I finally managed to successfully snag some items from an outgoing AAR fellow. Among the haul: 2 lamps, an electric kettle, a bathroom scale, and blankets, and I paid about $90. Not bad. I'm keeping something of a list of items I think I'll need upon arrival, like a blender if I want to keep making shakes for breakfast. I discovered that Amazon Prime in Italy costs only 10 euro a year, probably because a) the country is tiny and b) there's no Amazon Instant attached, which is fine (technically I shouldn't be able to watch Netflix or Amazon from Italy anyway, but I found a IP-switcher for Chrome a while back in order to access BBC's iPlayer, so it shouldn't be an issue).
I've been working through pre-Italy my to-do list: supplemental health care, for example, to cover doctor's visits without having to haggle with Yale back in the US; life insurance policies for both of us (I cost twice what Sean does--thanks, cardiac-arrest-having parents!); finally talking to Phyllis' financial adviser to get an outside perspective on our portfolio. Meanwhile, the online class for Temple is, just like last time, sucking up lots more of my time than I had hoped. There have been so many technological issues, the most major of which was my laptop hitting a death spiral when I tried to update its service pack last week. Sean took it to school as "his" laptop and they quickly pronounced that they needed to scrub and reinstall everything! We brought them our backup drive, so they should be able to give the laptop back with all my files restored. As a bonus, they're updating my poor Windows Vista OS to Windows 7. The nerve-wracking thing was that the software to record/edit the class videos was on that computer, and I wasn't sure if Temple would need to go through the (long) process of buying me another license. Luckily, I was able to download it onto Sean's laptop, and use the same key as the first time.
The long and short of this is that I got virtually nothing research-related accomplished last week...and this week is not looking good either. I have their first "tests" to grade, and two more lectures to record for this week. I'd be doing that right now, but naturally, Sean is trying to scramble together an abstract for a conference in Portugal next year (linguists, always meeting in awesome European places), so I'm on the loaner laptop Yale gave him. Le sigh. One of my students, failing to hand in the quiz on time, told me he was exhausted from having driven home late from a family wedding in Virginia, after springing one of the guests, a relative, from jail. WTF? Who are you people? Go away!
''One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.''
Monday, July 21, 2014
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Le Sigh
As I mentioned before, I've thus far been somewhat disappointed by what I've found in terms of gyms in Trastevere, both in terms of price and in terms of activities offered. I find myself reflecting on how much I'm going to miss kick after each and every class, even today, when my lower back is killing me after the "swoops" we did yesterday. Kickboxing and yoga are the first group physical activities I've really enjoyed and looked forward to, and it seems I'm going to have to give up both. Although there are plenty of yoga studios in Rome, I'm concerned about how difficult it would be for me to comprehend the instructions while taking positions. My first ever experience of yoga was in Italian, at Middlebury, but least that teacher knew she was speaking to students with varying levels of proficiency. I don't think I'd mistake the nouns for elbow/knee as I did then, and I'm certainly much more flexible (if no less sweaty), but if an Italian started dropping the Hindi names for poses into the mix, I think I'd be totally thrown off. What would utkatasana sound like in an Italian accent? I don't even know.
The other added issue is timing. I've had such a flexible schedule this past couple of years that I could easily go to a kick class at 4:45 on Mondays, or a yoga class at noon on Fridays. Now I have to figure out a schedule that will accommodate library and archive research at various spots around the city with the meals at the Academy, 1pm for lunch and 8pm for dinner. Lunch is a little more negotiable (I'm sure there will be plenty of times when I'm all the way on the other side of Rome at the Hertziana or somewhere else where getting back to the Academy won't be practicable) but sharing dinner is an important component of the Academy experience, and not something to be lightly missed. (Plus, someone is offering to cook me delicious, healthy meals for FREE twice a day? Hell yeah!) Of course, when do evening yoga and meditation classes tend to be offered? 8pm. And don't even mention early morning classes--Italians scoff at the American notion of hitting the gym, or anything else, at 6am.
Yoga is something I can do on my own, of course (and I've already found a number of websites with free class videos), but I'm much more motivated in a group setting, not least when I need to peek under my arm at the woman next to me to understand what bodily contortion I'm supposed to be assuming now. I know yoga must be popular among Academy fellows, because I've gotten a dozen emails from those departing offering goods for sale, mostly space heaters and yoga mats. (Try as I might, I haven't yet managed to email quickly enough to score anything--and I was particularly disappointed to miss out on an air mattress for $40. I just can't compete with people getting emails on their phone, I suppose). It gives me a little encouragement that maybe there will be an informal yoga practice among the group, or something.
Speaking of, an email just came in offering a brand-new iMac for $1000. He's apparently an artist who works primarily in film. Artists, architects, etc must have to invest in a lot of expensive equipment, it seems, if they can't bring it with them; I've seen several projector systems and even a soldering station offered up! Go humanities--all I need is my computer and my camera. I'm bringing my poor aged laptop with me. I had considered buying a new one in advance, but since I replaced the power cord and battery, there's nothing terribly wrong with this one, and I do love that it's 17" across. It's just old, and the programs are old; I'm still running like Word 2003 on this baby! My plan is to purchase a new laptop when I come home for Christmas, to take advantage of sales. The rewards cash building up on our cards will be put to this purpose. Right now it's at about $200 between the BoA and Chase cards, and the BoA has the benefit of an added 10% if you cash it out to a BoA account. I've only cashed it once so far, when the $400 balance netted me an extra $40, which purchased Sean his lovely piano keyboard. If it gets to $400 by Christmas, that would help me buy a more expensive laptop than a super-cheap version. How I wish I could just use a Chromebook...but I do need programs. Alas.
The other added issue is timing. I've had such a flexible schedule this past couple of years that I could easily go to a kick class at 4:45 on Mondays, or a yoga class at noon on Fridays. Now I have to figure out a schedule that will accommodate library and archive research at various spots around the city with the meals at the Academy, 1pm for lunch and 8pm for dinner. Lunch is a little more negotiable (I'm sure there will be plenty of times when I'm all the way on the other side of Rome at the Hertziana or somewhere else where getting back to the Academy won't be practicable) but sharing dinner is an important component of the Academy experience, and not something to be lightly missed. (Plus, someone is offering to cook me delicious, healthy meals for FREE twice a day? Hell yeah!) Of course, when do evening yoga and meditation classes tend to be offered? 8pm. And don't even mention early morning classes--Italians scoff at the American notion of hitting the gym, or anything else, at 6am.
Yoga is something I can do on my own, of course (and I've already found a number of websites with free class videos), but I'm much more motivated in a group setting, not least when I need to peek under my arm at the woman next to me to understand what bodily contortion I'm supposed to be assuming now. I know yoga must be popular among Academy fellows, because I've gotten a dozen emails from those departing offering goods for sale, mostly space heaters and yoga mats. (Try as I might, I haven't yet managed to email quickly enough to score anything--and I was particularly disappointed to miss out on an air mattress for $40. I just can't compete with people getting emails on their phone, I suppose). It gives me a little encouragement that maybe there will be an informal yoga practice among the group, or something.
Speaking of, an email just came in offering a brand-new iMac for $1000. He's apparently an artist who works primarily in film. Artists, architects, etc must have to invest in a lot of expensive equipment, it seems, if they can't bring it with them; I've seen several projector systems and even a soldering station offered up! Go humanities--all I need is my computer and my camera. I'm bringing my poor aged laptop with me. I had considered buying a new one in advance, but since I replaced the power cord and battery, there's nothing terribly wrong with this one, and I do love that it's 17" across. It's just old, and the programs are old; I'm still running like Word 2003 on this baby! My plan is to purchase a new laptop when I come home for Christmas, to take advantage of sales. The rewards cash building up on our cards will be put to this purpose. Right now it's at about $200 between the BoA and Chase cards, and the BoA has the benefit of an added 10% if you cash it out to a BoA account. I've only cashed it once so far, when the $400 balance netted me an extra $40, which purchased Sean his lovely piano keyboard. If it gets to $400 by Christmas, that would help me buy a more expensive laptop than a super-cheap version. How I wish I could just use a Chromebook...but I do need programs. Alas.
Saturday, July 05, 2014
A Busy Week
My sister's wedding turned out to be a lot of fun! There was stress on the day of, of course; Jen discovered she'd left the foundation garment for her dress at the bridal salon in Chicopee, which wasn't answering its phone. Without it she couldn't actually wear the dress! In the end, we bought her a new one at a nearby bridal shop, which happened to be the one where our mom bought her wedding dress, a neat full circle. The wedding went off without a hitch, and the reception was truly a blast. It was wonderful to spend time with my aunts and my cousins (at a non-death occasion). Our family table was packed with thirteen guests, including Sean's mom and my great-aunt Louise, my grandmother's baby sister (now 82). Once the dancing started, my aunts both kicked off their shoes and went at it with gusto--when you add in me, Jen, and my cousin Sara, the DiMarzos were, surprisingly enough, the ones holding down the dance floor all night! Donna, wearing a hat after losing her hair to the chemo, danced more than anyone else. It was awesome. Then we all went back to the hotel and tucked into the subs and fried chicken that my aunts had bought in advance (they are geniuses) and washed it all down with prosecco. (We DiMarzos love our prosecco; I think among all of us we contributed at least 5 bottles at the hotel over the course of two nights).
That was Friday night. After recuperating on Saturday, we spent Sunday morning kayaking with Jon and Kathy Ward, which was a lot of fun. I've never been in a kayak before, and was fully expecting a) to fall in the water and b) to ache the next day, neither of which happened, despite a good few hours on the water. That afternoon we went to Sean's dad's for a Jack-and-Jill shower for Sean's stepsister Morgan and her fiancee Paul. Once night fell and most of the guests had left, it was finally cool enough to light the fire pit. By this time Sean was already feeling weird pains in his stomach, which he attributed to all the bad food over the weekend, but when he still felt unpleasant on Monday night, Linda suggested appendicitis. Ruh-roh. On Tuesday he felt almost fine, but went to get checked anyway, and though he had no other symptoms, as a precaution they sent him for a CAT scan at the hospital. Surprise, surprise: appendicitis! One laparoscopic procedure later, he was sans appendix, which thankfully hadn't ruptured but was still pressing on his intestines and causing the discomfort.
Most of this week has been Sean recuperating from the procedure, which did have a more significant amount of pain after the fact than he was expecting. He can't drive for a little while, or jog, or lift anything heavy, so I was really proud of myself for being able to haul the big upright air conditioner up the steps from the basement. I wouldn't have been able to do that this time last year--thank you kickboxing and yoga! (I've begun to realize how much I'm going to miss kickboxing once I move; I've looked into gyms in Trastevere, but not only are they expensive--to the tune of 80 euro a month--kickboxing doesn't appear to be "a thing" in Italy, blerg) Today he felt a lot better, so we spent the afternoon at his aunt Kathy's house, the annual 4th of July party having been transformed into a graduation party for his cousin Maxine, who just completed nursing school with her RN. A lucky shift, too, since today was so beautiful after yesterday's gross weather! Finall, we capped off the evening by walking to the sea wall to watch the fireworks across the harbor in West Haven.
Monday marks the start of my online class, my last bit of teaching for two years. It also marks exactly two months to the day until I fly to Rome...eep.
That was Friday night. After recuperating on Saturday, we spent Sunday morning kayaking with Jon and Kathy Ward, which was a lot of fun. I've never been in a kayak before, and was fully expecting a) to fall in the water and b) to ache the next day, neither of which happened, despite a good few hours on the water. That afternoon we went to Sean's dad's for a Jack-and-Jill shower for Sean's stepsister Morgan and her fiancee Paul. Once night fell and most of the guests had left, it was finally cool enough to light the fire pit. By this time Sean was already feeling weird pains in his stomach, which he attributed to all the bad food over the weekend, but when he still felt unpleasant on Monday night, Linda suggested appendicitis. Ruh-roh. On Tuesday he felt almost fine, but went to get checked anyway, and though he had no other symptoms, as a precaution they sent him for a CAT scan at the hospital. Surprise, surprise: appendicitis! One laparoscopic procedure later, he was sans appendix, which thankfully hadn't ruptured but was still pressing on his intestines and causing the discomfort.
Most of this week has been Sean recuperating from the procedure, which did have a more significant amount of pain after the fact than he was expecting. He can't drive for a little while, or jog, or lift anything heavy, so I was really proud of myself for being able to haul the big upright air conditioner up the steps from the basement. I wouldn't have been able to do that this time last year--thank you kickboxing and yoga! (I've begun to realize how much I'm going to miss kickboxing once I move; I've looked into gyms in Trastevere, but not only are they expensive--to the tune of 80 euro a month--kickboxing doesn't appear to be "a thing" in Italy, blerg) Today he felt a lot better, so we spent the afternoon at his aunt Kathy's house, the annual 4th of July party having been transformed into a graduation party for his cousin Maxine, who just completed nursing school with her RN. A lucky shift, too, since today was so beautiful after yesterday's gross weather! Finall, we capped off the evening by walking to the sea wall to watch the fireworks across the harbor in West Haven.
Monday marks the start of my online class, my last bit of teaching for two years. It also marks exactly two months to the day until I fly to Rome...eep.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
A Study in Contrasts
Two weddings, two very different approaches: last weekend, we were up in the Catskills for Sara and Zach's wedding, which was undoubtedly the most laid-back and enjoyable wedding weekend I've been a part of so far. For example, at one o'clock on the wedding day (the time for which was "five-ish"), the bride and groom came pedalling back from town with sandwiches from a deli, and Zach hopped into the pool. The wedding site was Sara's cousin's backyard, the officiant was Zach's dad, ordained online, and formal pictures included a trampoline; definitely not your average wedding.
Sean's toast at the reception was named Zach's grandma's favorite, of the many that were given, as he welcomed Zach as a lifelong member of the Significant Other Brotherhood--the SOBs. I can't imagine that flying at my sister's upcoming nuptials on Friday, which could not be more different in tone. To begin with, it's a fairly standard wedding scenario (church, country club, DJ), with standard trappings (poofy wedding dress, bridesmaid gowns, etc). My sister is not what I could ever call "relaxed", either. Antic, neurotic, childlike, all yes, but relaxed no. Add to that a truly unpleasant mother-in-law, who has no counter-balancing force on Jen's side, and it's a complete recipe for stress. Trying to show some support, on Friday I drove up to Newingtown (45 minutes) to join Jen, Vinny, the mother, the father, and the creepiest brother at the venue to determine final seating arrangements, one of those ridiculously unnecessary steps that people with stressful weddings inflict on themselves. I endured about an hour of the mother-in-law's neurotic carping (things like "oh, we have to split our family up on both sides of the dance floor? oh dear, oh dear, I wasn't expecting this, what will we do" which actually caused me to chime in "think of those signs people put up at the church: Choose a Seat, Not a Side!" (translation: it's fucking twenty feet, Jesus Christ, shut up)) before I left, pleading a previous engagement with Sean's friends in New Haven...which was in fact our dinner reservation at a new restaurant in Branford, run by the former chef from Geppi's the restaurant Sean worked at in high school, and site of our first date. That wasn't all we were hoping it to be, but a couple of glasses of wine definitely took the edge off my impotent rage and desire to shoot Vinny's mom in the face.
So I can understand Jen is stressed, but still, she is too much for me to handle right now. In addition to unwillingly going to Newington Friday night, she'd asked if we could hang out on Sunday night, to which I grudgingly agreed, hoping she'd forget. Saturday night we were in the Bronx for Anna and Tj's housewarming/you're pregnant/welcome back from China party and got home really late, so I claimed hangover when Jen texted to ask about dinner and boy, was she pissed, because she was expecting super-awesome-buddy-hangout-time (which I am really uninterested in, at the best of moments, and definitely not on a day when I had no plans to shower whatsoever). She tried to do the icy "I guess I'll see you at the rehearsal" bit, so I finally just called her. She managed to run the gamut from from passive-agressive to bitchy to crying about a) my mom b) the wedding c) my impending move to Italy and d) her therapist's retirement, all in less than ten minutes! Long story short, she's coming to New Haven Tuesday night and we're going for pizza, while Sean is up in Wallingford taking Vinny's on a gentleman's evening. I'm hoping a public setting will prevent--no, let's say limit her tendency to be morose and sniffly, but I doubt it.
...It will not be a hardship to be separated from Jen by an ocean. It will not.
On the plus side, I don't have to spend the night before the wedding in her hotel room, like she originally demanded, which is awesome. I had actually forgotten to book the room until this week (shades of Heather Flanagan, who kept forgetting to book the room for Sara's wedding and so wound up in the "bunk house", which was not indeed proper rooms but tiny rooms with two bunk beds--so much ire). Sean's not going to stay at the hotel the night before, so it's going to be a DiMarzo women party up in the Holiday Inn, woohoo! (of course, Jen is a wimp about drinking, Lisa and Auntie Janice are both pre-diabetics who can't have sugar, and Auntie Donna is on chemo...my cousin Sara and I are going to drink so much prosecco together).
