French Immersion

Despite the obvious pleasures of drinking wine and eating pork daily, my primary reason for going to Sancerre was to spend two weeks in a French language immersion program at Coeur de France language school.

The reviews for the school on tripadvisor.com were uniformly positive and while CdF could accommodate families, it seemed that they mainly catered to adult learners. I took an online test that helped determine my level of proficiency (intermediate, no surprise there). And after a bit of emailing back and forth with Gerard, an American who is co-owner of the school with his French wife Marianne, I was able to coordinate my travel schedule with a suitable course schedule.

I was also able to arrange rental of an apartment directly above the school which was quite convenient. Although the apartment was certainly atmospheric and charming, some of the other apartments in the village maintained by the school were nicer. But those will have to wait for the next visit!

The view from my apartment window at dusk.

Literally upon our arrival at the train station in nearby Cosne (pronounce "cone"), we were asked not to speak English during our stay. It was difficult to comply with this 100% of the time because there were people at all proficiency levels attending the school, some of whom had no French at all, so every so often we found ourselves quickly whispering important information to each other in corners.

The school has around 10 instructors, including Marianne. Marianne was the instructor for the two weeks of my class. I was in a class of 5 other adults, with four of them in the same class as me for both weeks: John and May from England, Nennia from the US, and Jean from the US. Being together for two weeks brought a lot of continuity to our learning and our ability to understand each other.

Our group met for four hours each day, alternating mornings and afternoons. I spent an additional four to six hours each day working on homework and readings and grammar exercises (I carefully read three TinTin adventures during the two weeks; they are excellent because they present short sentences, colloquial expressions, multiple verb tenses, and a rather advanced vocabulary, all accompanied by pictures to help with meaning). It sounds like a lot of work and it really was. I’ve never worked so hard on a holiday. But despite being serious business, it was also a lot of fun. 

My first dinner in my tiny kitchen (thank goodness I am completely used to tiny kitchens from living for three years in my hovel in Dhahran): pork chop pan fried with shallots and garlic and salt and served on a bed of greens, crottin du chevre, a bottle of Sancerre blanc, fresh bread.

I discovered too late that I could have also signed up for a couple of hours of one-on-one instruction each day. I think my speaking skills would have improved much more if I had done this. Another useful bit of information for the next visit!

Four hours is a long time to sit in a class and Marianne used a variety of different activities to break things up. One activity that we did each meeting was to have group conversation. Marianne would usually initiate it by asking each of us to speak on a topic (what did you do on the weekend, tell us about your best vacation, describe situations where you’ve experienced French customs different from your own, etc.) then allow the others to ask each speaker questions. This free-form activity often led us into surprising conversational territory which sometimes we had trouble negotiating when our French wasn’t quite up to what we were trying to say.

By the second week, the five of us were getting pretty comfortable with each other and the jokes, made mostly at our own expense, were flying fast and furious. You know you are making progress in another language when you can make a joke and everyone gets it. After our group of five spent the weekend together drinking wine and gossiping, learning a lot about each others' lives outside of France in the process, we started teasing each other in class. Sometimes I think our teasing was maybe a bit too “English” for Marianne (even though it was all in French) but she remained calm when we started acting up.

We even established a few memes in our short time together. Jean watched "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" five times in one day, all in French of course. So watching or reading something five times became our new standard, a true measure of learning. I created a meme for “rolling the dice” because I was always getting confused about grammatical choices which appear on the surface to be similar and small but which actually affect the meaning in big ways, such as que/qui, tout/tous, le/la, a/de/nothing with infinitive verbs, whether the "c" at the end of parc and porc is pronounced (yes in the first one, no in the second) and so forth. I’d invariably make the wrong choice and be corrected by Marianne so I’d shake my hand and open it like I was throwing out a pair of dice. (I also managed to successfully explain the related 50/50/90 rule to John entirely in French!)*

Freshly made crottins set out on wire racks in a cool room to begin aging.

One of the most interesting group conversations we had was prompted by Marianne asking each of us to select, read, then discuss an article with the class. We could choose the article  in any media or language that we wanted but we had to give our recap of it in French. Jean talked about the recent suicide death of a film director which spiraled off into a discussion of euthanasia and why people might choose suicide. Another woman talked about a study of the incidence of autism. From those two topics we spiraled off into a discussion about Lance Armstrong having his titles stripped from him, doping in sports, and whether immoral people can do truly good deeds or not. After all this serious stuff, I felt a bit bad about presenting the article I had chosen about the new model of Barbie that will come out in December of this year. But I only felt bad for a little while because I had invested a lot of energy into this assignment. What’s special about this particular Barbie? She was created by a transvestite fashion designer (Phillip Blonde) and looks eerily like him. How exactly does one know that a Barbie doll is a transvestite? You can't use the presence or absence of secondary sexual characteristics since Barbie dolls only have breasts. But you can use as evidence her extremely heavily made up face, her wildly spangled gown, and the words of Mattel itself. I used my iPad to show photos of this socially radical doll. And it turns out that there have been other bizarre Barbies: a pregnant one (with suspiciously Latina skin and hair coloring) and a Barbie with an accompanying yellow labrador doll, a pail, a scoop, and little plastic dog poops (crottes du chien). (Marianne commented dryly, <<Évidemment elle n’est pas française>> which nearly dropped us to the floor with laughter; even in a small village like Sancerre, dog shit is everywhere on the streets). Nennia continued the hilarity with her discussion of the naked Prince Harry photos from his Las Vegas excesses.

