La Nell Ici

2008-06-26T03:43:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-13T02:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-11T00:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-09T02:00:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-05T01:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-21T23:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-15T00:43:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-04-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-25T23:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-21T00:46:00.000-07:00

(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

2008-03-17T00:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Nothing is better than crumbling grandeur

2008-03-06T02:45:00.000-08:00

We made a mistake on our way to Venice, and bought tickets for the water bus to get in from the airport instead of paying more for a private water taxi, which meant that we spent a long time waiting in the cold on the pier, and even longer on the somewhat creepy slow ride through the darkness, where small, abandoned-looking islands would loom up and slide past, illuminated by a construction light or two. So we didn't get to the city until around 10:30 at night. I was having intermittent sciatica attacks and could barely carry my handbag. Nellie was too tired to stand and Chris was carrying her on his back. It was very cold. Julian was announcing every three minutes that he had not had any dinner.

And yet. The four of us stumbled off the boat and into an alleyway, Chris and I peering at the map, wondering how we would find our hotel, and just like that, our traveler's misery evaporated -- the staggering beauty of Venice changed everything. The narrow streets were empty and spooky and indescribably interesting to look at and to walk in. There was a low murmur of voices in many languages, and the sound of lapping water, punctuated by cackling laughs and shouts. You can feel something like the pressure of history as you pass old palaces and cross bridge after bridge.

We went out for a late pizza, and walked from dark alleys into a lighted up square, with plenty of happy tourists still out despite the cold, and Asleep at the Wheel's Route 66 playing from somewhere.

I had thought that a treeless place overrun with tourists would not be the place for me. But I was utterly and completely wrong.

Le Gui

2008-02-28T01:40:00.001-08:00

Those green balls up in the trees are mistletoe, or le gui. They are everywhere, great masses of parasitic plants considered pests by people whose business is trees. I could easily make airy remarks about its prevalence in the country where courtly love was invented -- so easily that I'll skip that and go straight to the pictures.

Here is a close-up view:

Le gui is one of the things Panoramix, the Druid, goes off to gather in the Astérix books, so it gave me a little bang of pleasure to find out that those big green balls I'd been looking at ever since the leaves fell in autumn were exactly that. I can picture him trudging down a muddy lane and climbing up with his serpe d'or to cut enough for his latest batch of potion. I know, I know, it's a cartoon. But it's as good as Bugs Bunny, and that's saying something.

The Heart of the Village

2008-02-23T07:38:00.000-08:00

Well, maybe I should say mouth, or tongue, instead of heart. The place where you get all the news, the latest, the gossip: the hair salon, bien sûr. That's where I found out that there's an American couple who spends most of their time here in Villamblard, and I've never met them or even known they existed. And I found out that there's going to be a language exchange on Monday afternoons, where Anglophones and Francophones can come and practice with each other. I should be getting my hair done every week just so I can get a clue.

Patrique, the talented stylist, is from Belgium, and we were laughing about how amazing it seemed to him that my family had ended up in this village of 880 people, and how equally amazing it was to me that he and his family had too. French is his second language, although of course, he's quite fluent. Our only misunderstanding was when I was complaining about the thinning of my hair, thanks to my age, and he said he didn't understand what I was talking about. He was being chivalrous, and I thought I had the wrong vocabulary word and kept trying new ones.

You can see how much Julian was looking forward to his haircut.

It doesn't come across in pictures, but the children have been transformed thanks to Patrique. The same facial expressions take on new meaning with a different haircut -- what used to look sullen now looks elfishly wry. What used to look merely amused now looks positively overflowing with joie de vivre. Patrique talked about how the right hairstyle reveals personality, and he may be right about that. It's also true that the warm weather and daffodils have woken us all up from our winter doldrums. As I type I can hear Nellie and Julian racing their bikes around the house, yelling just to make a racket, yelling with the happiness of spring, and maybe also yelling with the pleasure of having just the right haircut.

Aligot!

2008-02-19T23:36:00.000-08:00

I know, it doesn't look so good. (For that matter, neither do I.) The photograph in my regional cookbook, Recettes de nos Terroirs, has a spoon lifted up with a long, stretchy mass of potatoey cheesy goodness oozing back down into the pot. As you can see, my aligot did not ooze. It did not stretch. It was barely stirrable.

It's true that I avoid arithmetic whenever possible, but I think to get the quantities correct I needed a scale, which is way more advanced kitchen equipment than our rental provides. So I guessed at everything, which just might possibly have affected the result. But after having it again the next night, heated in a saucepan with a little extra water, I think the lack of stretchiness was from not getting it hot enough, so the cheese was melting but not melting all the way. Like so many things, my aligot was better -- more garlicky and stretchier -- on the day after.

In any case, aligot is fantastic. It's a dish from the Auvergne, in the center of France, land of many terrific cheeses, including Cantal. If you like beer, I bet beer would be the perfect thing to go with. And make it soon, while it's still cold outside and it feels good to have something stretchy and warm and potatoey in your belly.

800 g puréed potatoes

400 g cantal

1 clove garlic

75 g butter

20 cl crème fraîche

salt and pepper

The trick, I think, is to keep the mashed potatoes really hot while you stir in the rest of the ingredients. I had it in a bowl over some hot water but next time I'll use low direct heat.

In some regions you can get aligot from street vendors in wintertime. That would be worth freezing for, no question.

Bon appétit.

Le Miracle de l'écriture

2008-02-17T01:34:00.000-08:00

Nellie is one of those kids that was attracted to paper and pencils as a baby. She scribbled constantly, on any surface and with any writing implement she could find. But her handwriting was...well, you can see how it looked last September, just after she turned seven.

Back in August, when an English friend guided me through the shopping trip for school supplies, I noticed that there were all sorts of new writing materials -- a slate with sponge and chalk, different colored ballpoints, cartridge pens -- so it was obvious the kids were going to be spending a lot more time on handwriting than they were used to.

Within a month, Nellie was writing like this

And now, in February, she's writing like this

Needless to say, entire forests have been sacrificed for the paper necessary to show off those capital letters. The house is inundated. But I admire all of it immensely. To me, French handwriting is emblematic of France, because it assumes that efficiency is not all that matters. It requires both a Cartesian precision and beauty, and every French child learns to do it.

Julian's copybook is at school at the moment, so I'll add pictures of his transformation later.

A Few Things That Are Not The Same

2008-02-14T13:32:00.000-08:00

1. A common road sign is the exclamation point above, which I always read as, "Be surprised!" or "Can you believe this?" or "WOW!" I guess it's a good thing Chris is usually driving.

2. Pillowcases are still rectangles, but not as wide and quite a bit longer.

3. Dogs run around loose on the streets, but I have never seen any road kill of any sort.

4. When you walk into a shop, you always exchange greetings with the shopkeeper before doing any shopping.

5. Stoplights rarely hang over the road but are usually at chest-level, not quite to the corner of the intersection you're approaching.

6. The trees. I've posted about pollarded trees before but I can't stop thinking about them.

7. Both sets of wheels on shopping carts revolve, so that they are practically impossible to steer. At first I thought the French had some special technique for moving them in the right direction, but by now it's clear that they're crashing into things as much as I am.

8. No litter. At all.

9. Each evening, the shutters are closed on the windows of houses, and opened again in the morning.

10. Children and animals are welcome in bars.

Little things like these are what makes living in another country so thrilling. It's not that the things themselves are so thrilling, obviously; it's that the small details of your life that you pay no attention to are suddenly not the same. Every day there's a series of small upsets that gives you a startle of unrecognition that's strangely pleasurable.

