in both France and China. And my feeling, listening to his story, is that we were kindred spirits -- we feel at home when we are strangers somewhere.

That's Rennes-Le-Chateau in the photo below  (at the top of a very twisty narrow road). Crazy monks. The Aude is dotted with chateaux, many of them ruins or built on top of what the Cathars had built before being stomped to smithereens.

We even got to stay in one, the Chateau des Ducs de Joyeuse, a 16th century chateau without a particularly bloody history. The transformation to hotel did not diminish its medievalness at all, and it was set just beside the river Aude which was jewel green and rushing from spring rains.

I want to come back to the Aude for about a month someday, with camping equipment and inflatable kayaks. And blinders and short-acting tranquilizers.

The Aude, II

Given my family's struggles with mercury poisoning, I wasn't going to miss the Musée de la Chapellerie (Hat Industry Museum) in Esperaza. We watched a video explaining all the steps of hatmaking, we saw the actual machines involved in the complicated process of turning wool into felt into hats, but there was no mention of mad hatters. 

From the Dartmouth Toxic Metals Research Program:

"The felt hat industry has been traced to the mid-17th century in France, and it was probably introduced to England sometime around 1830. A story passed down in the hat industry gave this account of how mercury came to be used in the process: In Turkey, camel hair was used for felt material, and it was discovered that the felting process was speeded up if the fibers were moistened with camel urine. It is said that in France workmen used their own urine, but one particular workman seemed consistently to produce a superior felt. This person was being treated with a mercury compound for syphilis, and an association was made between mercury treatment of the fibers and an improved felt.

 

Eventually the use of solutions of mercuric nitrate was widespread in the felt industry, and mercury poisoning became endemic."

Using mercury in hatmaking was banned in the United States in 1941. Of course, a failure to generalize to other routes of mercury ingestion, along with the decline of the felt hat industry, has meant that there aren't any mad hatters anymore, just autistic children and a lot of people who need drugs for mood problems, hormone problems, and immune problems.

 

That night we had so-so pizza in Limoux, but I had my favorite wine so far: blanquette de Limoux, a bubbly white. 

It was cold, and tourist season had not yet begun, so Julian and Nellie had the square all to themselves for a postprandial dance. Nellie was not wearing her new hat, which was not felt, and so presumably absent of mercury and urine, either camel or French.

The Aude, I

After school last Friday we hopped in the car and drove south, on our way to the département of the Aude, country of the Cathars. That night we stayed in our first chambre d'hôte, and it really did seem like being a guest of a French friend. Almost. The house was grand in a cozy kind of way, the propriètaire was gracious and forgiving (there was an incident with a broken plastic wheelbarrow that I'll sweep under the rug here), the dining room lovely. Just the four of us with many candles, fresh lilacs, and old silver. To start we had a salad of chopped lettuce, grapefruit, and salmon that I'll have to recreate. Then chicken with a creamy sauce and mushrooms -- and how does the skin stay so crispy? -- along with cauliflower in cream sauce, zucchini, roasted potatoes, tart tatin. 

Two things about highway driving in France: the food is really good, and there are plenty of places to pull over and picnic with playgrounds, places that are beautifully maintained where you can feed ducks or look at roses or read a book in peace. You don't have the feeling that if you take your eyes off your child for one second, they will be stuffed into someone's trunk. Highway traveling is, well, civilized.

It's hard to say whether it was simply the cold wind, the sciatica, and Julian's abominable mood, but Carcassonne was something of a disappointment. It's mostly rebuilt, and while it doesn't look Disneyesque or anything like that, still, you don't have the feeling while wandering around that you have dropped back 800 years and that a knight on horseback may come galloping around the next corner. It's very impressive to see from the highway, a walled city on a hill, but when you're actually in it, you can't forget that it's a recreation. I did have an excellent lunch of moules frites though, with a bottle of cider. 

Carcassonne is another addition to the list of places to go back to, in better moods and when the children are older. I was dying to go to the Museum of the Inquisition but had to keep Nellie from knowing such a thing even existed. I explained a bit of the history of the Cathars in the most antiseptic way, since she gets very upset at the idea of violence -- Simon de Montfort was...a mean man. Chris and I muttered about the similarities to our current President, crusader and chief inquisitionist. Another mean man. It turns out that the way to get that back-in-the-Middle-Ages feeling is simply to contemplate Bush, Abu-Ghraib, and the Patriot Act. Same behavior, different costumes.