We had role-playing activities each class meeting as well. One of the more amusing assignments required us to confront our partner who was playing the role of an upstairs neighbor who was having parties every night and making too much noise. Marianne asked us to not script these conversations out but to try to deliver them spontaneously. Much silliness ensued since beyond agreeing on the general outline of our skit, we had no idea what the other was going to say!

Here are some of my favorite vocabulary words: gonflier, to inflate; noyer, to drown; une fourmi, ant (ants produce formic acid, dontcha know!); une chauve-souris, bat ("bald mouse"); il fait loup, it's humid; se balader, to take oneself out for a walk; les draps, sheets, bedding; parier, to bet or gamble; se tromper, to be mistaken (tromper without the reflexive pronoun means to fall)...well, I filled two notebooks with interesting words and grammar bits and I could bore you for quite a while. I'll just leave you with this gem, a very difficult French tongue twister: Les grenouilles fouillent sous les feuilles à Marseilles (the toads rummage under the leaves of Marseilles, which just doesn't have quite the same ring as the French version).

In fact, I would have to say that we spent a good part of each class laughing uproariously. I didn't expect this at all but I think that we got lucky and had a pretty good mix of people. I was quite shocked to find out that the others thought after that first week that I was too serious (maybe even a bit scary serious) so I tried to be more relaxed about everything the second week. I even managed to figure out how to use an idiom with an incredibly obscure meaning (it involved prunes which were entirely metaphorical). And John, May, Jean: I still most firmly maintain that the act of dreaming (rêver) is expressing an emotion, i.e., c'est un verbe de <> donc ce n'est pas suivi de préposition avec un verbe infinitif.

Bottles of Sancerre blanc from the mid-80s stored in a cave. They keep a few bottles from important vintages to see how they age and keep. It is unlikely that this wine is still any good but the bottles looked pretty cool.

The school brings in a decent amount of money to the village and the shopkeepers are certainly aware of this. A two week stay like mine was common; some people even stay for four weeks! During this time, we do a lot of shopping and eating in Sancerre. In fact, we were instructed to tell shop owners and servers in restaurants that we were students at the school. Not only was this a flag that we wanted to try to practice our French but it was also a more subtle communication that we were not fly-by-afternoon tourists.

The woman who ran the charcuterie in particular was most charming to me (she saw me almost every other day), answering my questions about her terrines once I got a bit bolder and more confident that I could understand her.

One evening when I was out for a walk, I ran into Yvette. Imagine a typical little old French woman and you’ve got Yvette: small-floral-print dress, stockings, sturdy shoes. She was walking uphill and I was walking downhill. She stopped to rest on a bench and when I passed, I said “bonsoir, madame” because to pass by without speaking would have been considered quite rude, especially as we were the only people on that road at the time. Well, that was the only opening she needed. Yvette was off, chattering away to me about all sorts of things, only about half of which I understood. But I did get these bits from her: she was turning 85 in September, she has lived in Sancerre all her life, and during the war (the second one) when she was a girl, she was sent away with the other children to farms in the country. She also told me that there was a very large sweet pea vine at the end of a vineyard down the hill that I should be sure to stop at and get some wildflowers (les fleurs sauvages) for my kitchen table. When I told her I was a student at the school, her next question was to ask who my instructor was (I found this was the most often-asked question by the folks in the village). When I told her my instructor was Marianne and added that she was “tres formidable,” Yvette laughed knowingly then told me that Marianne had grown up in Sancerre and that her family was still in the area. It turns out that both Yvette and Marianne are well known throughout the village, each formidable in her own way!

This was a great holiday in many ways. I was kept busy every day learning and thinking and practicing French but I had ample time to enjoy the atmosphere and pleasures one would expect from a holiday in a village in the middle of France. I would recommend the Coeur de France school without hesitation...but you must be prepared to work hard!

Looking towards Chavignol village from the surrounding vineyards.

* The 50/50/90 rules states that given a choice between two equal (or equally likely) things or events, 90% of the time you will chose the wrong one.

Sancerre: Geology, Wine, and Crottins de Chavignol

After spending a couple of weeks in the U.S., I flew home, did some laundry, played with the dogs, made a batch of dog meatloaf, repacked my suitcase, and in about 48 hours was boarding another plane, this time to France. My ultimate destination was Sancerre, located in the eastern (upper) end of the Loire Valley, south of Paris and almost in the center of France. My goal: attend two weeks of French language immersion at the Coeur de France school. Because this was another amazing adventure, I’m going to have to spread it across a couple of posts. In this one, I’m going to talk about Sancerre itself. If you couldn’t care less about history, geology, wine or cheese, then you’ll have to wait a bit for my post about the language school experience!