And then, after a few months, especially on one of those days when learning the language seems unmanageably difficult and I'm thinking whose big idea was it to learn French anyway?-- on those days, the unfamiliarity of something like the shape of a pillowcase can make me homesick for Charlottesville and my old bed that requires no thinking, no noticing, no translation of any sort.

Then some more months go by, and I have a fresh startle, which is to notice that the shape of the pillowcase is now the way pillowcases are shaped. No longer odd, no longer anything but ordinary.

I wonder what it is like for the children, whose notions of pillowcases are not as entrenched as mine. I think they miss their beds too. But mostly, the details of life in France are becoming, for them, what life is composed of. At night I'm awake in my bed, reading, and I hear them, sleeping in their beds, sometimes making the little shrieks and pleadings of nightmares, but often muttering amiably, as though they're in a bar, with dogs underfoot, dreaming a dream of everyday life.

La Soirée Irlandaise

2008-02-11T02:06:00.000-08:00

....Nellie having a crêpe at the market in Bergerac.....

Orange flyers posted all over town announced Irish Night at the salle culturelle, so on Saturday night at 9, despite the elders among us really wanting nothing more than to go to bed, we walked into the village to see what was happening. Immediately Julian and Nellie were sucked into a vortex of children hurling themselves around the lobby and then outside. Inside, a group of musicians were onstage, tables filled half the room with candles on each one, and much of Villamblard was there, chatting and drinking beer and cider and Cokes.

Remember the delight of running in a big pack of kids? I sat down with some British friends, feeling pretty delighted myself at the prospect of a cider, and watched the children zooming around the room, all with gigantic grins, playing some kind of game that makes no sense to adults and involves much crashing and falling and high hilarity. It was late, at least by my family's standards, so Julian and Nellie had that glittery wide-eyed look kids get when they're doing something exciting and out of the usual routine.

The musicians began sawing and strumming away, just loud enough to keep me from being able to talk to the French couple at our table. The cider was very cold and appley and delicious, with just the right amount of alcohol. The one boy with some Irish blood began doing a jig in between the game of chase, kicking his feet up and momentarily bedazzling Julian, who had been doing the chasing. Toddlers were rocking to the music, mamans swayed with their babies.

Soon a young woman with a headset was calling for couples to dance, and before long, around twenty of us were stumbling through her directions and having a fine time. I was pleased to notice that my failures at following the dance steps were only due to my clumsiness, not to misunderstanding the French. The kind of Irish dancing we were doing was much like the Virgina square dances I was taught in gym class as a kid -- but it's much more fun as a grownup, much more fun with an excellent live band, much more fun with Chris and the laughing, stumbling villagers of Villamblard.

We walked home under the velvety dark sky, looking at stars when we got past the streetlights, continuing our argument over the Little Dipper (Is! Is not!), and all of us were asleep within seconds.

Lunch. Again.

2008-02-08T06:38:00.000-08:00

On Friday we needed to get some supermarket things like milk and wine, so we decided not only to shop but to have lunch at the Super U, where the plat du jour on Fridays is always moules frites, one of my very favorites.

If I were an enterprising sort, I'd get back to the US and open up moules frites shacks all up and down the East Coast. It's a dish that's popular all over France. You can get the moules with a cream sauce, or with tomato sauce, or the ever-popular white wine with piles of garlic and parsley. Something about the flavor and texture of the moules goes perfectly with crispy salty frites. With a glass of rosé, you've really got something.

It has taken us awhile to break the habit of eating lunch quickly, usually standing up in the kitchen. When we first got here we were so greedily stuffing ourselves with bread and cheese and cornichons that we couldn't be bothered to sit down. But slowly the French habits are taking hold, so much so that we spend a leisurely lunch even in the supermarket, and grabbing a sandwich feels rushed and unfinished somehow.

I know it seems like I go on and on about the food, but it's also the habit of paying attention and taking your time that goes along with the food that I find so deeply appealing. We've just passed the halfway mark of our time here, and I admit it, I will be very, very sad to leave.

Lunch, children's version

2008-02-04T07:08:00.000-08:00

....ice cream in Périgueux....

One of the rituals of our daily life here is the recitation of the school lunch menu. On the walk home from school, or at the dinner table, Nellie and Julian tell us the details of their three- or four-course lunches, enjoyed for a leisurely hour with another half-hour to play outside and digest before returning to class.

At both schools the entire school eats together in a separate building, so they have a short walk to get to the lunchroom. In Issac, at Nellie's school, the children sit at assigned tables and are served by the lunch ladies. In Villamblard, they have a semi-cafeteria system, with the kids moving through a line with trays, and seconds and sometimes dessert is served to the tables later. They are expected to eat the main course, no exceptions. Nellie, a reasonably adventurous eater as long as you skip the mushrooms, has taken to the French system with enthusiasm, and now sometimes wonders aloud during weekend lunches at home where the cheese course is. Julian, forever picky and given to long food fads, is happily eating whatever is served. He now even likes sauces.

Today, Nellie will be having salade composée, ravioli, and an apple. On Friday, salade mimosa, oeufs à la béchamel (eggs in cream sauce), and tarte au chocolat. Next Thursday she's having oeufs vinaigrette, blanquette de veau, rice, cheese, and an apple. You can see how a weekend lunch of a sandwich while standing in the kitchen is not quite up to her standards.

The last lunch before a vacation is usually an extra-special meal, and I see this month is no exception: salade piémontese, rôti de porc (roast pork) and champignons à la persillade (mushrooms with parsley). Uh oh. Will Nellie eat what she calls "brown rubber"? Will the mushrooms be chopped so she won't recognize them? I await the report with amusement -- because along with spending a lot of time eating and planning our next meals, we also spend much of the day talking about them as well.

My stomach is growling. Time for a morning petit goût, a little taste, as they call morning snack at Nellie's school. Since I'm once again gluten-free, I won't be having the pain au raisin the kids were gobbling for breakfast. I suppose I'll have to content myself with a dried fig smeared with foie gras. Or some fresh chevre and a handful of prunes. Poor me.

Le Marché Bio

2008-01-31T02:20:00.000-08:00

Last weekend my British friend, who has lived in Villamblard for eight years, took me to the Saturday market in Bergerac and introduced me to the local organic producers. The market stalls circle the church in the center of town, most with awnings or umbrellas in case of rain, and with the exception of a few digital scales, decidedly low-tech -- not so much as a calculator in sight.

In fact, shopping for food this way feels agreeably like stepping into the Middle Ages. The men and women I met had very small quantities of vegetables out, in baskets or boxes, with the names and prices written on slates or scraps of paper. The church bells sound on the hour. There is as much talk -- about Sarko, about the latest convoluted irritation caused by the bureaucracy, about food -- as there is commerce. The pace of buying and selling is slower than any American can imagine.

Yesterday I went by myself while Chris took care of Nellie and Julian who were home with the flu. I went around the loop twice, because it's easy to miss somebody. I bought a box of fresh chanterelles that I'd have had to take out a second mortgage to buy at home. I bought 5 different spices from the man who only sells spices and tea; I'd forgotten to look the words up at home and was relieved to see that coriander is coriandre and cumin is cumin. The spice man sized me up (and heard my accent) and began chatting to me in English, and I kept speaking in French. This happens all the time. Everybody wants to get in some practice, and although it sounds awkward, it's actually quite a friendly kind of thing.

From the apple woman I bought six different varieties of apple, the only one I'd heard of is Gala. Next time I'll take the time to write down the names. From the sturdy young man in muddy boots, I got brussels sprouts, spinach, and mâche. On Saturday, I'll go back, for this is a twice a week ritual, to get the freshest vegetables, and, if I knew people better, the freshest gossip.

