The Leslie Show

France and The French

This trip has been remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is getting a better feel for France and the French people.  Oftentimes when I travel, I pick one place and stay there for a while.  I'm not a big fan of The Grand Tour in 10 days, where "If this is Tuesday this must be Belgium".  How can you get to know a place like that?  I find it exhausting. 

I'm also reading a terrific book:  SIXTY MILLION FRENCHMEN CAN'T BE WRONG:  What Makes the French so French (I bought this at an English bookstore in Cannes, so the version I'm reading is the England-English version.  The American version of this book is sub-titled:  "Why We Love France But Not the French" which I find most embarrasing and rude.)  It explains, in direct and un-romanticized terms, the history of La Republique and why the French act and live as they do. 

Here are some things I have learned (through this book and over the course of my two-week stay):

• The French like to take it easy. But it's not the same kind of "hang loose" attitude we found in Hawaii.  They are a very industrious and proud people, but they have built leisure time into their lives.  For example, many (but not all) shops close from noon to three.  That's lunchtime, folks, and it is taken extremely seriously.  So, the shops are open from nine (or ten) to noon.  Closed from noon to two (or three), then open til 7 or 8 at night.  During those open hours the shopkeepers will be quite attentive to you and give you very nice customer service.  It's not as though they're lazy while they're working.  They just make room for leisure.
• There is a looser sense of time here in the South.  The shops might open at 10.  Or 9.  Maybe 8:45.  Then they're closed for lunch for ... a while.  Then they're open again.  Pas de problème, Madame.  You'll get what you need eventually. 
• Manners are extremely imporant here. And it has a different context.  Yes, sure, in the United States "please" and "thank you" are the magic words.  But here it is required that you greet the shop owner with a "Bonjour" when you walk into a store, and leave with an "au revoir".  The analogy they give in the book is that in French culture, a shopkeeper's store is like an extension of their home.  (Sometimes it literally is.)  You would never walk into someone's home without a "hello", right?  It would be rude.  Same deal here.  "Bonjour" will get you good service.  Just marching in without a polite greeting = you're a boor.
• Snacking is not a major phenomenon.  Mealtimes are very set things.  You have, perhaps, a coffee and some fruit or a croissant for breakfast.  Then you have a very nice lunch (with wine and salad and an entree).  Then you have a nice dinner, somewhat late.  To graze around all day just isn't done.  Also, grabbing a quick cup of coffee "to go" is really hard.  There are cafés with delicious coffee everywhere.  There are no Starbuck's.  A cup of coffee?  Great idea!  But you'd better be ready to sit down and drink it. I think this has a great deal to do with why the French aren't fat.
• Wine is good, cheap, and everywhere. We've been staying in apartments while we're here so we've had to go to the grocery store to get our food (which is both fascinating and very nice...eating all your meals in restaurants gets old fast, even in France).  In the grocery stores, the wine section takes up rows and rows, and most bottles don't run any more than five or six euros.  There are more expensive wines available in the specialty stores, but we haven't felt the need to go there too often.
• Cheese is a way of life.  You know how in your grocery store the cheese section might take up a quarter of an aisle?  Well, in France, it takes up three or four full aisles.  One whole aisle, both sides, just for the different kinds of yogurt. 

Well, that's all for now.  Time to go drink more cheap rosé, as we are leaving in two days and then the rosé won't be quite as good or quite as cheap. Au revoir!

Calissons

As we've traveled all around Provence, I keep seeing these diamond-shaped boxes in all the gift stores.  Calissons d'Aix, they say, and I couldn't quite figure out what they were.  I assumed they were hard candies, but the ingredients list said "almonds" and some of the boxes seemed awfully big (and expensive) to be hard candies. 

