Roadtrip

....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

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!

(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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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!

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

Café de la Place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le Marché d'automne

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

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

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

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

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

"Merci," I said.

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

École d'Issac

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

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

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

Untranslatable

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

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

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

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

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

Language Learning

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

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.