Reflections on France III June 25, 2006
By Sandra Price
It’s midsummer and I haven’t written about late winter and spring. So before our summer guests arrive, here’s an update. I had hoped to master sending pictures but will do that next time. More will be forthcoming. Have great summers. Pretend you are in a foreign country and visit some of the tourist places near your home that you’ve never seen.
Sandy
Spring
Everyone says it was a long and cold winter, although from a Chicago perspective I found it quite reasonable. Flowers for planting began to show up in the stores in March, way too early in my mind but I guess in a normal year that’s when people start planting. When spring finally arrived, it did so in purple and yellow. Daffodils and forsythia and pansies were followed by lilacs and iris and wisteria. A telephone pole in Mucelle was covered in wisteria. Entire fields of yellow appeared, creating an artistic contrast with those of green and brown. The fields had been planted with rapeseed or colza (Canola oil comes from a kind of rapeseed) and were intensely yellow. Now, at the end of June the yellow and purple have been replaced by roses in bloom everywhere, in every color you can imagine. We have orange, yellow and red roses as well as delicate pink wild roses in our garden. Our neighbors have even more since they get more sun and the scent walking past their roses is wonderful. I learned that there traditionally are roses in vineyards because the roses are more susceptible to a fungus and act as an early warning system to the wine growers. That may be part of the reason there are roses everywhere in this region.
Ville Fleurie
There is also a competitive reason. There’s a contest for the most flowery villages. One sees signs on entering villages with the words Ville Fleurie and then one or more stylized flower symbols or fleurs. There is a national committee that visits the 12000 communes (1/3 of the total communes in France) that have joined the competition and the fleurs are awarded at the beginning of the year. 55 % of the score is based on the flowers, trees and parks and 45% is based on care of the environment and a welcoming atmosphere. There are 196 four fleur villages, none in our departement. Thoiry has three fleurs this year. I’ve heard that our village even has its own greenhouse. Larry is convinced that the whole purpose of local government is to plant flowers. There is a circle about four yards in diameter at the bottom of the hill. Last year it had a map of France in flowers with a cone of flowers rising to show the location of Thoiry. We’re waiting to see what the plan for this year is now that the pansies that were put in in March are gone. The theme for this year’s planting involves forsythia branches tied together like the vaulting in a cathedral with flowers underneath the arches. The contest makes for beautiful villages.
Weather Reporting
Having lived for years where I could pretty much count on the weather report for the next day (“Snow should arrive around 4 PM and we should get 3-5 inches), I’ve totally given up on weather reports here. The Tile Cal group had its monthly barbecue here Friday. All the weather reports (I consulted four) said that it was going to rain so I cleaned up the top floor so people would have somewhere to go. It was warm and clear. Some friends and I went to St. Claude in the Jura Mountains yesterday. The website meteo.fr (meteo is weather) said it would be raining at 2 PM. (It actually said 14 hours – I still haven’t truly made the transition to 24 hour time.) BBC and NYTimes weather concurred. It was sunny all day. We’ve been without real rain here for more than 2 ½ weeks although there have been numerous predictions of rainstorms. I realize the mountains make it almost impossible to predict what will happen where because of all the micro-ecosystems. So the weather is just another way that I’m not certain about what will happen next. (PS It’s now three days later and we finally have had rain in the evening.)
Cows
Having passed numerous herds of cows since we arrived, I realize that I am very ignorant about them. I have noticed that they are large animals and that they come in all white (Charolais from Burgundy) to all black (Heren from a region of Switzerland.) with assorted red/white or brown/white or black/white pied patterns in between. Many of the herds around here seem to have a mix of breeds. One Sunday evening about three weeks ago we heard cowbells nearby and Larry called me to see a herd of cows walking up the rue de Puits Mathieu at the end of our house. One stopped to smell our neighbor’s roses. They were headed to higher pasture. Occasionally a truckload of cows go up the road, too, heading for the greener grass above. I don’t know why some get to ride and others don’t but guess that proximity is the main factor.
From one of the AWOJ members whose husband was raised on a dairy farm we learned about the combat des reines (the battle of queens). The combat is a contest that occurs when Heren cows (it’s a breed in one region of Switzerland that has a strong sense of hierarchy) compete to see who will lead the herds up the mountain. The cows face off in pairs and snort and push until one walks away and ultimately there is one cow left standing, the queen. I saw a piece on Swiss TV before the spring contest where the owners had, in essence, put their prize cows in training for the event. I learned that the big contest occurs after weeks of playoffs for different levels, a kind of bovine World Cup. We missed the spring event where the favorite did not win but hope to go to Martigny for the fall combat.