Sancerre is an unbelievably charming medieval walled village located on the top of a hill overlooking the Loire River. It isn’t the highest hill in the area but it clearly has major strategic value by virtue of its many clear sightlines across the river floodplain and back into the hills. The older settlement in the area is located down on the river itself but it apparently was abandoned several times due to flooding and warfare; the river is broad and shallow and the floodplain is  flat although bordered by low hills, and the riverside settlement would have been difficult to defend.

Looking east towards Sancerre from the vineyards.

Looking NNE towards the Loire River in the upper left distance. You can see the broad river floodplain and the gentle hills that surround it. Sancerre village is directly behind me.

The hill is a distinct topographic feature (more on this below) that was probably used for thousands of years by Neanderthals and other early humans for a variety of purposes, even if for nothing else but the views! Native Celts probably used the hill for scouting (they established settlements in the area though apparently not on top of the hill) and the Romans certainly liked it, building roads up it, several successive churches on it, and a fortification on the top. Foundations of the village wall date from this time. Things really began cooking in the 10th century as the growing middle class of landowners and merchants started building larger, more elaborate homes, establishing Sancerre as an important center of commerce, trade, and power. There is a mostly intact (it’s been thoroughly repaired) tower dating from around 1150 that is all that is left of a larger, multi-tower castle. And there are buildings in the village, some occupied now as private homes, that date from the 1380’s or so. The fortified village was involved in a dizzying array of wars and local power struggles because of its geographic position and the wealth of its residents. Still, it has managed to survive and thrive.

View of the 12th century tower (far upper left) from my window. The other towers that you can see in the middle background are much younger.

I climbed to the top of the tower on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon. The tower is at a topographic knob at the top Sancerre, roughly in the middle of the "back side" of the hill. Here I'm looking southwest. In town, you can see the main church in the middle left. At the west end of the small plaza in front if it is the charcuterie. This photo really shows the topography of the gently rolling hills within the Sancerre AOC and the topographic isolation of Sancerre village.

I'm looking south from the top of the tower. In the middle of the village at my feet you can see an L-shaped, grey-colored, grey-roofed building with white window casements. That is the Coeur de France school. My apartment was on the right side of the L on the second floor.

The Sancerre hill is the result of a fault that runs at its foot (see the map below). The fault juxtaposes different rock types (older rocks to the west of the fault, younger ones to the east). Because the section of older rocks is tilted, different types of rocks are exposed at the surface. This soil variation is the source of the world-famous Sancerre wines. There is verified documentation of wine making in the area dating from 582 AD but as with most things of this nature, it is likely that the people in the area were making wine for centuries before that.

The blue colors are for older rocks of Jurassic age, say 150 Ma, and the greens are for younger Cretaceous rocks, say 90 Ma. The orange blob north of Sancerre is Eocene age, around 35 Ma. The tan color at the top of the Sancerre hill is also Eocene produced by weathering of the Eocene rocks. This map is a reproduction of an old hand-colored map and unfortunately the colors in the legend don't match up too well with the colors in the map. The linear fault runs N-S at the foot of the Sancerre hill (on the west side of the hill). To my great annoyance, there is no scale on the map but I estimate that one inch at the full-size of the scan is about 1 mile. Put another way, the crow-flight distance from the center of Sancerre to Saint-Satur is about a mile.

If you drink wine, then you have heard of Sancerre white wine, which is made using sauvignon grapes. You may not know that in the same area they also make small volumes of rosé and red wines using pinot noir grapes. The small wine region around Sancerre has a coveted AOC (appellation d'origine contrôlée) designation, and the land and the vines are very tightly controlled indeed. Many of the larger vineyards have storefronts in Sancerre or in nearby villages and I did two formal and several informal tastings. One of my favorite wines was a rosé from the Alphonse Mellot Domaine Moussiere vineyard which has obtained a rare “biologique” (organic) labeling from various European and French agencies (they don't make much of this rosé and don't export it; I was lucky to be there at the source). I also really liked the white wine called “Les Chasseignes” made by Domaine Fouassier. It is a beautiful example of a Sancerre white: light, dry, low acidity, slight fruit aromas and flavors but not fruity tasting (nor terribly sweet), and smooth to drink.

(For you wine buffs, Pouilly Fume whites are cousins to Sancerre whites. They come from similar soil types and also have their own AOC, but the vineyards are located on the other side of the Loire River. This constitutes an enormous difference in the world of AOC.)

