On The Road Again

After three wonderful months in France it is time to head home.  We will leave St.-Remy tomorrow morning and drive to Neuchatel, Switzerland to stay with our good friends and former neighbors Anne and Francois.  It will be great to catch up with them and other friends.  It is also supposed to snow, which will bring back memories of living there!

Then we drive to Zurich for our flight back on Saturday, just in time to see Stanford smack Cal around in the Big Game. 

This is our last post for this trip.  We hope you have enjoyed our little blog!

Vos amis,

Val et Keith

The World

 

I love Le Monde.  There is nothing better than sitting in a café, sipping an espresso and reading the paper.  Sometimes I feel like I should be wearing a beret and smoking a Gauloises cigarette.
 

Le Monde is France’s leading newspaper and is very intelligently written.  It is known less for its scoops and more for its analysis.  The front page editorial is always interesting.

For years I have thought of Le Monde as a lefty newspaper, given the articles it prints and its editorial slant.  But I’ve been surprised on this trip about how far it has moved to the right, especially on economic matters.  It is always telling the government to move farther and faster to liberalize the French economy.

When I mentioned this to my friend Christian, he told me something I didn't know.  He said that unlike Figaro (always right wing) or Liberation (always left wing), Le Monde tends to lean against the party in power.  So during the right wing Sarkozy government of 2007-12, it leaned left.  Now that the socialists are in power, it leans right.

Because Le Monde is so widely read and so influential, it tries to counterbalance the government.  That’s one of the things that makes it so interesting, because it is not dogmatic.  I don’t read Figaro or Liberation because they are boring - you always know what they are going to say and it’s usually a knee-jerk reaction to that day’s events.  But Le Monde is much more thoughtful, and often surprising.

We don’t have anything like it in the US.  Our two leading papers - the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal - lean left and right respectively.  Their news coverage is pretty straight and then they make their opinions known on the editorial pages.  But those opinions are usually boring because they are so predictable and often knee-jerk.

I guess that means I’ll have to keep reading Le Monde when I get home.  I wonder where I can find a good beret in Menlo Park?

KVS

The Judgment of History

I just finished a great book that my friends Marjorie and Antoine gave me, “1940” by Max Gallo.  It describes the first year of WWII in France.

 

A major figure in the book is Philippe Pétain, the head of the Vichy government during the war.  Petain was one of the great heroes of WWI, the Lion of Verdun, and the French people rallied around him after the devastating defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940.  While trying to protect France from the worst excesses of the Nazis, he instituted a policy of collaboration which is considered today a black chapter in French history.

After the war, Pétain was tried and convicted of treason, though his death sentence was commuted by De Gaulle.

I was curious to know what French people now think of Pétain, a major figure in 20^th century France, given his very mixed history.  So I asked my friends, “What is Petain’s reputation?” What I got back was interesting.

Some of my friends thought the French see him as a devil, the man who betrayed his country to the Nazis.  They really don’t consider his heroism in WWI at all.

Others thought his reputation is more ambiguous – that of a hero who tried to save his country in WWII but went much too far in cooperating with the Nazis.  But on balance negative.

Our French teacher had an interesting view.  She expected that the older the person, the more they would give credit to Pétain’s heroism at Verdun.  The younger the person, the less they would see WWI as being important, given how long ago it was.

That was in part confirmed by Jean-Pierre, who is in his 60’s.  He said that while he had studied the two world wars in school, he hadn’t studied the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, even though it was a very important event in modern French history – it was just too long ago.  Similarly, perhaps WWI and even WWII are less a focus for today’s French students.

This was borne out when we asked Chloe, who is a recent university graduate.  Her response: 

“Pétain who?”

KVS

Row, Row, Row

We went to the Antiquities Museum in Arles today.  Arles is an old Roman town and they have a wonderful collection of Roman antiquities – statues, mosaics, weapons, sarcophagi.  A few years ago a fisherman found a bust of Julius Caesar in the Rhone river, one of the best ever discovered.

 

More recently, archeologists have been exploring the bottom of the Rhone, which runs right past Arles.  The river is big and slow but carries a lot of sediment from up north, making it hard to see anything.

Three years ago they discovered part of an old Roman barge that had sunk just offshore.  As they dug through the sediment they realized it was almost completely intact after almost 2,000 years!  The barge has been recovered and restored and the museum built a special wing to display it.  The exhibit just opened a few weeks ago so we were excited to see it.

The barge is amazing, over 100 feet long and held together with thousands of giant nails.  There is a great movie that explains how it was discovered, brought to the surface and restored.  How it survived so long is incredible.

The museum also has lots of the cargo that ships like this used to transport, especially the big Roman jars called amphora.  They often contained wine because the Romans were huge consumers.  That could explain why their empire lasted as long as it did.

