13 posts tagged “france”

In honor of Bastille Day, show us something French.

How could I pass up the chance to post this one again?  Paris patisserie window, taken May 2007.

I haven't missed it yet!  And I have a cow picture, too!  FRENCH cows!  Who moo in an outrageous Frawnshe accent!  Moo-la-la!

Nothing but the classiest dairy delivery platforms for AmyH!

More notes from my trip to France:

Thursday

Today's insect horror show is several wasps in the latch of the big iron gate that I have to open and close so Deborah can drive the car out of the driveway.  (Deborah does all the driving, I do all the speaking in French here.)  I use these huge medieval keys to do it, and I have to struggle with the latch and throw my entire weight against it to make it shut tight.  So I get pretty close to that little metal space where the bolt goes in.  When we get back that evening, I find a can of bug spray in the garage and spray the hell out of that latch, because they're still in there, hours later.

Our day trip was to Semeur-en-Auxois, the little town I'd wanted to come back to from a couple of days ago. This is how it looks on the approach.

We poke around a bit, and wander the main shopping district.  In a jeweler's shop, I see a cat that I get to pat (briefly) and an odd display in this window:

Don't bother embiggening it, it's kind of fuzzy and won't give you the detail I want.  But contrary to how it appears, it's not a display of soldier figures.  Every one of them is a firefighter -- a different kind.  One is in chemical gear, putting out chemical fires.  One is in gear for forest fires, and so on.  There must be twenty different ones.  Who collects these?

We eat dinner back in our village, a few minutes walk down the road.  That stereotype of gays opening B&Bs takes a little twist in France where a gay couple have opened a B&B in a chateau, Les Roches. 

They do dinner twice and week and we have a very fine dining experience.  This is not an old place, by French standards, it was finished in 1906, built by a rich man for his mistress.  But it was old enough for the Germans to have lived in it when they came to the town during World War II, and use the same dining room we ate in.  Our hosts pointed out that whereas houses in the village line the road on both sides all the way up the hill, just opposite Les Roches, there are no houses blocking the view over the valley.  The Germans knocked them down for a better view.

This is the night I discover my computer has died.  I start to fret at this point and don't stop till I get home.

Friday

The Insect Horror Show today is that after I smugly step over the body count of my wasp-killing spree of the day before, I see large, wriggling larvae in the metal slot where the gate deadbolt slides.  Eeeeeeuw!  I hit it with the bug spray, too.

Deborah and I drive to see Chateau Le Rochepot, a fairy-tale looking castle near Beaune. 

We can't take pictures inside, but this is a cool castle, because it still has Stuff inside.  Furnishings, and weapons and kitchen stuff, etc.  Our tour guide points out a statue of a Madonna in the castle chapel, and I swear, the face is identical to her own.  I wonder if anyone ever points it out to her.

Saturday

We return to Paris, not a moment too soon, because today's Insect Horror Show is that there appears to be some nest-like thing appearing where the larvae were in the gate lock.  I throw the bolt one last time and bid the wasps good riddance.

In Paris, we walk around to see the Arc de Triomphe, and make our way to the foot of the Eiffel Tower to get on a Seine cruise, which is packed with hundreds of tourists.  I've been taking photos of ornamental lions all over the place, but today in Paris I get this instead.

Sunday, our last full day, we go to the Rodin Museum, where people with knapsacks larger than a tiny daypack are asked to wear them on their fronts, so they don't go turning around quickly and knocking over any sculpture.  Here and at the Musee d'Orsay, I have fallen in love with sculpture.  It pours rain all day, and this was the sight at the entrance to the permanent collection:

Yes, they're handing out umbrella condoms to everyone coming in. 

We left the next morning, with our last Today in French Fast Food appropriations in hand for the trip:  feta-cheese flavored Pringles (Deborah) and bacon-flavored Bugles (me). 

There may be more odd photos lingering about I feel are worth sharing, but that's it for me for tonight.

Okay, I'm finally going to do a post with the highlights of the rest of my time in France, and some photos from the week we spent in the Burgundy region, and our final two days in Paris.  Sorry for the delay.