There is a museum in town called “La Maison de Sancerre” which has to be one of the more interesting museums I’ve visited in a while. They don’t have art. Instead, all of the displays address some aspect of the history, anthropology, manufacture, cultivation, science, even the geology, of the local wine industry. And the displays utilize an amazing array of technology, lighting, and color. It was professional and scientifically thorough. I know that might put some of you off but I found it fascinating! There were bizarre 3D models, examined under a magnifying glass, of the various parasites and insects that can infest grape vines. There were panels describing in fair geologic detail the four main types of soil present in the Sancerre AOC (variations on chalky, chalky-clay, and chalky-flint). There is quite an obsession with the different taste that each soil type gives to the wines. There were movies that contained long and rather humorous interviews with local winemakers that you watch on Macs in small alcoves or projected onto large screens placed at the back of a diorama of an underground storage cave. The movies were in French, of course, but there were English subtitles and they were a great opportunity to practice listening to “common” French (which is different than written French or formal spoken French). In the movies you could watch multiple generations of winemakers, fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, talk about their work making Sancerre wines. There are even a couple of women winemakers. Traditionally, many farmwives maintained a few vines and made their own wine, but commercial wine making ventures are not often run by women in France. The museum is housed in a mid-17th century building that was originally built as a meeting place for the guild of Sancerre winemakers. Out back was an herb and flower garden in full, magnificent summer display. I gained a much deeper appreciation for the history of winemaking in Sancerre from the afternoon I spent in the museum.

A description of one of the important soil types from La Maison de Sancerre (the wine museum).

These soil profiles are not in La Maison de Sancerre but in the tasting room of one of the largest vineyards in the area, Henri Bourgeois. This was an activity arranged by the school. We got to taste 10 Sancerre wines, a real treat. I bought a bottle of 2002 Jadis, an unfiltered wine made using old fashioned techniques on grapes grown on chalky caillottes soil (the word "jadis" means "in times gone by"). This wine was incredible! It had an almost powdery texture and was very flowery without being at all sweet. It is unusual for a Sancerre blanc to be aged for so long but it was a wonderful bottle of wine.

Like most decently sized villages in France, there was a small number of local food shops: a couple of patisseries and boulangeries, quite a few fromageries (see next paragraph for more on this), a tiny marché with a lot of canned foods and a few fresh vegetables. There was also a charcuterie around the corner from the school, facing the small plaza in front of the old church (the structure of which is only three hundred years old or so). Madame made pork and duck terrines using local ingredients, stuffed the sausages by hand, and of course she sold beautiful chops from local, free-range pigs. You might not be surprised to learn that I ate pork in some form and drank wine every single day I was in Sancerre. Every. Single. Day. (Lardons on top of greens with shaved goat cheese and a dash of olive oil most definitely count as a form of pork.) It was sublime.

The local goat cheese industry was also a surprise. They call the individual cheeses, little round wheels about 2” (5 cm) in diameter, crottins de Chavignol (this link is definitely worth a visit!) (Chavignol is a tiny village west of Sancerre). They have a rather silly story to explain the origin of the word, something to do with impractically small oil lamps roughly the same size and shape as a crottin. But most suspiciously, the word for poop is crotte or crottin. It sure makes a lot of sense if you imagine the little cheeses to be the droppings of a rather giant goat. But that doesn’t make for a very palatable tourist sell, does it?

 
Anyway, crottins de Chavignol also have a coveted AOC designation; the area of this AOC overlaps closely with the Sancerre wine AOC area. It’s hard to imagine how they find room to fit in pastured goats when so much of the land space is covered with grape vines, but they do. There are three or four kinds of crottin which are all the same cheese prepared the same way but progressively aged. The young crottin is very soft and smooth, brilliant white inside with only a tiny bit of yellowish rind. It tastes a bit too much of goat pee for my taste. I liked the demi-sec, aged about a month, the perfect texture and firmness for cutting up and serving on a small plate with a glass or two of Sancerre white wine (I didn’t even need guests for dinner to do this; I often made this little treat for myself after class was over for the day). The sec crottins, aged 3-4 months, are perfect for shaving over sautéed veggies or a fresh salad or fresh melon or peaches (the latter were in season and I stocked up). The sec crottins can look horrendous: covered with a thick, grey or brown, wrinkled rind that looks like a fungal infection gone very wrong. The hard cheese inside is a pale yellow color.

Sec crottin at top, aged 4 months. The two on the lower left are demi-sec, aged two months, and the one on the lower right is the young one, aged just a couple of weeks.

You already know that I love to cook and I particularly love to cook when in France, so I was able to indulge myself almost every day. Besides eating pork and drinking wine, I managed to eat some crottin de Chavignol every day as well! It was sublime!

I stayed in an apartment above the school, which is located in a 17th century house built by a local semi-demi-nobleman. My apartment had a small but decently stocked kitchen and a tiny washer and dryer. And utterly fabulous views of that mid-12th century tower that looks over the town! I never tired of watching the sun rise and set each day out my windows.

The tourist industry hums along in Sancerre. It has more hotels and hostels and BandBs and apartments for short-term rent than most French villages of its size. I saw many French families on holiday but there were plenty of Brits and Dutch, a random German or two, and a scattering of Americans. Most were making day trips into the village as part of their chateau-viewing adventures farther west along the valley but plenty of people stayed overnight.