Sean's toast at the reception was named Zach's grandma's favorite, of the many that were given, as he welcomed Zach as a lifelong member of the Significant Other Brotherhood--the SOBs. I can't imagine that flying at my sister's upcoming nuptials on Friday, which could not be more different in tone. To begin with, it's a fairly standard wedding scenario (church, country club, DJ), with standard trappings (poofy wedding dress, bridesmaid gowns, etc). My sister is not what I could ever call "relaxed", either. Antic, neurotic, childlike, all yes, but relaxed no. Add to that a truly unpleasant mother-in-law, who has no counter-balancing force on Jen's side, and it's a complete recipe for stress. Trying to show some support, on Friday I drove up to Newingtown (45 minutes) to join Jen, Vinny, the mother, the father, and the creepiest brother at the venue to determine final seating arrangements, one of those ridiculously unnecessary steps that people with stressful weddings inflict on themselves. I endured about an hour of the mother-in-law's neurotic carping (things like "oh, we have to split our family up on both sides of the dance floor? oh dear, oh dear, I wasn't expecting this, what will we do" which actually caused me to chime in "think of those signs people put up at the church: Choose a Seat, Not a Side!" (translation: it's fucking twenty feet, Jesus Christ, shut up)) before I left, pleading a previous engagement with Sean's friends in New Haven...which was in fact our dinner reservation at a new restaurant in Branford, run by the former chef from Geppi's the restaurant Sean worked at in high school, and site of our first date. That wasn't all we were hoping it to be, but a couple of glasses of wine definitely took the edge off my impotent rage and desire to shoot Vinny's mom in the face.
So I can understand Jen is stressed, but still, she is too much for me to handle right now. In addition to unwillingly going to Newington Friday night, she'd asked if we could hang out on Sunday night, to which I grudgingly agreed, hoping she'd forget. Saturday night we were in the Bronx for Anna and Tj's housewarming/you're pregnant/welcome back from China party and got home really late, so I claimed hangover when Jen texted to ask about dinner and boy, was she pissed, because she was expecting super-awesome-buddy-hangout-time (which I am really uninterested in, at the best of moments, and definitely not on a day when I had no plans to shower whatsoever). She tried to do the icy "I guess I'll see you at the rehearsal" bit, so I finally just called her. She managed to run the gamut from from passive-agressive to bitchy to crying about a) my mom b) the wedding c) my impending move to Italy and d) her therapist's retirement, all in less than ten minutes! Long story short, she's coming to New Haven Tuesday night and we're going for pizza, while Sean is up in Wallingford taking Vinny's on a gentleman's evening. I'm hoping a public setting will prevent--no, let's say limit her tendency to be morose and sniffly, but I doubt it.
...It will not be a hardship to be separated from Jen by an ocean. It will not.
On the plus side, I don't have to spend the night before the wedding in her hotel room, like she originally demanded, which is awesome. I had actually forgotten to book the room until this week (shades of Heather Flanagan, who kept forgetting to book the room for Sara's wedding and so wound up in the "bunk house", which was not indeed proper rooms but tiny rooms with two bunk beds--so much ire). Sean's not going to stay at the hotel the night before, so it's going to be a DiMarzo women party up in the Holiday Inn, woohoo! (of course, Jen is a wimp about drinking, Lisa and Auntie Janice are both pre-diabetics who can't have sugar, and Auntie Donna is on chemo...my cousin Sara and I are going to drink so much prosecco together).
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Vive La France: Quatrième et Dernière Partie
If the third part of this magnum opus was the longest, that's because we enjoyed Bordeaux the most. In fact, we were heartily sorry to have to leave on Thursday to head back to Paris, but as Maureen said, better to wish you'd stayed longer, than to wish you could have left earlier!
We dropped the car off at the Hertz office in Bordeaux, having suffered no accidents or issues in five days of driving, something I was rather proud of. (OK, in Nimes we did think we'd gone down a street the wrong way, but I think we just mistook the no-parking sign for the wrong-way sign. Even if we'd been wrong, there was no one on the street, anyway). The train ride back to Paris was uneventful, and as I mentioned in my first post, once we got back to our hotel we found ourselves ensconced in the lovely red-draped room on the 8th floor, looking out over the Paris rooftops toward the ungainly bulk of the Pompidou Centre, and in the distance, the Eiffel tower. Carla had arranged to come by the hotel at 4pm, so it was only an hour or so after we got back that she arrived. I had only realized recently that it had been an entire year since I'd seen her, during the great stress-fiasco that was our Rome trip. It didn't feel that long, certainly.
The weather had finally gotten a bit warmer, so I was able to change into a dress and sandals and we took off to walk around the city. Our path took us by the Canal St Martin, where we watched the lock system lowering a tour boat, and then through the covered shopping arcades called things like Passage du Panoramas and Passage Jouffroy. Their 19th-century steel-and-glass architecture reminded me scenes from Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, where Amy Adams and Frances McDormand are shopping in the (far grander and more ornate) Royal Arcade in London. From there we went to Monmartre, where just leaving the subway required seemingly a dozen flights of stairs. Carla and I are lazy SOBs, so naturally we chose to take the funicular to the top, while Sean jogged up the stairs. By the time Carla and I were taking a photo of ourselves with Sacre Coeur in the background, he was already standing up by the church, calmly surveying the city below. We popped our heads into the church itself, but there was a Mass going on, and...it's 19th century church architecture, I can pass. We had a drink in an outdoor cafe instead, until it was time to head to dinner--at Le Felteu, of course!
Carla can't actually speak much French, but her opera training means that her pronunciation is perfect. Therefore, Sean and I were more than happy to let her do any and all communication with French people. We got the same gruff-but-nice treatment from the proprietor this time as we had on our last visit, and the same quality food--not as heavenly or refined as La Poudette, but certainly better than the tourist-trap fare we had with Delphine and Herve (which was itself, I should say, not bad; just not very distinguishable in memory). Carla has actually gone vegan and gluten-free, which quite honestly boggles the mind, but luckily she's flexible, because there was literally no option on the menu that didn't feature meat, even the salads. I can't believe she doesn't eat cheese anymore either! What a loss, to live in Italy and not eat pasta and cheese! Still, she tucked into the potatoes gratin with gusto, and had earlier inhaled some fries, so I knew my friend had not gone entirely mad. After dinner, we walked to the Pont Neuf, watched the hourly light show of the Eiffel Tower, and then separated; Carla took the metro back to her hotel, and we walked.
Our last full day in Paris was fairly subdued. After breakfast, we headed in the direction of the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which turned out to be quite a lengthy walk. The most famous inhabitant here for Americans is Jim Morrison (we couldn't find his grave on our way out; Carla and I didn't care, but Sean wanted a picture for his brother, so we sat while Sean hunted him down), but it's absolutely chock-full of famous names: Oscar Wilde (whose monument was covered in lipstick kisses, making me wonder if these women were aware Wilde would not have returned their affections), Delacroix, Nadar, Proust (whose tomb had several notes reading "Merci" and "grazie", but no madeleines) Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, and even some recent academic names for me: Pierre Bourdieu and Fernand Braudel. The cemetery was impressive, but it was sprawling, with little of the piquant charm that I love about the tiny Protestant cemetery in Rome.
The most moving part, however, was in the rear right corner, where at least a dozen separate large Holocaust monuments commemorated French victims at the many camps. I'm often brought to the verge of tears by reminders like these. In the war museum in the Invalides, for example, I wanted to cry looking at a display case of all the items carried by a infantry soldier; I suppose it reminded me of all those who went, whether out of duty or desire for glory, and never returned home. The same was true for the Holocaust memorials, they called the mind the awful destruction of all those lives. Many of these featured relatively abstract sculptural representations, or stylized depictions of skeletal, abused bodies. One featured a 10-foot-tall pair of hands, crossed at the wrist and chained, inscribed DACHAU. But the one which really brought tears to my eyes was a smaller monument, on top of which was reproduced graffiti reading, in a slanting script "Nous sommes 900 Francais." The plaque below said that the graffiti was found in one of the way-stations from which French Jews vanished to the concentration camps in the east, written by a member of "Convoy 73", which left France on May 15th 1944. Of the 878 Jews in that convoy, only 22 returned in 1945. I was incredibly moved by this monument, at the demand implicit in that graffiti to be recognized, to be remembered, and not as Jews, but as Frenchmen. It didn't even hit me until looking at the picture again that they were deported three weeks before D-Day. True, Paris wasn't liberated until August, but to think how close they came to salvation feels particularly awful.
It was D-Day's 70th anniversary as we walked through the cemetery. I wish we could have seen Normandy, but it was just too far to fit it into our itinerary. Instead, as we ate lunch in a cafe near the cemetery, we watched live coverage of the arrival of dignitaries at the site of the memorial, trying to guess the identities of various heads of state from flags, since the muted TV had no captions. Of all of them, only the Queen of England and Italian president Napolitano were alive during the war. We tried to imagine how awkward it must be for Angela Merkel to go down the row of Allied veterans thanking them for their service, and watched Hollande's solemn inspection of the French troops. Funny, we never would have bothered to spend two hours watching these ceremonies in the US, where they'd have aired at 9am, but there we were, Americans in France, unable to look away from a TV we couldn't even hear.
From there, we headed to Ile-St.-Louis for ice cream from Berthillon's, a place well-worth its fame. Carla remembered coming here on her first trip to Paris, which was a 16th birthday present from Claudia (they even flew first class!), and has stopped here ever since. Best vanilla I think I've ever had. For dinner, we'd asked the receptionist to find us a place that wasn't too formal, and not ridiculously overpriced. I think she misheard, because when we finally found Cafe Marly, which was inside the Louvre, on a balcony looking at the pyramid, it was very chi-chi, full of nattily-dressed French people, many of whom were smoking al fresco. We sat for about two seconds, wedged into the people next to us, before I made an executive decision and called for a retreat. Sean can't stand cigarette smoke when he's eating, and I also refused to spend my last night in France feeling awkward in a pretentious restaurant (the waiters were in black tie), to say the least of paying through the nose for the privilege. We walked away from the Louvre, found a likely-looking spot, and went in; as luck would have it, our waiter turned out to be from Rimini, so he and Carla were fast friends, giving us a relaxed and quiet spot to share a final meal together. Parfait. (When Sean looked online later, Cafe Marly was described as a favorite hangout of French movie stars. I don't know what the receptionist was smoking, but then again, she also called that first room "an upgrade"!)
Our plane left at 1pm from CDG, so Carla came over in the morning so that she and I could go on a coffee-and-croissants run. The fabulous bakery that I had seen recommended in guidebooks, which bears the rather uninspiring name 134 RTD Boulangerie, was closed again. Merde! Five mornings total in Paris, and they were only open for two of them. Their croissants were so buttery, they left big grease stains on the paper bags. So worth it. (Carla thought we were kidding about how good they were, relative even to other French croissants, till she actually got to try one).
And then it was over! We had a fantastic trip overall, despite the slow start on the first round in Paris. Our of favorite day was the first day with the car, because it was the most adventurous. Bordeaux won for best scenery, even if there wasn't as much brilliant sunlight as Provence. For food, Sean claims the onion pie over toasted foie gras at Le Chat Touilleur wins best app, while my entrecote at La Poudette definitely has best entree. We never had a bad bottle of wine, though the bottle we had with dinner in St. Emilion was probably our least favorite. I wish French wineglasses weren't so tiny; you're constantly having to refill them! Sean liked Paris, but I wasn't really that charmed; the 19th-century architecture, with the grey mansard roofs and black wrought-iron balconies, is definitely charming at first, but it's all in that style. I also found Paris quite loud, a fault it shares with Rome and other European cities, because of those goddamned motorbikes and scooters--when New York City streets sound calm in comparison, you know you've got an issue. Sean, on the other hand, wasn't bothered by the bikes at all, and thought Paris was one of his favorite cities, with Madrid.
I was more impressed by what I learned about Paris from some of my train-ride reading material, a book called How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, the main argument of which was that while we tend to give Napoleon III and Haussmann all the credit for making the Paris of today, they merely built upon and enlarged projects and ideas begun in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Much of this early modernization came under the lengthy reign of Louis XIV. Among the innovations which appeared in Paris for the first time in history during his rule: public transportation, mail delivery, street lights, a city police force, park benches, and sidewalks. Not all of these lasted; for example, the mail and public transit services were actually run by private investors, and when they stumbled after a few decades, the services vanished, not to be seen again for a couple of centuries.
Haussmann didn't invent the boulevards, either; Louis XIV did, by ordering the destruction of Paris' medieval ring wall. He declared them no longer necessary in his newly-secure realm, protected by its outer band of Vauban-designed fortresses; this destruction not only allowed the creation of a massive greenway constructed expressly for the recreation of the populace, it also limited the possibilities of another protracted siege of the city--which he had personally experienced as a child, during the Fronde uprising against royal authority. The very term "boulevard" intially referred to a single bastion (think of the connection to our word "bulwark") that was among the first to be flattened; the wide area that resulted later became an interchangeable term for all wide streets. The Fronde itself also gave us the beginnings of the newspaper industry and the concept of "headline news", some of spread by making up factual lyrics to go with popular songs; these compositions were called, quite literally, "goes around the city": vau-de-ville, or vaudeville. The path between a Frondeur news report and Cary Grant doing pratfalls must be a long and interesting one, indeed.
To conclude: the French may not have been the most welcoming nation we've ever encountered, but we certainly did more, learned more, and ate and drank better than we have anywhere else in the world. Or, I should say, anywhere else in the world so far!
We dropped the car off at the Hertz office in Bordeaux, having suffered no accidents or issues in five days of driving, something I was rather proud of. (OK, in Nimes we did think we'd gone down a street the wrong way, but I think we just mistook the no-parking sign for the wrong-way sign. Even if we'd been wrong, there was no one on the street, anyway). The train ride back to Paris was uneventful, and as I mentioned in my first post, once we got back to our hotel we found ourselves ensconced in the lovely red-draped room on the 8th floor, looking out over the Paris rooftops toward the ungainly bulk of the Pompidou Centre, and in the distance, the Eiffel tower. Carla had arranged to come by the hotel at 4pm, so it was only an hour or so after we got back that she arrived. I had only realized recently that it had been an entire year since I'd seen her, during the great stress-fiasco that was our Rome trip. It didn't feel that long, certainly.
The weather had finally gotten a bit warmer, so I was able to change into a dress and sandals and we took off to walk around the city. Our path took us by the Canal St Martin, where we watched the lock system lowering a tour boat, and then through the covered shopping arcades called things like Passage du Panoramas and Passage Jouffroy. Their 19th-century steel-and-glass architecture reminded me scenes from Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, where Amy Adams and Frances McDormand are shopping in the (far grander and more ornate) Royal Arcade in London. From there we went to Monmartre, where just leaving the subway required seemingly a dozen flights of stairs. Carla and I are lazy SOBs, so naturally we chose to take the funicular to the top, while Sean jogged up the stairs. By the time Carla and I were taking a photo of ourselves with Sacre Coeur in the background, he was already standing up by the church, calmly surveying the city below. We popped our heads into the church itself, but there was a Mass going on, and...it's 19th century church architecture, I can pass. We had a drink in an outdoor cafe instead, until it was time to head to dinner--at Le Felteu, of course!
Carla can't actually speak much French, but her opera training means that her pronunciation is perfect. Therefore, Sean and I were more than happy to let her do any and all communication with French people. We got the same gruff-but-nice treatment from the proprietor this time as we had on our last visit, and the same quality food--not as heavenly or refined as La Poudette, but certainly better than the tourist-trap fare we had with Delphine and Herve (which was itself, I should say, not bad; just not very distinguishable in memory). Carla has actually gone vegan and gluten-free, which quite honestly boggles the mind, but luckily she's flexible, because there was literally no option on the menu that didn't feature meat, even the salads. I can't believe she doesn't eat cheese anymore either! What a loss, to live in Italy and not eat pasta and cheese! Still, she tucked into the potatoes gratin with gusto, and had earlier inhaled some fries, so I knew my friend had not gone entirely mad. After dinner, we walked to the Pont Neuf, watched the hourly light show of the Eiffel Tower, and then separated; Carla took the metro back to her hotel, and we walked.
Our last full day in Paris was fairly subdued. After breakfast, we headed in the direction of the Pere Lachaise cemetery, which turned out to be quite a lengthy walk. The most famous inhabitant here for Americans is Jim Morrison (we couldn't find his grave on our way out; Carla and I didn't care, but Sean wanted a picture for his brother, so we sat while Sean hunted him down), but it's absolutely chock-full of famous names: Oscar Wilde (whose monument was covered in lipstick kisses, making me wonder if these women were aware Wilde would not have returned their affections), Delacroix, Nadar, Proust (whose tomb had several notes reading "Merci" and "grazie", but no madeleines) Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, and even some recent academic names for me: Pierre Bourdieu and Fernand Braudel. The cemetery was impressive, but it was sprawling, with little of the piquant charm that I love about the tiny Protestant cemetery in Rome.