Last night for dinner Chris made a stunning crème fraîche and champagne sauce for some veal, and it was fantastic on the chanterelles. Food is personal here, so personal that even strangers like us know, for instance, that the veal on our plates was raised by a leftist of the Green Party. We finished up with some prunes Chris got last week, that come from Agen, a town a bit south of here. Shockingly, they taste like...plums! Absolutely delicious.

My only regret at abandoning the Mussidan market for the one in Bergerac is that we'll be missing chicken man, who sells the best rotisserie chicken in the universe. But maybe if I take a few extra turns around the church, I'll find a chicken man in Bergerac too.

Les Truffes

2008-01-14T02:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we drove north, past Périgueux and up to the small village of Sorges, to see the seasonal truffle market, which turned out to be a small tent with about seven or eight people with very small baskets of a handful of truffles for sale. Say, 800 euros for a truffle smaller than a tennis ball. Yes, I wanted one, badly. But not that badly.

The microclimates in this part of France are quite dramatic -- it's not the first time we've driven just a bit farther north and been shocked by how much colder it is. So the image I had of the four of us gaily roaming around Sorges and enjoying the market was replaced by the four of us whining about the cold and wanting something hot to eat, preferably by a fire. We wandered around Vergt but found nothing open, and ended up in Pont St. Mamet, a very small village whose boulangerie we know quite well, since it's right on the way to Bergerac and apparently we tend to reach it at the very moment a desperate need for a croissant aux amandes presents itself.

Le Petit Jardin had several fires going, lots of glittery pillows to lean against, and a friendly propriétaire whose ponytail Nellie admired. Plat du jour, 12 euros. First course, a wonderful potage, the tiniest bit creamy, with lots of mushrooms chopped finely enough that Nellie happily ate a bowlful of the detested fungi. Second course, boeuf bourguignon and a big heap of creamy scalloped potatoes. Both spectacular.

Julian ran off the rails at some point during the second course, despite having a Coke and despite our strong suspicion that at school he relishes boeuf bourguignon. My pichet of red wine made this a little easier to ignore. And the profiteroles that came for dessert, with both a custard and a chocolate sauce, focused his attention on food again, much to the amusement of the propriétaire.

So no truffles for us, at least not yet. But I can settle for those scalloped potatoes any day.

Galette des rois

2008-01-06T10:44:00.000-08:00

January 6th is Epiphany, the day when the Three Kings came to visit the baby Jesus. In France, because in France everything ends up being about food, it's the occasion for galette des rois, which of course is delicious and a kind of game to boot. In each galette is a feve, a little ceramic figure, and if you get the slice with the feve, you wear a golden crown for the rest of the day. (Feve means bean, which used to be baked in the galettes before the days of cheap ceramics.)

Even better, there are multiple kinds of galettes des rois so there's no danger of getting tired of it. Our favorite is the puff pastry with frangipane, but the other one, a kind of circular brioche with chunky bits of sugar on top, is good too, especially with a coffee in the afternoon. Maybe after a nap. If you're that kind of person. Julian came back from the boulangerie this morning with tales of a chocolate galette des rois, and since this is the very last day to have them, we may have to send him back to get one.

Since we are obsessed with all things Astèrix, we got a couple of galettes des rois from the supermarket Intermarché, which not surprisingly cannot begin to compete with the galettes from real bakeries -- but the feves were Astèrix characters. Impossible to miss out on that. We considered eating our way through enough galettes to get the whole set until we saw that there were a dozen. I don't think the baby Jesus would have approved.

The ritual for eating a galette des rois is to put the youngest person under the table to act as the main des innocents (hand of the innocents). The oldest person is the distributeur, who cuts the slices. Then the main des innocents calls out a name, and a slice is handed over. This is to prevent any funny business on the part of the distributeur, who can sometimes feel the feve as he's cutting. We didn't discover this procedure until after we'd made our way through several galettes by simply hacking off a piece when we walked by, heathens that we are.

Am I making it sound as though we have eaten an ungodly number of galettes des rois? Perhaps we are celebrating Epiphany with all the monarchical and religious fervor it deserves. No? Well, somebody has to get out there and do the cultural research. Am I right? You should thank me.

Pretty-Ugly

2008-01-04T04:05:00.000-08:00

In winter, you see trees like these everywhere, down the main streets of tiny villages, in yards, in parks. The process of pruning off every last shoot is called pollarding, a technique of woodland management that allows new wood to be cut off every year and used for firewood. It seems like an awful lot of work when most of the time firewood seems unlikely to be the goal. Perhaps keeping the canopy small also means fewer pests and diseases; at least there isn't any possibility of branches snapping into power lines during ice storms, of which we've had exactly zero so far.

I think the point of pollarding is aesthetic. At first, the sight of those stubby tree trunks depressed me. So ugly! So deformed! But I have four of them in my backyard, and a long line of them in the village, and so I look at them every day. And after some months of seeing them in different weathers, and I suppose with me in different moods, the pollarded trees now look beautiful to me. So many things in France are obviously, easily beautiful. But almost better are the things, like escargots, that take some getting used to. And maybe jolie-laide is especially appealing to the middle-aged.

Partly it's the knobbiness of the stubs that are left, and the way they make such a hard silhouette against the winter sky or the sides of buildings. There's an elegance to the spareness, to the baldness. Partly it's the way the habit of pollarding is one of the French rituals that mark a time of year. These rituals -- mostly I mean agricultural or arboricultural ones, but also religious and otherwise -- are like chimes ringing, giving a rhythm to the passing months the way the village church bells now give a rhythm to my days.

The other reason I've come to love them is that I know when spring comes, those pollarded trees are going to be sending out shoots in a dramatic frenzy, and I'm looking forward to the thrill of it. The transformation from stubs to a round head of leaves will be fast and furious, and I'm imagining sitting in a chaise, reading and eating an ice cream cone, watching the shoots fly out over my head.

Roadtrip

2007-12-31T09:13:00.000-08:00

....rooftop in Issigeac....

After spending way too many days lounging around the house, today we hopped in the car and took off with no other plan but exploration. We headed through Bergerac and made our first stop in the medieval village of Issigeac, at the southern edge of the Dordogne, where we wandered around in the cold, admiring the very old church that had moss and even small plants growing on its buttresses, visited a boulangerie (of course), peeked at the listings in the window of a real estate office...but found no adventure.

So the children became restless. They protested. They claimed to be nearly dead of hunger. Julian fell down and scraped his knee a bit and limped dramatically, several times collapsing to the street in dire agonies. They sighed the age-old traveler's plaint of, "How much faaaarrrther?"

We drove to Castillonès, another old village high on a hill, but found no place open for lunch. Apparently New Year's parties start early here, as we saw people in each town, dressed up and carrying presents, scurrying down the sidewalk. At first I was thinking of a nice meal, in a dining room with a roaring fire. Then I was ready to settle for pizza. Finally I would have taken a sandwich and a container of yogurt...but everything was closed. Everything!

Eymet is a lovely town too, with the covered walk around a central square that characterizes a bastide village. Lovely but closed up tight at lunchtime on New Year's Eve. Finally we found a small brasserie on the road out of town with lights twinkling. The man behind the bar scowled at us, and scowled more deeply when we asked for pizza. "No pizza," he said gruffly. But we answered back in French, asking what he had for lunch, and once we were discussing the plat du jour, he was smiling warmly and running off to get a banquette ready.

We've had this experience many times: at first, when people realize we are not French (in other words, the instant they lay eyes on us), their faces are closed. Wary. Looking like they wish we would go away. But once we make an effort to speak French -- even if they've made a gesture in English, and even if our French is execrable -- and especially once the conversation is about food, their faces beam and the joking begins.