I took early morning jogs through town, exploring the streets in the pre-dawn grey when everything was quiet and it was just me, the cats, the bats, and the guys who go around town each morning to water the hundreds of flower pots maintained by the town. Apparently there was live music in the main square in the evenings but I don’t go out much after dark no matter where I am and stuck to my early-morning habits. Even though none of the street surfaces are original (houses have plumbing and municipal water; all the original streets were ripped up to lay mains and sewers, although some were resurfaced with cobblestones to give an air of authenticity), I could easily imagine myself in another time when walking along the curving, narrow streets, some no more than alleys, far too narrow for modern cars, overhung with crumbling buildings.

On the Sunday in the middle of my stay, I made a long morning hike of about 15-16 kilometers, following a designated randonnée that I researched on the internet. Randonnées are formal walking routes, often with a bit of signage here and there. It took me 5 hours to make the round trip from Sancerre through the villages of Amigny, Chavignol, and Verdigny, skirting a bit of Saint-Satur on the river, then back up the hill to Sancerre. Except in the villages, the route was through the vineyards covering the hills. There is a maze of roads and paths up there so I used the GPS on my iPad to make sure I didn’t miss a turn and end up too far from home.You can see all of these villages on the geologic map.

View of vineyards that I took during my hike. Every so often you see a brightly colored flowering plant at the end of a row of vines. The plant type may vary (roses are most common) but the flowers are usually red or deep pink. What is the purpose of these flowers? Decoration? That seems pretty frivolous for the serious business of making wine. We discussed this in class and thought it might be a sort of "canary in the coal mine" thing whereby if the flower wasn't doing well, perhaps the vines needed some attention too. But there were far too few of these flowering plants for them to be a broad measure of something like soil health or fungus or something (this site agrees that the roses don't serve this purpose in the modern vineyard). Another suggestion is that the flowers are used to attract flying pollinators (bees, moths, etc.) to the vines. But most grape types don't need flying pollinators (see this link and this one for TMI). So this explanation doesn't work too well either. I guess we'll just enjoy the spots of color and not worry any more about it!

Although I could have rented a car on the weekends, the idea of trying to see a chateau or two along with the hordes of other tourists just didn't seem very pleasant. Except for a couple of trips down to the Carrefour in Saint-Satur and my Sunday randonnée, I stayed close to home in Sancerre.

It was almost like having two separate vacations in one: the quotidian routines of life alternating with the intense atmosphere in the language classes. With four hours of instruction each day and hours of homework and extra study each night, I was working very hard. Excursions to buy bread and cheese and wine were a welcome break from that.

We have a four-day weekend in KSA so I have no excuse to finish the second post in this set on my language school adventures. Stay tuned!

Travels: Medieval Church in Aulnay, France

I didn't do much touring outside of La Rochelle (because I spent most of my time in France in bed sick). However, I roused myself one morning to drive to Aulnay to see its 12th century church. One of my travel guides said the fantastical sculptures were not to be missed.

The back side of the church. Medieval churches were shaped like crosses. This view is looking down along the "head" of the cross where the main altar is located.

The church was built between 1120 and 1140, so its claim to medieval fame is well established. I'm always amazed first and foremost when I visit such old structures--think of all of the wars, even modern ones with bombs and such, that they have withstood. The sharp-eyed amongst you may notice quite a few places in the interior where damp and decay have been repaired. Most of the gravestones in the yards around the church date from the 16th through 18th centuries--certainly not the first burial cycles that place has seen. The grounds were mowed and tended and the inside of the church was spotless, obviously still in use for at least special ceremonies.

I presume this is an array of saints, angels, and related figures. The layered arches with dozens and dozens of detailed figures reminds me of a buddhist wat,

Surprisingly, all of the doors were unlocked. Sure, Aulnay is a fair ways off the main roads, but several decent sized villages are located all around it. Such a wonderful treasure, unlocked, free, available to be seen and enjoyed whenever you took the fancy (the mairie's parking lot was even directly across the street)--that just wouldn't, couldn't, happen in the U.S.

Yep, that's what I think it is too: a cow rain spout.

The Oriental influence on the carvings is striking. Elephants? How did unlettered masons of the early 12th century know what elephants looked like?

These elephants capped one of the columns inside.

All of the columns were topped with the most fantastic carvings: plants, faces, shells, animals.

The church is dedicated to St. Peter. According to my guidebook, this is a carving of two Roman soldiers hammering nails into a crucified St. Peter. Note more of the Oriental motifs and layered arches.

A view of the front of the church with the suitably atmospheric, lichen-covered grave markers and monuments.