The most moving part, however, was in the rear right corner, where at least a dozen separate large Holocaust monuments commemorated French victims at the many camps. I'm often brought to the verge of tears by reminders like these. In the war museum in the Invalides, for example, I wanted to cry looking at a display case of all the items carried by a infantry soldier; I suppose it reminded me of all those who went, whether out of duty or desire for glory, and never returned home. The same was true for the Holocaust memorials, they called the mind the awful destruction of all those lives. Many of these featured relatively abstract sculptural representations, or stylized depictions of skeletal, abused bodies. One featured a 10-foot-tall pair of hands, crossed at the wrist and chained, inscribed DACHAU. But the one which really brought tears to my eyes was a smaller monument, on top of which was reproduced graffiti reading, in a slanting script "Nous sommes 900 Francais." The plaque below said that the graffiti was found in one of the way-stations from which French Jews vanished to the concentration camps in the east, written by a member of "Convoy 73", which left France on May 15th 1944. Of the 878 Jews in that convoy, only 22 returned in 1945. I was incredibly moved by this monument, at the demand implicit in that graffiti to be recognized, to be remembered, and not as Jews, but as Frenchmen. It didn't even hit me until looking at the picture again that they were deported three weeks before D-Day. True, Paris wasn't liberated until August, but to think how close they came to salvation feels particularly awful.
It was D-Day's 70th anniversary as we walked through the cemetery. I wish we could have seen Normandy, but it was just too far to fit it into our itinerary. Instead, as we ate lunch in a cafe near the cemetery, we watched live coverage of the arrival of dignitaries at the site of the memorial, trying to guess the identities of various heads of state from flags, since the muted TV had no captions. Of all of them, only the Queen of England and Italian president Napolitano were alive during the war. We tried to imagine how awkward it must be for Angela Merkel to go down the row of Allied veterans thanking them for their service, and watched Hollande's solemn inspection of the French troops. Funny, we never would have bothered to spend two hours watching these ceremonies in the US, where they'd have aired at 9am, but there we were, Americans in France, unable to look away from a TV we couldn't even hear.
From there, we headed to Ile-St.-Louis for ice cream from Berthillon's, a place well-worth its fame. Carla remembered coming here on her first trip to Paris, which was a 16th birthday present from Claudia (they even flew first class!), and has stopped here ever since. Best vanilla I think I've ever had. For dinner, we'd asked the receptionist to find us a place that wasn't too formal, and not ridiculously overpriced. I think she misheard, because when we finally found Cafe Marly, which was inside the Louvre, on a balcony looking at the pyramid, it was very chi-chi, full of nattily-dressed French people, many of whom were smoking al fresco. We sat for about two seconds, wedged into the people next to us, before I made an executive decision and called for a retreat. Sean can't stand cigarette smoke when he's eating, and I also refused to spend my last night in France feeling awkward in a pretentious restaurant (the waiters were in black tie), to say the least of paying through the nose for the privilege. We walked away from the Louvre, found a likely-looking spot, and went in; as luck would have it, our waiter turned out to be from Rimini, so he and Carla were fast friends, giving us a relaxed and quiet spot to share a final meal together. Parfait. (When Sean looked online later, Cafe Marly was described as a favorite hangout of French movie stars. I don't know what the receptionist was smoking, but then again, she also called that first room "an upgrade"!)
Our plane left at 1pm from CDG, so Carla came over in the morning so that she and I could go on a coffee-and-croissants run. The fabulous bakery that I had seen recommended in guidebooks, which bears the rather uninspiring name 134 RTD Boulangerie, was closed again. Merde! Five mornings total in Paris, and they were only open for two of them. Their croissants were so buttery, they left big grease stains on the paper bags. So worth it. (Carla thought we were kidding about how good they were, relative even to other French croissants, till she actually got to try one).
And then it was over! We had a fantastic trip overall, despite the slow start on the first round in Paris. Our of favorite day was the first day with the car, because it was the most adventurous. Bordeaux won for best scenery, even if there wasn't as much brilliant sunlight as Provence. For food, Sean claims the onion pie over toasted foie gras at Le Chat Touilleur wins best app, while my entrecote at La Poudette definitely has best entree. We never had a bad bottle of wine, though the bottle we had with dinner in St. Emilion was probably our least favorite. I wish French wineglasses weren't so tiny; you're constantly having to refill them! Sean liked Paris, but I wasn't really that charmed; the 19th-century architecture, with the grey mansard roofs and black wrought-iron balconies, is definitely charming at first, but it's all in that style. I also found Paris quite loud, a fault it shares with Rome and other European cities, because of those goddamned motorbikes and scooters--when New York City streets sound calm in comparison, you know you've got an issue. Sean, on the other hand, wasn't bothered by the bikes at all, and thought Paris was one of his favorite cities, with Madrid.
I was more impressed by what I learned about Paris from some of my train-ride reading material, a book called How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, the main argument of which was that while we tend to give Napoleon III and Haussmann all the credit for making the Paris of today, they merely built upon and enlarged projects and ideas begun in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Much of this early modernization came under the lengthy reign of Louis XIV. Among the innovations which appeared in Paris for the first time in history during his rule: public transportation, mail delivery, street lights, a city police force, park benches, and sidewalks. Not all of these lasted; for example, the mail and public transit services were actually run by private investors, and when they stumbled after a few decades, the services vanished, not to be seen again for a couple of centuries.
Haussmann didn't invent the boulevards, either; Louis XIV did, by ordering the destruction of Paris' medieval ring wall. He declared them no longer necessary in his newly-secure realm, protected by its outer band of Vauban-designed fortresses; this destruction not only allowed the creation of a massive greenway constructed expressly for the recreation of the populace, it also limited the possibilities of another protracted siege of the city--which he had personally experienced as a child, during the Fronde uprising against royal authority. The very term "boulevard" intially referred to a single bastion (think of the connection to our word "bulwark") that was among the first to be flattened; the wide area that resulted later became an interchangeable term for all wide streets. The Fronde itself also gave us the beginnings of the newspaper industry and the concept of "headline news", some of spread by making up factual lyrics to go with popular songs; these compositions were called, quite literally, "goes around the city": vau-de-ville, or vaudeville. The path between a Frondeur news report and Cary Grant doing pratfalls must be a long and interesting one, indeed.
To conclude: the French may not have been the most welcoming nation we've ever encountered, but we certainly did more, learned more, and ate and drank better than we have anywhere else in the world. Or, I should say, anywhere else in the world so far!
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Vive La France, Troisième Partie
On Monday morning we left Avignon heading west. Our first stop was the Pont du Gard, the great Roman acqueduct that carried water to Nimes. It crosses the river Gard between two high hills, both of which are now full of trails and lookout points; on the side we climbed, you can see where it once emerged from a channel in the mountain, but which now peters into nothing, the channel having collapsed in the 6th century. An effort in the 1850s to resuscitate it by Emperor Napoleon III left a tunnel through the top of a hill, but no other result. This was where Sean's unquenchable thirst to follow any path he sees meandering away--or preferably, up--from a main trail caused us to get separated. Sean decided to go over the hill, and told me to go through the tunnel and meet him on the other side. I waited 20 minutes, until finally I was walking around the hill calling his name, feeling like an idiot, but also weirdly vulnerable, since I realized that if you needed help on the side of the river, you'd have to go back down the steps, cross the pedestrian bridge, and run back to the visitor center. Finally, Sean appeared, but coming up the steps from the river--he'd gotten completely off track, and only running into a fellow wanderer who told him there was nothing on the path he was on sent him climbing down to the river. If he hadn't met that guy, who knows how long he'd have been gone. Needless to say, from here on out we agreed there would be no separating in wooded areas!
The Pont du Gard really is extraordinary. Together with the acqueduct of Segovia, we've now seen the two most complete surviving examples of this feat of Roman civil engineering and architecture. (The Pont du Gard's scenic setting makes it somewhat more impressive than the city setting of the Spanish aqueduct, I must say). This whole trip I felt like I was filling in gaps of monuments I teach in the survey courses but had never seen myself, with Sainte Chapelle and the Pont du Gard being only two of the most prominent examples. On the walk back we met another venerable antique: a Spanish olive tree, which a nearby plaque informed us was "born" in 908 CE, and transplanted to this site from Spain 1,080 years later, in 1988. Sean was fascinated, pointing out that it's one thing to marvel at a hunk of lifeless stone that has weathered a few millenia, but to think of a living creating being over a thousand years old is another.
Nimes was a fairly brief stop. There was another arena, but we'd already seen one in Orange and another in Arles, so we were set. Its main attraction is the Maison Carre, the most complete Roman temple in existence (which has of course, in its long life, seen service as everything from gentleman's mansion to convent to stables). We admired it from the outside, but in order to go in we'd have to wait for the next film screening 30 minutes later, and we realized that we really needed to get on the road. It was 2:30, we had a five-hour drive to Bordeaux, and we'd arranged to have dinner at the B&B at 8pm. As we later learned, part of the laws governing a chambre d'hôtes says that if dinner is offered, it must be served at one table and to all the guests at one time--I imagine to avoid competition with restaurants. I was driving, since I drive faster than Sean. I admit to taking advantage of the rules of the road, generally observed scrupulously by French drivers: on two-lane highways, the left lane really is just for passing, it's not a fast lane like we think of it. Well, for me it was! It was great, even though I was a little worried about getting a French speeding ticket, since I was doing between 130-140 most of the way, a speed I have now realized was not 70-75 like I thought, but 80-85. Whoops.
We were a little stressed because the GPS told us we'd arrive around 8:20, and we had no way to contact the B&B to let them know we'd be late. We stopped at a gas station (the price of diesel gas, not to mention double-digit tolls, was appalling) only to discover that French pay phones only take France Telecom cards, not cash (ah, France Telecom--I remember in the long-ago days of 2006, Heather bitching about her battle to get telecommunications in her Paris apartment). We had opted not to get a French SIM in the end, as a waste of money, but right about then how we wished we had one!
Despite the push to move quickly, there was plenty of time to enjoy the countryside we were moving through, which was really exquisite. Southern France is one of the loveliest places I've ever seen, so lush and green and full of flowers! Although we've always found beauty in the places we've traveled, most of them have been relatively dry and hot, especially Spain, Turkey, and Greece. Compared to these, France was like Eden! Even the rolling hills of Tuscany were outshone by the verdant landscape between Provence and Bordeaux. That beauty only intensified as we got off the highway and began to drive through seemingly endless miles of vineyards in the French countryside, punctuated regularly by tiny villages, many of which amounted to no more than a church and a cluster of buildings at a juncture of two roads. Sunset was falling, there was golden light on the vines, and it was really one of the most picturesque things I'd ever seen.
At long last, we found our way to the tiny postage-stamp village of Naujan-et-Postiac, where Beau Sejour is nestled right next to the church. We were only 20 minutes late, and Maureen assured us the cheese souffle for the first course wasn't even in the oven yet, so we had time to unload and freshen up--I even changed into a dress, like a 19th-century society girl "dressing for dinner"! Our fellow dinner guests were two Australians, or I should say wealthy Australians, who were on a year-long vacation in Europe, and about to meet up with their daughter, our age, who was herself on a two-month vacation! From them, too, we got some ribbing about America's terrible vacation allowance. The wife told Sean at one point, with the voice of true shocked privilege, "but two weeks isn't anything! You've only begun to relax at the end of two weeks, and then it's all over!" I don't think that's true in every case, though. If you have a home base (they, and another Australian couple at the B&B the next night, were headed to rented houses in Provence and Spain), then absolutely, you can stay as long as you want, develop a relaxing routine, cook at home, wash your clothes, etc. But I couldn't travel like we were doing, on the go and moving around every few days, for more than a couple weeks. It's just too tiring.
Describing a vacation as "tiring" seems the height of contradiction, but even I was feeling it by the time we were in Bordeaux. Sean and I almost always wind up in some kind of squabble over resting vs. active time when we're travelling. If I'm planning to hang out in a park, I'll bring a novel, but I get annoyed if we're out somewhere and Sean suddenly announces he wants to linger there, as he did when he plopped onto the grass in the park adjoining the papal palace in Avignon and announced his pressing need to nap in the sunlight (which, admittedly, we'd seen precious little of in Paris). Sean, for his part, gets annoyed at being expected to plan these reveries in advance, and especially at feeling hurried on from wherever he's communing with nature. In the Avignon case, I grudgingly sat on a bench and people-watched for half an hour while Sean soaked up the rays, but by Bordeaux, as I said, even I was feeling the need to slow down.
There could be no more welcoming and restful place to do that than the B&B we picked. Maureen and Jon, a British couple, bought this property ten years ago and restored it, over a period of six years, to its full glory. It reminded me of Longbourne, from the A&E Pride and Prejudice, crossed with a French farmhouse. The kitchen alone was bigger than most New York apartments. The house was full of gorgeous antiques, including surprisingly comfortable couches in the great room, but there were entirely welcome spots of modernity, like the bathrooms. Biggest bathroom I have ever seen in Europe! The most comfortable mattress, too, though it still doesn't compare to how soft mine is at home. Our hosts said they'd been in computers previously, and they must have made a fortune, because I can't even imagine how much money it cost, not only to restore the house, but to decorate it as well. This was clearly a dream for them, and they were awesome at it; as Sean said, they were "true innkeepers," warm, welcoming, and extremely helpful. Wherever you wanted to go, Maureen had a printed set of driving instructions that were invariably more helpful than the GPS. Whatever you wanted to do, they had suggestions and would make reservations. Maureen was brisk and all-business, Jon was quieter, but the one with the funny stories that were at first difficult for us to understood, his voice muffled behind a truly impressive mustache.
And oh, the food. Dinner that first night was cheese souffle, duck in a wine sauce that had first been marinated and then slowly braised for hours (I fully recognized in France what Julia Child had called the secret ingredient of French cooking: time), and a lemon citron tart. The wine was superb. Jon said it was a neighbor's and that they'd virtually bought out the stock, and they weren't kidding--Chateau Minvielle was barely a mile down the road! It's one of Sean's regrets that he didn't try to buy a bottle from Jon, since this is a local producer, not someone who exports. (Indeed, that word "chateau" sounds awfully grand to us Americans, but in France it refers to a vineyard property. Every single acre of vineyard you pass is part of some chateau or other, and one which may or may not have an actual structure worthy of the term; Minvielle, for example, looked to be a relatively modest establishment). Breakfast in the morning was an ample buffet that included three kinds of homemade jams (Sean's favorite) and actual toasted bread (my favorite--gotta love those Brits!). In the late afternoon they'd put out tea service, plus white and rose wine and some baked goods. Sitting in the great room, nibbling a shortbread cookie, sipping rose, reading, and listening to the birds in the garden outside: it was very near to perfect. The only improvement would have been more sun, which would have let us lounge on the patio and in the grounds.
Tuesday we had an appointment at Chateau Prieure-Lichine, which ended up our only wine visit of the entire trip. This was in the Medoc region, a thin peninsula between the Gironde River and the Atlantic that produces some of the most famous wines which are all called "Bordeaux" in America, but which respond to far more specific appellations in France (the ones we would taste were part of the small parcel called Margaux). We headed up the D2 "wine road" on Jon's recommendation, and as we closer to our destination, we passed huge places like Chateau Palmer that were truly worthy of the name "chateau". We visited a fort constructed by Louis XIV's military architect, Vauban (who is buried with Napoleon in the Invalides), one of three designed to protect the river from enemies, particularly the English, getting down to Bordeaux. We learned that Bordeaux was wealthy even in the late middle ages, and was consequently always rather independent from the French crown (for example, Ulrich at Prieure-Lichine claimed that when Louis XVI [he said Henry IV, which made no sense] banned The Marriage of Figaro by Beaumarchaise, Bordeaux instantly planned a performance and sent the king an invitation; I can't find any evidence of this on the Google, though. Ulrich also tried to tell me that the Romans did not invent or even know how to make concrete, though, so his word is perhaps not to be trusted...) Their wealth came from their wine, which was particularly famous in England, where it was called "claret" because its red light was so clear.
Ulrich's two-hour introduction to wine production and tasting was pretty fabulous. Half-French and half-German, with intense eyes and a long, graying ponytail, this man could go from waxing utterly poetic about the difference between simple wine-making (which anyone could do and most producers did do) and what he called "expression" (his word for true artisanal production of fine wine), to making ribald sex jokes or criticizing some of the choices of the corporation which now ran the chateau. Although he quickly lumped American wines into the "wine-making" category (here I thought, but what about that famous blind-tasting in Paris in 1976 where Napa wines whipped the French ones?), he made fun of the French, too. Our favorite quote: "Do you know why the rooster is the national symbol of France? Because he is the only one who can crow so proudly with his feet in the shit!" Possibly he was putting it on a little bit for our benefit, who knows--he was very funny, but also full of fascinating information about the vintner's art.
And art it really is, because we learned that there is no factor, no matter how seemingly insignificant, which they don't consider capable of altering the taste of the wine. I mean, I was aware of aging in steel vs. oak, for example, but we're talking about things like the shape of the vats (they use tear-drop-shaped concrete vats, which is what raised the Roman issue), the newness of the oak barrels (theirs are used twice on their finest wine, once on the second-tier wine [which I actually liked better], and then sold off), and even the varieties of yeast living in the vats (he invited us to stick our heads into an empty vat and smell what he called, in true European fashion "the yeast memory" of generations). We also learned that the precise blend of grapes used changes every year, depending on what kind of year it's been for the vines. One of the characteristics that Ulrich claimed distinguishes a fine wine from a "produced" wine is that a mere wine-maker finds a recipe, a mixture, and follows it every year with the goal of reproducing the taste exactly, while a chateau looking to "express" the true character of the wine not only allows, but expects, the wine to taste subtly different every year.