One person has explained that he was worried that any Americans would be supporters of Bush, and he wanted nothing to do with that. It does seem to me that our being American, generally, is not exactly a positive thing, as it has seemed to be on previous trips. Maybe that has partly to do with being far from Normandy, where Americans were heroes. But mostly I think it is the shadow of Bush.

We ended up with platters of croque monsieur and frites, and a plat of stuffed chicken leg with an immense heap of sautéed mushrooms and green beans. Très traditionelle, the propriétaire assured us. All delicious. Afterwards, a bûche made with ice cream, which apparently healed the nearly fatal wounds to Julian's leg and gave Nellie the strength to make it back to the car without having to crawl.

La fête

2007-12-26T12:33:00.000-08:00

Our energies went into the Christmas Eve dinner -- le réveillon -- more than into buying presents this year. We had fresh oysters from the Oléron which Chris managed to open; he had seen a kids' show in French about oysters and knew the difference between the American and French methods of opening, but could not do it the French way (along the side) without crumbling the shell. I could not do it at all. So I stood by and squeezed on the lemon and ate.

The children were wonderfully horrified that we were eating living creatures right before their very eyes.

The Christmas turkey, raised on a nearby farm, was unlike any turkey we had ever seen -- sleek, slender, you could even say chic, compared to the Vegas showgirls from back home. Its head was tucked up under one wing. It was unmistakeably a bird. It took only a couple of hours to roast and was stunningly good.

We had mashed potatoes with crème fraîche, broccoli amandine, and coquilles St. Jacques made by the butcher. Waiting in the garage where it was cool, a bûche de Noël with a snowman, two meringue mushrooms, a tree, and a disc of chocolate to fight over.

My favorite presents of all were the little Astèrix figures we found for the kids' stockings -- Assurancetorix, the singer who can't sing, is tied up and gagged; the fishmonger is holding a fish behind his back ready for a fight; even a menhir with a red bow and "O + F" in a heart carved in the side. Astèrix is the best comic ever. Today we've played "Clue" in French, worked on a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, flown Julian's remote-controlled plane all over the yard, and eaten lots of leftovers.

Now it's time to start planning le réveillon for New Year's.

Joyeux Noël!

2007-12-23T04:09:00.000-08:00

(a few pictures of our yard in winter...)

We're having a tranquille Christmas Eve Eve; our shopping is done, and the only remaining errands are to pick up our bûche de Noël at the boulangerie and our turkey and oysters from the boucherie tomorrow. The kids ran off to the boulangerie this morning, as they do every Sunday morning (Julian has had a kind of conversion in favor of the pastry called la réligieuse), with directions to order a bûche for tomorrow -- it's a chocolate cake rolled with whipped cream, dusted with cocoa, and decorated to look like a Christmas log, with candy mushrooms growing out of it and whatever else the baker comes up with. Now they're on the terrace on this mild afternoon, stringing popcorn for the birds, and probably talking about Pokemon.

We had our first oysters for lunch this morning, bought from a woman on a street corner in Périgueux. Just a squeeze of lemon, and slurped them down standing over the sink. Magnificent. As good as a trip to the beach, all briny with a taste like a wave breaking over your head. I followed them up with a plate of escargots -- not a dish from this region but no point in being rigid, n'est-ce pas? No one had the courage to join me. Maybe my description of their tasting like buttery garlicky erasers put them off. I love them.

Last night we drove into Périgueux for dinner because we'd seen a flyer announcing a Balade aux Flambeaux (a walk with torches), with singers and theater and medieval costumes. We wandered around the empty streets, on most of which no cars are allowed because this section of Périgueux was built in the Middle Ages -- the four of us could easily hold hands and touch opposite walls. The slender turrets on the corners of the some of the buildings were casting sharp shadows. Our footsteps clattered on the cobblestones. Aside from some of the wares for sale in a few of the shops, and a few strings of Christmas lights, there was nothing to remind us that we weren't in the 16th century.

After dinner (not good or bad enough for a full report, alas!) we caught up to the procession -- around 200 people carrying torches, moving down a wide street and then pouring through a narrower one. It was 9:30 and Nellie was very tired, until she heard the cackling of a woman's voice over a loudspeaker and saw a man racing by in costume with a chest on his back. We followed the crowd into a small square and watched the scene for a while. Ah, life in the Middle Ages -- gluttony, poverty, lasciviousness, and derangement! The costumes were very good, the masks and makeup scary, and apparently the language of theater is the same around the world, although I don't happen to speak it.

But the walk through those medieval streets behind the mob carrying torches was worth staying up for, even for delicate flowers like Nellie and me.

Lunch

2007-12-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

We sing the praises of canned goods here. Several days a week, Chris and I meet in the kitchen for a big bowl of something out of a can. And for the first few minutes, there is no sound but the clink of spoons as we gobble away. Well, also little murmurings of wordless pleasure.

Yesterday we had our first can of Saucisses aux Lentilles. It comes in a large can with a brown, unglossy wrapper, from Eymet, a town not far south from us. The ingredients are: lentils, fresh vegetable broth, goose fat, tomatoes, salt, pepper, onions, thyme, bay, garlic, and pork sausage. No ingredients that began life in a lab, nothing you've never heard of that has forty-two syllables, no fake color, fake flavor, fake anything. It's nothing but food.

And OH MY is it good. How I weep for my vegetarian friends, for what goose fat does for lentils is sublime and irreplaceably, monumentally delicious. The sausages are all fine and well, but you could throw them to the dogs and eat only the lentils and be a happy, happy person.

An old favorite is canned cassoulet; we've made a minor hobby of trying the products of as many of the local farms as possible, and they're all fantastic. The ingredients are roughly white beans, Toulouse sausage, confit of duck or goose, garlic, tomatoes, and more goose fat. Part of the reason canned cassoulet is so good is that it isn't prettified -- there are bones and flabby pieces of skin to contend with, but of course that's part of why the flavor is so deeply satisfying.

Today we stopped in a very good boulangerie in Lembras, on our way to Bergerac to Christmas shop. Maybe fifteen different kinds of bread, including bread with figs and bread with various kinds of nuts. I picked out something that looked like a big mess studded with olives, called fougasse.

We raced through the shopping as quickly as possible, got the fougasse home and warmed it in the oven, and, well, how good was it? It's true that we did not run around the yard waving our arms in the air and shouting with glee, but we felt like it. Chris ate his standing up, moaning. I kept saying, "oh, this is good!" taking another bite, and saying "this is really good!" over and over. After Nellie tried a bite, she beamed. Julian, in true nine year old fashion, refused to have anything to do with it.

Fougasse is like a rough puff pastry, messily assembled, with little bits of ham mixed in, a lot of green olives, some gruyère. But not enough ham and gruyère and butter to be all greasy and heavy, oh no. Just enough to give it a wondrous flavor. The outside has crispy bits and soft bits, it's kind of chewy like pizza dough in places, kind of flaky in others. Fougasse is worth making the fifteen-minute drive to Lembras, any time of the day or night, singing all the way.

(The photo is the Catholic church in Villamblard.)

Les Guignols

2007-12-16T02:25:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday we dashed out to catch the final moments of Villamblard's marché de Noël, which was actually organized by the local British community. We were nearly the only people there thanks to the driving rain. A lonely Père Noël sat on the stage, waving at us, but neither child wanted anything to do with him, even though they suspected there might be candy involved.