Travels: Bordeaux and My Annual Shopping Trip in the US

I'm back home after my annual repat trip. I spent a week in Bordeaux, France, and a week in Virginia. It was a rather frustrating trip because I was sick for the entire two weeks (something I picked up here because I was sick when I stepped off the plane in Paris). I probably should have gone to a doctor while I was in France. But by the time I decided that I needed to do that, I had to head back to Paris and get on a plane. Being stuck on a plane for 8 plus hours breathing dry, recycled air sent my entire system into a complete tailspin (to apply an appropriate metaphor). Couple that with jet lag and you shouldn't be surprised that I spent most of my repat sleeping. It's a very good thing I gave myself three days here in Dhahran before I return to work (tomorrow) because I'm only now starting to feel sort of like myself. So in short, the trip was not exactly the adventure I had hoped to have. But that's the way it goes sometimes.

I was in La Rochelle, located on the southwest Atlantic coast of France in the Bordeaux province. This very old port city with a deep harbor is favored by the French for their summer holidays. Not just the middle class French, either. The Ile de Ré just offshore of La Rochelle attracts French people of considerable wealth. While I was there, I observed only a handful of Brits and no Americans at all (who are unfortunately all too obvious by their manners and dress and speech).

La Rochelle is a very old city. The main streets that extend back from the original harbor are bordered by arch-covered walkways. Based on some literature I picked up there, many of the cobblestones in the streets are original. Can't you just imagine these walkways filled with vendors hawking all sorts of goods? This particular street was no longer part of the tourist commercial center but along other streets the arches were lined with shops and thronged with tourists.

The city was packed to the gills with happy French families enjoying the seashore and the (mostly) sunny weather. The autoroutes from Paris to La Rochelle were clogged with French people on holiday, their cars packed to the roof with bags and people, stacks of bikes on the rear racks, kayaks, tents, and other gear tied to the roof. The French seem to do just fine with their small cars and all that gear--not an SUV to be seen. I was also rather interested in the fact that all of the cars were new or only a couple of years old. With the obvious exception of the slums in the larger cities and some of the rather dismal rural areas, in general France is a relatively prosperous country. It is another interesting factoid that I've encountered in more than one guidebook and website that the French spend their holidays and their money in France. 

Even though the tide was out the morning I took this photo, exposing a rather unlovely muddy shore, this La Rochelle beach was jammed with sun seekers.

I stayed at the Vue sur Cour B&B in La Rochelle. Located in the heart of the old city in a solid old building with a tranquil courtyard, it was perfect for short trips out and about in La Rochelle. Marika was a wonderful hostess, serving up homemade pastries and yogurt in the mornings and helpful tourist advice.

View from my sitting room window into the courtyard at Vue sur Cour.

The Bordeaux countryside is flat farmland. Fields of grass, grain, corn, and to my surprise, sunflowers, stretched as far as one could see.

The green patches are the sunflower fields--hundreds of flowers facing the same direction in each field.

The terrain is a bit more hilly around Bordeaux, which is why it is so perfect for the vineyards.

The famous vineyards of that province are all located around the city of Bordeaux, which is about 200 km south of La Rochelle. I was only able to visit the old medieval town of St. Emilion. Bordeaux itself is one of the larger cities in France with over half a million in population. It looks sleek and prosperous.

St. Emilion is a medieval walled city. Here you can see part of the walls and what was originally a moat.

St. Emilion is built on a bluff of cream colored limestone. The numerous monasteries and convents and churches and shrines on top of the bluff are sharply separated from the secular part of the village at the base. The usual claptrap about a hermit saint, a miracle spring, etc. accompany a large church carved into and under the base of the hillside.

This demon creature was in the corner of an otherwise standard religious painting/fresco inside one of the main churches in St. Emilion.

I stayed with my friend DSL and then my mother while in the US. What did we do? For the most part, shopped for things on my list. It has been almost a year since I was in the US and I needed a large variety of items that I can't get or find here or that I don't want or can't bring in via mail order: underwear, shoes, medicine and supplements. I won't go down the list because that would be pretty boring. But I will say that I traveled out with two suitcases with about half a suitcase of clothes spread between them and returned with, well, you can see for yourself in the photo below.

Harry and Mimi instantly suss out the suitcase containing the dog treats and toys!

Of course I don't go to the US just to go shopping. It was good to visit with friends and family, sharing meals and a good glass of wine or two. But I don't write about everything in the blog!

While at my mother's, I was able to spend time with Bhumi, my Siamese mix cat who almost instantly upon his arrival two years ago became BFF with her 17-year old male cat (I always suspected that Bhumi was gay) and with little Dyna, the sweetest SFT there ever was. She gave me a truly enthusiastic welcome, followed me around the house all week, and deigned to sleep with me at night. She's quite the spoiled princess, as of course she should be.

Bhumi and Freckles taking up residence in the guest room, usually forbidden to them.

Dyna, little sweet pea.

Upul managed to "endure" (as DSL so aptly put it) for the two weeks but it was clear that he was relieved to get a break from the terrier madness. Harry and Mimi were ecstatic when I finally got home. Tsingy has been a burr, never more than a few feet from me. I was sitting on the couch reading before I got up to take this photo. Can't you just feel the contentment? All is right with their world again.

Harry, Tsingy, and Mimi purring.

