If its Tuesday this must be Belgium*

* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064471/

After strolling around lovely old St. Emilion this morning, I walked back to the train station (its downhill from town). Three trains later I arrived in even smaller Les Eyzies (less eh-zees) and started another walk from a train station into town. A woman who had been at the station seeing her daughter off took pity on my and gave me a ride all the way to my hotel. Who says the French are unfriendly? All of my experiences have been positive…or at least as positive as I’d expect in the U.S. Just don’t expect as much random smiling.

Les Eyzies is all about the caves and Cro-Magnon Man.  For easy reading check the Wikipedia link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon  I have a couple of tours lined up for tomorrow: Lascaux 11 and  Grotte de Rouffingnac. Grotte de Font-de-Gaume is right outside of town but I need a half day to just relax. My hotel has a swimmable pool (and I’m fine that its not heated) and lovely grounds backing up to a wooded stream, right under ancient cave dwellings. Hotel des Roches. http://www.roches-les-eyzies.com/  Its not even that expensive. Overall, I’ve been happy about hotel prices. Paris is high of course, but so is every major world city.

Tonight I chose to have dinner at a low-priced place but the salad and dessert were top shelf. Have you ever had that chocolate lava cake? This French version was at least three times better. Its a good thing I was sitting down, is all I can say. Food that makes you swoon. Imagine. All of the chocolate I’ve had in France has been incredible. I didn’t feel like photographing my food tonight but I did last night. The trouble with last night’s dinner was that after the first two courses I just dove into the cheese and dessert courses before remembering to take pictures. Food too good to wait for a photo. Ha!

I’m sorry that Kathie never did want to splurge on a really nice dinner. The experience of a real French dinner has been incredible. Last night: entree – foie gras (NOT pate) on thin bread with carmelized apple, then the main course of filet mignon, sauteed potatoes, and the most yummy carrots and green beans ever (garlic and something else), then the salad and cheese course, and finally dessert — fantastic little scoops of chocolate glace (ice cream) with chocolate shavings in it, topped with chantilly (whipped cream) and drenched in whiskey. I enjoyed my small bottle of wine so much that I went searching for some to bring home while I was out and about this morning. The only shop I found that carried Chateau Mauvezin (Grand Cru, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes) had only one vintage: 1994. I’d enjoyed a 2007 at dinner. I took a chance and bought two bottles. But then I worried, what if the ’94 is past its prime and I’m wasting my 2 bottles allowed back on the plane? So I’ve opened one. Its not quite as good as the ’07 but I’m okay with drinking it this week and taking one home to share. Maybe I can get a taste of something else I’d like to take home. Not that I need to add any more wine to my collection. I really can’t drink much anymore but when I do, I want it to be great stuff.

I think this chocolate has spoiled me forever. If you love Ghirardelli….the stuff I’ve been having is all at least as good.

My French TV is playing Towering Inferno. I never saw it in English so its a bigger challenge to understand than the NCIS episodes I saw a couple of nights ago. Its pretty cool when I can understand an entire sentence.

Relaxing onthe TGV

 

Le Petit Affaires

It’s often the small things that make an adventure memorable. Here are a few so far —

First day: When I missed my connection from the train to the bus at Challon, I was fortunate to find a taxi driver who not only spoke English but who was happy to chat about all things American and French for the entire half-hour drive to St. Jean de Monts. It was quite enjoyable.

First  day: In Paris you can get just about anything you need or want at any time of day, much like any big city. But out in the small towns, restaurants close between lunch and dinner time. I sat down in a cafe overlooking the Atlantic after enjoying the equestrian events on the beach and ordered a glass of wine. The waitress gave me the sad news that the kitchen was closed but that she could still make me some fries. So my cafe experience was FRENCH FRIES. Mon dieu! Later it occured to me that I could have asked for bread and cheese. D’oh! Chalk it up to jet lag/brain fag. “(Brain fag” is not any sort of slur on homosexuals; rather it is a “culture bound” condition common among students in certain British Commonwealth countries but it seems to happen everywhere. In general it is mental fatigue, but there is more to it in the cultures where it is listed among temporary mental disorders.)