This was the week I knew I'd be without internet, so I kept notes on my computer for future posting:

Saturday

Left Paris for Mont-St-Jean today.  One rule of thumb for I haven’t mentioned yet is that the French give very vague directions.  Maybe they’re still thinking like an occupied country.  ("Don't help the foreigners too much.")  Ask for a bank machine and it’s “just over there” with a wave in the direction of a complicated corner where five of six streets meet.  Ask the hotel desk attendant how to get a password and login for the hotel’s WiFi network and he’ll say “go to the little box on the next floor up and push the button.”  When you get to the box, there are four buttons.  Ask for directions from the rental car lady to the highway for when you’re ready to drive out of the multi-storey car park, and she’ll tell you definitively “go right”.  While that sounds reasonably precise for a start, it was not quite right.  Not quite, to the tune of completely wrong.  Left was the correct way to the highway, as a nice man at a garage told us when we stopped a kilometer back into the city to ask more directions.

.

The rental car is a Toyota Prius hybrid, with a GPS, so some of the systems took some figuring out.  Deborah was driving and I was official navigator, armed with a city map, a map, Google directions to the cottage, and the rental agent’s e-mailed directions to the cottage.  After we’d gotten well underway and had stopped for a bite in a roadside picnic area, Deborah wanted to use the GPS, because she’s in IT and IT people like smart gadgets.  We’d already heard the female GPS Autonag’s voice from some random touchscreen playing earlier (in which we also found we could zoom out to the level of  “invisible dot on invisible dot” you-are-here-ness where I swear I saw Magellanic clouds), but now Deborah wanted to program it for our extremely rural destination.

Actual snippet of conversation after programming. 

Deborah:  How do we get the woman's voice to come on and give us directions?

Me:  I don’t want to hear her voice.

Deborah:  I do.

Me:  But I’m the navigator.  Are you telling me my job’s outsourced already?

Deborah:  Come on, let’s figure out how to turn it on.

Me:  No.  She’s a scab!

Deborah:  You’re still the navigator, this is just the control test.

I think I know IT bafflegab when I hear it.  Long story short (or if it’s too late for that, at least, interesting), eventually we arrived at the right village.  And then, despite two maps and two sets of written directions, took a half hour and three villagers (who only spoke French) to find the exact cottage we’d rented.  One of them went and consulted down the lane with the one we’d just left.  And then he got in the car with us to ride along and consult the third.  Since the address is simply a road and nothing has a house number, only a name, you don’t know if you’ve over- or under-shot it.  The third guy (Stephane) found it for us.  And all three probably laughed about les Canadiennes perdues over their cassoulet later.

The cottage is fabulous.  Roomier than I expected, and exactly as lovely as the photos I posted before.  With a very pretty garden.  We ate dinner outside.

 

Sunday

In the key of poultry.

The cottage is cold.  It’s warmer outside than in.  Many layers on to sit around and read. 

Our garden wall on one side looks over a farmyard with chickens and a rooster pecking about.  The rooster crows pretty much all day, but it’s not loud enough to be woken up by when the windows are closed in the bedroom.  Which is a relief, since it’s still taking me hours to fall asleep even when I’m already tired.  Stuck around the house all day, outside when it was sunny, I wrote a thousand words.  The clothes we laundered last night and this morning are taking forever to dry.  Rain overnight last night and a thunderstorm this afternoon made it a clean sweep of some rain every day since we got to France.

 

Remind myself to tell Aubrey I read Ben Elton's World War I novel The First Causalty.  Definitely gives a feel for the trenches.

 

Monday

Drove out to the Abbé Fontenay with the AutoNag sending us on rather more back roads than I thought was entirely needed.  Drove through a cobblestoned town I’d like to come back to and poke around it, and found out where to get gas, and needed assistance in how to pump it (like sex, the angle of entry is all-important, or things just don’t work).  Lunch wasn’t till four, after the abbey and we stopped at a roadside restaurant for a very civilized plate of cheese and salad.  For a snack earlier, I’d had madeleines from a vending machine, since vending machine food was all there was at the Abbé.  They weren’t bad.  The monks at this abbey were steelworkers.  No guff.  They smelted iron out of the rock.  I'd never heard of that before.  They slept in a room with a roof like the ribwork of a ship.

 

 

A week from now, we’ll be on the plane home.  I can’t believe we’re only halfway through the trip.  I feel like it should be at least three-quarters over by now.  I’d kind of like it to be.  is all well and good, but I have cats and friends and conveniences to get back to.  I did see a cat today, a calico one who liked being petted and wound around my ankles.  I miss that.