Emergency Immersion

Nothing like a little crisis to hone one's language skills.

 While we were in Burgundy, my mother became very ill. As it turns out, she required surgery and ended up spending 6 days in the Centre Hospitalier in Macon, France. The details are not important here. My aim with this post is to thank the army of people who helped me and Judy get through that mess.

First and foremost, I want to thank Kim. She is a doctor and was monitoring my mother's condition and she was the one who said, we need to take her to the emergency room. And Kim stuck by my side for those very long 8 hours as we began our navigation through the French health care system. Kim was professional, focused, and calm. I would have been much more stressed if she hadn't been by my side for those first two days.

To give you some feel for our experience, the staff at the hospital, most of whom had no English at all, referred to my mother as "l'Anglaise," the English woman. The fact that the usually fastidiously polite French chose this name over Madame B. told me that having a foreigner as a patient was a pretty unusual event.

I also have to thank Madame Hala and Madame Rita, the two women from whom I've taken French lessons through Aramco Community Education. I've had over 100 hours of classroom instruction and speak only the barest of French. If they hadn't drilled me over and over in class, I might not have had the confidence to keep trying even though I was perfectly aware that I was barely communicating at all. Forget articles, forget gender, I was just trying to string together the right verb with the right pronoun with something like an object. I quickly realized that as long as my pronunciation was correct, I was being allowed all sorts of egregious grammatical sins. I did learn many new words, including lots of medical terms I never planned to have to know (le vesicule bilaire and the conjugation of the verb vomir [to vomit], for example), but some of them are quite useful, such as l'attestation de paiement (receipt).

We were so lucky to have an emergency room doctor with a bit of English who called in a specialist who has, as it turns out, quite a lot of English. In fact, I met the specialist's English teacher one afternoon! Dr. O. was kind, caring, and professional. His advocacy and support were amazing.

I have to also thank the ladies in the hospital billing department who spent hours with me while I was on the phone to Judy's insurance company, translating faxed documents from English into some sort of French that made sense to them.

Marc and Karen, the owners of Le Nid, threw open their house, their computer, and their internet connection to me, gave me a cell phone when mine was out of money on a Sunday, and even a couple of supportive hugs. They went far above the normal call of hosting guests at Le Nid.

Judy and her husband Dave's neighbors Karen and Greg deserve a mention too. Because Dave didn't have an email account of his own, I got their email addys and flooded their inboxes with flight reservations and other information that Dave needed to get to France.

Dave also gets a nod because I called when Judy was in surgery, waking him up and giving him about 30 hours notice of his departure for France. He managed to pull everything together and arrived in Macon more or less on schedule. Not a feat to be dismissed.

And I want to thank all of my friends who were with me in France. They shadowed me for almost three days before I was able to give them the slip (by getting up and leaving before they were up!). They came to visit Judy in the hospital the afternoon she was out of surgery when tubes were coming out of her in all directions! Now that is a group of good friends! These same friends also handed me glasses of wine in the evenings and even offered to play more Uno (not sure if they actually liked the game by then or if they were just being nice).

I barely remember sitting in the McDonald's in Macon using the free Wifi on my iPad to look for a hotel near the hospital while Duwain and Kim were struggling to get their locked devices to surf on the 'net. I know they were frustrated and jonesing for their email. Still, everyone kept a decently good perspective on the situation.

And Duwain, bless him, said, there has to be a silver lining to this mess: it may result in Judy being able to put a chronic health problem behind her entirely. And that is indeed how things are looking now. Oh, there are a few arguments still to be had with the insurance company. And my mother is still mending, by no means back to full health. But she is at home and doing well.

I am very lucky to have such good friends, both new and old.

Burgundy in March

View of a small village in the area around Le Nid, located WSW of Cluny in central Burgundy, France.

I'm back from another adventure in France. We made a good sized group: Julie from Nashville; Kim, Duwain, and Barb from Austin; Kelly, Kim's sister, who now lives in Italy; and my mother Judy from Virginia. Duwain is a very brave man to spend nine days with all of these opinionated women.

Our first night in Le Nid. Kelly hadn't joined us yet.

And what did we all have in common? Really, it was me and dogs! I know Julie from our love of smooth fox terriers (and our trip to Paris in 2002 and our co-ownership of Jack and our interest in conformation and of course Jack and Jen's litter from which came Mimi and the ever awesome Gracie), and Kim, Duwain, and Barb from Dogz Rule! flyball (I know Kim from agility too), and of course my mother Judy who gracefully took my sweet pea Dyna and young Bhumi into her home as two more rescues in need of some TLC.

I was pretty amused that everyone kept asking me, what are you going to write on your blog? It only took a few hours for me to figure out that traveling with a group presents very different dynamics than traveling with just one other person. So some things that happened in Burgundy are going to have to remain in Burgundy...but there are plenty of tales left to tell.