Feu! Feu! Petassou!

We had a do-over of rained-out Carnaval a few days ago, moments after a hailstorm. First the children paraded around the village, picking up parents and stragglers as they went, confetti flying everywhere.

We had been wondering what a petassou was for many weeks -- it had been mentioned in notes home from school several times but wasn't in our dictionary. And had we been forced to guess, I don't think "octopus dressed in old clothes and stuffed with hay" would have made the top ten.

Each class sang a song or two, and then began making as much racket as possible, shaking plastic soda bottle with shredded ends and other homemade noisemakers, and yelling "Feu! Feu! Petassou!"   (Burn! Burn! Petassou!) The ritual is that the petassou takes on all the bad deeds of the entire year, goes through a trial, and is burned so that the village and its people are purified for the coming year. The costumes and masks allowed everyone, of every class, to participate, so that the lowliest worker could party with the aristocrat.

Have I mentioned I love it here?

 

Often I see the children reach a point of collapse -- sudden weeping and wailing over something they are certain they will never ever master, like riding a bicycle or jumping rope-- and right after the collapse, whatever they were collapsing over is accomplished. I have been grumbling about the state of my French, and feeling rather hopeless about it. It's not that I couldn't read French, or understand when someone was speaking clearly and relatively slowly to me. It's French among French people, fast and furious and slangy, that I was unable to navigate. But Saturday, at the market in Bergerac, I was walking behind an elegant old man, who suddenly shook his cane at another man passing by, and said, "You walk right by without saying a word, what a savage you are!" with a giant grin for the friend he was harassing. And I laughed out loud because I understood all of what he said. Then I noticed I was catching little bits here and there of conversations around me, and it was like a veil had lifted, or at least become more transparent, that had been separating me from everyone.

On the way home, I listened to a radio show in which commentators discussed Hannah Arendt, Nazism, and what is lost when a film about the Nazis is done in English rather than German. And I understood most of that too. The next program started with a tape of a speech, and I recognized De Gaulle's voice, and understood what he was saying. 

So after my wailing and complaining reached its peak, a breakthrough. And that, along with the fact that the average radio show talks about Hannah Arendt, is enough to make me want to stay in France and not go back. Well, those things and crème caramel.

I was so overflowing with confidence that going to lunch yesterday at a friend's did not worry me. And it's true that I had no trouble understanding anyone's French, on a variety of topics. But my speaking was...bad. My ears have started working better, but not my mouth.

Sunday lunch is an event in France. The children ran around outside while we chatted and I drank a delicious glass of wine from a box. Children are expected to participate in things like Sunday lunch, and they are expected to make their own fun -- no one is making the slightest effort to entertain them or to provide them with toys, movies, craft supplies, anything. So the children made up a game that involved hurling seed pod grenades and guarding ammo dumps that was apparently deeply fun, and when they came in to eat they were beaming and sweaty and red-cheeked.

The first course was a bright green pea soup. We mopped up the last bits with some bread and kept our plates for the salad, a layered heap of raw fennel, sliced orange, and olives, with a vinaigrette. Fabulous. We drank an organic wine from near Perpignan, not nearly as good as the red from the box. Next was cous-cous, with stewed pumpkin and parsnips, raisins and roasted sunflower seeds. And quince tart. We talked about Bush, and Monsanto, and how to keep from being depressed in the face of all they have done. We talked about plants. We talked about books.

I love it here.

Les Trottoirs de Villamblard

I love the French word for sidewalks. It makes me think of pigs trotting down the side of the road, doing errands and visiting like those old Uncle Wiggly stories. And even more than the word, I love the trottoirs here in the village. Imagine how much time they took to make! And doesn't it make you wish concrete had never been invented?


The other side of the street does not fare so well, but it makes me smile to myself every time I walk there because it is so utterly un-American. Maybe it's because my father is a lawyer, or maybe it's simply because I've lived in the US for most of my life -- but when I make my way down the west side of the street, I can't help imagining the towering piles of lawsuits brought for sprained ankles and the broken hips of little old ladies.