Second day: For my adventure in attempting to see a doctor to get a prescription for insulin I got a taxi driver who spoke no English. I had prepared by writing a brief script for him but there were unanticipated conversations, like “Do you want me to pick you up when you are finished, and how long do you think you will be?” that had to be conducted using a combination of words that only one of us understood plus gestures. I’m proud of both of us for doing so well. I also learned that the “Le Perrier” road signs had nothing to do with mineral water but did have something to do with the driver’s father. Perrier is not in my Beginner’s French Dictionary so I’m going to guess that it has something to do with trucks on the roadway since the signs always included a truck. Perhaps his father was a truck driver (although) “truck” is “le camion” so those signs remain a mystery to me. But I enjoyed his explanation anyway just to hear the lilt of French being spoken by a native.

The faces of happy children at play, and the love shown by their parents – the same in small towns or large, and every ethnicity.

Electricity appears to be well guarded but water flows freely. Every toilet I’ve encountered demonstrates the power of Poseidon.

Successfully navigating the Metro system in a new city is always a feat to boost one’s confidence but doubly so in Paris; the first city I’ve visited where there is no giant “M” indicating a Metro station. A few station entrances sport a lovely art nouveau style sign but most are simply stairways into the ground with a small sign best seen once you begin to descend that indicates which line or lines can be found below.

The horror of Kathie when confronted with “too much big city Paris” life in a short span of time and space. Example: first we came across a homeless man sporting some sparkly yellow ladies’ mules (an open back sandal with a short heel) – hey the guy needed shoes and those were available, I said. Kathie lives in Irvine. And then our attention was turned to the 3-legged dog hopping along happily. “Why doesn’t she buy him a prosthesis?” she asked. “The dog seems perfectly able to get along without one,” I offered.  She wanted to take its picture. Just then the lady’s other dog met up with another small pooch coming the other way so the lady was paying attention to the dog meet…while Trois-jambe squatted to poop behind her. Kathie: “She’s not even going to clean it up!” Its fun to observe culture shock in others sometimes 🙂

Later I saw some large lumps of poo on the sidewalk in Kathie’s path and all I could think to shout was “Poop! Poop! Poop!” She had no idea what was going on but managed to just barely avoid stepping in it. I still bend over in laughter remembering. She returned the favor on another day, shouting, “Watch out!” but I didn’t know where the danger was coming from so I looked for oncoming vehicular traffic rather than sidewalk mines. Again, a near miss. Its good to be lucky.

There are lots of people walking their chiens but chat sightings are sparse. I do miss my kitties when I travel away from home, so spotting cats gives my heart a lift.  My favorite so far was a huge fluffy orange tabby proudly surveying his realm from a first floor (that would be second floor to you and me) apartment’s open window. His front half was outside the iron balcony fence while the back half was safe on home turf. My second favorite was a bistro cat whose mottled gray coat purrrfectly matched the cobblestone street. There is a photo of her in the Around Paris set on Flickr. And number trois so far were the feral cats of the Versailles gardens.

Arriving by train at St. Emilion is an adventure. It is a good twenty-minute (American time, not Parisien time) walk along a mostly cobblestone road through the vineyards to town. Yeah, yeah, its all very picturesque but not kind on the feet or the wheeled luggage. A thirty or forty-something Frenchman and his Japanese friend  helped me with my luggage. The Japanese fellow wanted to pick some grapes but the Frenchman said “no, to the owners the grapes are like gold” but his friend picked five or six anyway. We shared them – deliciously sweet. Within 5 minutes the Frenchman went over and grabbed a giant clump. I told his friend that it was “very French” that his friend would speak the rule and then break it. Both laughed.

Merlot grapes - web photo

 

Lots of photos added

Unfortunately I haven’t had time to label them all, but they are sorted into sets at my Flickr site. Still need to upload Versailles; expect that to be in two sets. More Paris photos coming too. On Sunday I’m off to St. Emilion, then a little town in the Dordogne region; Les Eyzies (near Sarlat) and then back to Paris for one night before flying off to Montreal.

Met an American bride and groom when we were leaving Versailles yesterday. They had been all over the Paris area taking photos of themselves in their wedding clothes. The photos will be used for thank you cards for wedding gifts – cute idea!