That's wonderfully evocative to hear about, but the proof should be in the pudding, so to speak, and their was. The wine was good, very good, even if I don't have enough of a proper vocabulary to say what was good about it. The bottle we ordered that night at dinner, for example, was very clearly not to to par with what we'd sipped earlier, and yet neither of us could precisely say why--phrases like "less developed" and "not as smooth" came to the tongue, but what does that really even mean? Anyway, we learned the various tasting procedures, including inhaling air while swishing the wine in your mouth, and then spitting--I always thought the spitting was to keep from intoxication, but Ulrich pointed out that it helps you focus on the wine, since your brain never switches gears to processing the wine going down the throat. I was skeptical, but it really was true--the flavor was stronger, and I could think about it more, but I'll be damned if I'm ever going to suck in air while swishing a liquid in my mouth in public, fine wine or no.
We bought our second and third bottles here, a 2010 edition of their second-level wine, Confidences du Prieure-Lichine, which we'll be sharing with Linda and Gary over dinner ronight, and a 2007 bottle of their Gran Cru Classe, which we'll be sharing with Danny G tomorrow. The Gran Cru label, I've learned, refers to wines which were classified in 1855 on the occasion of an International Exposition in Paris on the orders of Napoleon III, who wanted to be able to show off France's best Bordeaux wines to the world, ranked in terms of "growths" or "cru" from first to fifth. The five first-growth wines are the most famous: Mouton, Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion (there's also a white first-growth, Chateau d'Yquem, which produces a sweet white that was one of Julia Child's favorites; too bad a bottle costs $400!). Prieure-Lichine is a humble fourth-growth in comparison, but it's still considered a big deal even to have been around and been classified in 1855. (Imagine the shame of the poor parvenu wines of the 1860s!) Our third bottle, incidentally, was a Chateauneuf-du-Pape, which we've decided to share with Jon and Kathy Ward, fellow wine-drinking-lovers (as opposed to wine lovers, which sounds rather more elevated than our skills allow). I was very proud that all three made it home undamaged: first in the carrying box, then surrounded by an entire roll of bubble wrap procured from a Monoprix back in Paris, and finally wrapped in a heavy-duty black trash bag given to me by the hotel, in case of breakage, before being stowed in the dirty-clothes suitcase. We were also careful to remove any particularly favorite articles of clothing, just in case!
After our wine-tasting, we headed back down the winding country roads to the B&B, where we partook in the aforementioned afternoon delight. At 8pm we left for St. Emilion, a small medieval hilltop city nearby famous for its local wines; in fact, I found Beau Sejour because I was looking for a place to stay in St. Emilion (again on Julia Child's recommendation) but couldn't find anything at that precise juncture of appealing and affordable, and this B&B had near-perfect rankings on Tripadvisor, not to mention ecstatic reviews, of which mine is now the most recently-minted. After dinner, we wandered the very steep cobbled streets of the town, which was quite empty. Like Venice, few can afford to live there now, so at night it's the province of the tourists.
We originally had scheduled another wine tasting, this one in St. Emilion, for the next morning, but Sean decided that what he wanted more than anything else was just to sleep in. We struck a perfect compromise: while Sean slept, I (in no rush myself) headed about 15 miles or so east to Chateau Montaigne, once home of my friend the essayist. It was a cold and cloudy morning, and when I got there at 10:20, the girl at the little shop gave me a map and told me to meet her at the entrance for the guided tour, in French, at 11am. It was a little more chilly than one wants it to be when you have to amuse yourself outside for 40 minutes, but oh well. The property was lovely, with a fantastic view out over the surrounding countryside from the rear garden/parapet thing (apparently Montaigne could see his brother's castle from here, but I couldn't pick it out), and a rather insistent black pony who followed me around from the confines of the penned-off parts of the ground, barrelling toward me on his stumpy little legs in a parody of a stallion's elegant gallop.
The girl had given me a sheet with all the info on the property in English. I already knew that the chateau itself was destroyed in the 19th century by fire, rebuilt, and is a private residence; only the tour is on the tour [edit: I should have written "tower", but tour does mean that in French!]. With 10 or 15 minutes to go (no watch!) it started to pour, and my umbrella was in the car. Luckily there was a bridge connecting the tower to the wall on the other side of the entrance, where the girl found me huddling. She spoke virtually no English, so I relieved her of the need to actually give the tour, which I wouldn't understand anyway; we just walked through the rooms. I would have liked to have spent a bit more time, but it was awkward--she clearly had a cold, and no coat, and was coughing, so I felt terrible for pulling her down this lane to let one sad tourist in to Montaigne's chilly tower! Aside from the library, where 1,000 books once reposed on curved shelves, and where painted maxims still adorn the roof-beams for him to contemplate as he walked up and down, there was a small cabinet which was once frescoed with scenes from Virgil, almost totally effaced now, especially by graffiti of previous visitors, but she pointed to one small surviving vignette of a bird eating grapes.
That was all for my visit. Maureen had warned me strictly not to try the wine, which was awful, as she said all chateaux with any kind of historical connection are bound to be, so I thanked my poor guide (who had brought an extra umbrella for me!) and headed back to Beau Sejour. Sean and I went then to explore St Emilion in the daylight, and followed our usual procedure: Sean finds and insists on climbing high structures (I joined him for the clocktower, a really powerful breeze, but declined the lower "prince's tower"), we check out pastry and sweet shops (best salted caramel I've ever had!) and generally admire the splendor. Near the ruins of a convent (and St Emilion must have fared badly in the Wars of Religion, because they're chock-a-block with ruins of monasteries and things) there was a huge, impressive house which had been abandoned a long time, and which was absolutely a ruin inside--graffiti and garbage everywhere, collapsed ceilings and floors--and yet you could see it had the same kind of extraordinary potential of Beau Sejour. This place would require millions, would have to be ripped down to the studs, and yet it faced a charming little acre of vines and beyond them, St. Emilion itself rising up on its hill. If we won the lottery, I would seriously consider it--at least, till I remembered that would require living among the French!
A second evening's enjoyment of the cookies and wine followed, and finally it was time for the piece-de-resistance: our dinner at La Poudette, possibly our best meal of the entire trip (and certainly the most expensive). Maureen and Jon had named it their favorite in the area, but wanted to make sure we didn't mind cats, as they would be underfoot--they'd had a problem with a past guest who was appalled by this, and actually fought with Sophie, one of the owners! Rather than be put off, I was only sad I didn't get to pet the ones who wandered by; the little girl at the next table had a petting-monopoly going on. La Poudette is run by Sophie and her husband at their farmhouse near Pujols. The setting is idyllic: from a small road, you turn down a one-car lane, at the end of which you see the white wrought-iron gates. The little parking area was full so we pulled our car next to the adjacent vineyard and walked down the gravel drive, which was positively overflowing with flowers (indeed, at one point during the meal, we looked outside and saw Sophie watering flowers with a hose where she had a minute earlier been bustling about the tables!). There were geese in a pen (someone on Tripadvisor got chased by them, so possibly that's a new thing), horses, which the owner apparently races, and chickens wandering through the plants. If it had been warmer we would have eaten on the patio, but alas, we had to eat inside, which was fairly plain.
The Pont du Gard really is extraordinary. Together with the acqueduct of Segovia, we've now seen the two most complete surviving examples of this feat of Roman civil engineering and architecture. (The Pont du Gard's scenic setting makes it somewhat more impressive than the city setting of the Spanish aqueduct, I must say). This whole trip I felt like I was filling in gaps of monuments I teach in the survey courses but had never seen myself, with Sainte Chapelle and the Pont du Gard being only two of the most prominent examples. On the walk back we met another venerable antique: a Spanish olive tree, which a nearby plaque informed us was "born" in 908 CE, and transplanted to this site from Spain 1,080 years later, in 1988. Sean was fascinated, pointing out that it's one thing to marvel at a hunk of lifeless stone that has weathered a few millenia, but to think of a living creating being over a thousand years old is another.
Nimes was a fairly brief stop. There was another arena, but we'd already seen one in Orange and another in Arles, so we were set. Its main attraction is the Maison Carre, the most complete Roman temple in existence (which has of course, in its long life, seen service as everything from gentleman's mansion to convent to stables). We admired it from the outside, but in order to go in we'd have to wait for the next film screening 30 minutes later, and we realized that we really needed to get on the road. It was 2:30, we had a five-hour drive to Bordeaux, and we'd arranged to have dinner at the B&B at 8pm. As we later learned, part of the laws governing a chambre d'hôtes says that if dinner is offered, it must be served at one table and to all the guests at one time--I imagine to avoid competition with restaurants. I was driving, since I drive faster than Sean. I admit to taking advantage of the rules of the road, generally observed scrupulously by French drivers: on two-lane highways, the left lane really is just for passing, it's not a fast lane like we think of it. Well, for me it was! It was great, even though I was a little worried about getting a French speeding ticket, since I was doing between 130-140 most of the way, a speed I have now realized was not 70-75 like I thought, but 80-85. Whoops.
We were a little stressed because the GPS told us we'd arrive around 8:20, and we had no way to contact the B&B to let them know we'd be late. We stopped at a gas station (the price of diesel gas, not to mention double-digit tolls, was appalling) only to discover that French pay phones only take France Telecom cards, not cash (ah, France Telecom--I remember in the long-ago days of 2006, Heather bitching about her battle to get telecommunications in her Paris apartment). We had opted not to get a French SIM in the end, as a waste of money, but right about then how we wished we had one!
Despite the push to move quickly, there was plenty of time to enjoy the countryside we were moving through, which was really exquisite. Southern France is one of the loveliest places I've ever seen, so lush and green and full of flowers! Although we've always found beauty in the places we've traveled, most of them have been relatively dry and hot, especially Spain, Turkey, and Greece. Compared to these, France was like Eden! Even the rolling hills of Tuscany were outshone by the verdant landscape between Provence and Bordeaux. That beauty only intensified as we got off the highway and began to drive through seemingly endless miles of vineyards in the French countryside, punctuated regularly by tiny villages, many of which amounted to no more than a church and a cluster of buildings at a juncture of two roads. Sunset was falling, there was golden light on the vines, and it was really one of the most picturesque things I'd ever seen.
At long last, we found our way to the tiny postage-stamp village of Naujan-et-Postiac, where Beau Sejour is nestled right next to the church. We were only 20 minutes late, and Maureen assured us the cheese souffle for the first course wasn't even in the oven yet, so we had time to unload and freshen up--I even changed into a dress, like a 19th-century society girl "dressing for dinner"! Our fellow dinner guests were two Australians, or I should say wealthy Australians, who were on a year-long vacation in Europe, and about to meet up with their daughter, our age, who was herself on a two-month vacation! From them, too, we got some ribbing about America's terrible vacation allowance. The wife told Sean at one point, with the voice of true shocked privilege, "but two weeks isn't anything! You've only begun to relax at the end of two weeks, and then it's all over!" I don't think that's true in every case, though. If you have a home base (they, and another Australian couple at the B&B the next night, were headed to rented houses in Provence and Spain), then absolutely, you can stay as long as you want, develop a relaxing routine, cook at home, wash your clothes, etc. But I couldn't travel like we were doing, on the go and moving around every few days, for more than a couple weeks. It's just too tiring.
Describing a vacation as "tiring" seems the height of contradiction, but even I was feeling it by the time we were in Bordeaux. Sean and I almost always wind up in some kind of squabble over resting vs. active time when we're travelling. If I'm planning to hang out in a park, I'll bring a novel, but I get annoyed if we're out somewhere and Sean suddenly announces he wants to linger there, as he did when he plopped onto the grass in the park adjoining the papal palace in Avignon and announced his pressing need to nap in the sunlight (which, admittedly, we'd seen precious little of in Paris). Sean, for his part, gets annoyed at being expected to plan these reveries in advance, and especially at feeling hurried on from wherever he's communing with nature. In the Avignon case, I grudgingly sat on a bench and people-watched for half an hour while Sean soaked up the rays, but by Bordeaux, as I said, even I was feeling the need to slow down.
There could be no more welcoming and restful place to do that than the B&B we picked. Maureen and Jon, a British couple, bought this property ten years ago and restored it, over a period of six years, to its full glory. It reminded me of Longbourne, from the A&E Pride and Prejudice, crossed with a French farmhouse. The kitchen alone was bigger than most New York apartments. The house was full of gorgeous antiques, including surprisingly comfortable couches in the great room, but there were entirely welcome spots of modernity, like the bathrooms. Biggest bathroom I have ever seen in Europe! The most comfortable mattress, too, though it still doesn't compare to how soft mine is at home. Our hosts said they'd been in computers previously, and they must have made a fortune, because I can't even imagine how much money it cost, not only to restore the house, but to decorate it as well. This was clearly a dream for them, and they were awesome at it; as Sean said, they were "true innkeepers," warm, welcoming, and extremely helpful. Wherever you wanted to go, Maureen had a printed set of driving instructions that were invariably more helpful than the GPS. Whatever you wanted to do, they had suggestions and would make reservations. Maureen was brisk and all-business, Jon was quieter, but the one with the funny stories that were at first difficult for us to understood, his voice muffled behind a truly impressive mustache.
And oh, the food. Dinner that first night was cheese souffle, duck in a wine sauce that had first been marinated and then slowly braised for hours (I fully recognized in France what Julia Child had called the secret ingredient of French cooking: time), and a lemon citron tart. The wine was superb. Jon said it was a neighbor's and that they'd virtually bought out the stock, and they weren't kidding--Chateau Minvielle was barely a mile down the road! It's one of Sean's regrets that he didn't try to buy a bottle from Jon, since this is a local producer, not someone who exports. (Indeed, that word "chateau" sounds awfully grand to us Americans, but in France it refers to a vineyard property. Every single acre of vineyard you pass is part of some chateau or other, and one which may or may not have an actual structure worthy of the term; Minvielle, for example, looked to be a relatively modest establishment). Breakfast in the morning was an ample buffet that included three kinds of homemade jams (Sean's favorite) and actual toasted bread (my favorite--gotta love those Brits!). In the late afternoon they'd put out tea service, plus white and rose wine and some baked goods. Sitting in the great room, nibbling a shortbread cookie, sipping rose, reading, and listening to the birds in the garden outside: it was very near to perfect. The only improvement would have been more sun, which would have let us lounge on the patio and in the grounds.
Tuesday we had an appointment at Chateau Prieure-Lichine, which ended up our only wine visit of the entire trip. This was in the Medoc region, a thin peninsula between the Gironde River and the Atlantic that produces some of the most famous wines which are all called "Bordeaux" in America, but which respond to far more specific appellations in France (the ones we would taste were part of the small parcel called Margaux). We headed up the D2 "wine road" on Jon's recommendation, and as we closer to our destination, we passed huge places like Chateau Palmer that were truly worthy of the name "chateau". We visited a fort constructed by Louis XIV's military architect, Vauban (who is buried with Napoleon in the Invalides), one of three designed to protect the river from enemies, particularly the English, getting down to Bordeaux. We learned that Bordeaux was wealthy even in the late middle ages, and was consequently always rather independent from the French crown (for example, Ulrich at Prieure-Lichine claimed that when Louis XVI [he said Henry IV, which made no sense] banned The Marriage of Figaro by Beaumarchaise, Bordeaux instantly planned a performance and sent the king an invitation; I can't find any evidence of this on the Google, though. Ulrich also tried to tell me that the Romans did not invent or even know how to make concrete, though, so his word is perhaps not to be trusted...) Their wealth came from their wine, which was particularly famous in England, where it was called "claret" because its red light was so clear.
Ulrich's two-hour introduction to wine production and tasting was pretty fabulous. Half-French and half-German, with intense eyes and a long, graying ponytail, this man could go from waxing utterly poetic about the difference between simple wine-making (which anyone could do and most producers did do) and what he called "expression" (his word for true artisanal production of fine wine), to making ribald sex jokes or criticizing some of the choices of the corporation which now ran the chateau. Although he quickly lumped American wines into the "wine-making" category (here I thought, but what about that famous blind-tasting in Paris in 1976 where Napa wines whipped the French ones?), he made fun of the French, too. Our favorite quote: "Do you know why the rooster is the national symbol of France? Because he is the only one who can crow so proudly with his feet in the shit!" Possibly he was putting it on a little bit for our benefit, who knows--he was very funny, but also full of fascinating information about the vintner's art.