I covet the handmade paniers people use for shopping -- the perfect present for the Luddite on your shopping list-- and they come in quite a lot of different shapes depending on what you plan to be carrying around, and contrasting colors of wicker if that has an appeal, but I was not in the mood for comparing and thinking about exactly which shape and color to get. So I bought fudge instead, from two smiling Englishwomen. This area of France is home to many transplanted Brits, which is nothing new; Aquitaine, the land of the Hundred Years' War, has been fought over endlessly and even held by the British for long stretches.

After the fudge I was mesmerized by a display of local honeys of different types and depths of color. I ended up getting miel de forêt, although I have no idea what "honey of the forest" might mean. It is very dark and very thick. "Merci," I said to the vendor, after handing over my euros. "C'est très...ombruese, ne'st-ce pas?" It's very shadowy. Well, he knew what I meant.

Next, off to the neighboring village of Beleymas, much smaller than Villamblard, no commerce at all, and deeply peaceful (that's Beleymas above). Beleymas had sent out flyers announcing a fête with les guignols, which we didn't feel we could miss since we didn't exactly know what it was.

We stepped into the small salle culturelle to find Père Noël getting smooches and passing out presents to all the children from Beleymas. Rosy-cheeked toddlers were hurling wrappings into the air, grandmothers were bending down to see the new toys, the sounds of several electronic keyboards beeping at once. We were greeted by a smiling white-haired woman that I had never seen before, who said, oh, you live in Villamblard, yes?

Well, yes. It is unsettling to realize that we are not, as I like to pretend, going through our days under a cloak of invisibility. People we don't know know who we are and where we live. It's not that I mind. But it clashes with my sense of how things are.

Eventually Les Guignols began, with three oldish men dressed in various homemade costumes clowning about. Early on, the classic -- one of the clowns squirted the oldest one, dressed in a top hat and very shiny waistcoat, in the face with water squirting out of a flower, and then doused the shrieking audience -- after that, Julian was entirely won over. I'm always laughing to myself when Julian gets interested in something and forgets to pretend he doesn't understand French.

Many of the skits involved setting off firecrackers under someone's nose or getting a person from the audience up on stage and making them put on costumes -- a young girl was chosen for a princess costume for a Shrek sequence that eventually led to Smashmouth's "Hey now, get your game on, go plaaaaay" booming from the loudspeakers. An old man with an elegant gray moustache was brought up on stage to chuckling that quickly turned to hilarity when he was dressed in a pleated miniskirt, a shirt with Charlotte aux fraises on it, a kitty peeping out of his handbag, and a large hat fashioned to look like a giant strawberry. A teenaged boy was dressed as a pirate, told to sit in a big boat flying the pirate flag -- and with another great burst of firecrackers, the side of the boat dropped down and he was shown to be sitting on a chair over a bucket. In the head, in other words.

So to sum up: cross-dressing, public humiliation, American culture, potty humor, and firecrackers, all with a set and costumes that cost around $4. We adored every second of it. Not to mention the fudge.

Sicko!

2007-12-12T12:56:00.000-08:00

Nellie has been sick. For the first three days, never mind the fever and the stuffed-up nose, she buzzed around with her usual hummingbird energy, making Christmas tree decorations and memorizing her poésie for school. She was improving and we expected her back at school, but then a decline -- which meant we had to take her to the doctor, to get a note for school.

We just showed up at the door of the village doctor with Nellie, since we have no phone book. We were ushered in by the nurse, who brightened once we explained which house we live in -- we are part of the village and not some vacationing strangers nobody knows. The doctor's office, or cabinet, is part of his house, so the examining room is a lovely old room with plenty to look at while you worry whether you have enough medical vocabulary to manage: a fireplace, two immense carved armoires, one with a stuffed pheasant on top, an ancient parquet floor, a silver bowl with wax fruit, and my favorite -- a small cast iron Godin stove.

That appointment went well. But this morning, Nellie dropped -- her words -- into "the deepest depths of my misery". And no one would disagree, since she added a severe ear ache and throwing up to the fever and headache she already had. Back to the doctor we went.

How many seven year olds have thrown up on the main street of Villamblard? This one has. Several times.

Today we saw a woman, who checked Nellie for meningitis and appendicitis and who knows what else, and gave us a long list of médicaments including a liquid antibiotic you put right into the affected ear, and, uh, suppositories. She felt so bad we gave her every last one of the medicines, and she's much better, thanks.

The real reason for this blog post? I was trying to explain that her ear must really hurt because Nellie is usually quite tolerant of pain, but she had been crying and crying over that ear. "Elle pleut," I said. "She rains." Pleut, pleure -- so close, yet so far.

Vin

2007-12-05T04:19:00.000-08:00

At the Villamblard market last week (which was under the big brown roof almost in the center of the photo, since it was raining) I stopped at a table where two of the mothers from Julian's school were selling organic wine. They asked if I wanted a taste, took out a tiny little wine glass, and poured me some of the red. Before language school I'd have likely said, "The wine, she good", but oh, those days are past. I was proudly able to say "It's good!" But after that, I had nothing. I finished off my wine and smiled stupidly.

"It is hard, to work organic?" I said, wincing over the lost adverb.

She smiled -- she has a very warm, very French sort of face -- and let loose a torrent of explanation accompanied with much gesticulation. The serious drawback to improving in French is that people understandably assume you will be able to understand what they say. Finally she took a breath, and asked, "Est-ce clair?" (Is it clear?)

"Non," I said, and we both laughed. The other woman -- whom we call Glamourpuss, because she is -- gave it a try, speaking more slowly, and I could more or less follow what she was saying, although again I had nothing to add. A chic young man with lovely hair came up then, and chattered away with the two women. He took the tiny glass of wine and swirled it. He sniffed it. He swirled it again, asking many questions about where it was made, what grapes were in it, how old it was. Eventually he took a little sip, and went on with the questions.

At that moment I decided something had to be done about my ignorance of wine. Even to myself I say, "The wine, she good" and have nothing more to add. So I got the DK book French Wine which is nicely filling the vacuum of facts and understanding, and I'm nearly ready to move on to copious tasting.

Did you know that corks were first in use in 1650? That certain sweet wines are made when the grapes acquire a kind of fungus called noble rot? That most French wine labels give the place where the wine was made, not the grapes it was made with, or even, at least in large letters, the name of the chateau that made it? That the laws concerning wine-making in France are so strict that a winemaker cannot plant any vines he wants to but must choose from an approved list -- and that may mean, for example, that he has to make red and is not allowed to make white.

Gardening, science, history, pleasure, and art -- if I were twenty years old I'd want to start a vineyard. Now, in December, you can see a few people out in raincoats doing the pruning, which must be done by hand. Walking up and down the long rows, all alone, secateurs in hand, snip, snip, snip, under the gray wet sky. A perfect job.

I bought three bottles from the two women, partly in an effort to be friendly. Just as we were about to leave, it started to rain rather hard.

"Oh, il pleut!" I said, in that way not-fluent people have of pointing out the obvious.

"Oh, mon Dieu!" the woman said. "Avez-vous un ashtray?"

What a delicious pleasure to have the shoe on the other foot! We laughed without restraint after telling her "umbrella" was the word she was looking for. But I think she may have done it on purpose -- like I said, she has a very kind-hearted face.

Language Learning II

2007-11-20T05:28:00.001-08:00

Since making small-talk with strangers is not one of my talents (nor for the French either), I'm not getting much practice in speaking apart from chat with shopkeepers. But Harry Potter has saved the day. It's perfect in many ways -- I already know the story, yet it's still exciting enough to read that often I can forget I'm reading French and just tear along. The translation, according to my teacher, is very well-regarded. I was given the excellent advice to read in French but not to look up any words in the dictionary -- terrific news for the naturally lazy among us, but also I'm finding that I'm actually learning vocabulary, instead of writing down the words, looking them up, writing down the definitions, and instantly forgetting every bit of it.