I, who packed waaaaaay too much for this trip and have already struggled on and off trains with my one GIANT suitcase and another reasonably sized suitcase plus my briefcase have brilliantly arranged to leave the GIANT suitcase at the hotel in Paris where I’ll be staying my last night here (Wednesday). So I go happily to the train station tomorrow with about half of my load. Yea!!!

Bonsoir!

The pigs and I in Paris

 

Versailles

Too exhausted to say much more than: Versailles. Chateau (ha! Ginormous Palace), Gardens, Trianon. Would’ve paid twice as much to take the tram at the end of the day. So much concentrated wealth – no wonder there was a revolution.

Sorted through pix for an hour; still not ready to post here. Perhaps tomorrow? I’m quitting the tourist biz early in the afternoon after a visit to Montmarte’s Ouen Flea Market and a coffee near the Moulin Rouge. All this stuff is really here. Amazing.

Popped into Notre Dame during a mass yesterday when we were out and about in the Latin Quarter and St. Germain de Pres after changing hotels. Much to tell. Stay tuned.

 

“Brief” Update

There is much to share but we’ve been so busy experiencing Paris, that there has been little time to write about it. And isn’t that the way it should be? So here are some highlights from the past couple of days.

Wednesday – Kathie and daughter (who prefers to remain anonymous) slept in while I ventured out on my own. Place Vendome. Jardin Tuileries. Musee L’Orangerie. Place de la Concorde. Cathedrale Madeleine. Met up with K and daughter back at the hotel and headed off toward the Louvre, but stopped on the way for another delicious lunch. Remember that I’ve been on my feet a lot already. I was not adequately prepared for the size of the Louvre. One really should train for all the stairs. And now I understand why so many people were buying tickets for only one of the three buildings. Will post photos of some of my favorites soon. I must say that it was  not the thrill I thought it would be to see the Mona Lisa in person because they put the painting behind protective glass and several feet away from where people were allowed to stand. Still, a special moment…just not as intimate as I’d hoped.

Thursday – I suppose I should have talked more with Kathie about our accommodations while we were planning. The new room is more the standard size for Europe, and Paris specifically — no room for me.  Even if daughter had been willing to sleep on the floor (she likes it, actually), there was not enough room on the floor. And a second room would not open up until the next night. So off I went searching the neighborhood for a hotel with a vacancy. I intend to fully enjoy every moment in my high-end boutique hotel (Hotel le Petit Paris) tonight. Mmmmm..plush bed after 3 nights on a fold out couch. Ahhhhh…..

Lunch at Crepes A-go-go. Jardin de Luxembourg. St. Germain de Pres shopping district. Chocolate shops. Macaron shops. St. Germain de Pres Cathedral. Cluny Museum (really just for the tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn). Notre Dame (during a mass). Resting now. Paris-at-night bus tour tonight. Whew!

 

The Paris Museum Pass

Tuesday we strolled down the street from our highbrow hotel that Kathy scored with Hyatt hotel points, through the Place Vendome, then through a bit of the Jardin des Tuileries, across the pedestrian bridge (see the photos of the lovers’ locks attached to the sides of the bridge at my Flickr link) over the Seine where we stopped to enjoy some roasted chestnuts from a street vendor. Then on to the huge Musee D’Orsay. A major advantage of the Museum Pass is that you don’t have to wait in the Disneyland-esque ticket line. There is a very short line where you flash your pass and then go quickly through security. Saved us at least 45 minutes on our feet. Unfortunately no photos are allowed in this museum, although I did manage to snap two without detection – one Van Gogh and one of the inside of the museum itself; a beautifully converted train station. Check out their website and the Wikipedia article. Both include some of the more famous works in the collection. Somehow I managed to miss some of the more famous pieces but did see the few that I expected to be there…by unknowns such as Renoir, Manet (I’m becoming a bigger fan all the time), Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin (I really like the Tahitian women), Toulouse Lautrec, Degas and Cezanne (most of his stuff just doesn’t do it for me). There were some lovely sculptures too, and the structure of the building itself was a delight.