And art it really is, because we learned that there is no factor, no matter how seemingly insignificant, which they don't consider capable of altering the taste of the wine. I mean, I was aware of aging in steel vs. oak, for example, but we're talking about things like the shape of the vats (they use tear-drop-shaped concrete vats, which is what raised the Roman issue), the newness of the oak barrels (theirs are used twice on their finest wine, once on the second-tier wine [which I actually liked better], and then sold off), and even the varieties of yeast living in the vats (he invited us to stick our heads into an empty vat and smell what he called, in true European fashion "the yeast memory" of generations). We also learned that the precise blend of grapes used changes every year, depending on what kind of year it's been for the vines. One of the characteristics that Ulrich claimed distinguishes a fine wine from a "produced" wine is that a mere wine-maker finds a recipe, a mixture, and follows it every year with the goal of reproducing the taste exactly, while a chateau looking to "express" the true character of the wine not only allows, but expects, the wine to taste subtly different every year.
That's wonderfully evocative to hear about, but the proof should be in the pudding, so to speak, and their was. The wine was good, very good, even if I don't have enough of a proper vocabulary to say what was good about it. The bottle we ordered that night at dinner, for example, was very clearly not to to par with what we'd sipped earlier, and yet neither of us could precisely say why--phrases like "less developed" and "not as smooth" came to the tongue, but what does that really even mean? Anyway, we learned the various tasting procedures, including inhaling air while swishing the wine in your mouth, and then spitting--I always thought the spitting was to keep from intoxication, but Ulrich pointed out that it helps you focus on the wine, since your brain never switches gears to processing the wine going down the throat. I was skeptical, but it really was true--the flavor was stronger, and I could think about it more, but I'll be damned if I'm ever going to suck in air while swishing a liquid in my mouth in public, fine wine or no.
We bought our second and third bottles here, a 2010 edition of their second-level wine, Confidences du Prieure-Lichine, which we'll be sharing with Linda and Gary over dinner ronight, and a 2007 bottle of their Gran Cru Classe, which we'll be sharing with Danny G tomorrow. The Gran Cru label, I've learned, refers to wines which were classified in 1855 on the occasion of an International Exposition in Paris on the orders of Napoleon III, who wanted to be able to show off France's best Bordeaux wines to the world, ranked in terms of "growths" or "cru" from first to fifth. The five first-growth wines are the most famous: Mouton, Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion (there's also a white first-growth, Chateau d'Yquem, which produces a sweet white that was one of Julia Child's favorites; too bad a bottle costs $400!). Prieure-Lichine is a humble fourth-growth in comparison, but it's still considered a big deal even to have been around and been classified in 1855. (Imagine the shame of the poor parvenu wines of the 1860s!) Our third bottle, incidentally, was a Chateauneuf-du-Pape, which we've decided to share with Jon and Kathy Ward, fellow wine-drinking-lovers (as opposed to wine lovers, which sounds rather more elevated than our skills allow). I was very proud that all three made it home undamaged: first in the carrying box, then surrounded by an entire roll of bubble wrap procured from a Monoprix back in Paris, and finally wrapped in a heavy-duty black trash bag given to me by the hotel, in case of breakage, before being stowed in the dirty-clothes suitcase. We were also careful to remove any particularly favorite articles of clothing, just in case!
After our wine-tasting, we headed back down the winding country roads to the B&B, where we partook in the aforementioned afternoon delight. At 8pm we left for St. Emilion, a small medieval hilltop city nearby famous for its local wines; in fact, I found Beau Sejour because I was looking for a place to stay in St. Emilion (again on Julia Child's recommendation) but couldn't find anything at that precise juncture of appealing and affordable, and this B&B had near-perfect rankings on Tripadvisor, not to mention ecstatic reviews, of which mine is now the most recently-minted. After dinner, we wandered the very steep cobbled streets of the town, which was quite empty. Like Venice, few can afford to live there now, so at night it's the province of the tourists.
We originally had scheduled another wine tasting, this one in St. Emilion, for the next morning, but Sean decided that what he wanted more than anything else was just to sleep in. We struck a perfect compromise: while Sean slept, I (in no rush myself) headed about 15 miles or so east to Chateau Montaigne, once home of my friend the essayist. It was a cold and cloudy morning, and when I got there at 10:20, the girl at the little shop gave me a map and told me to meet her at the entrance for the guided tour, in French, at 11am. It was a little more chilly than one wants it to be when you have to amuse yourself outside for 40 minutes, but oh well. The property was lovely, with a fantastic view out over the surrounding countryside from the rear garden/parapet thing (apparently Montaigne could see his brother's castle from here, but I couldn't pick it out), and a rather insistent black pony who followed me around from the confines of the penned-off parts of the ground, barrelling toward me on his stumpy little legs in a parody of a stallion's elegant gallop.
The girl had given me a sheet with all the info on the property in English. I already knew that the chateau itself was destroyed in the 19th century by fire, rebuilt, and is a private residence; only the tour is on the tour [edit: I should have written "tower", but tour does mean that in French!]. With 10 or 15 minutes to go (no watch!) it started to pour, and my umbrella was in the car. Luckily there was a bridge connecting the tower to the wall on the other side of the entrance, where the girl found me huddling. She spoke virtually no English, so I relieved her of the need to actually give the tour, which I wouldn't understand anyway; we just walked through the rooms. I would have liked to have spent a bit more time, but it was awkward--she clearly had a cold, and no coat, and was coughing, so I felt terrible for pulling her down this lane to let one sad tourist in to Montaigne's chilly tower! Aside from the library, where 1,000 books once reposed on curved shelves, and where painted maxims still adorn the roof-beams for him to contemplate as he walked up and down, there was a small cabinet which was once frescoed with scenes from Virgil, almost totally effaced now, especially by graffiti of previous visitors, but she pointed to one small surviving vignette of a bird eating grapes.
That was all for my visit. Maureen had warned me strictly not to try the wine, which was awful, as she said all chateaux with any kind of historical connection are bound to be, so I thanked my poor guide (who had brought an extra umbrella for me!) and headed back to Beau Sejour. Sean and I went then to explore St Emilion in the daylight, and followed our usual procedure: Sean finds and insists on climbing high structures (I joined him for the clocktower, a really powerful breeze, but declined the lower "prince's tower"), we check out pastry and sweet shops (best salted caramel I've ever had!) and generally admire the splendor. Near the ruins of a convent (and St Emilion must have fared badly in the Wars of Religion, because they're chock-a-block with ruins of monasteries and things) there was a huge, impressive house which had been abandoned a long time, and which was absolutely a ruin inside--graffiti and garbage everywhere, collapsed ceilings and floors--and yet you could see it had the same kind of extraordinary potential of Beau Sejour. This place would require millions, would have to be ripped down to the studs, and yet it faced a charming little acre of vines and beyond them, St. Emilion itself rising up on its hill. If we won the lottery, I would seriously consider it--at least, till I remembered that would require living among the French!
A second evening's enjoyment of the cookies and wine followed, and finally it was time for the piece-de-resistance: our dinner at La Poudette, possibly our best meal of the entire trip (and certainly the most expensive). Maureen and Jon had named it their favorite in the area, but wanted to make sure we didn't mind cats, as they would be underfoot--they'd had a problem with a past guest who was appalled by this, and actually fought with Sophie, one of the owners! Rather than be put off, I was only sad I didn't get to pet the ones who wandered by; the little girl at the next table had a petting-monopoly going on. La Poudette is run by Sophie and her husband at their farmhouse near Pujols. The setting is idyllic: from a small road, you turn down a one-car lane, at the end of which you see the white wrought-iron gates. The little parking area was full so we pulled our car next to the adjacent vineyard and walked down the gravel drive, which was positively overflowing with flowers (indeed, at one point during the meal, we looked outside and saw Sophie watering flowers with a hose where she had a minute earlier been bustling about the tables!). There were geese in a pen (someone on Tripadvisor got chased by them, so possibly that's a new thing), horses, which the owner apparently races, and chickens wandering through the plants. If it had been warmer we would have eaten on the patio, but alas, we had to eat inside, which was fairly plain.
Oh, but the food! This was not simple-but-good farmhouse cooking, this was evidence of serious culinary training. Before our appetizers came, we were presented with small bowls with a dollop of cheese in the bottom. The waiter poured a small lake of cream of asparagus soup on top, and voila! It was so light, so delicate, and yet the flavors corresponded perfectly. Then came an amuse-bouche, a platter of 4 pairs of bite-sized bits of deliciousness, again each carefully designed so that its component flavors and textures did something incredible. There was a beignet, and another with caviar on a bit of hardboiled egg (now I can say that I know I don't like caviar), and two others I can't recall beyond "Mmmmm." My appetizer was a bit too daring for me--I chose tartare du canard, figuring that I liked duck so much I couldn't go wrong. Not quite--I couldn't get past the reality of eating raw ground meat (the texture), so Sean, who had discovered a love of beef tartare, finished it, and pronounced it excellent. It was the main course, though, that was incredible. I chose a beef cut, entrecote, that was perhaps one of the most tender, most deliciously sauced pieces of meat I have ever eaten. Sean, for once, acknowledged that my meal choice was superior to his! There was also a platter of potatoes gratin, far fluffier and dreamier than the more homespun offering at Le Felteu. The price was well worth paying to experience such incredible food in an atmosphere so lacking in pretension. We were comfortable there, something which I think applied in addition only to Le Felteu in Paris and to Le Chat Touilleur in Avignon.
Sean and I have already discussed our return to Beau Sejour, and La Poudette. It's incredible to think that it will be possible to that as a long weekend trip next year! RyanAir flies to Bordeaux from Rome; fares next month are only 50 euro, and even less so in the fall. We'd have to rent a car, which would be the largest expense, but I think it will be worth it. The most likely choice would be to celebrate our 30th birthdays in the fall of 2015. One way or another--we'll be back there!
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Vive La France: Deuxième Partie
On Friday morning, we headed to Gare du Lyon to catch our train south to Avignon. I had thought that the TGV fast-train we'd be taking would be similar to the bullet train that once sped us from Spain to Paris in a matter of hours, the landscape whipping by indistinguishably outside, but I was happy to be mistaken, so we could enjoy the scenery. I had booked our tickets at the last minute, so they were expensive enough that upgrading to first class was only a little bit extra, and it was definitely worth it, for the leg room alone! I'd also booked us in a quiet car, so that meant a peaceful ride south as I worked on Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad, his unofficial sequel twenty years after Innocents Abroad.
We were delighted to find the skies in Avignon clear, and the sun hot. Our hotel was basic, but their Tripadvisor rating came from how friendly the owners, Sylvie and Pascal were. When we asked Pascal about restaurants, he whipped out a city map and started writing down his recommendations; we took two of these on successive evenings, and both wound up numbering among our favorite dinners, first L'Epice and Love, and the second Le Chat Touilleur. Our first afternoon we visited the papal palace, where there happened to be a rose festival going on. I don't think I've ever smelled so many roses. I had the idea that I didn't like roses all that much, but it seems that only applies to the regular red rose type (they smell a bit like floor polish to me somehow); there were so many other varieties that had subtler smells, and plenty I wouldn't have been able to ID as a rose at all. Poor Sean has allergies, so he had to limit his sniffage somewhat.
We also crossed the bridge which is apparently famous as the subject of a French nursery rhyme, which all the signs referenced but of course we Americans don't know. I should say that Sean crossed the bridge. I made it out about a third of the way, but the wind was so powerful that I wound up huddling in the lee of one of the chapels built into the bridge while Sean sprinted across to the other side. (I had thrown on a dress when we arrived, excited to finally wear some of my nicer clothes, only to discover that I needed to wear my purse cross-body just to hold the skirt down as we walked around--and there were still some close calls).
This wind, the mistral, was certainly one of the most memorable features of our time in this part of the country. I'd read about its power in Julia Child's memoir; she lived for a time in Marseille, where the wind could hit 50 mph and strip the roof shingles off the houses, and that's when the sun is shining! We didn't see anything quite that strong, but the next morning, but when I came down on Saturday morning in another dress, and Sylvie heard our plans to visit Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Mount Ventoux, she told me to go change. Thank god for that, because the wind up on Chateauneuf-du-Pape (once the location of the Avignon popes' summer palace, bombed out in WWII, hence the name), must have been 30mph. I don't think I've ever felt anything that powerful in my life--it was like a hand in the middle of your chest, pressing on you as you tried to walk! It was exhilarating but shocking at the same time, a reminder that we're basically dry leaves to Mother Nature. We ended up scrapping the Mont Ventoux visit, because Sylvie had warned us it gets so cold up there at the summit that you can't even get out of the car for a picture. I admired it from a distance instead.
Speaking of the car, that was quite an adventure in and of itself. We had originally decided not to pay for a GPS, assuming we could do just fine with a map like we had in Greece, but we hadn't factored in how much more of a busy, populous, and complicated place southern France is, versus the provincial one-horse towns of the Peloponnese, where every place was fairly distant and had just a few streets to navigate. It was a stroke of luck that at the pick-up desk they offered us a car with an onboard GPS for an extra 10 euro a day; we took it, which was one of the best decisions of our trip! I have no idea how we would have survived without it, especially driving at night. Anyway, we got out to the parking lot and discovered we were driving a Peugeot 3008, which is one of those wagon-crossed-with-SUV type things. Much bigger than our cars, or the VW Golf we were expecting. I was driving first, so we hop in, fire it up, and then are immediately confused that there's no D for drive. Nor is there P, for park. (This despite the manual we whipped out, which assures us that even in a French car, there should be D and P). Instead, we've got Reverse, Neutral, and A, which we decide means drive. The car could only be started or turned off in neutral, which meant you had to use the parking brake as the primary brake. OK, fine. I take my foot off the brake, put it in drive, and the car absolutely lurches forward. I hit the brakes, which turn out to be so super-sensitive we're both thrown forward. WTF was that? I try ahead, slowly releasing the brake. Again, the car jolts forward entirely of its own accord. Now I was getting really freaked out, because the parking lot was really tight, and a woman returning a car in Hertz had mentioned how happy she was they'd chosen the extra coverage because her husband had damaged the car getting out of a tight spot. So I'm afraid to even touch the gas, if this is what's happening on its own. Of course by this time Sean and I are yelling at each other, and I'm convinced the car is a dud and we have to go exchange it. What a moment!
Finally, we manage to maneuver it out of the lot and onto the road, when we notice something else weird. When you slowed down to about 10mph or so, the car's engine just cut out. Absolute silence when you were sitting at a red light. Then, the light changes, you lift your foot from the brake, the car moves forward a bit on its own, the engine returns, you hit the gas, and--sluggishly--you accelerate. The answer to this mystery revealed itself in fairly short order, once I noticed the ECO sign light up in green on the dash every time the engine died out. It was a fucking hybrid car! Apparently the lurch forward was simply how the car dealt with switching from electric to fuel. We got used to it--sort of--but I would never buy that car. It was like driving a lawnmower when you had to switch gears, and the acceleration was pretty terrible. We later figured out you could turn off the ECO mode, but by then--having learned the price of French gas--we permitted it lunge forward from every pause. That's what we get for needing an automatic car in Europe, I guess.
From Chateauneuf-du-Pape we headed north to Orange, home to the famous Roman theater, which was very impressive indeed. I learned from the educational video that it's one of only three in the world to retain its stage wall, partially because it's been in continuous use over the millenia--not for long as a theater, after the Christians took power, but rather as housing! The exterior walls still had post-holes from where beams and lintels of adjoining homes were stuck in, and the interior of the theater was all shanties at one time. The didactic panels explained how in the 19th century, the well-educated, classically inclined folk of Orange decided it was time to reclaim the theater, by evicting everyone who lived their and destroying their homes, a 20-year process. Something tells me those people didn't appreciate the gesture.
We acquired some souvenirs in Orange: lip balm and face wash from a pharmacy. It's amazing the things you wind up needing to buy in a foreign country, no matter how well you think you've planned. We've got Turkish aloe, Turkish indigestion pills (acquired when Sean was trying to mime "sun poisoning/nausea" at the pharmacy), Italian Benadryl, and now things like French bandaids and tampons. For the latter, after a failed and awkward attempt to buy them at a pharmacy (where the pharmacist did not speak English, so I had to ask for "produits...feminine?" only to be offered, after she disappeared into the back for a few minutes, a sad box of maxi pads) we wound up at a massive Carrefour, which is basically French Walmart. When we walked in, there were patio sets to your left and a meat counter straight ahead. The French: just like us.
Our next stop from Orange was the idyllic "perched village" of Gordes, on the top of a very steep hill looking out over a picturesque plain, where Sean bought some lavender honey. (I don't know why people enjoy putting lavender in food; I'm not terribly fond of its smell, and in food it tastes like eating perfume, but people like lavender in Provence and so it was offered in everything--Sean's lavender ice cream in Arles was particularly gross, I thought). We had seen a couple of signs on our way in, one for an abbey famous for its lavender fields, and another for the "bories" village, little dwellings made of corbelled stone, which have appeared in France since the Bronze Age. We went first to Senanque, traveling down a mountainside on an insane switchback road. We arrived too late to visit the lovely Romanesque church, and the lavender fields were just barely coming into flower, but it was still extraordinary, one of the most peaceful places I've ever been, located in a little valley with virtually no sounds but the birds. It was easy to understand why the monks chose this isolated spot to pray and work their gardens. Monastic life wouldn't be much of a chore under that beautiful blue sky, in the shadows of those great mountains.