 

Tuesday

Drove to Dijon.  Well, we eventually got to after driving to another endless series of farmlands on the back roads that the AutoNag told us to take.  Some of which had greenery growing between the wheel ruts.  Some of which were C roads, which we hadn’t been on before, were one lane wide (total) and I assume are named C for Combines, which must be the only vehicles to use them.  We must have been 45 minutes without getting 10 miles from our starting point.  I know this thing can tell us to take a U-turn if we take a wrong turn, because it’s done it in the past, but not today.

 

It was market day in Dijon.  Huge farmers market and market for cheap sunglasses, cheap shoes, Zellers spread out on tables, in main streets basically.  But I found nice proper harem pants that I’ve been looking for in ages in Toronto, and bought two pair.

 

While we were eating lunch on a patio outside the covered market, we saw the fruit and vegetable stands outside packing up, leaving detritus everywhere.  And a man and a woman picking through the discarded stuff—the man pulled out handfuls of meat trimmings and put them into a carrier bag, I'm not sure if he was taking stuff home for himself or his dog.  After lunch Deborah and I walked back to the car park to drop off stuff before walking around more, and barely recognized the route back, since the merchants had started to leave the area.  And as we walked around looking for the historic buildings and in some shops, we realized two things—some of them we’d already been by, only looking down at tables of cheap perfume and socks, instead of up; the character of the street had totally changed over lunch as the marketers folded up their tables and went away.  Two, we realized that the historic buildings shared their facades with retail outlets, as in the photo I took. 

On our way back to the car, we passed the same spot we’d had lunch again, and it was wall to wall street cleaning machines.  By 3 p.m., they’d erased every trace that market day had come and gone.

 In the evenings, I’ve started watching Max Headroom on DVD on my computer.  Good fun.  I can’t believe a network ever chose to air it, even for the one season it was on, it takes so many shots at network ethics.

 

Wednesday

Stay-at-home writing day for me.  This feels as vacation-y as going out to a castle, since we have a beautiful, sunny, very private garden (more on that in a moment) and I don’t have so much as a balcony in Toronto.  Deborah has taken the car and made a run for the border (okay, maybe a leisurely drive), having realized we’re only a three or so hour drive from Switzerland.  She wants to say she got to two countries on this visit, even though I don’t think they stop you at any the EU country borders and stamp your passport any more.  At the very least, she’s pretty sure she can get to where she’ll be able to see the Alps.

 

Between the various books, VHS and DVD sources around, I’ve discovered I have Harry Potters 1, 2, 3 and 4 in various forms.  Also very vacation-y for me.

 

So, about the garden.  I’ve sat out there various times this week, and got 1,000 words written on two different days around our touring.  There are a great many insects, and some lizards living out there.  The bugs only irritate me when they get in the house (no screens, of course) and the flies start buzzing around the windows, unable to find the way back out.  This morning I opened the bedroom window and something enormous seemed to make a beeline for it from about a kilometer away.  It loomed larger and larger and would have flown right in if I hadn’t quickly shut the window again before it zoomed just as fast back out another kilometer.

 

So today, I’m just getting settled at the garden table to write, hearing the flies buzzing around me in the flowers and overhanging tree, when I hear a lower, louder buzz.  Something at least a couple of inches long flies into view, heading for some flowers on the edge of the patio, the honeysuckle, I think.  O.  M. G. Way bigger than a fly.  Iridescent blue.  Not a “blue-bottle” fly, unless that description means “flying insect as big as a bottle”.  Hovering like a bee, drinking at the flowers.

 

As an urbanite, and someone who has always been afraid of bugs, I’m still quite capable of being frightened back into the house by an insect large enough to make me mistake it for a small bird.  So, I chickenshitted my way back into the house in record time.  Decided staying plugged in in the sunny bedroom might be okay for a little bit.  Opened the window there.  Another one veers way close to the window again—I swear, I actually ducked.  Later, once I overcame my paranoia, another one whizzed overhead as I sat writing on the patio, and I swear, it cast a shadow.

 

Within five minutes of Deborah having come home at dinner time (didn't make it to Switzerland, but was able to see some Alps) she'd left the door hanging open for a bit.  Next thing I know, one of these ginormous blue, flying beetle things is WALKING ACROSS THE DINING ROOM CARPET!  After I'd been avoiding them all day!  It disappeared under a sideboard.  I sat very nervously in the living room, trying to read, knowing it was there.  Then, IT WALKED ACROSS TO THE LIVING ROOM!  And hid under another piece of furniture.  When it emerged a third time, I begged Deborah to kill it.  Which she did.  By putting MY sneaker on top of it and stepping on the sneaker.  "I killed it, you get to clean it up," she said.  Fine.  But I waited till the next morning, in case it might shrivel up some and be not so voluminous to pick up in a (okay, several) paper towel(s).  It didn't.