The one downside to Harry Potter is that my vocabulary is getting very deep in magical terminology, but I'll take what I can get.

Chris is reading his favorite mysteries in French (continuing his binge of Ruth Rendell novels) and they're having the same effect. Today he was able to explain to our class that porter atteinte means to put a black mark on someone's reputation, something he had figured out from the current Rendell book. I gnashed my teeth like Hermione Granger at being shown up so dreadfully, but was secretly impressed.

There's general agreement that it takes children about six months to get a language when they're immersed in it -- they can do it so quickly because they absorb the structures of the new language instead of learning it by thinking it through and translating, the way adults do. The first indication of this was that after about six weeks here, the children started using double negatives in English for the first time. "I don't want none of that," Julian would say, and Nellie would add, "I don't never want any!" We were a little choqué. But all they were doing was imitating the French structure of negatives, which requires two words to complete, such as "Je n'en veux pas!" (I don't want any) or "Je n'en veux jamais!" (I don't ever want any).

Nellie went through a phase of saying French words and phrases out loud, randomly, with no particular meaning intended. So she'd walk through the living room and say, "C'est interdit!" but not because she was telling us something is forbidden -- she was only practicing making the sounds, getting the connection made between her ear and her mouth. Now she's begun speaking in French sentences, can understand Astérix if I read it aloud, and is reading short, easy-reader type books in French herself.

Needless to say, she is very pleased that for once, the youngest person in the family has the advantage.

Julian has always disliked any kind of learning curve. When he does something, he wants it to be correct the first time. At home, when he forgets to say he doesn't understand, he understands nearly all the French Chris and I are capable of speaking. At school, my spies tell me he has begun saying words and phrases in French -- but to us he denies all.

Nellie and I have begun an ongoing debate over pronunciation -- she corrects mine all the time, because she is learning with the accent of the Southwest, which often stresses the last syllable like Italian does. The effect has carried over into her English, so she says things like, "Stop-pah! I'm coming-ah!"I wish I knew what the accent equivalents would be in the US...when she speaks in Paris, will it be the same as someone from Mississippi going to New York City?

I find all of it -- the accents, the weird way our brains accumulate vocabulary (or not), the way sometimes it feels like jumping into a canoe and whooshing effortlessly downstream on the river of French, and on other days, inexplicably, I'm unable to find words in any language -- all of it is deeply interesting and entertaining to me. Even though I'm finding the experience not simple to describe.

2007-11-12T21:50:00.000-08:00

I woke up early, in the dark, and lay in bed looking at whatever planet comes up at that hour in the left side of my bedroom window every morning. I was thinking about what makes a place feel like home, and about how, and I suppose everybody does this, we chase after bits and pieces of how things were when we were children to make ourselves feel at ease.

Our car has been in the shop since Saturday a week ago (unhappy gear box), but aside from the second installment of Harry Potter in French, there's nothing I need that I can't get by walking into the village. Yesterday was market day, and Chris and I strolled along buying vegetables from the vegetable woman and sausages from the butcher, and a few delicious-looking stinky cheeses from the cheese man. We loaded up on clementines, kiwis, apples, and pears. Then swung by the tiny épicerie for some chocolate and Badoit water. It is an immense pleasure to do this without having to get into a car.

A few blocks from where I grew up in Richmond, there was a little grocery store almost exactly the same size as the épicierie, and when I was old enough to cross streets I was often charged with walking to Mr. Johnson's to pick up something we needed for dinner. Usually the streets were empty, except for someone out walking the dog. I could give all my attention to the soft red bricks of the houses along the way, to the cobblestones of the alleys, to the drippy branches of the elms overhead. I would squeeze down the crowded aisle to Mr. Johnson himself, in a paper butcher's hat, and ask for whatever my mother had ordered.

It is the same now in Villamblard, a quiet walk to get food. The walk starts with the cemetery across the street, where almost always someone is going in to put flowers on one of the graves. I always look at the iron words at the gate that say Priez pour vos morts (pray for your dead). Once in the village, it's the textures of the buildings that get my attention -- many are of a particular kind of local limestone that gets somewhat crumbly at the edges, and the color is warm enough that it doesn't look grim even under the ever-gray November light.

Yesterday, the vegetable woman dropped a shallot and muttered, "Merde!" Then, seeing a wizened old lady waiting to be helped, apologized. I stifled a laugh, the old lady cackled, and turned to me with merry eyes, and the vegetable woman was laughing with us too. It sounds like a small thing -- it is a small thing -- but almost always, the tall Americans are not allowed into the jokes of the village. People avert their eyes, not out of coldness, but out of respect for our privacy. So a laugh with the old lady was a great step forward, socially speaking. We exist! And apparently we know what merde means.

Qine!

2007-11-11T06:31:00.000-08:00

Last night we and the rest of Villamblard met in the Salle Culturelle for the annual school fundraiser -- qine! We bought our cards for 1.50 euros and managed to find a table wedged into a corner of the big room. It was past 9:00 (or 17:00, the 24-hour clock I will never get used to) but as the French stay up late the room was filled with kids of all ages.

Not just kids, everyone was there. Grandmères, grandpères, teenagers, everyone. It's a wonderful thing about a small village, that when there's an event, any event, everyone shows up for it. In three long rows of tables sat all of Villamblard, hoping to get lucky and win a canard gras (a fat duck), or a bottle of wine, or a ham, or hair products, or a coffee maker. Down the row I could see, people were drinking Cokes and beer. Smoking not allowed.

Many of the adults were playing big cards with four or five smaller cards on each one, with big glittering heaps of multicolored chips at the ready. Qine is a kind of bingo, with each card having three lines of numbers to fill. After the start of a new game, the first person to fill one row yells "Qine!", the person calls out the numbers so they can be checked for accuracy, and they get a prize. Then the game continues until someone gets two rows, and then three, for the biggest prizes. (Admittedly it took us until the end of the night for the rules to be entirely clear.) Since numbers are not exactly my strong suit in any language, one card was enough for me. I was kind of hoping not to win so I wouldn't have to call out my numbers in front of the entire village, and I was not disappointed.

When someone yelled Qine! and turned out to have made an error, the crowd was merciless. Jeering, booing, taunting, wild cackling ensued.

When we described the game to Julian at dinner beforehand, he was suddenly motivated to learn his French numbers. They are, for the computation-impaired, not so easy -- 70 is soixante-dix, or sixty-ten. 71 is soixante-et-onze, or sixty-and-eleven. The same thing with the 80s and 90s -- eighty-two is quatre-vingt-deux, or four-twenty-two, and 97 is quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or four-twenty-seventeen. At first Julian was asking Chris for the translation the second the number was called out, but then Chris started answering more and more slowly, and Julian began shouting it out himself -- correctly, and faster than I was translating it myself. Studious Nellie was working her card by herself, not minding numbers at all.

Sometime after 10 I sneaked out to go to bed, leaving the other three feverishly qine-ing. The report I got is that Julian filled his second row, Chris shouted Qine!, but it turned out that he needed two complete rows, not the second row complete.

The crowd was kind.

In the end, no duck for us. But the children got to drink some Coke and stay up really late, and Chris and I were happy to be part of the village, even if once again playing the role of the Hapless Americans.

Les Vacances II

2007-11-08T02:01:00.000-08:00

For some reason Nellie and Julian were not interested in lounging around the hotel room, reading and drinking coffee. So we walked. And walked. And walked. Chris got his old New York rhythm back and led us (speedily!) from our hotel on one end of the 7th arondissement to the Eiffel Tower, on the other. Just looking up at it from underneath made my stomach lurch, so happily for me the lines to go up were long enough to discourage Julian. So we hopped on the Batobus and cruised down the Seine to Notre Dame, where the kids had by far their favorite time in all of Paris.