The little old ladies in Villamblard seem to negotiate the trottoirs without problems. They simply walk slowly and look where they're going. Last week I was trotting through the church parking lot, which in my defense is somewhat pebbly and not perfectly flat, and was turning around to look at the flowers blooming around the statue of the Madonna, when suddenly -- boom! -- I was on the ground. I brushed myself off and looked furtively around to see if any of the old ladies had seen me, but the streets were deserted and possibly my dignity is not in tatters. 

Halfhearted work has begun on the most dilapidated parts of the trottoir, so that in the future it will be at least solid if not flat. I'm making a vow that before we leave, I'm going to strike up a conversation with one of the little old ladies to see if I can find out how old those beautiful stone trottoirs are, where the stones came from, and whatever else she can tell me. And in our remaining three months I plan to walk slowly and look where I'm going.

Language Learning III

(Hard to photograph this, but see the colombage on the top half of the building? In Bergerac.)

One of the best moments in France so far was last week, when Nellie invited a French girl over to play, the bespectacled gangly Pauline, and the two of them were in her room playing with stuffed animals and Playmobil, chattering away in French. I was eavesdropping from my room, and honestly could not tell which voice was which. As far as learning the language goes, the seven year old has the rest of us beat by a mile.

Chris and I have been reading French books and French newspapers. We try, with varying success, to speak mostly French to each other and the children. But even after seven months, we are unable to follow a conversation in which French people are talking to each other, which is kind of depressing. 

A few days ago, Nellie and I snuggled in to watch Astérix Chez Les Bretons, in which our heroes go to England to help an English cousin. One of the best parts of the movie is that the English characters speak French with a hilarious English accent. I was chuckling away until Nellie asked me to translate what they were saying, and I saw that we had opposite problems -- she could understand the French fine, but the English-accented French threw her. For me, the opposite. 

I realized that all the reading has been improving my French quite a lot, and that the thing I am lacking is not grammar, or vocabulary, or even idioms -- it's rhythm and intonation. The English-accented French in Astérix is funny partly because the words are pronounced wrong, but also because the flow of the sentences is utterly non-French. And to my ear, the words become comprehensible because the English rhythm is familiar. 

So instead of spending this rainy morning reading more Harry Potter et La Coupe de Feu, I'm going to go watch TV instead, even though I resist it because it is so much more difficult. And Julian? He falls somewhere between Nellie and the tone-deaf adults. His accent is better than ours, his comprehension is much better, but we don't get to hear him speak much. I hope before we leave I'll have a chance to eavesdrop on him too.

Carnaval

Saturday was carnaval, which meant for starters that Nellie was dressed up as a frog in a decorated green trash bag with a mask that had a long pink rolled-up tongue, ready to perform a few songs with her schoolmates at the old folks' home across the street. It would have been considerably more festive if the skies hadn't opened moments before, so that everyone was soggily packed inside, but nonetheless it's always good to see children in costumes. And according to Julian, if there's cake, the event is a success. 

The plan (or so we think) was to visit the old folks, and then to have a parade around the village. The notice sent home from school asked us not to throw wheat or eggs. But the rain kept us even from having the chance, the parade was postponed (or so we think), so we'll see what develops this weekend. 

I was unsure what to wear to Le Bal. Le Bal sounds fancy, n'est-ce pas? Costumes, yes or no? I asked one woman, "What do we wear tonight?" And she replied, "Nothing." Completely deadpan. So I said, "Oh, we come naked?" "Yes," she answered, not cracking even the tiniest smile. 

We wore our Venetian masks with non-fancy clothes, which turned out to be sort of right. I drank several kirs, and the children tore around in a pack, among Spiderman and cheerleaders and mummies. We chatted with our English friends and a bit with our French friends. The plat was frites and duck, with rosé and an apple tart. All delicious. Chris is now adept at French ways of doing things so that he was unfazed by the handful of different-colored tickets with which to order our dinners and soon had a woman behind the counter looking out for him.

After dinner, the lights started flashing and pulsing, the DJ put on the macarena, and le bal began. Children were copying the adults, drunk old men were dancing with toddlers, a woman in a wheelchair was twirling to the beat, and soon the dance floor was packed with much of Villamblard moving and grooving under the multicolored strobes. I'm not sure why, but there is something deeply amusing about the odd disjunction of French life and American pop, and every time a new song started, Chris and I were cracking up. The Village People's "YMCA"! A techno remix of "Oh, What A Night"! 

I love it here.