Yesterday we went to Aix en Provence and I discovered what they were.  They're sort of midway between a cookie and candy, and they're a very specialized, very regional treat.  Calissons have been made in Provence for centuries, and they were handed out on Sept. 1st to commemorate the end of the plague.  (Gotta love the French:  "Hooray!  The plague is over!  Let's eat!")  I went to a local confiserie (confectionary, i.e. candy maker) and bought a teeny box so I could try before I bought.  They're not bad.  A little diamond of almond paste flavored with some fruit syrup (from the melons of the area, don'tcha know) and some sugar.  Kinda mild, and some of the nicer places offer chocolate covered ones.  I'll bet those taste better, but I didn't want to worry about the chocolate melting them before I got them back to the states.    Here is the best site I've found that describes calissons. 

Aix en Provence was very pretty.  It's a big college town, so there were lots of attractive college kids running about.  It was also market day (which is French for "you will never find a parking spot").  Chris and I have perfected our technique of visiting towns:  Drive there, go to a café, order lunch, lunch takes an hour and a half, pat our bellies, walk around a wee bit, roast to death from the heat, head back to the house to go swimming in the pool.  HA!  Rushing about cramming in lots of sites in one day is virtually impossible here, for a couple of reasons:  1)  It's bloody hot (mid to upper 90's by noon, hotter thereafter) and 2)  The French do not rush lunch.  Please allow at least 90 minutes for lunch.  If you're in a hurry, get a sandwich and bypass the cafés and restauants. 

We've actually been enjoying this slow pace very much.  There are so very many things to see and do here, but if we tried to cram them all in we would be very stressed and unhappy.  Instead, we take our time and just see a few highlights and all is well. 

So much to write!

Lord, we've done so much and have so much going on.  I have fallen way behind in my bloggging of this trip, mainly because I've been having so much fun experiencing it.  That's a good thing.  I'll probably be writing recounts out of sequence or going back and changing the dates so they all line up chronologically. 

Does my English sound stilted here?  If it does, there's two reasons:  1) I'm feeling pleasantly buzzed on a few glasses of the local rosé wine, and 2) after nine days of living in France and communicating via poor French and fractured English my syntax is all screwed up.  I'm finding myself saying things like "We must make with the returning".

Today we went to the Abbaye de Sénanque to see the beautiful architecture and the lavender fields.  Unfortunately, we just missed the tour and it was going to be three hours 'til the next one (there are five monks who live there and they're not terribly keen on letting the tourists run around the place on their own).  If we'd waited, the tour would be conducted entirely in French (nine days of experience predicts we would have absorbed only 30-40% of what was said).  So, we didn't get to see the insides of the place.  We did, however, get to explore the lavender fields, which were lovely.

Even better, we discovered the village of Gordes on the way there.  It's one of the many Provençal villages that are perched at the top of a hill, and it's quite impressive.  I'm told it's a popular location for celebrities (the Martha's Vineyard of the Vaucluse? I just made that up) and I can see why it would be.  It's very beautiful, not too big, and it has killer views.  We had a yummy lunch (Chris tipped the waitress 5 euros because we didn't have change and he thought she was really cute) and met a lovely couple who have an olive oil shop in the center of town.  Got some nice gifties for friends and family. 

We also saw several bories on the way up and down the hill.  Bories are a sort of beehive-shaped stone igloo.  They date back to 600 BC and have been used up to modern times.  The amazing thing is they are made without mortar.  They're just stacked stones, and many of them are still standing today. 

Coming home, we went for a swim in the pool, then whipped up a pasta dinner which we enjoyed on the patio.  I have been eating so much on this trip!  It will be really interesting to see how much weight I can put on in two weeks.  I can definitely feel the weight gain.  Ah well.  Who cares?  I'm on vacation and I'm bloody well not going to diet in France!  [Julia Child voice] Bon Appetit! [/Julia Child voice]

Champs des Rêves

"Is this heaven?"
"No, it's Iowa Provence."

We are living in some sort of Merchant-Ivory/Martha Stewart dream.  A 200-year old French farmhouse.  Cicadas singing as the hot Provencal sun heats up the lavender fields.  The owner greets us with a homemade rustic apricot tart and coffee.  We have dinner out on the patio with the bees buzzing all around us in the flowers.