 

(to be continued) 

Oh, patisserie!
Eclairs so fresh and creamy
Pain au chocolat

This next post was supposed to update everybody on my final week in France, with ironic notes and photos of what I saw and experienced.  However, that has been temporarily forestalled, since all all that is stored on the large paperweight formerly known as my laptop.  Oh, yes, it died on my as I was counting down the days (2) before I would be out of rural cottage radio silence and back into a WiFi connection at the hotel in Paris we would stay at for another two days before leaving for home.

So not only didn't I have a working laptop, it meant I also wasn't going to have internet at home when I got back, till the problem was diagnosed and dealt with, as it's my only computer (I only have work access at the moment).  And there was the fear of losing various files (my completed fiction and novel-in-progress had been backed up elsewhere, but all my photos from since I got my digital camera, and files with story ideas and notes and other stuff were all on it).

When I got to the final hotel, they had a computer in the lounge I could use by paying by the half hour, but it had a French keyboard where the letters were all in different places and you only got a period with a shift key.  WTF?  I think it says something about the French that it takes special effort to get a period and none to get an exclamation point.  And the W key was way off in the next county.  Added stress when you can't touch type when you're racing the clock.  And though I could see Vox and all you Voxen, I couldn't post, edit a former post, or even comment from that machine.  I was banging on the screen, but couldn't get in!

Anyhow, long story short (okay, shorter), I got home Monday (insomnia and jet lag are a lethal combination) and it turns out to be a software problem (the laptop, not my sleep issue...okay maybe my sleep issues, too), and a friend has been able to safe boot it in DOS and copy files, so they are going to a safe place (his computer) and then I will (guided by Dell) do something called an "image restore" and copy everything back over.  And only then (probably around the weekend) will I be able to post my usual warped observations, photos and Today in French Fast Food updates, however belatedly. 

Till then, I cling to this connection at the office (though I have to leave it now and go home), and say how good it is to be home.  Tumbleweed seems to have specially festooned my entire apartment in large clumps of long gray fur for my return.  What a sweetie. 

Tomorrow we enter radio silence (i.e. go to the cottage in Burgundy, where there's no internet connection) for a week.  Don't think I won't miss you guys.  Even though I'm eating a chocolate eclair (with OMG chocolate filling) as I type.  Other flavors seen today to add to the growing eclair list:  chocolate mint, and caramel. 

Because of how hard it's been to get to sleep, we weren't up early enough to make a day of it and go to Versailles (we might make it when we're back in Paris for two days before we leave -- comments anybody?  Is is worth it?) but since I've walked my legs down to nubbins the last few days, an easier day was needed anyway.  So we spent the afternoon shopping and I bought some ooh-la-la French lingerie.  High-end, colorfully patterned stuff like you don't see in Canada, or the US.  And no, I'm not posting photos.  Just trust me, it looks divine.

We also finally had a warm, sunny day here.  Though it's pouring rain on and off since the evening started.  My incipient cold has mostly retreated without developing into a congested/runny nose phase, so I'm once again a big fan of Cold FX.

Since we've decided not to go up the Eiffel Tower (I prefer my panoramic vistas of the city in the company of gargoyles), I've got only from-below photos of it.

And here's a picture of ducks at the Louvre.  I'm somehow drawn to taking photos of the mundane birds around these famous places.  I think it keeps them (and us) humble.

Edited to add:  Tumble-update for the Friends of Tumbleweed...his eating is okay, he's apparently just missing me terribly, hiding in the closet a lot.  He's my sensitive emo cat. 

Sorry, no photos today.  Few of them turned out, because I spent most of the day in the Musee d'Orsay, which doesn't allow flashes, so my photos came out not in good focus.  I wish I'd got one, though.  My "Today in French Fast Food" installment would have shown you that in the fast food cafeteria at the Musee (sorry, accents not working today), you could buy wine and cheese.  Small bottles of wine and a very civilized assortment of cheeses prewrapped by the piece.  Alongside the pre-packed tuna sandwiches, etc. that you fished out of a refrigerated case.

After three days of walking museums and the like, and with an incipient cold (I'm at the sneezing and starting-to-feel-like-crap stage), I'm all worn out already.  Oh, and not falling asleep till 2:30 every night even when I go to bed at 11 is having an effect, too.  If I went home now I'd say I had a full trip, and we're still here in Paris till Saturday, then off to the countryside for a week.