http://www.musee-orsay.fr/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_d%27Orsay

http://www.flickr.com/photos/callistalee/sets/

One of the Information booth gentlemen was kind enough to guide us to a wonderful bistro for lunch and then we marched on to the Musee Rodin, not so far by Parisien standards but a lot of walking for our untrained SoCal feet. I liked Rodin’s apprentice/lover’s (Camille Claudel) work until her message got redundant: angst over Rodin’s other lover. Ugh. Come on, you’re French! Appears that there was plenty of passion in that mansion amongst artists of all kinds (painters, sculptors, poets, and at least one dancer) – its evident in the art. Art photos will be uploaded tomorrow… probably. Between museums I managed to find a post office where we bought lots of postcard stamps. Now we just need the time and energy to write them and send them. Snapped a few photos along the way of cheese shops, kids razor scooters locked up outside a Catholic School, narrow streets, self-serve bicycle rentals, etc.

Kathie’s feet were especially sore – she’s been walking around with a broken toe for goodness sakes! So we were very happy when luck had it that the #69 bus – which I’d read about in my handy Rick Steve’s France 2011 guide – was not far from Musee Rodin. We figured we’d just ride around for awhile and see the sights. But the one we boarded was near the end of its run and we found ourselves stranded and still footsore at the Eiffel Tower. (I know, awful luck.) But a quick check of the bus map perked up the weary museum-goers and we boarded the #42 which went “close enough” to our hotel. Except that we missed our stop and got lost after we finally got off. Having lost the bet that I was taking us in the right direction, I paid for the taxi. The shopkeeper who told us we were going the wrong way and the taxi driver were each sort of horrified that we’d take a taxi for such a “short distance” but our feet were just not up to their standards. “Short distance” is a relative term, after all.  When the taxi driver gave us a hard time I asked if he’d like us to just get out right now, but he didn’t want to lose the fare and kept going. But then he passed our hotel and I insisted he stop. He explained that he wasn’t making this up; that there was a minimum trip/fare. I said I’d pay the minimum but don’t make us walk any further by driving down the street until he’d reached it and for God’s sake don’t drive us around the block and run up the bill OVER the minimum! Kathie kept saying to just let him do what he wanted but I overruled her and said “GET OUT! I’m going to pay him legally required minimum; we’re HERE and we’re not going any further!”

We pampered our sore footsies in the whirlpool at the hotel spa  later.

More walking Wednesday. Coming up: Musee L’Orangerie, Place de la Concorde and The Louvre!

Thursday we change hotels and leave luxury-land for more moderate digs in the Latin Quarter.

 

D’oh!

I’m no Homer Simpson, but I have been saying “D’oh!” a lot lately. I don’t know why it took me four weeks of struggling to finally remember how to say “eau” (water). I asked for “ou” (where) at breakfast one day and got a really puzzled look. They didn’t think I was saying “ouef” (egg) but couldn’t be sure, especially since the ouef’s were right in front of me. I’ve known how to say”eau-de-cologne” for many years. Oh. Eau.

Sunday night, before the roses healing dream, it finally dawned on me that instead of getting back to the hassle of obtaining insulin when I got to Paris that I could simply walk into a pharmacie and ask for Glipizide (the medication I was taking with Metformin before I began insulin in June). My numbers have been pretty good, considering I hadn’t had any insulin since Wednesday night; Glipizide would probably work fine. (I’m still taking the Metformin).

So once I got checked into the fancy schmancy hotel I’ve been sharing with Kathie and daughter (daughter prefers to remain anonymous), I walked up the street with my three pages of translated explainations plus some new stuff about Glipizide being okay instead of insulin, all I had to do was ask the twenty-something year old woman there for this prescription medication and she placed an order to be filled by the next morning. She apologized for not having it on hand. A bottle of thirty pills would be under seven Euros. I ordered two. D’oh! Easy access. Ultra inexpensive. I love the French!