I can't even begin to do it justice.  It's just lovely.  We should have some more entries and some photos up in the next few days.  By "we" I mean me or duffergeek.  :-)  Meanwhile, here's a link to the place we're staying at now:

http://www.holiday-rentals.com/index.cfm/property/8989_1

Life is good!

I'm sitting in our little apartment in Cannes, eating a piece of sugared brioche from the Paul bakery, fresh melon with ham, and drinking some rich coffee with milk.  The sun is just peeking over the red-tiled roof of the opposing house across the courtyard, and I can hear the seagulls yelling as they fly in from the beach.  Aaah, the Riviera.

Yesterday we went to Grasse, which is a town that proclaims itself the World Capital of Perfume.  We went to the Fragonard museums, where we toured the factory and got lessons in how bushels and bushels of lavender, jasmine, roses, etc. are made into essential oils, which are then mixed into perfume.  It was really fascinating stuff for me, since I hope to be certified in aromatherapy at some point in the next few years.  They showed us the workplace of the "nose", which is a person who has a gift (and a thorough education) in scents and how to detect and blend them.  They called his workplace his "organ", because it looks very much like an organ you'd see in a church.  He has over 250 different bottles of essential oils there that he works with.  And "he" is the word.  Virtually all "noses" are men.  Which suprised me, actually.  I have a much better sense of smell than Chris does, and I was under the impression that women had a better sense of smell than men.  Perhaps it isn't true, or perhaps it's just French chauvinism when the female tour guide said "Women wear the perfume, men make it."

Old Grasse is a beautiful city up on top of a hill.  Chris took some lovely photos.  We did make a bit of a blunder yesterday:  we were told it was only 3 km to the center of the city (the first place we went was just outside the city...we got there by bus.)  We were impatient and it was kind of nice out so we decided to get some exercise.  Well, it was 3 km, all UPHILL on winding and not very attractive roads.  Ack!  By the time we got to the city (and the top of the hill) we were EXHAUSTED and had used up a great deal of our energy. A plate full of steak tartare, fries, and salad at an outdoor café overlooking the harbor of Cannes helped remedy that.  We managed to toodle around a bit in the lovely downtown area before heading back.

Today I think we are going to visit the Iles de Lérins (Ile St.-Honorat and Ile Ste.-Marguerite), which are two small islands just off the coast of Cannes.  They are supposed to be a quiet and sharp contrast to the hustle and bustle of Cannes, and Ile Ste.-Marguerite is where "The Man In The Iron Mask" was held for many years.  Will let you know how it goes!

Greetings from Cannes!

I am not coming home.

I'm going to France.

That's it.  I've had it with this place.  I'm going to France for two weeks. 

(A week in Cannes then a week in Cavaillon!  I might post from there, I might not.  Stay tuned!)

I'm LEGAL!

Licensed to Kill Touch!  My Washington State Massage License showed up in the mail today.  I can finally start getting paid for massage. 

YEE-HAAAA!!!!!

An Inconvenient Truth

Chris and I went and saw "An Inconvenient Truth" last night.  It's the new documentary about Al Gore's speeches and lectures on global warming.  I had heard of it, and heard it was good, but it wasn't something I was particularly keen to see.  I mean, it's like Schindler's List, in that I know it's going to be sad/bad/hard news that hurts and who wants to see that?  But Chris really pushed to go see it so we went.

It was really, really good.  I strongly encourage everyone to go see it. 

First and foremost, it is ultimately an inspiring and uplifting film.  Of course there is harrowing data and alarming stories, but I left the movie feeling very empowered, as though this was a difficult problem that I could do something about.  Second, it's fascinating to see a movie about someone who really has a lot of passion about something and works hard to make things happen.  And finally, it's just a really well shot and well edited movie.  I want to go back and take my kids to see it.  I think it's that important.