Fouine or Stone Martens
I’ve never seen a stone marten but have heard tales from three people about how the animal, a kind of weasel, chews on ignition cables here. Swiss auto insurance covers such damage but French insurance doesn’t. Our friends, the Taylors, learned the hard way that one needs to keep moth balls or cheap perfume, which fouines seem not to like, near the car to keep ignition cables safe. The Taylors also learned that ignition cables for US Toyotas are not the same as ignition cables for European Toyotas. Fortunately a friend FedEx’ed the parts to them long before the order the mechanic placed came from Japan. Who would have thought?
“Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver and the other gold.”
I remember learning this round in Brownie Scouts and we’ve had two chances to test it this winter. First we joined Peggy and John Mooney for a week-end in Paris in February and had a wonderful time. Peggy and I met at Newton’s Bigelow Jr. High where she was a new teacher and I was an MAT student back in Cambridge. In Paris, we visited the Rodin and d’Orsay museums, wandered a bit in the Latin Quarter, attended an organ concert, ate at good restaurants, and traveled to St. Denis to see the Cathedral. It was there that Suget helped shape the Gothic style and it is there that the kings of France are buried. Does anyone know why there are two “sculptures” of Catherine de Medici, one clothed and one nearly nude? In St. Genis we also saw a table at a market. The sign behind the table read something like “France, we are so grateful to you for colonizing us.” St. Genis was where the riots last fall started.
Then on Easter week-end we drove to Freiburg, Germany, where other grad school friends, Dan and Lissa Petersen, were visiting as part of Dan’s sabbatical. . Saturday we did some bike-riding to see solar projects for Dan's project, took in a design museum near Basel, stopped at a winery and tasted 13 wines before we bought some (I was designated smallest sipper), had dinner at a restaurant suggested by the vintner where they squeezed us in because we took some wine over to the restaurant for him on Saturday. Sunday we attended Easter mass at the Cathedral, went to Basel where we walked around and saw an exhibit at the art museum and took a ferry ride over the Rhine, and then had dinner in Freiburg high up in a hill. Larry and I decided to come home through France rather than face two Swiss customs station with our wine. Since the signage was not terrific and did not conform to our map, we got lost from time to time but saw lots of Alsatian countryside.
Keep in touch with old friends provides golden opportunities.
Burgundy
The main cities of Burgundy are an hour and a half to two hours away. One Sunday Larry and I left rather late in the morning and drove to Macon. Going through the town we spotted a restaurant whose name was on a list Larry had downloaded from Michelin.com. We had a lovely lunch and then drove on to Cluny to see what little is left of the monastery where the powerful Cluny order began. The cathedral must have been magnificent. Going home we drove on back roads through the vineyards that march up and down every hillside and through towns like Chassalas (a type of grape), Pouilly, and Fusee, stopping to marvel at an impressive outcropping called the Salutre and an inn called La Grange du Bois. A pleasant way to spend a day.
We made another foray into Burgundy two weeks ago, the Saturday of Pentecost week-end, Pentecost being a Monday holiday in France and all but one canton in Switzerland. It was a 17 hour one-day event, leaving here at 8 and getting to Beaune (in the middle of the region between Dijon and Macon, the place of our first visit) around 10. It was on a Saturday so we looked through the market, purchased some boar sausage, and then visited the Hospices de Beaune Hotel Dieu, a medieval hospital well worth the time. Click on http://www.hospices-de-beaune.com/fr/musee/ to see the distinctive roof and one piece of art. The hospice was built between 1443 and 1452. A chancellor of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, built the hospital to care for all the indigent left after the Hundred Years’ War. The war ended but the “ecorcheurs” continued to pillage the countryside and most of the residents of Beaune were indigent. Turning off a war has never been easy.
After lunch we drove into the countryside and stopped at a winery called Perrin (the name had a familiar ring being that of friends we’d known in La Grange) and tasted some wines in a wonderful old barrel-vaulted stone cave. There is a hotel there, too. The website is http://www.hotel-villa-louise.fr/. We then went to a much larger operation in Nuits-St. George but I forget the name of the winery since I took a nap while the others tasted. There was a group of young people abusing the tasting process.