Le Nid, located in a tiny speck of a village outside Cluny in central Burgundy, is a fabulous place to stay. It is surrounded by lush green fields dotted with white Charolais cows, sheep, and goats. One of the interesting features of this area is the use of bocage, or natural hedges, to enclose and divide the fields.

Utterly pastoral.

 Every view was its own postcard. And Marc and Karen were welcoming, thoughtful hosts. They have created a wonderful house that feels like home as soon as you walk in.

One of the bedrooms in Le Nid. Julie took this room. I thought it was particularly pretty with the afternoon sun streaming in.

View of the former stables at Le Nid. We rented the entire main house, which is behind me. View to the northeast. You can see the bell tower of the old church on the hill in the background.

We spent most of our time in the kitchen/dining room, a large open space with a small wood burning stove. If there were any themes of this particular trip, they would be drinking wine and eating cheese and bread--which we did nearly every single night! We were very lucky to also have an abundance of good cooks. We didn't eat an evening meal out even once!

Julie and Barb preparing bread and the evening's cheese platter.

Cluny is located in the middle of Burgundy. Northern Burgundy is known for its heavy, full bodied reds. And south Burgundy is Beaujolais country. But tucked in between, right in the middle, is an area where white grapes, mainly Chardonnay varieties, are grown. In fact, the reds from this white grape area are terrible! Our group unanimously dismissed one of them, not even finishing the bottle. All of us were amazed at how inexpensive the wines were in the store. And while we did do a winery tour, we got most of our wine at the local grocery store in Cluny (we regularly descended like locusts on the Intermarche).

Julie and me in the Intermarche in Cluny.

I am not sure if anyone did a final cork count but this is a shot of the dishwasher after one evening's festivities in Le Nid.

The remnants of our first night. Despite the evidence, I assure you that there were only six of us!

We arrived to stupendous sunny weather which we enjoyed for almost a week before the clouds and light rain rolled in. It was warm enough during the days for short sleeves but as the sun set, the temperature quickly dropped to 2 or 3 degrees C and the fire in the kitchen/dining room was always a welcome addition.

Le Nid is located in the center of the photograph. View to the south.

As usual, I don't have that many pictures (this time I can claim as an excuse having to always drive when we were out and about; at least DSL was driving half the time we were in Limousin last winter). I'm waiting for the rest of the group to post their pictures on Flickr or Picasa (hint hint....HINT HINT) so I can steal their best ones for the blog. The pics I've posted here are only a taste of what is to come!

Adventures Part 11: Paris

Ta da! The final set of vignettes from my French adventures.

After four days of rain and chateaus, I said goodbye to Brice and Patricia and headed to Paris. As I mentioned above, it quickly became a particularly horrible day combining all of the worst aspects of traveling, and it is best left as a story told over some good wine and food.

But I finally made it to my hotel located in a normal, working class neighborhood in the heart of Paris. The place has a one-star rating, but keep in mind that it is all relative. The towels were so old and stiff (resembling flat loofahs, basically) that I wouldn't even have used them to clean the floor (which wasn't all that clean anyway). And my room was on the third floor up a tortuously winding staircase that was so narrow that I had to turn my suitcase to the side to get it around the corners.

Standing on my landing looking straight down the staircase in the hotel.

But the bathroom was at least free of obvious signs of previous occupants, the water was hot, and the radiator worked. And I was just a 30-minute walk from the Louvre, my goal for these last few days. All in all, considering the central location, a good value for the money.

I.M. Pei's glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre.

I spent two full days in the Louvre. By the end of the second day, the ice that had encased Paris had mostly melted and I was utterly done with museums and artifacts and art.

I took very few pictures in the Louvre even though it was allowed. This marble caught my eye.

Odd detail from a 16th century tapestry! Somebody had better check what that poor dog's been eating!

The Louvre is an amazing place. The galleries and hallways just go on and on, every corner, wall, and ceiling crammed and encrusted with things too look at.

I spent my last two days walking around window shopping and people watching. I didn't take any pictures. And I didn't buy a single trinket. Instead, I practiced my French on the Parisians every chance I could. Either I was just really lucky or they needed the trade because it was the off season, but just like the French people in the boonies to the south, the Parisians were relatively tolerant of my mangling their language.

View of Ile de la Cite and the Seine. The sky was grey and it was cold and windy...but at least it wasn't snowing or raining.

I completely forgot which bridge this is but the fences on both sides had hundreds of padlocks of various kinds attached to them. Many of the padlocks had messages engraved on them: AB loves MN, that sort of thing. I heard some French guy tell some tourists that the locks are cut off daily. I don't think that's true because some of them had been there long enough to become rusty, but you get the basic idea.

The four days I was in Paris I made like a Parisian and carried my plastic shopping bag with me so each afternoon on the way back to the hotel I would stop in at the charcuterie for sausage, at the fromagerie for cheese, at the marche for fruit, at the boulangerie for bread, and of course I'd pick up a bottle of wine somewhere along the way.

Dinner!

At last I got in the taxi, headed to the airport, and flew home so I could rest up for a couple of days from my fabulous month of adventures.