Readers Note: All photos in this post were taken by DSL. I swiped them from her Flickr stream, which you can find here. She takes much better (and many more) pictures than I do, apparently.
Navigation established itself as a theme of our trip from the day that I met DSL at the Frankfurt Airport and we picked up the rental car (a very nice Renault Scenic diesel). I had a giant, spiral-bound A-to-Z road atlas for France, a couple of regional maps, and of course, XMotion GPS software on my iPad. Both of us know how to read maps. I thought we were adequately armed with navigation information.
The regional map of Burgundy wasn't very helpful. DSL's caption for this was "This is what happens when maps don't work. You should have seen KDA an hour earlier." Smartass. The stupid map stayed like that for the rest of the trip.
Still, we managed to get lost every single day. Sometimes it was just a missed turn or exit, resolved by circling around and trying again. But there were some larger navigation mishaps such as the night we tried to find the hovel for the first time.
Our first night in the hovel.
The drive from Trier to south-central France took far longer than I had planned. It should have taken a total of 10 hours divided between two easy driving days. Instead, we were on the road for almost 8 hours the first day and nearly 12 hours the second.
Before we leave Germany, I thought I put up some photos since I didn't take many myself and the previous blog post was a bit light on images.
Me and my mother, Judy.
Trier at night. The Christmas Market hadn't opened yet but they were setting up.
Um. Words fail me.
KDA in Bernkassel-Kues, Germany. Pretty pastel paint on the buildings.
My mother and her husband Dave, Trier, Germany.
The Porta Negra at night, part of the original Roman wall and fortifications around the town. Our hotel in Trier was a stone's throw from this gate.
We managed to navigate out of Trier using some crappy printed Google maps, and find our way to Metz, France, and then to the Orange store in downtown Metz, all due to the excellent navigation skills of DSL (she did direct me towards an oncoming bus the day we arrived in Trier but we'll let that one go...). In the Metz Orange store, I purchased a microSIM for my iPad so we could use the Orange 3G network to get to the maps for the GPS software.
The cathedral in Metz. Metz turned out to have a very pretty old town center. That entire northeast corner of France is certainly worth spending more time in.
In the next day and a half, we managed to navigate out of Metz, south through Burgundy, and west to Limoges. By the time we arrived in Limoges, we were approaching 9 hours on the road for that second day. It was dark, cold, and we were both tired. I was navigating.
To be honest, I thought I knew where the house was--the address was in Saint-Laurent-sur-Gorre which was relatively easy to find on the map. It is a small village located a few kilometers southwest of Limoges. And in fact we made it to that little village without too much trauma.
This is a view of the entire "main drag" in Saint-Laurent-sur-Gorre.
And that's where luck, maps, and technology all failed us. Not because we had bad luck or bad technology. But for technology to work best, you do have to have a reasonably good idea of where you are supposed to end up. As it turns out, that is the one critical bit of information that we did not have.
This is the speck called La Cote. It's so small it doesn't have any stores. Not even a tabac shop. View is north from the end of the street where the hovel is located.
From Saint-Laurent-sur-Gorre, I had to revert to the instructions emailed to me by the ditzy absentee owner. And let me just put it all on the table: that woman couldn't navigate her way out of a wet paper bag. Words like "north" or "west" are not in her vocabulary. Tidbits such as "go 2 km down this road" were apparently just too much information for her to provide. Even comments such as "turn left at the sign for La Cote" were far too complex. She mentioned "landmarks" that had no signs and never mentioned the numerous signs that were actually there. Here are her directions exactly as she emailed them to me:
Continue to Saint Laurent going through the town on the main road. As you follow the road round you will see a Fire Station on your left and a School on your right. Continue up the hill past the gendarmerie and take the next turn on your left. This road leads you out of the village. Continue until you come to a crossroads and turn left. Carry on and take the second turning on your left (there is a house at this junction), our house is first on left down this lane leading you into a courtyard with a barn to the left or facing you as you drive in and our house is on the right hand side of the same courtyard.
DSL and I spent TWO HOURS driving in circles looking for the hovel. In the dark. After hours and hours of driving already. You can imagine how frustrated and tired we were. Main road? All roads were two-lane or smaller. Note the bit about "this road leads you out of the village"? We took every single road leading out of the village at least twice (there were about half a dozen of them). Was a "crossroads" a four-way intersection or just a turn left or right off the main road? Any of these were possible. We never figured out where the fire station was. We think we identified the location of the school during our second week passing to and fro through the village.
In fact, out of that entire paragraph of gibberish, the only landmark we could find was the gendarmerie. We would pick a road, drive kilometers out of St-L-sur-G, testing all possible turnings to see if they fit the "model", give up, and return to the gendarmerie.