Our last stop of the day was to be the bories. We'd passed the entrance turn-off on our way up, so we thought we'd pop in quickly and then head back to Avignon. Ha. That entrance was merely a red herring. We had to drive some twenty minutes on one of the smallest roads I've ever seen, fearing desperately that we would encounter another car coming the opposite direction (there were pull-offs every few hundred yards for this purpose--not the only place we encountered this method of deal with roads that were created long before cars or even carriages). The Peugeot was not a small car, so it basically took up the entire road, which seemed to get smaller, and curvier, as we worked our way further into what the GPS called "zone not mapped". Finally we arrived at the village of the Bories, patiently waited for the families with kids to actually notice a car trying to maneuver around them in the tiny parking lot (I have never seen anyone with less self-preservation instinct than French children), pay a pretty hefty fee for the ticket, and head in to check out some Bronze Age stuff. Except--it's not Bronze Age at all! These particular bories were built from the 17th through the 19th centuries, as temporary shelters for men working far from their home villages. We felt kind of cheated at first, especially with the price of the ticket and the effort to get there, but climbing in and around the stone structures--which were held together without mortar, by sheer gravity--was kind of cool in the end. They kept everything in those stone huts--sheep, pigs, silkworms. The smell must have been intense.
In the guidebook, I had read about free car parking on the island in the middle of the Rhone river next to Avignon, from where a shuttlebus would drop you back at the city walls. We parked in a fairly abandoned dirt lot, caught the shuttle, and were back in the hotel when I started to freak out about leaving the rental car in that location. I realized that the free parking was probably great for day-trippers, but overnight, a new car, one that we were responsible for? Sean was willing to chance it, but my paranoia induced me to go back out at 9pm (it was basically dusk, the sun lasts so late), walk across town, look in vain for the shuttle, power-walk across the bridge, convincing myself I'm going to get murdered the whole way, race to the car, and park it in an underground, video-surveilled lot that costs 20 euro a day. Whew. That is, until we go to get the car out on Sunday, and discover that the sole pay machine is out of order, and then I read something horrifying on the board, that they are fermee--closed--on Sundays, and freak out. Our car is stuck in the parking lot! We're screwed! We'll have to take the train to Aix and Avignon! Then I saw someone drive their car in, which made no sense if the garage was closed. In desperation I hit the help button near the stairs, and explained to the guy on the other end that the pay box was broken. He told us to drive to the exit, and opened the gate for us remotely--so in the end, we actually saved 20 euro, a rare experience on this expensive voyage. (The garage was indeed fermee when we returned Sunday night, with a gate across the entrance; we parked in another city garage inside the walls inside, where it was only 10 euro a day, go figure!)
On Sunday we visited Aix-in-Provence, home to Cezanne. Most shops were closed, but there was a street market going on, at which we bought some delicious-smelling soaps. We decided to skip visiting Cezanne's last workshop in favor of driving to the lookout point facing Mont St-Victoire, one of his favorite subjects, which I could see in the distance as we drove in (its profile is very recognizable). This turned out to be another one of those tiny, seemingly-impossible-to-be-two-lanes-but-oh-my-god-it-is-why-don't-these-fuckers-go-slower roads, which we followed for twenty minutes or so up a mountain, only to arrive at the designated parking lot to find it 100% filled. And this was not a spot where you could park on the road--there was just the road, and then there was wall or slope or tree, no shoulder, no extra parking lot. We'd come all that way, feeling superior to the shmucks walking or pushing their bikes uphill, only to have to turn tail and go back! We couldn't even linger a minute in the hopes of a departing visitor, as there was were two cars right behind us, one of them a big van. We wished them better luck than we, and left. That's one of the most valuable lessons I've learned from travel: you have to be willing to let things go. Of course, that's not a lesson I was particularly interested in following in Paris when we arrived, haha, but by the time we were in the south my mood had evolved toward C'est la vie! Or, in more accurate French (and Julia's favorite phrase): tant pis!
From Cezanne we went to van Gogh in Arles, a much more charming and quaint city than Aix had been. We visited a very lovely church cloister, the Roman arena, the theather, and the cryptoporticus of the ancient Roman forum, which seemed the perfect setting for a Dan Brown novel. And, naturally, we took a picture of the Night Cafe. At this point we were fairly close to the seaside, maybe an hour or less, so we decided to go down to Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the site where Mary Magdalen and compatriots were believed to have landed in France. The single road south led us through the marshy Camargue, famous for its white horses, many of whom we saw in farms advertising horse trips on the side of the road. The other thing we noticed was that the northbound lane was positively jammed with cars--all French people headed back from the four-day weekend of Ascension (for a secular nation, they do love them some obscure religious holidays! Not even Italy celebrates Ascension). It was like Cape traffic, though we were luckily going the right way. We told ourselves we'd have to hang out in the town and have dinner, because there was no way we were sitting in that line on our way out.
Once in Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, which already had the signs of a beach town that has emptied out, we walked out on a long rock pier to look out at the Mediterranean, and then dipped our feet in the freezing water while I picked up some tiny seashells for my sister. We had dinner in what seemed to be a fairly touristy spot, looking out at the water, but which Sean insisted upon because it was the only place offering bouillabaisse for one, instead of for two (and I'm just not interested in seafood soup, sorry). The waiter, who had seemed kind of dismissive (and you know, French) for most of our meal, suddenly became our best friend once he saw that Sean had actually finished the entire soup--a feat he said few rarely accomplish, and which would please the chef mightily. Sean has now received this compliment from waiters on two continents! After that we headed home. It was almost 11, there was still a bit of light in the western sky, and I had Sean pull the car over so we could listen to the bullfrogs in the marshes. No street lights, of course, so it was just the soft darkness and the sounds of nature. It was beautiful. Sean gets kind of unnerved by the absolute darkness, though, so our stop was brief.
That was our Provencal adventure! The food was delicious, the wine tasty, and the people overall much friendlier than in Paris. The next day would bring us to Bordeaux on the west coast.
We were delighted to find the skies in Avignon clear, and the sun hot. Our hotel was basic, but their Tripadvisor rating came from how friendly the owners, Sylvie and Pascal were. When we asked Pascal about restaurants, he whipped out a city map and started writing down his recommendations; we took two of these on successive evenings, and both wound up numbering among our favorite dinners, first L'Epice and Love, and the second Le Chat Touilleur. Our first afternoon we visited the papal palace, where there happened to be a rose festival going on. I don't think I've ever smelled so many roses. I had the idea that I didn't like roses all that much, but it seems that only applies to the regular red rose type (they smell a bit like floor polish to me somehow); there were so many other varieties that had subtler smells, and plenty I wouldn't have been able to ID as a rose at all. Poor Sean has allergies, so he had to limit his sniffage somewhat.
We also crossed the bridge which is apparently famous as the subject of a French nursery rhyme, which all the signs referenced but of course we Americans don't know. I should say that Sean crossed the bridge. I made it out about a third of the way, but the wind was so powerful that I wound up huddling in the lee of one of the chapels built into the bridge while Sean sprinted across to the other side. (I had thrown on a dress when we arrived, excited to finally wear some of my nicer clothes, only to discover that I needed to wear my purse cross-body just to hold the skirt down as we walked around--and there were still some close calls).
This wind, the mistral, was certainly one of the most memorable features of our time in this part of the country. I'd read about its power in Julia Child's memoir; she lived for a time in Marseille, where the wind could hit 50 mph and strip the roof shingles off the houses, and that's when the sun is shining! We didn't see anything quite that strong, but the next morning, but when I came down on Saturday morning in another dress, and Sylvie heard our plans to visit Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Mount Ventoux, she told me to go change. Thank god for that, because the wind up on Chateauneuf-du-Pape (once the location of the Avignon popes' summer palace, bombed out in WWII, hence the name), must have been 30mph. I don't think I've ever felt anything that powerful in my life--it was like a hand in the middle of your chest, pressing on you as you tried to walk! It was exhilarating but shocking at the same time, a reminder that we're basically dry leaves to Mother Nature. We ended up scrapping the Mont Ventoux visit, because Sylvie had warned us it gets so cold up there at the summit that you can't even get out of the car for a picture. I admired it from a distance instead.
Speaking of the car, that was quite an adventure in and of itself. We had originally decided not to pay for a GPS, assuming we could do just fine with a map like we had in Greece, but we hadn't factored in how much more of a busy, populous, and complicated place southern France is, versus the provincial one-horse towns of the Peloponnese, where every place was fairly distant and had just a few streets to navigate. It was a stroke of luck that at the pick-up desk they offered us a car with an onboard GPS for an extra 10 euro a day; we took it, which was one of the best decisions of our trip! I have no idea how we would have survived without it, especially driving at night. Anyway, we got out to the parking lot and discovered we were driving a Peugeot 3008, which is one of those wagon-crossed-with-SUV type things. Much bigger than our cars, or the VW Golf we were expecting. I was driving first, so we hop in, fire it up, and then are immediately confused that there's no D for drive. Nor is there P, for park. (This despite the manual we whipped out, which assures us that even in a French car, there should be D and P). Instead, we've got Reverse, Neutral, and A, which we decide means drive. The car could only be started or turned off in neutral, which meant you had to use the parking brake as the primary brake. OK, fine. I take my foot off the brake, put it in drive, and the car absolutely lurches forward. I hit the brakes, which turn out to be so super-sensitive we're both thrown forward. WTF was that? I try ahead, slowly releasing the brake. Again, the car jolts forward entirely of its own accord. Now I was getting really freaked out, because the parking lot was really tight, and a woman returning a car in Hertz had mentioned how happy she was they'd chosen the extra coverage because her husband had damaged the car getting out of a tight spot. So I'm afraid to even touch the gas, if this is what's happening on its own. Of course by this time Sean and I are yelling at each other, and I'm convinced the car is a dud and we have to go exchange it. What a moment!
Finally, we manage to maneuver it out of the lot and onto the road, when we notice something else weird. When you slowed down to about 10mph or so, the car's engine just cut out. Absolute silence when you were sitting at a red light. Then, the light changes, you lift your foot from the brake, the car moves forward a bit on its own, the engine returns, you hit the gas, and--sluggishly--you accelerate. The answer to this mystery revealed itself in fairly short order, once I noticed the ECO sign light up in green on the dash every time the engine died out. It was a fucking hybrid car! Apparently the lurch forward was simply how the car dealt with switching from electric to fuel. We got used to it--sort of--but I would never buy that car. It was like driving a lawnmower when you had to switch gears, and the acceleration was pretty terrible. We later figured out you could turn off the ECO mode, but by then--having learned the price of French gas--we permitted it lunge forward from every pause. That's what we get for needing an automatic car in Europe, I guess.
From Chateauneuf-du-Pape we headed north to Orange, home to the famous Roman theater, which was very impressive indeed. I learned from the educational video that it's one of only three in the world to retain its stage wall, partially because it's been in continuous use over the millenia--not for long as a theater, after the Christians took power, but rather as housing! The exterior walls still had post-holes from where beams and lintels of adjoining homes were stuck in, and the interior of the theater was all shanties at one time. The didactic panels explained how in the 19th century, the well-educated, classically inclined folk of Orange decided it was time to reclaim the theater, by evicting everyone who lived their and destroying their homes, a 20-year process. Something tells me those people didn't appreciate the gesture.
We acquired some souvenirs in Orange: lip balm and face wash from a pharmacy. It's amazing the things you wind up needing to buy in a foreign country, no matter how well you think you've planned. We've got Turkish aloe, Turkish indigestion pills (acquired when Sean was trying to mime "sun poisoning/nausea" at the pharmacy), Italian Benadryl, and now things like French bandaids and tampons. For the latter, after a failed and awkward attempt to buy them at a pharmacy (where the pharmacist did not speak English, so I had to ask for "produits...feminine?" only to be offered, after she disappeared into the back for a few minutes, a sad box of maxi pads) we wound up at a massive Carrefour, which is basically French Walmart. When we walked in, there were patio sets to your left and a meat counter straight ahead. The French: just like us.
Our next stop from Orange was the idyllic "perched village" of Gordes, on the top of a very steep hill looking out over a picturesque plain, where Sean bought some lavender honey. (I don't know why people enjoy putting lavender in food; I'm not terribly fond of its smell, and in food it tastes like eating perfume, but people like lavender in Provence and so it was offered in everything--Sean's lavender ice cream in Arles was particularly gross, I thought). We had seen a couple of signs on our way in, one for an abbey famous for its lavender fields, and another for the "bories" village, little dwellings made of corbelled stone, which have appeared in France since the Bronze Age. We went first to Senanque, traveling down a mountainside on an insane switchback road. We arrived too late to visit the lovely Romanesque church, and the lavender fields were just barely coming into flower, but it was still extraordinary, one of the most peaceful places I've ever been, located in a little valley with virtually no sounds but the birds. It was easy to understand why the monks chose this isolated spot to pray and work their gardens. Monastic life wouldn't be much of a chore under that beautiful blue sky, in the shadows of those great mountains.
Our last stop of the day was to be the bories. We'd passed the entrance turn-off on our way up, so we thought we'd pop in quickly and then head back to Avignon. Ha. That entrance was merely a red herring. We had to drive some twenty minutes on one of the smallest roads I've ever seen, fearing desperately that we would encounter another car coming the opposite direction (there were pull-offs every few hundred yards for this purpose--not the only place we encountered this method of deal with roads that were created long before cars or even carriages). The Peugeot was not a small car, so it basically took up the entire road, which seemed to get smaller, and curvier, as we worked our way further into what the GPS called "zone not mapped". Finally we arrived at the village of the Bories, patiently waited for the families with kids to actually notice a car trying to maneuver around them in the tiny parking lot (I have never seen anyone with less self-preservation instinct than French children), pay a pretty hefty fee for the ticket, and head in to check out some Bronze Age stuff. Except--it's not Bronze Age at all! These particular bories were built from the 17th through the 19th centuries, as temporary shelters for men working far from their home villages. We felt kind of cheated at first, especially with the price of the ticket and the effort to get there, but climbing in and around the stone structures--which were held together without mortar, by sheer gravity--was kind of cool in the end. They kept everything in those stone huts--sheep, pigs, silkworms. The smell must have been intense.
In the guidebook, I had read about free car parking on the island in the middle of the Rhone river next to Avignon, from where a shuttlebus would drop you back at the city walls. We parked in a fairly abandoned dirt lot, caught the shuttle, and were back in the hotel when I started to freak out about leaving the rental car in that location. I realized that the free parking was probably great for day-trippers, but overnight, a new car, one that we were responsible for? Sean was willing to chance it, but my paranoia induced me to go back out at 9pm (it was basically dusk, the sun lasts so late), walk across town, look in vain for the shuttle, power-walk across the bridge, convincing myself I'm going to get murdered the whole way, race to the car, and park it in an underground, video-surveilled lot that costs 20 euro a day. Whew. That is, until we go to get the car out on Sunday, and discover that the sole pay machine is out of order, and then I read something horrifying on the board, that they are fermee--closed--on Sundays, and freak out. Our car is stuck in the parking lot! We're screwed! We'll have to take the train to Aix and Avignon! Then I saw someone drive their car in, which made no sense if the garage was closed. In desperation I hit the help button near the stairs, and explained to the guy on the other end that the pay box was broken. He told us to drive to the exit, and opened the gate for us remotely--so in the end, we actually saved 20 euro, a rare experience on this expensive voyage. (The garage was indeed fermee when we returned Sunday night, with a gate across the entrance; we parked in another city garage inside the walls inside, where it was only 10 euro a day, go figure!)
On Sunday we visited Aix-in-Provence, home to Cezanne. Most shops were closed, but there was a street market going on, at which we bought some delicious-smelling soaps. We decided to skip visiting Cezanne's last workshop in favor of driving to the lookout point facing Mont St-Victoire, one of his favorite subjects, which I could see in the distance as we drove in (its profile is very recognizable). This turned out to be another one of those tiny, seemingly-impossible-to-be-two-lanes-but-oh-my-god-it-is-why-don't-these-fuckers-go-slower roads, which we followed for twenty minutes or so up a mountain, only to arrive at the designated parking lot to find it 100% filled. And this was not a spot where you could park on the road--there was just the road, and then there was wall or slope or tree, no shoulder, no extra parking lot. We'd come all that way, feeling superior to the shmucks walking or pushing their bikes uphill, only to have to turn tail and go back! We couldn't even linger a minute in the hopes of a departing visitor, as there was were two cars right behind us, one of them a big van. We wished them better luck than we, and left. That's one of the most valuable lessons I've learned from travel: you have to be willing to let things go. Of course, that's not a lesson I was particularly interested in following in Paris when we arrived, haha, but by the time we were in the south my mood had evolved toward C'est la vie! Or, in more accurate French (and Julia's favorite phrase): tant pis!