French pastry update:  the patisserie had new eclair flavors today -- rose, with pink icing (natch), and something that looked like poppy (red icing, little sprinkled circle of poppy seeds on top).  I'm sure they'll work their way through the entire world of flavors eventually.  I'll look in when we return to Paris from the Burgundy region and see a gray-iced one with "eclair elefant" printed out on the little tag next to it. 

I had a pain au chocolat, still warm from the oven.  A little piece of heaven.  It would also be a little piece of heaven if the sun would come out for a day this week.

I believe I’m getting a cold.  No surprise, in the last two days before I left for France, I was in the company of two different people with colds.  So far it’s just a tickle in my throat, and the start of a generally crappy feeling.  I keep pounding back the Cold FXand crossing my fingers.

 

A bit of business left from yesterday:  in this photo you can see where I did the tower walk.  See the people’s heads in the middle bit between the towers?

Today in French fast food, a lesson.  After a morning open-topped hop-on-hop-off bus tour of the sights of central Paris, Deborah and I stopped at a sandwich shop for a quick bite before touring the Opera Garnier.  I got a pre-made salad, and because I wanted some bread, ordered a croissant, too.  Then discovered when I took my tray from the cash, that they’d tossed a paper bag onto it.  Which I opened to find contained a chunk of baguette.  Because they already know in Paris, you can’t just have a salad without bread, it goes without saying.  I didn’t need to ask for bread extra, and they shouldn’t have needed to tell me I’d get it.  They probably thought I was a loon, ordering croissant when I was already getting a hunk of bread.

 

Speaking of hunks, here’s George Clooney in an ad for an espresso maker. 

I’ll try to get a better one.  These are all over the fine shopping areas of Paris.  And Clive and Johnny are still staring at me from the back of every tour bus and city bus, respectively.

 

Speaking of tasty, here’s a shot of a patisserie window near the hotel at about 10 a.m.

Down in the front left there, those are all éclairs, all different flavors, color-coded as follows:

green = pistachio

red = strawberry

light brown = milk chocolate

dark brown = dark chocolate

white and fuzzy-looking = coconut

tan = coffee

white with a tiny bit of vanilla bean = vanilla

yellow = passionfruit

violet = violet cream

 

We stopped in after touring today to bring something sweet home for dessert.  Even with 90% of this display gone at that time of day, it was still really hard to decide.  For those keeping score, I had a chocolate cream slice (two items back from the strawberry éclairs, though all éclairs were gone by then), and Deborah had some kind of lemon tart (not lemon meringue). 

 

It was a tough day for the bus tour driver, because certain parts of the route were closed for Sarkozy’s swearing-in as president.  I think I saw his car arriving at a government building.  I saw a paparazzi scooter scrum, many police, and then a dark sedan with a hand waving through one of its windows.  Then a guy in uniform saluted it.  All while we were sat at a traffic light.

 

Here’s a French public building.  Doesn’t matter which one, there’s a half-dozen awe-inspiring edifices just like it on any major street, it seems. 

Any time I see the tricolor on top, I want to start humming the Marsellaise.  (Note to self:  learn to hum more than the first two lines of the Marsellaise.)

 

Also seen en route – this carousel, right smack on a street corner.  I like to picture it spinning wildly out of control, winging kiddies into the street left and right.

At the Opera Garnier de Paris (aka Paris Opera) we had a great guided tour, full of detail and anecdote, in charmingly accented English. 

 (Aside:  unlike in Montreal, when I speak any French to anybody here, they reply in French.  The only exception was the ticket seller for the guided tour, who answered me in English, as they do in Montreal.  I kept on in French.)

 

Here’s the signature of the architect of the Opera Garnier, smack in the middle of the ceiling of one of the lobbies, where the hoi polloi would gather.  It reads 1861-1875 [his first name which I can’t remember and can’t make out now] Charles Garnier Architect.  Just so they’d still talk about him when he was done.

Here’s a cool thing.  The ruling powers changed, and the money was running out by the time he was expected to finish.  So there are some bits he just left undone.  These angel pediments are around the back.  The one on the right is still mostly uncarved.

Well, Vox doesn't want me to post my couple of photos from our quick breeze through the Louvre, so that's it for tonight.

My sister calls this "the one eating the rubber chicken."