Pharmacy sign in France

 

Chartres: A Pilgrim’s Journey

I do admire the French railway system; there is something to be said for centralizing some services. They run on time, they are clean and comfortable, they cover the country well. There is also something to be said for packing light. Which I have a real problem with. After a relaxed morning in St. Jean de Monts, I splurged on a taxi (instead of the bus) to Challon to get the train. I had a reservation, purchased online at Rail Europe. But they give you a confirmation number that may only be understood by the workers at the CDG Airport train station. Once you’re in France, you’ll do yourself a favor if you switch to using the SNCF website or just showing up early at the station to make your reservation. And it would help too if you had the new style credit card with a chip or something-or-other on the front of the card because all of the self-help machines at all of the train stations will only take that form of payment. My credit card would not work. My reservation number meant nothing to the machine either. In the small town of Challon, the one station agent doesn’t come to work until about half an hour before the train comes and goes. So after getting help from two very nice French ladies (one older, one younger) and still failing with the machine and holding up the line, I got in the agent’s line and he was also unable to figure out my reservation. So he did what they apparently do on a relatively regular basis; he wrote a note by hand on a ticket blank and stamped it with his official Challon train station stamp and said that the agent on the train would accept that. And he was right. So now all I had to worry about was wrangling my two suitcases (one of which is giant-sized but is blessed with four wheels) in and out of trains, from one track to another, through the stations, and finally to my hotel in Chartres.  It was all good for train number 1 from Challon to Nantes. And for train number 2 from Nantes to LeMans. And from LeMans to Chartres. But at Chartres there was no lift and so I banged them down the stairs from the track to the underpass and was beginning the struggle of going back upstairs to the station when a gentleman rescued me. Merci beaucoup! It was raining as I emerged from the station and I had only one word on my mind: taxi. I’d forgotten that I’d intentionally booked a room near the railway station and in the rain with Sunday evening traffic the town looked intimidating. I waited at the taxi stand for awhile and saw exactly zero taxis anywhere when I finally asked a couple of teenage boys how I might get a taxi. They asked where I was going and they told me “its right THERE” pointing up the street. I could see a sign saying “Hotel” but not “Hotel Chatelet.” I wasn’t sure that they understood that I needed to get to a specific hotel. But they were insistent so I wrangled my wheeled companions and bumped my way across the busy, bumpy street, glasses covered in raindrops. When I was within half a block of the hotel I could see, that sure enough, it was the Hotel Chatelet. Home sweet home.

Tired from all of the lugging of luggage in the rain, I didn’t want to walk far for dinner, so the Italian place three blocks away looked inviting. The description of the pasta carbonara included an ouef (egg), which seemed odd, but the extra protein would be a good thing. There was a Frenchman working his way through a whole pizza, covered in thin slices of Vendee ham (think proscuitto) with a fried egg in the middle so I figured I’d be getting a fried egg as well. My egg, however was prettily delivered in a small bowl set astride my heap of pasta. It was raw. The waitress saw the expression on my face and quickly offered to take it away. Its not like the pasta was hot enough to have cooked it. Unpasteurized, unrefrigerated cheese is one thing, but I draw the line at raw eggs. I made up for it by ordering the creme brulee for dessert.

My room was sweet, with a partial view of the Cathedral and a door-sized window that opened to let in the cool, rain-washed air, and the full effect of the church bells. I slept soundly that night. Near wake up time I was enmeshed in my usual anxiety dreams that are almost always tangled up in my adolescence. This morning, however, some folks showed up who insisted that I needed a healing. Sounded good to me to I ignored the dream-drama-du-jour and let them take me…dancing and chanting in a circle, I felt some energy rising but it was kind of like one of those sex dreams where you can never reach orgasm. I thought about faking the being healed because I knew that the people participating really wanted it to work. But I couldn’t do that. Faking a healing would be even worse than faking an orgasm. Bad operant conditioning at the very least! With my decision to NOT fake that I was healed, all of the chanting, dancing people fell away and before me was a quickly growing, vine of red roses. I laughed with delight. And awoke happy, refreshed, and ready to visit the Cathedral whose labyrinth had been calling me for some years. Mary, Queen of All the Saints and Angels, thank you for welcoming me to your home here in Chartres.

I was doubly thrilled that I was able to take one of famed Malcolm Miller’s tours. (Triply thrilled that it wasn’t raining.)