From Cezanne we went to van Gogh in Arles, a much more charming and quaint city than Aix had been. We visited a very lovely church cloister, the Roman arena, the theather, and the cryptoporticus of the ancient Roman forum, which seemed the perfect setting for a Dan Brown novel. And, naturally, we took a picture of the Night Cafe. At this point we were fairly close to the seaside, maybe an hour or less, so we decided to go down to Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the site where Mary Magdalen and compatriots were believed to have landed in France. The single road south led us through the marshy Camargue, famous for its white horses, many of whom we saw in farms advertising horse trips on the side of the road. The other thing we noticed was that the northbound lane was positively jammed with cars--all French people headed back from the four-day weekend of Ascension (for a secular nation, they do love them some obscure religious holidays! Not even Italy celebrates Ascension). It was like Cape traffic, though we were luckily going the right way. We told ourselves we'd have to hang out in the town and have dinner, because there was no way we were sitting in that line on our way out.
Once in Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, which already had the signs of a beach town that has emptied out, we walked out on a long rock pier to look out at the Mediterranean, and then dipped our feet in the freezing water while I picked up some tiny seashells for my sister. We had dinner in what seemed to be a fairly touristy spot, looking out at the water, but which Sean insisted upon because it was the only place offering bouillabaisse for one, instead of for two (and I'm just not interested in seafood soup, sorry). The waiter, who had seemed kind of dismissive (and you know, French) for most of our meal, suddenly became our best friend once he saw that Sean had actually finished the entire soup--a feat he said few rarely accomplish, and which would please the chef mightily. Sean has now received this compliment from waiters on two continents! After that we headed home. It was almost 11, there was still a bit of light in the western sky, and I had Sean pull the car over so we could listen to the bullfrogs in the marshes. No street lights, of course, so it was just the soft darkness and the sounds of nature. It was beautiful. Sean gets kind of unnerved by the absolute darkness, though, so our stop was brief.
That was our Provencal adventure! The food was delicious, the wine tasty, and the people overall much friendlier than in Paris. The next day would bring us to Bordeaux on the west coast.
Monday, June 09, 2014
Vive la France, Première Partie
We're back, and exhausted! We joke that it's the mark of one of our vacations that you feel like you need another vacation to recover--even though this time we took it rather easy the last few days.
Things didn't start out in the most auspicious manner, I have to admit. Sean was working up to the very last minute on his last paper of the semester--and by the last minute, I mean that when the limo driver pulled up in the driveway, he was racing to jump in the shower while I proof-read the paper itself. Sean had rolled his eyes at my insistence on paying for the private car, but it turned out to be not only a stroke of genius but absolutely necessary; we simply wouldn't have made it down to the train station in time. Instead, our driver, who turned out to be Syrian, waited for us patiently and then talked politics with Sean the whole way to NYC, after discovering their opinions were perfectly in line. I didn't get his name, unfortunately, but once he found out that my grandmother was Syrian he acted like I was one of the tribe. (I learned that the word my grandmother applied to her meat and rice dish, hushway [حشو or, as it sounds on Google translate, hush-oo] really just means "stuffing", and in Syria is generally not served on its own...he seemed confused when I told him we put it in pitas!)
Our plane ride to Dublin was short, and I didn't sleep much (the presence of no fewer than three babies in the rows around us didn't help!). I was so tired in Dublin that we scrapped the plan to go into town for breakfast, but Sean still got his Irish breakfast on, right down to the disgusting blood pudding. Blech! We arrived in a Paris that was grey and cold, which was pretty disappointing. Our hotel room was also not what I had expected, despite being told that we were being upgraded to a triple (as I would learn when we came back to the hotel at the end of our trip and got exactly the beautiful room that I thought I'd booked, not protesting this "upgrade" was a mistake).
I will admit that I was not in the best mood that first day or two. In a twist of our usual roles, Sean found himself in the position of cheerleader to my black gloom! I had just been looking forward to this trip so much after the hellish year we'd had, and to leave New Haven, where it was climbing the upper 70s, only to have to bundle up in Paris and face the drizzle seemed the ultimate disappointment.
One immediate bright spot was our first dinner, at Le Felteu, which was a wonderful, entirely non-pretentious establishment with portion sizes on the American, rather than French scale (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the gruff-but-friendly proprietor, who sported some serious tattoos-- including the word VITRIOL--is apparently a Harley rider, as I learned from a review). The food was fucking amazing, even though we were largely guessing as to what we were ordering. The "menu" was just a chalkboard that he plunked on the table. Now, I can read French generally, but that is very little help in a restaurant; I can identify canard, veau, boeuf, etc, but not how it's being prepared. The owner was kind enough, in his limited English and with my zero French, to warn me off the andouillette. I knew it was a kind of sausage, since I had read about it in Emile Zola's The Belly of Paris, but what Zola did not mention was that it was a tripe sausage. No thanks. We had a charcuterie plate to start, and both of us had duck, which came not only with delicious vegetables but a heaping side dish of potatoes gratin. I'd never had that before, but cheese and potatoes, you really can't go wrong, right?
I was hoping for better weather the next day, but alas, no luck. We had bought two-day Paris museum passes, and Sean doesn't believe in taking the metro if you can walk for 10 hours straight, so we pretty much went non-stop Wednesday and Thursday. Our first stop was the Pantheon, burial site of luminaries like Marie Curie and Emile Zola (Sean was very amused by the signage which explained that Voltaire was buried directly across from Rousseau, his sworn enemy). The first "wow" moment came at the sight of Notre Dame, though I was disappointed by the darkness of the interior. After waiting a good 30 minutes in line, we were able to climb the towers, which offered an extraordinary view over the city. I found it more impressive than the view from the Eiffel, which was really too high, and too far from the center, to allow you to connect with what was below. We had brought along my mom's opera glasses (which actually got my bag searched in Dublin, because they were confused by them on the X-ray; the security woman was then so delighted by how cute they were), so we could look at things quite far distant, which was pretty cool.
In the late afternoon on Wednesday we found ourselves at the Louvre, the day it stays open till 9:45PM. This proved to be a mistake. Not only were our feet already very tired, but contrary to my hopes, the museum was no less full than it ever is. I suppose the drizzly weather had something to do with it. Anyway, while it was extraordinary to finally see, in person, paintings like the Pastoral Concert or the Belle Ferroniere, it was really hard to appreciate them in a setting that was loud, crowded, and humid from the press of all those bodies. And forget about Mona Lisa! The crowd was so thick, it wasn't worth the effort. I've always told my students that she is the rare painting that's better experienced and discussed in a classroom than in person; there's just no way to have a quiet moment with her to understand why she might have any importance at all. I wasn't disappointed, because I knew it would be like that. I was more pleased to see paintings like David's Napoleon Crowning Josephine, or Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, and Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, huge canvases that didn't fail to impress, and which can also stand up to the mass of humanity passing in front of them.
After the Louvre, Sean consented to a taxi back to the hotel, so we could get ready to meet his friend Delphine and her husband Herve for dinner. We didn't wind up getting a French SIM, so we were relying on Facebook. She had told us to meet her in front of the city hall at 8pm. According to Google that was the Hotel de Ville, a massively elaborately 19th-century building with a big empty plaza in front of it that Sean had admired the night before. At 8pm there we were, huddling under one umbrella. Sean hadn't seen Delphine since they taught at Xavier together 6 years previously, so he wasn't 100% certain of what she looked like anymore, and as the minutes ticked on, we started to fear that Hotel de Ville and City Hall might somehow not be the same thing. Luckily, at about 8:20, we spotted her and her husband racing across the plaza. They had encountered so much traffic coming in from the suburbs that they'd ditched their car and gotten on the metro.
I suppose it was silly of me to expect them to have a place in mind to go, any more than I'd know where to take a foreigner in New York, but it was ironic that in the company of real French people we wound up having dinner in the most touristy restaurant of our whole trip! On the plus side, our service was great in the company of natives. This was where Sean tried to order "lapin" as "lapeen" instead of "lahpohn", leading Delphine to later explain that he'd asked for a serving of dick. In the company of friends it was a hysterical mistake, but I'm sure we'd have felt more embarrassed if we'd managed to figure that out when we'd been on our own. This was also the spot where we tried escargot, and found them delicious. It's pretty much like a bit of chewy calamari, and they're served drench in pesto. Again, having friends was helpful because Herve showed Sean how to hold each shell firmly in this little tong device, then scoop the escargot out with a tiny fork. It's not as simple as it sounds, as I discovered when I tried, but at least no one got splattered with basil. Herve was also kind enough to pay for the whole meal.
There's something very releasing about sharing a meal with other people, especially in a foreign country, that can improve your spirits dramatically, and that was the turning point for me. As if the weather was responding, Thursday morning dawned with some sun, and we decided to head to climb the Eiffel tower first thing. Well, the rest of Paris had gotten this memo too, so it ended up taking us longer to wait in line than to climb its 700 steps! Still worth it. We only went to the second level (which is as far as you can climb steps, anyhow), because Sean, in another reversal, was getting freaked out by the heights. Looking out from the structure on our way down was a little woozy, I'll admit, but there was something about the strength of the iron structure enclosing you that prevented my fear of heights from coming into play; I was actually more nervous going down the narrow, curving staircase inside Notre Dame. Hell, I get nervous on a stepladder! Meanwhile, Sean is not fazed by standing on a cliff's edge, but a man-made tower makes him nervous. Go figure.
After lunch, our next visit was the Invalides and the church of Saint Louis, which had been re-purposed into a monumental burial site for Napoleon I after his body was returned to France in 1840, while the country was ruled by its last king, Louis-Phillipe of Bourbon. We particularly admired the propaganda in the relief sculptures decorating the lower level, which touted Napoleon's many achievements, not only military, but in terms of education, the Napoleonic code, etc, all of it presented in lovely Neoclassical fashion. In the Museum of the Army in the Invalides, Sean discovered a whole wing dedicated to World Wars I and II, which he insisted we visit.
It really was interesting, as much as I groused about going in, to see things from the French perspective, particularly World War I, largely fought on their territory. The reading I had done before the trip had enlightened me about the far-reaching consequences of 1870-1, when Emperor Napoleon III's failed war against Germany led to his capture, the fall of the Second Empire, the uprising (and brutal quelling) of the Paris Commune, and, most keenly felt in French pride, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans. The ensuing decades saw a steep rise in nationalism, machismo, and the need to absolve the stain on French honor, whether on the sports field or the battlefield. The Great War, when it came, was France's chance, and when it was over, even though their country and economy were decimated, they took their opportunity to punish Germany thoroughly for a slight committed nearly fifty years earlier. And, of course, we all know how that turned out. In fact, one of the most instructive points for me was in the display of military costumes, by all interested parties, from the late 19th century through WWII, demonstrating how the showy grandeur of the 19th century slowly reappeared in the interwar period, a symbolic example of France's failure to modernize its military--the failure that would doom them against the German invasion in 1940.
Later that afternoon we made two other stops, first to Saint Chapelle, one of the most glorious monuments of Gothic stained glass, and to the Musee Cluny, the medieval museum. Sean was wowed by Saint Chapelle, more than I think I've ever seen him moved by any post-classical monument. The Cluny museum was interesting too, but by then our feet were really dragging. It was time to pack up our things and get ready to head out to Avignon in the morning.
TBC...
Things didn't start out in the most auspicious manner, I have to admit. Sean was working up to the very last minute on his last paper of the semester--and by the last minute, I mean that when the limo driver pulled up in the driveway, he was racing to jump in the shower while I proof-read the paper itself. Sean had rolled his eyes at my insistence on paying for the private car, but it turned out to be not only a stroke of genius but absolutely necessary; we simply wouldn't have made it down to the train station in time. Instead, our driver, who turned out to be Syrian, waited for us patiently and then talked politics with Sean the whole way to NYC, after discovering their opinions were perfectly in line. I didn't get his name, unfortunately, but once he found out that my grandmother was Syrian he acted like I was one of the tribe. (I learned that the word my grandmother applied to her meat and rice dish, hushway [حشو or, as it sounds on Google translate, hush-oo] really just means "stuffing", and in Syria is generally not served on its own...he seemed confused when I told him we put it in pitas!)
Our plane ride to Dublin was short, and I didn't sleep much (the presence of no fewer than three babies in the rows around us didn't help!). I was so tired in Dublin that we scrapped the plan to go into town for breakfast, but Sean still got his Irish breakfast on, right down to the disgusting blood pudding. Blech! We arrived in a Paris that was grey and cold, which was pretty disappointing. Our hotel room was also not what I had expected, despite being told that we were being upgraded to a triple (as I would learn when we came back to the hotel at the end of our trip and got exactly the beautiful room that I thought I'd booked, not protesting this "upgrade" was a mistake).
I will admit that I was not in the best mood that first day or two. In a twist of our usual roles, Sean found himself in the position of cheerleader to my black gloom! I had just been looking forward to this trip so much after the hellish year we'd had, and to leave New Haven, where it was climbing the upper 70s, only to have to bundle up in Paris and face the drizzle seemed the ultimate disappointment.
One immediate bright spot was our first dinner, at Le Felteu, which was a wonderful, entirely non-pretentious establishment with portion sizes on the American, rather than French scale (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the gruff-but-friendly proprietor, who sported some serious tattoos-- including the word VITRIOL--is apparently a Harley rider, as I learned from a review). The food was fucking amazing, even though we were largely guessing as to what we were ordering. The "menu" was just a chalkboard that he plunked on the table. Now, I can read French generally, but that is very little help in a restaurant; I can identify canard, veau, boeuf, etc, but not how it's being prepared. The owner was kind enough, in his limited English and with my zero French, to warn me off the andouillette. I knew it was a kind of sausage, since I had read about it in Emile Zola's The Belly of Paris, but what Zola did not mention was that it was a tripe sausage. No thanks. We had a charcuterie plate to start, and both of us had duck, which came not only with delicious vegetables but a heaping side dish of potatoes gratin. I'd never had that before, but cheese and potatoes, you really can't go wrong, right?
I was hoping for better weather the next day, but alas, no luck. We had bought two-day Paris museum passes, and Sean doesn't believe in taking the metro if you can walk for 10 hours straight, so we pretty much went non-stop Wednesday and Thursday. Our first stop was the Pantheon, burial site of luminaries like Marie Curie and Emile Zola (Sean was very amused by the signage which explained that Voltaire was buried directly across from Rousseau, his sworn enemy). The first "wow" moment came at the sight of Notre Dame, though I was disappointed by the darkness of the interior. After waiting a good 30 minutes in line, we were able to climb the towers, which offered an extraordinary view over the city. I found it more impressive than the view from the Eiffel, which was really too high, and too far from the center, to allow you to connect with what was below. We had brought along my mom's opera glasses (which actually got my bag searched in Dublin, because they were confused by them on the X-ray; the security woman was then so delighted by how cute they were), so we could look at things quite far distant, which was pretty cool.
In the late afternoon on Wednesday we found ourselves at the Louvre, the day it stays open till 9:45PM. This proved to be a mistake. Not only were our feet already very tired, but contrary to my hopes, the museum was no less full than it ever is. I suppose the drizzly weather had something to do with it. Anyway, while it was extraordinary to finally see, in person, paintings like the Pastoral Concert or the Belle Ferroniere, it was really hard to appreciate them in a setting that was loud, crowded, and humid from the press of all those bodies. And forget about Mona Lisa! The crowd was so thick, it wasn't worth the effort. I've always told my students that she is the rare painting that's better experienced and discussed in a classroom than in person; there's just no way to have a quiet moment with her to understand why she might have any importance at all. I wasn't disappointed, because I knew it would be like that. I was more pleased to see paintings like David's Napoleon Crowning Josephine, or Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, and Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, huge canvases that didn't fail to impress, and which can also stand up to the mass of humanity passing in front of them.
After the Louvre, Sean consented to a taxi back to the hotel, so we could get ready to meet his friend Delphine and her husband Herve for dinner. We didn't wind up getting a French SIM, so we were relying on Facebook. She had told us to meet her in front of the city hall at 8pm. According to Google that was the Hotel de Ville, a massively elaborately 19th-century building with a big empty plaza in front of it that Sean had admired the night before. At 8pm there we were, huddling under one umbrella. Sean hadn't seen Delphine since they taught at Xavier together 6 years previously, so he wasn't 100% certain of what she looked like anymore, and as the minutes ticked on, we started to fear that Hotel de Ville and City Hall might somehow not be the same thing. Luckily, at about 8:20, we spotted her and her husband racing across the plaza. They had encountered so much traffic coming in from the suburbs that they'd ditched their car and gotten on the metro.
I suppose it was silly of me to expect them to have a place in mind to go, any more than I'd know where to take a foreigner in New York, but it was ironic that in the company of real French people we wound up having dinner in the most touristy restaurant of our whole trip! On the plus side, our service was great in the company of natives. This was where Sean tried to order "lapin" as "lapeen" instead of "lahpohn", leading Delphine to later explain that he'd asked for a serving of dick. In the company of friends it was a hysterical mistake, but I'm sure we'd have felt more embarrassed if we'd managed to figure that out when we'd been on our own. This was also the spot where we tried escargot, and found them delicious. It's pretty much like a bit of chewy calamari, and they're served drench in pesto. Again, having friends was helpful because Herve showed Sean how to hold each shell firmly in this little tong device, then scoop the escargot out with a tiny fork. It's not as simple as it sounds, as I discovered when I tried, but at least no one got splattered with basil. Herve was also kind enough to pay for the whole meal.