Fascinated by the architecture? A religious experience? Mais non -- the pigeons, of course!

That night, despite a long forced march home from Notre Dame that had my dogs barking, the children were very rambunctious at dinnertime. We were standing on the sidewalk near our hotel, Chris and I wondering whether they were in any state to enter a restaurant (the time a woman selling crepes out of a truck told me that Julian was mal elevée [badly brought up] still burns, and the last thing I want to do is incur any more French disapproval). Nellie was dancing frenetically and Julian running around behind to poke her -- you know, the Dance of 7 to 9 Year Olds. Then the door to the restaurant in front of us swung open, and a big man with wild gray hair tossed Nellie a champagne cork, threw up his arms and said, "Ohh, la danse!" and then he invited us in for dinner.

Figuring he knew what he was getting into, we squeezed into the tiny place, where at one table a man with an Irish accent was talking about politics, and some French men were at the bar drinking wine. The waiter knew some English but we insisted on using our mangled French which he graciously pretended to understand.

Céleri remoulade, roast duck in foie gras sauce, and crême brulée. Magnificent frites. Superbe.

The next morning we went to the Musée d'Orsay before the children were awake enough to protest. But we hit on the perfect way to do it -- we'd enter a room and immediately sit together on the benches in the middle of the room, and then look at the paintings on one wall, pick our favorites, discuss, then turn around and do the other wall. Hands down favorite with the kids was Van Gogh, with Monet as first runner up. It's kind of a shock seeing that many famous paintings, one right after another, many of which are so familiar because the prints are so popular. "Oh look -- that was in the Trigg's living room at the river!" "That was in my classroom in second grade!" And on and on.

The only shopping we did turned out to be in the museum gift shop -- Nellie and Julian got Victorian masks to wear, since it was Halloween after all. We're now the proud owners of a Van Gogh refrigerator magnet. And I got a copy of Ranelot et Bufolet, which is Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad in French. Nellie has just begun speaking sentences in French, so I think she'll be reading it any day now.

Les Vacances

2007-11-07T00:39:00.000-08:00

School was out for nearly two weeks for Toussaint, so we went to Paris for a few days, taking the superfast TGV train.

Let's buckle right down to dinner, shall we?

The Brasserie Bourbon, where we ate our first dinner, instantly had me sighing with pleasure at the decoration. The banquettes were a mustard-yellow striped velvet. There were chandeliers a yard wide, with hundreds of muted crystals -- not shiny, nothing to glare your eyes -- and reddish-brown shades. The overall effect is muted, soothing, comfortable, elegant, cozy.

The news was playing on a flat-screen TV. Sheila E. was belting out pop. None of it loud at all, nothing to discourage conversation. The other diners were a single woman with hair dyed very dark (Blonde is not a popular color for hair-dyeing here. They go for dark brown, or a kind of eggplantish color that takes some getting used to.) An Asian person of indeterminate gender in a futuristic motorcycle jacket. An elderly gay man, very chic with his cashmere cardigan and razor-short white hair.

There was much visiting back and forth amongst the tables, much smoking, many kisses (in Paris, it's three pecks; in the Dordogne, either two or four). The Brasserie Bourbon seemed to be the neighborhood meeting-place, or perhaps there was a particular group that congregates there -- people who work at the nearby Musée d'Orsay, maybe?

Julian, as usual, ordered a hamburger and frites. The cute waitress took him under her wing, delivering catsup without being asked (!) and calling him, "Le jeune homme" which had him rolling his eyes and smiling. Chris had steak in a roquefort sauce, which he whinged about being too tough, but when I glanced back a few moments later, the steak had disappeared. Nellie had roast chicken with mashed potatoes, which was fabulously tasty, but she was too interested in eavesdropping at the next table to finish. I had cassoulet, which was blindingly delicious. Each bean was a buttery, flavorful marvel. And how I wish I had written down the name of the wine I had a glass of, because it had a dark, mysterious ruby color and it tasted like a magic potion, full of the forest somehow.

Paris in the fall was like a new place to me. No packs of tourists, no lines, the streets are calm and uncrowded, and there is a feeling that it has opened up a bit, that you can have more of its subtle pleasures, find more of its secret places, feel more at home than is possible during the summertime. The sky was often gray, but there is the occasional gold dome to light it up, or you turn a corner to see a block of buildings in the fading sun that stops you in your tracks, it's so lovely. And of course, cassoulet is a dish for gray skies and frost.

Quelle semaine!

2007-10-26T02:29:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-13T04:29:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-12T05:28:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Language Learning

2007-09-28T11:03:00.000-07:00

Here's Chris at our language school. He has not yet had his daily allotment of espresso, so the smile is a bit forced.
So far Chris wins. In our French class the other day, we were given pictures of an object, and then did a role-play in which we tried to ask a shopkeeper (our teacher) for the object by describing it, as though we didn't know what it was called in French. Chris's object was a toothbrush, which he knows is called a brosse à dents. He inventively described it as a manche avec chevaux, by which he meant "a handle with hairs", as close as he could get to "bristles". But manche avec chevaux means " a handle with horses". The teacher is admirably restrained at such moments and does not guffaw in our faces.

In the heat of the moment Julian is confusing Je voudrais (I would like) with Je suis (I am). So he has raised his hand and said to his teacher, "I am the toilet?" One day he wanted to ask for glue (la colle) but what came out sounded like Je suis l'école? or "I am the school?" OK, maybe Julian wins.

Some days I am bursting with confidence, feeling that fluency is just around the corner. Pulling a tidbit of vocabulary from nowhere is an absolutely wonderful feeling, as though the brain has as-yet unknown powers that are only beginning to be tapped. Other days I'm convinced it's hopeless and in each encounter I gape and clear my throat and am completely bloquée. But I can't give up, because the more I study French, the more my ability to speak English is impaired. I can't think of the English words for things, and I've started stumbling into phrases such as, "I will remember that to you," like I'm a French person learning English. I'm stuck between languages.

La Réunion

2007-09-26T01:41:00.000-07:00

Last night was la réunion at Julian's school, the night when parents come to meet the teachers and hear what's going on at school. We brought the kids and they joined the wild pack of children tearing around the little playground. Well, "playground" is something of an overstatement -- it's a small asphalt-covered area with two bent and netless basketball hoops, and a bent and netless soccer goal. The kids don't seem to notice the lack of typical American playground equipment and spend their time playing tag and hurling themselves at the wall to pull themselves up on thin ledges, and making up games that require much screeching.

I went to the réunion at Nellie's school last week -- her school is run by two young women who are very organized and precise, and they gabbled on for three and a half hours about every detail of la vie scolaire, looking at their carefully prepared notes and outlines that had headings underlined in different colored inks. Even though the experience of listening to all that education talk left me feeling like a wolf trying to chew its leg out of a trap, I was terribly pleased with myself because I could understand what they were saying. Less pleased when I told Nellie's teacher that "She reads the books of chapters." But still.

Julian's school is run by three men, older and rumpled and much less interested in rules and bureaucratic regulations. I was understanding about a third of what they said. Maybe.

We trooped into Julian's classroom with the other parents, who ranged from round women with only a few teeth to a very glamorous woman with gorgeous eyes and the makeup to go with it. Julian's teacher, Philippe Martin, is middle-aged, with hands that look like they could crush boulders. He wears a silver ankle bracelet over his white athletic sock. He is a mixture of kind-hearted and very solid, both physically and emotionally -- Julian has told us stories of the way he handles a classmate who sounds possibly autistic, by holding the boy firmly in his arms to keep him from hurting himself, and speaking to him in a tone both soothing and strong.