Stepping onto the labyrinth

 

St. Jean de Monts

I was there just a weekend to get a feel for the place and it felt like home enough to wonder why my ancestors would leave. My readings of French history give some clues – more on that later.  Even today, over 300 years later, with the increase in population and all the building that has gone on, this little French seaside town includes many forested patches and public access to wide, flat, hard-sandy beaches. Its now a popular beach resort and I was fortunate to just happen to be there for a major equestrian event, Caval  ‘Oceane  (http://www.vendee-tourisme.com/content/view/full/58693). Check out my flickr photo set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/callistalee/sets/

I hesitated to take photos of people and their dogs because it felt like intruding, but it was just so…French. My research tells me that yes, there are lots of beloved pet dogs in France but that recent surveys indicate that there are even more cats! However, the cats aren’t taken on weekend trips away from home (very often – I did hear one meow from a pet carrier at the train station) or walked on leashes around town.

Besides riding horses on the sand or splashing through the shallow surf in a horse-drawn carriage there are little cars that use the wind to propel them (sand surfing?), and the usual sailboats and parasailing, para surfing, and when the weather is warm, good old fashioned swimming. The food was scrumptious (see my photo of my dinner crepe – made from dark flour, with Vendee ham  – think provolone, cheese, and walnuts, the wine divine. I took a nice long walk from hotel to beach to town center, stopping by an arcade where there were gambling games for adults and rides for kids. And as luck would have it, there was a little hardware store across the street where I was able to buy some plastic cord with which I was able to mend my broken purse strap. The book, paper, and postcard shop was just up the street from the old church. The blowing rain made the long walk tiring, but my new poncho from Rick Steve’s Travel Store kept me and my backpack dry. But here’s how tired I was: I skipped the free pass my hotel gave me to swim in the warm salt water pool at the Thalassotherapie spa next door and instead I fell asleep in the bathtub. Bonsoir, indeed!

 

Remembering Officer Odie

If you are up on 1960’s American culture then you ought to remember Officer Odie. “Twenty-seven 8×10 color glossies with circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back of each one to be used as evidence against us.” Alice’s Restaurant. The Thanksgiving Day Masacree in four-part harmony. Arlo Guthrie.

This morning I spent about an hour and a half copying down my medical records from my account at Kaiser Permanente’s KP.org and using Google Translate (and my trusty Beginner’s French-English Dictionary – Harper Collins – I highly recommend it) to write two full pages explaining

Horsing around St. Jean de Monts

my predicament. Another half hour went to writing notes for the taxi driver plus some I had to work on enroute. $33 Euros each way to the Urgencie Hospital in the town of Challons.

I nervously waited my turn to see the intake nurse, seeing how kind, friendly and helpful she was to everyone. As I was standing there next in line I could feel my pulse quickening and I thought, “Oh fine, my BP will be high and the doctor will be all worried about that instead of my diabetes, since my sugar numbers haven’t gotten too bad yet. So I frantically searched through aforementioned French-English dictionary so that I could explain that my BP was usually FINE, but I was just nervous about not being able to speak French and being without my most important medication.

And then, like Officer Odie, I met “Blind Justice.” I could hear Aphrodite giggling in the distance when the nurse read my note (no time to wait for me to clumsily read it to her) about leaving my insulin at home. She pointed to her full waiting room and gave me a list of doctors back in St. Jean de Monts (pronounced by locals as sah-jhunh-moh). Knowing I didn’t have time for the dictionary, I did my best to explain that I hadn’t had a dose since Wednesday night and that the local pharmacist had said that I should seek help at this hospital immediately. She frowned and pushed the list of doctors back into my hand. I knew I could have continued to plead my case but, honestly I was in no immediate life/death/  danger. I was unprepared for “Systeme D” today.

No worries, friends. I’m testing regularly and am doing amazingly well even with the French cheeses, a bit of wine, and a pastry.

So to Officer Odie, I feel your pain, man. I just hope that the Group W bench is not in my future. But if I come across a worker strike while in France I may feel compelled to belt out, “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.”

And today on Callista’s Silver Lining channel: The drive was nice. Saw a Great Blue Heron and several fence-sitting hawks. And, best of all, I was able to get to the Caval’ Ocean: Les Chevaux en liberte  a whole lot earlier than I would have if I’d spent time in the ER waiting room – and got to enjoy some steeple chases before the rain came.