In desperation, after two hours of this, I called the owner. Her directions on the phone were even more frustratingly vague. In the end, she called up some English guy she knew who lived in the area. He met us at the gendarmerie and we followed him back to the hovel.
This is an amazingly beautiful picture of the hovel taken after we returned from one of our day trips (more on those in another post). This was the only evening it didn't rain or snow.
As a result of that first traumatic evening, every single day as we drove through St-Laurent-sur-Gorre, we would sing out "Bonjour, Gendarmerie!" as we passed our one and only landmark.
We snapped this on our way out. This is the only picture in this post that I can claim.
We got lost at least two more times returning to the house in subsequent days.
The hovel is on the left. Another nice picture despite the grey skies. The owner should hire DSL to make publicity shots for her ad.
Another amazing shot of the back of the hovel. This was the only evening it did not rain or snow during our 11 days there.
Still, once we got in the groove, the iPad proved to be an invaluable tool. Orange has astonishing cell coverage across France, even in the country, and we used the GPS software on the iPad every day to make day trips to all sorts of amazing places in south-central France.
Even in the hovel, we could get to the Orange 3G network and check email. Both of us had our iPads with books and other entertainment loaded up. The biggest problem in the hovel was finding a working outlet to recharge the things. Lack of reliable internet connectivity, just like the lack of hot water, would have driven us out of the hovel much sooner.
Wine at hand, fire to the right, covered with down-filled duvet, reading an ebook on the iPad. Despite the fact that the kitchen and our bedrooms were colder than the inside of the refrigerator, this wasn't too bad.
"Ou sont les toilettes?"
I've been taking French classes through Community Education here at Aramco. DSL started the Pimsleur taped language program and I followed her example as soon as I realized to my dismay that the third French class wasn't offered last fall like I had hoped. I knew going into to this trip that my French was extremely limited. Still, I hoped that enthusiasm would help me past the rough spots.
And in fact, it did. I attempted to speak French in every conversation that I had during my stay there. Mispronounced, halting (I speak two or three words at a time then pause so I sound like I have either a speech impediment or a learning disability), limited to present tense or only one type of past tense, with only a few dozen verbs at my ready disposal (I know more but in the heat of the moment I'd revert to using just a few reliable ones)--the French people we interacted with were for the most part amused and quite pleasant about it all.
Limousin countryside. Nothing to do with language, just a pretty picture.
When I had interactions involving more than just a sentence or two, like talking to the B&B owners in Cour Cheverny over breakfast each morning, I found that the French were never shy about correcting my mistakes. And I was extremely careful to repeat the correction back to them to make sure I had it right. They'd beam and nod their head and we'd continue stumbling along.
Overall, I'd say the first immersion experience was a success.
Baked chicken. Yum!
One of the secrets is context. If you sit down in a restaurant and the waiter comes up and starts babbling away in French, first, be flattered that he didn't peg you as a tourist the moment you walked in, or that he's at least polite enough to know that you are a tourist but will pretend otherwise for the moment. And second, you can assume he is talking about what you want to eat and drink. So I'd listen for a handful of familiar words and take a stab at a reply.
We spread wood out around the living room each morning in the hopes that it would dry a little by evening.
And the other secret is planning. I'd actually plan out what I wanted to say before I opened my mouth. This helped a lot during adventures such as negotiating with a neighbor down the lane from the hovel to buy a new allotment of firewood. He spoke not a word of English--just a country boy, really. Afterwards, DSL said, why didn't you stand there talking to him longer? He seemed to want to chat more. (I agree that he found us rather amusing.) But I was just so relieved to have actually accomplished the transaction that I figured, better stop while things were going so well.
Fruits of another successful language adventure: the box of firestarters I purchased next to the motor oil which we had used the night before.
I spoke French during the entire transaction to purchase an Orange SIM card for my phone in Blois. And DSL and I had a riotous time in the Marche de Noel in Aixe-sur-Vienne chatting to the various vendors. The honey seller in particular got quite a kick out of my poor, ragged French. But he really stumped me when he asked me if I liked Obama. Since I couldn't make any reasonable reply (I can handle concrete conversations about buying sausages or wine but not ones about philosophical topics), I asked him in return his opinion of Sarkozy (he wasn't very impressed with him).
Baked pasta layered with goat cheese and homemade tomato sauce cooked up with fresh basil, garlic, and onions. Yum!
Now I'm going to tease DSL a bit because she hardly spoke French at all during our three weeks galivanting around. In fact, one of the only complete sentences I heard her utter was when she asked a waitress where the toilets were.
This self-portrait of DSL just cracks me up. So serious! She put this caption on it: "Took this photo to prove I was there." Hovel is the second house back along the lane.
Such innocence. On our drive from Trier to Limousin. We had no idea what was in store for us.
1 comment:
I can simply sum it up:
ROFLMAO
G
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