KVS

Front view

Back view

Party at Virgil's place! 

Fashion Forward

It was cold and windy today but we decided to go for a bike ride anyway.  But how to stay warm?

 

Val usually wears black bike shorts and so it was easy for her to add her black leggings.  Very styling.

I, on the other hand, have black bike shorts and leggings but usually just go with my brown shorts.  Much more convenient to have all those pockets.

But it was so cold I decided to take a fashion risk and wear the black leggings with my brown shorts.   

Was the result:

          A)    Next season’s hot new fashion?

Or

          B)    A new world record on the dork-o-meter?

We report.  You decide.

KVS

The names have been changed to protect the innocent

Early Wakeup Call

The weather was really windy last night, with gusts up to 70 mph.  The trees were waving back and forth and rubbing against the house.  At one point I thought I saw Dorothy and Toto fly by but it was dark and I couldn’t be sure.

 

Throughout the night would we would occasionally be awoken by shutters banging and other noises.  But it was the beeping I heard at 4 a.m. that got me out of bed.  It sounded like a smoke alarm warning of a low battery. 

When I found the source - a little electronic box - the beeping was becoming more insistent. Sonofagun, I thought, it’s a burglar alarm.  I didn't know we had one of those because we had never used it. 

I was leaning in to take a closer look just as it began to shriek.  Incredibly loudly.  And I’m not talking ringringring-scare-the-burglars kind of loud.  I’m talking air-raid-siren, shatter-your-eardrums, make-your-head-explode of loud.

At this point, Val woke up.

“Here,” I said, “Cover the alarm with a pillow while I investigate.”

I found the alarm control panel and did what guys do – I started pushing buttons randomly.  That didn’t work so I did what guys do – I pushed them again, but harder.  Then I yelled at them.  I may have also used some bad words but I’m not sure.

Meanwhile, the air raid siren continued to shriek.

Eventually, Val made me hold the pillow while she calmly and rationally investigated.  She made sure no doors were open.  She looked for an instruction manual.  She studied the control panel.

Then she did what any intelligent, thoughtful woman would do – she started pushing buttons randomly.  And swearing.  But in French.

Eventually, after an excruciating 20 minutes, the alarm stopped.  Who knows why?  We went back to bed, a little shell-shocked.

Lucca slept through it all.  That dog really is deaf.

The next morning we saw our proprietor, who lives in the attached apartment.  She was very apologetic and explained that she had accidentally set off the alarm and it had taken her a long time to figure out how to disarm it.  She showed us the electronic key that she uses to arm and disarm the alarm remotely.  She offered to let us borrow it so we could check out how it works.

We’re not giving it back until we leave.

KVS

The guilty party

Don't Light a Match!

We were invited to lunch at Sara and Christian’s place and agreed to bring the cheese.  Christian is from Normandy and loves the famous Normandy Camembert so Val went to the cheese shop to get one.  

 

She didn’t want the kind you often get, tasteless and rubbery, but a true Camembert, strong and runny.  And smelly.  Really smelly.

When she walked into the house with the Camembert the odor preceded her.  It smelled like when someone has just…well…you know why we use the expression “who cut the cheese?”  Exactly like that.

Of course, I figured it must have been Val.  Lucca is usually the source of such silent-but-deadly attacks but he was in the other room.

“Whoa, was that you?” I demanded.  “What the heck did you eat?”

“It’s the cheese, you idiot,” she said, and smacked me.  I guess I believed her.

But what to do about the smell, with the lunch still two days away?  Luckily, we could wrap the Camembert and put it in the fridge.  But the day of the lunch we had to take it out early to warm up.  No way you can eat cold cheese.  The odor wafted through the house.  I hid in the bedroom.

But the worst part was the 30 minute drive to Sara and Christian’s house.  Do you know how small the inside of a car is when you are sharing it with a Camembert?  I kept casting suspicious glances at Val and she kept pointing at the cheese.  I guess I believed her.

When we presented the cheese to Christian he inspected it carefully.  He looked, he poked.  He inhaled deeply, a smile on his face.  Then he took a little taste.  “Parfait”, he said.

Christian explained that in Normandy, the taste of Camembert varies based on what the cows eat – grass, apples, or a combination of the two.  The strongest and smelliest Camembert, and thus the best, comes from cows who eat only grass.  Christian told us, approvingly, that this cheese definitely came from grass-eating cows.  Success!

Our lunch that day was a special Normandy dish that is finished with a flambé of Calvados.  As Christian got ready to light it, I edged away.  What if that smell wasn’t really because of the cheese?  But luckily nothing exploded and Val gave me an I-told-you-so look.  I guess I believed her.

KVS