There's something very releasing about sharing a meal with other people, especially in a foreign country, that can improve your spirits dramatically, and that was the turning point for me. As if the weather was responding, Thursday morning dawned with some sun, and we decided to head to climb the Eiffel tower first thing. Well, the rest of Paris had gotten this memo too, so it ended up taking us longer to wait in line than to climb its 700 steps! Still worth it. We only went to the second level (which is as far as you can climb steps, anyhow), because Sean, in another reversal, was getting freaked out by the heights. Looking out from the structure on our way down was a little woozy, I'll admit, but there was something about the strength of the iron structure enclosing you that prevented my fear of heights from coming into play; I was actually more nervous going down the narrow, curving staircase inside Notre Dame. Hell, I get nervous on a stepladder! Meanwhile, Sean is not fazed by standing on a cliff's edge, but a man-made tower makes him nervous. Go figure.
After lunch, our next visit was the Invalides and the church of Saint Louis, which had been re-purposed into a monumental burial site for Napoleon I after his body was returned to France in 1840, while the country was ruled by its last king, Louis-Phillipe of Bourbon. We particularly admired the propaganda in the relief sculptures decorating the lower level, which touted Napoleon's many achievements, not only military, but in terms of education, the Napoleonic code, etc, all of it presented in lovely Neoclassical fashion. In the Museum of the Army in the Invalides, Sean discovered a whole wing dedicated to World Wars I and II, which he insisted we visit.
It really was interesting, as much as I groused about going in, to see things from the French perspective, particularly World War I, largely fought on their territory. The reading I had done before the trip had enlightened me about the far-reaching consequences of 1870-1, when Emperor Napoleon III's failed war against Germany led to his capture, the fall of the Second Empire, the uprising (and brutal quelling) of the Paris Commune, and, most keenly felt in French pride, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans. The ensuing decades saw a steep rise in nationalism, machismo, and the need to absolve the stain on French honor, whether on the sports field or the battlefield. The Great War, when it came, was France's chance, and when it was over, even though their country and economy were decimated, they took their opportunity to punish Germany thoroughly for a slight committed nearly fifty years earlier. And, of course, we all know how that turned out. In fact, one of the most instructive points for me was in the display of military costumes, by all interested parties, from the late 19th century through WWII, demonstrating how the showy grandeur of the 19th century slowly reappeared in the interwar period, a symbolic example of France's failure to modernize its military--the failure that would doom them against the German invasion in 1940.
Later that afternoon we made two other stops, first to Saint Chapelle, one of the most glorious monuments of Gothic stained glass, and to the Musee Cluny, the medieval museum. Sean was wowed by Saint Chapelle, more than I think I've ever seen him moved by any post-classical monument. The Cluny museum was interesting too, but by then our feet were really dragging. It was time to pack up our things and get ready to head out to Avignon in the morning.
TBC...
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Montaigne
"For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me."
I suppose it was a hopeless project to think I could revisit even a good sampling of Montaigne's many essays before our trip...I'm not even through Book One, and it's due back to the library tomorrow. Oh well. Two tidbits I wanted to save:
On the need to inspire curiosity in children regarding their education: "there is nothing like arousing appetite and affection; otherwise all you make out of them is asses loaded with books. By dint of whipping, they are given their pocketful of learning for safekepping; but if learning is to do us any good, we must not merely lodge it within us, we must espouse it."
One of his most famous essays is "On Friendship", in which he discusses his intense bond with Etienne de la Boetie. ("So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.") They only knew each other for six years before de la Boetie died, and yet he writes "what we ordinarily called friends and friendships are nothing but acquaintanceships and familiarities formed by some chance or convenience...in the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering, Because it was he, because it was I." It's tempting to read a love that was deeper than friendship into that statement. One the one hand, the same essay does disregard the idea of a woman as the object of a true friendship...but it also contains a condemnation of "Greek love." Based on my Googling, theirs has been referred to as a "romantic friendship" to indicate the depth of feeling that was separate from sexual activity.
I suppose it was a hopeless project to think I could revisit even a good sampling of Montaigne's many essays before our trip...I'm not even through Book One, and it's due back to the library tomorrow. Oh well. Two tidbits I wanted to save:
On the need to inspire curiosity in children regarding their education: "there is nothing like arousing appetite and affection; otherwise all you make out of them is asses loaded with books. By dint of whipping, they are given their pocketful of learning for safekepping; but if learning is to do us any good, we must not merely lodge it within us, we must espouse it."
One of his most famous essays is "On Friendship", in which he discusses his intense bond with Etienne de la Boetie. ("So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.") They only knew each other for six years before de la Boetie died, and yet he writes "what we ordinarily called friends and friendships are nothing but acquaintanceships and familiarities formed by some chance or convenience...in the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering, Because it was he, because it was I." It's tempting to read a love that was deeper than friendship into that statement. One the one hand, the same essay does disregard the idea of a woman as the object of a true friendship...but it also contains a condemnation of "Greek love." Based on my Googling, theirs has been referred to as a "romantic friendship" to indicate the depth of feeling that was separate from sexual activity.
The Art of Travel
I'm not generally that into the Ted Talks, but a while back I came across one by philosopher Alain de Botton on the meaning of success. One point that has stood out in my memory was his observation that the same people who society considered "unfortunates" in the ancient through early modern world are today called "losers", signifying a shift in how we assign responsibility for lack of success: once it was ascribed to forces beyond human control, but now it implies innate worthlessness. Overall I was interested in his mode of address and his ideas, so I put some of his books, especially Status Anxiety, on my to-read list. Then I saw that he'd written an a book entitled The Art of Travel, in the introduction to which he notes that despite all of the massive literature on where to go, there's very little written on why we go, or what we hope to gain from it. There are a number of thematic essays in the book, each interspersing a personal journey of his own with the ideas of a "guide", among which are found Wordsworth, the naturalist Alexander van Humboldt, van Gogh, and Flaubert. I found his many of his observations fascinating and on-point, but when I tried to share some of them with Sean, he was turned off by what seemed to him their "obviousness." (I later learned from his Wikipedia page that this division of opinions on his work is fairly standard!)
Here are some of the things that struck me:
Here are some of the things that struck me:
- On travel in real life vs. travel as it's presented in art: "A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon.' We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look at the window at a field. We look back in side...It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be [this goes on for an entire paragraph!]. A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetitions, misleading emphases and inconsequential plotlines." [Sean: So what? Of course an author isn't going to write all that stuff, it'd be boring. Me: But isn't it interesting to think about all the stuff they leave out? Sean: No, because it's boring.]
- After reflecting on train travel as conducive to contemplative thought: "Journeys are the midwives of thought...At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves--that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it cannot; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are."
- On our delight with points of difference in other cultures and places, whether an airport sign or a jam jar: "Yet difference alone would not be enough to elicit pleasure, or not for long. The difference has to seem like an improvement on what my own country is capable of...what we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home."
- From a letter by Flaubert, on his deep hatred of his home country and the notion of national identities: "I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country--that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black--has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man."
- On his lifelong passion for the East, which resulted in a 9-month stay in Egypt that would remain with him for the rest of his life: "Why did Flaubert so admire the camel? Because he identified with its stoicism and ungainliness. He was touched by its sad expression and its combination of awkwardness and fatalistic resilience. The people of Egypt seemed to share some of the camel's qualities, exhibiting a silent strength and humility that contrasted with the bourgeois arrogance of Flaubert's own Norman neighbors."
- On the need for curiosity when we travel, particularly a curiosity about something in particular that has had time to develop: "A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to built up the necessary receptivity...the risk is compounded by geography, in the way that cities contain buildings or monuments that may be only a few feet apart in space but are leagues apart in terms of what is required to appreciate them...We are asked to be curious about Gothic architecture on one street and then fascinated by Etruscan archaeology on the next."
- On the travels of Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled to the still virtually-unknown continent of South America and returned to Europe with vast data sets about its geography, ethnography, biology, climate, etc.: an early biography of him was subtitled What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime--to which de Botton adds, "and seldom or never is."
- On Wordsworth's belief in the harmful effects of cities on the human soul: "The poet accused cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and a desire to shine in the eyes of strangers...however well-provided for, they had a relentless desire for new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which their happiness did not depend."
- On the emergence of the concept of the sublime with the Romanticists: "A landscape cold arouse the sublime only when it suggested power--a power greater than that of humans, and threatening to them. Sublime places embodied a defiance to man's will...It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside."
- Ruskin's words to the Working Men's College, where he was teaching drawing with the goal of teaching people to observe the world more closely: "Now, remember, gentlemen, that I have not been teaching you to draw, only to see. Two men are walking through Clare Market. One of them comes out at the other end not a bit wiser than when he went into; the other notices a bit of parsely hanging over the edge of a butter-woman's basket, and carries away with him images of beauty which in the course of his daily work he incorporates with it for many a day. I want you to see things like these..."
Commonplace some of these points might be, but I enjoyed reflecting on them in light of our travels, and especially on the eve of our next journey through France. I especially enjoyed the chapter on "Eye-Opening Art", in which he explores how his original lackluster impression of Provence was changed through his experience of van Gogh (thanks to a charismatic PhD student leading a van Gogh tour in Arles, naturally!). His distaste for the low, gnarled forms of the grapevines amused me, because I had something of a similar experience. The school in Florence had arranged for a Chianti tour, and when we arrived in the vineyard I was shocked to to that those ugly, stooped plants, which I had seen in innumerable fields out the windows of trains as we traveled around Italy, were really grapevines...to think I didn't even like wine back then. Oh, 2006, how distant you seem!
Friday, May 16, 2014
Leaving Books Behind
I've thought before about the question of what books I'd bring to a desert island (isn't it interesting that this hypothetical assumes that you'll somehow be given advance notice of your impending exile, not to mention allowed luggage?). Books that almost always find a place on the list include Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Lake Woebegone days, my Jeeves & Wooster omnibus edition, and Innocents Abroad. There's a second-tier, too, which includes books I'm fond of and have re-read many times but could probably leave behind, like Illusion, or Howl's Moving Castle, or Judith Merkle Riley's books. Of course, this kind of listmaking is just done idly; you never think you'll have to make those kinds of decisions. That is, until you start thinking about your impending move to a foreign country. Even within 100 lbs of checked luggage, there's not a lot of room for novels.
The classics, like Austen and Twain, present no problem, because their e-books are cheap. I already put Innocents Abroad and its semi-sequel, A Tramp Abroad, on my tablet, for example. But what about the others? Few of them are new or popular enough to be available within the e-lending libraries to which I have access (though Diana Wynne Jones' books are in the New Haven library's digital catalog), and since Kindle books cost $7-10, on average, replacing a bookshelf's worth of material with digital versions would be pretty expensive. That means if I want any hard copies, I'll have to make some difficult choices on who gets to travel with me. I can probably also acquire some books at the Paperback Exchange in Florence, or an equivalent store, if there is one, in Rome.
I don't really look forward to a future filled only with e-books; I don't mind them (I just finished Zola's The Ladies' Paradise yesterday on my tablet, actually), but I'd always prefer a physical copy if I can get one. What's annoying is that there is no version of the second-hand store or library tag sale for e-books; they're always new, never used--and thus never deeply discounted. Would any e-book purchase ever be able to equal the price-to-value ratio of acquiring Lake Woebegone Days at the PapEx for 0.25 euro cents??
Friday, May 09, 2014
Another Philly Farewell
I got really lucky with the weather yesterday. It drizzled and rained through most of CT, NY, and NJ, then cleared in NJ and PA; by the time I reached Philadelphia, it was warm and sunny. I got to enjoy the late-afternoon light on the patio, with a couple of past issues of the New Yorker and a glass of the Riesling that Phyllis texted me to tell me I should open. In other words, whitest afternoon ever.
I guess I had forgotten that this region changes seasons a couple of weeks in advance of Connecticut, so where all the green things are just budding around New Haven, everything is in full and glorious bloom here. In fact, I came too late to see the pink cherry blossom tree out front in all its true glory; it blooms in early May, and by the second week is already disgorging its blossoms onto the hapless cars parked below. I couldn't help smiling at the sight of the car that was positive covered in pink petals, parked in what used to be my spot--it might be pretty on the tree, but on your car it's a damned nuisance to get rid of without a full-scale car wash.
After dinner, Phyllis and I went over to Chestnut Hill, parked, and walked around in some of the leafy neighborhood streets. We wound up walking down Gravers Lane, though not the side you'd typically use as an artery onto Germantown. It was filled with beautiful houses, most probably from the late 19th century. One of the benefits of an area that's been lived in for so long by people with money to spend on landscaping is the profusion of flowering trees and plants. Apple blossom, lilac, verbena, bleeding hearts...so many pretty sights and even more delicious smells!
Phyllis' soon-to-be-departed housemate, Laura, is off in Italy with her boyfriend right now, so when I got here yesterday I took the opportunity to go up to the third floor, which I haven't seen since I moved out. It was strange, peering into rooms that are both familiar and not. Laura doesn't have many material possessions, apparently, so aside from her bed frame, all of the furniture up there is either things Phyllis had donated over the course of my tenure, or that I had left behind. The crappy Ikea couch that I'd put away in the storage room after Thomas peed on it (I guess the smell faded? I could never get it out); the little metal bedside table that I think I absconded with from Shelton; the bureau, one of my mom's tag sale finds, with the drawers that were always a pain to shut; the rocking chair; and the blue couch in the front room, which I kept covered by a green top sheet while I lived there (and now it's obvious how much more faded it is than the fitted sheet, from its years in the sun). My green curtains are still up in the windows, too.
I miss the wonderful light-filled expanse of that front room. I stood in front of the windows--finally seeing over the treetops again--and remembered practicing for my exams there in front of my DIY standing desk (stacks of art history books on the windowsill with my laptop perched on top, rolled-up yoga mat under my feet). When it came to my oral exam, I paced in huge circles, talking to myself out loud, faking all the confidence that I didn't feel at the time. It's been two years since then, which is kind of hard to believe. Then again, when I told Phyllis that Sean and I would be celebrating our five-year wedding anniversary this year, she looked shocked. Where does the time go, indeed.
Tonight, off to Morgan's Pier to see my friends--time to toast Jasmine's doctorate, Laura's upcoming defense, Suzanne's new job. I'm not planning to come down to Philadelphia again, so while Phyllis I'll see in Connecticut, and even Dr. Cooper told me she'd like to get together in Princeton over the summer, this is my last hurrah with them.
I guess I had forgotten that this region changes seasons a couple of weeks in advance of Connecticut, so where all the green things are just budding around New Haven, everything is in full and glorious bloom here. In fact, I came too late to see the pink cherry blossom tree out front in all its true glory; it blooms in early May, and by the second week is already disgorging its blossoms onto the hapless cars parked below. I couldn't help smiling at the sight of the car that was positive covered in pink petals, parked in what used to be my spot--it might be pretty on the tree, but on your car it's a damned nuisance to get rid of without a full-scale car wash.
After dinner, Phyllis and I went over to Chestnut Hill, parked, and walked around in some of the leafy neighborhood streets. We wound up walking down Gravers Lane, though not the side you'd typically use as an artery onto Germantown. It was filled with beautiful houses, most probably from the late 19th century. One of the benefits of an area that's been lived in for so long by people with money to spend on landscaping is the profusion of flowering trees and plants. Apple blossom, lilac, verbena, bleeding hearts...so many pretty sights and even more delicious smells!
Phyllis' soon-to-be-departed housemate, Laura, is off in Italy with her boyfriend right now, so when I got here yesterday I took the opportunity to go up to the third floor, which I haven't seen since I moved out. It was strange, peering into rooms that are both familiar and not. Laura doesn't have many material possessions, apparently, so aside from her bed frame, all of the furniture up there is either things Phyllis had donated over the course of my tenure, or that I had left behind. The crappy Ikea couch that I'd put away in the storage room after Thomas peed on it (I guess the smell faded? I could never get it out); the little metal bedside table that I think I absconded with from Shelton; the bureau, one of my mom's tag sale finds, with the drawers that were always a pain to shut; the rocking chair; and the blue couch in the front room, which I kept covered by a green top sheet while I lived there (and now it's obvious how much more faded it is than the fitted sheet, from its years in the sun). My green curtains are still up in the windows, too.
I miss the wonderful light-filled expanse of that front room. I stood in front of the windows--finally seeing over the treetops again--and remembered practicing for my exams there in front of my DIY standing desk (stacks of art history books on the windowsill with my laptop perched on top, rolled-up yoga mat under my feet). When it came to my oral exam, I paced in huge circles, talking to myself out loud, faking all the confidence that I didn't feel at the time. It's been two years since then, which is kind of hard to believe. Then again, when I told Phyllis that Sean and I would be celebrating our five-year wedding anniversary this year, she looked shocked. Where does the time go, indeed.
Tonight, off to Morgan's Pier to see my friends--time to toast Jasmine's doctorate, Laura's upcoming defense, Suzanne's new job. I'm not planning to come down to Philadelphia again, so while Phyllis I'll see in Connecticut, and even Dr. Cooper told me she'd like to get together in Princeton over the summer, this is my last hurrah with them.