Out in the countryside again we stopped at a liqueurs producer in Arcenant (www.artsetdecorationsdebourgogne.com) and tasted a variety of liqueurs, purchasing a plum and blackberry, passing on the dandelion and rose hip although I bought rose hip jelly. Our next adventure was following the signs we noticed to Gallo-Romain ruins. We actually found them even though the last sign on the highway was missing. (Not an unexpected situation.) The venture included a 15 minute walk into woods. There was little signage on the ruins except to identify the rooms and say that the place had been destroyed in 259 CE. I still haven’t found any information about the ruins. Then it was off across the countryside to a restaurant listed in Michelin and the drive home.
Pentecost
On Pentecost Day Ellen Taylor and I went to a village called Vesancy. It is
close to a wonderful old chapel that sits up in the hills about the town and
commands great views of the region. Each Pentecost there is a pilgrimage to the
Riantmont Chapelle. So with about two hundred other people, we marched, singing
songs and chanting "Hail, Mary's" all the way to the Chapelle. The priest, who
we learned is newly ordained and is black, would occasionally say “Courage” over
the loudspeaker carried by a relay team of teenaged boys. It turned out that
there was a meal afterwards but we left before the Mass. The views of the Jura
were terrific. And when the picture of the pilgrimage appeared in the local
paper, Ellen and I were right in front. Our flicker of fame.
Swiss and French Wine-Tasting
There was a “Visit Your Local Swiss Winery Day” in late
May. We went with some friends. The plan was to go to wineries nearest Gex,
where they live, over in the Bossey-Collex-Bellevue region on the theory that it
would be easier to go back if the wines were terrific. The day was cloudy with
occasional rain storms. So we started in Collex and had a nice time at a winery
that also has an apple festival in the fall. We got apple juice and some wine.
The neighboring winery was closed so we went to a chateau where there was also
an antiques sale but nothing pleased us. We drove around trying to find the
winery we’d read about where they also raise buffalo and elk. We found the
animals in fields – an arresting sight -- and finally learned that the winery
was closed, too. So we gave up on that region and drove to the region west of
Geneva called the Mandement to the village of Dardagny where there were at least
13 wineries and far too many cars for the narrow roads and lots of people. We
even met some people we know. We wandered through the village stopping here and
there and tasting wines. In the end we had a trunk full of wine and went home
via Challex, a French village nearby, where the doane (customs) was not
active. Just in case.
The next week-end we went with other friends to the Mucelle winery in Challex,
the only winery in our “county,” the Pays-de-Gex. It was the French national
“Visit Your Local Winery” day. We sat in a lovely tasting room with a friend of
the vintner who explained the wines to us in English. Our friends got some
bottles of what we have designated “Cote de Fosse” or “Side of the Ditch” since
the winery is around the corner from where I put the car in a ditch. I had
built some Ikea wine rack kits I'd gotten and we had filled them up so Larry and
I decided to wait.
Cherries
It turns out that we have around ten or so cherry trees on the property we rent. We had been warned to let all our friends know and have them come pick the cherries. So I got an old wooden orchard ladder (you can climb up both sides) at a resale shop and created a Cherries Alert distribution list. As the summer has progressed, we’ve come to realize that we have three different kinds of cherries – large and sweet, small and a bit tart, and almost sour. For the large ones, we found a telescoping pole with an apple picker basket attachment and Larry had great success reaching some of the high ones. I should mention that no one has pruned these trees for years so they are way too high for really picking all the cherries. Fortunately the cherries are ripening in stages. Friends have responded to the ongoing alerts and we’ve done a reasonable job of harvesting the first two crops so far. We’ve even had two families come and it has been a true delight to see children excitedly learn to pick cherries, climbing the ladder and straining to reach the ripe ones or telling adults where to pick. Now I’m experimenting with techniques for making cherry liqueurs and Larry’s trying his hand at jams. Then there is cherry clafouti, a custardy cake with a layer of cherries for which you don’t have to pit the cherries. (Recipe from Pam Forbush available on request.)
Factoids
After a recent debate in Switzerland on gun control, one exasperated legislator pointed out the every cow in Switzerland is registered so they should be able to handle registering guns.
Pharmacies in France (readily identifiable by the green neon plus sign outside) have condom machines outside, available 24/7.
French ipods have a top limit of 100 dbs. In the US, the limit is 110 dbs.