Chris and I are soon scrunching down in our seats because Philippe begins by describing his complicated classroom that has an American, an English, and a Dutch child, and then continues to talk about Julian. And more Julian. We are understanding bits and pieces, but at least we can make out Julien when we hear it. Both of us half expect the French parents to stone us when the réunion is over -- these Americans, overrunning our village and taking all the maître's attention!

The reputation of French schools is that they run with Napoleanic precision, every French student in a class learning the same thing at the same time, all over France. Not in Philippe's class. He talks about how each child works at his own pace on what he needs to be working on. I'm not sure how he manages that with around twenty students, three of whom don't even speak French. But he inspires confidence. He talked about how the class solves problems as they arise, like that fact that kids were playing rugby on the asphalt last week (France is in the grip of a rugby craze at the moment) and kids were getting hurt. Rather than the teacher telling them to knock it off, they sat down as a class and had a kind of trial, with kids writing their opinions on a piece of paper and then voting on a solution.

At least that's what I think he said. Perhaps they're preparing to hang witches. Who knows.

Beyond Gluttony

2007-09-23T03:59:00.000-07:00

It is possible to have a bad meal in France. A charming café in Dinan where I ate a not-quite-heated-through croque monsieur springs to mind, and so does the aftermath. So before taking the family out for a real meal, we got a recommendation from our British friends, Terry and Jackie. Go to Lou Marmitou in Mussidan, they told us. Real cuisine familiale, five courses, 12 euro a person, wine included. I wanted to get in the car immediately. But first we had to wait until the kids' hacking coughs had diminished enough that we wouldn't feel like we were spreading the plague, and we needed to convince our less adventurous member that he wouldn't starve to death while the rest of us ate ourselves silly.

Back in Charlottesville, Julian had elevated the typical kid's pickiness about food to something approaching an art form. He would have jags of only eating hamburgers for months at a time, or only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or only turkey. Trying new flavors and textures was only accomplished with bribery. But here in France, there is opportunity for bribery on every street corner -- les pâtisseries. So even though the idea of a five-course meal was not appealing, he was won over by the fifth course -- the dessert tray.

Once outside the restaurant, we stopped to look at the board listing the night's meal. Potage avec vermicelli. Salade composée. Steak de kangarou.

Kangarou?!

"I'm not eating that," said Julian. I wasn't so sure how I felt about it myself. We stood there exchanging glances of indecision.

"No way I'm eating kangaroo," Julian said, not indecisively.

"You can eat something else," I said.

"There isn't anything else there I like!"

"There'll always be bread," I offered, but weakly, since I was not embracing the idea of kangaroo either. I kept trying to remember whether kangarou meant something else in French, like pork chops.

Then a girl came rushing out and began speaking very quickly to me in French. I heard the word choix in a sea of incomprehensibility.

"It's all right," I told Julian. "You'll have a choice of something else." And in we went.

Lou Marmitou is a little family-run place, in a small town -- it looks like the kind of place that might not take credit cards.

"Bonsoir, Madame. Prenez-vous la Carte Bleue?"

The woman behind the bar looked at me blankly.

"La Carte Bancaire? Pour payer?" I thought I was speaking French, even if it was bad French, but the woman looked at me like I was speaking Parseltongue. She dashed off to get her daughter. Or daughter-in-law. (My French is at the stage where I get in the neighborhood of the actual meaning, not so much the actual meaning itself.)

A group of four middle-aged men was at a formica table nearby, furiously talking and smoking and drinking. In the dining room, a table of twelve Brits of a certain age were whooping it up. We were the only other table, since it was only a little after seven and too early for self-respecting French people to start dinner. Within seconds the daughter (or d-i-l) had plunked down a bottle of unlabeled red wine, a basket of bread, and a big tureen of potage, and scampered away. We served ourselves and dug in, Chris making little "unh" groans of pleasure at the rich chicken broth, bits of onion, slices of carrot, parsley -- it was homemade soup to make you cry from happiness.

Plus it had alphabet vermicelli, so Julian ate plenty as he tried to eat the letters in alphabetical order.

Chris had four bowls. It's only soup, he said.

Next came platters of salade composée, which in this case meant a heap of smoked salmon, a heap of terrifically tasty and firm shrimp (shells and heads on), some lettuce adorned with a vinaigrette and bits of seafood we couldn't identify, a half a hard-boiled egg, an entire tomato sliced and fanned out, and a plum-sized lump of sauce, a kind of garlicky mustardy lemony mayonnaise. Every single bit of it was deeply delicious. Julian actually ate some shrimp, after Chris decapitated it, and Nellie was thrilled to dip her egg in the fabulous sauce.

Chris ate all of his platter, plus the rest of Julian's shrimp and smoked salmon, plus some bread. Waste not want not.

Next was a gigantic platter of yellow haricots and tomatoes, topped with two kangaroo steaks and two bavettes, a kind of beefsteak. By this time the kids were running out of room, or were saving themselves for dessert, but I managed to eat a pile of the meltingly wonderful haricots and most of a kangaroo steak. The flavor and look of it was almost exactly like that of beef, except for a slightly muttony angle in there somewhere.

Chris ate his kangaroo steak, plus the two bavettes, plus two helpings of haricots and two more tomatoes. Apparently many slices of bread were needed for accompaniment.

Ah, just what we needed! A big bowl of green salad, with a lemony mustardy dressing that immediately took me back to being sixteen, when I lived one summer with a French family that made that exact salad for every lunch and dinner. Chris only ate one bowlful, not as affected by nostalgia as I was.

It would be rude to drink only a bit of the wine, n'est-ce pas? Since I was the only one drinking, I gave it my all.

By now over two hours later, the room was filled with more Brits, several French families, and some groups of young French men. After the table of Brits sang Happy Birthday, one of the young French men came over to give the birthday gentlemen a big kiss, causing much shrieking and raucous laughter. Then we heard the French man say something about one of the British ladies taking off her dress, and the shrieking was less friendly. At some point another table of four young men called the server over, talked for a moment, left in the middle of their seafood platters, and never came back. Despite Nellie's intent observation and our best efforts at eavesdropping, we couldn't figure out what drama was unfolding. A baby was crying a few tables over, but it felt like we were part of this village family, and the sound was kind of sweet, like a little cousin crying at a big party.

Dessert next? Oh non, the cheese course, bien sûr! Chris sampled all three kinds.

By this point we were feeling quite sorry for the daughter (or d-i-l), who was the only server for the entire room, nine or ten tables, including a ten and a twelve-top, plus all the busing. She was looking rather glassy-eyed with a frozen smile as she charged around the room, asking "Terminé?" before taking plates away. When she came with the weighted-down dessert tray, we wanted to make our selections quickly before her arms gave way. I chose a slice of pie that turned out to be marzipan, Julian and Nellie got mousse au chocolat, Chris had an immense floating island -- a heap of meringue on top of custard, with caramel sauce drizzled over it.

At this point, I faltered. I looked at the pie, I tasted the pie, but I could not eat the pie. But Julian, having rejected his steak, had room for it, and sadly Chris was forced to eat only his own dessert. His tiny cup of espresso cheered him up though.

Oh, we'll be going back to Lou Marmitou. But I'll check the menu board first. And skip lunch.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure about this blogging business yet, so future entries may be...sparse. Also I've just figured out (well, Chris has) that I can recharge my camera by putting in new batteries, so I don't have any photos yet.