Reflections on France IV November, 2006
By Sandra Price
(We have been busy since I last wrote, doing a lot of entertaining and some travel. The items up to French School were written during the spring and summer. My apologies for French words that are not properly accented. I’ve not conquered the language tool.)
Late Spring
In my last posting I forgot to mention poppies. They are everywhere – in the fields of rapeseed, along the roadside and even in our backyard. I had the man who sometimes mows my lawn mow around them because they are so bright and cheerful. The fields that were winter wheat have been harvested leaving a patchwork of gold. Adding to the landscape are world class clouds and dramatic lightening storms. Those Dutch landscape painters could have used our skies as models.
Summer July was hot (“canicule”) and August chilly and sometimes rainy.
Football 5 July
It's 11 PM and France just made it to the finals of the World Cup. The game against Italy is on Sunday. It was an unusually quiet evening here. No cars and motorcycles were going up and down our hill. But we could hear an occasional muffled cheer from the little restaurant/bar at the bottom of the hill where they have been advertising a big screen TV for Le Coupe du Monde. It took about five minutes after the game for people to get to their cars and now there are horns beeping and people yelling. I wonder how much work will get done in France tomorrow. Lacking a TV, I followed the game in text on Eurosport in English. I tried it in French but even the English terminology was occasionally beyond me. I did learn that the French word “buteur” means “kicker,” “but” being the word for “goal or target.” In slang it also means “killer,” but I digress.
(Added later -- For the final on July 9th we finally bought a TV, which we’ve rarely watched since, to see the final game. Ed, my father-in-law, and son Matt were here and we all watched together. Too bad France lost and Zidane committed his final act of aggression. I gather there was much excitement among Italians in Geneva but no action here.)
18 July
I just put Ed and Matt on the plane home. They were to be here 12 days but arrived a day late - bad weather between Vermont, where they were visiting my monk brother-in-law, and Newark. We had a nice low-keyed time. My beau-père is amazing, still enjoying long walks and willing, at ninety, to travel to see us and drive all over creation.
I especially appreciated our twenty-seven hours in Dijon last week-end. We arrived; did a little wine-tasting near Dijon; had a nice dinner in a restaurant, which had been a medieval cloister, one of Larry’s Michelin guide finds; and then on Sunday toured the ducal palace and the art collection. The high point was seeing two really extravagant 15th century tombs. Their style is known, with good reason, as flamboyant Gothic. I'll let you know when Larry gets the pictures on the web.
Then Ed wanted to see all the plazas in Dijon so we drove from one to the other. The first was a park dedicated to a man named Darcy who seems to be the patron saint of hydrologists. He brought clean water to Dijon from underground reservoirs in the mid-1800's and went on to develop the principles of hydrology. We followed the boulevards that mark old city walls to see the rest. FYI the word “boulevard” comes from the Middle High German word “bulwarks” or “defensive wall or embankment.” When the walls were taken down and replaced by roads, those roads in French were called “boulevards.” The plazas seem to be where the wall bent. None were nearly as interesting as the park so we ended our visit at the canal. Just before the French Revolution someone had the great idea to connect Dijon to the Atlantic and Mediterranean by canals. Part of the work got done. The canal is now used for recreational boating. We saw the lock, still operated manually, being expertly closed by a young woman after a boat went through.
French School
The end of July we attended a week-long French school in Roanne, beyond Lyon, where, except “entre-nous,” we spoke only French. I felt I made some progress. Henri (or Heinz, a retired German teacher) and I were the only students in my class so there was no hiding from Nathalie who was a delightfully helpful teacher. I even had a tutoring session where, at my request, the teacher just read numbers to me until I could begin to hear them. It’s embarrassing at stores when the clerks rattle off the charges and I can’t understand them.
My favorite visit was to a charmingly old-fashioned museum in a nearby village called Ambierle. The museum was created by a woman who had returned to the village with her father in the 20’s and wanted preserve the rural way of life that she had known. She purchased a former convent and set up representative rooms in the nuns’ cells. One small exhibit was of various types of beehives. Bees provided honey, an important means of bartered exchange. In case of a wedding, sugar was taken to the bees and a white ribbon was put on the hive. In case of death, it was a black ribbon. One never swore in the presence of the hives for fear of upsetting the bees. Her description further included a prayer that was said when bees threatened to swarm. A person could try to stop the flight of the bees by banging noisily on a scythe or cauldron or by extending his/her arms and saying “Mouche, arrête-toi ! La cire est a la Sainte Vierge, le miel est a moi. Belles, descendez ! (“Bee, stop. The wax is for the Holy Virgin, the honey is for me. Beauties, descend.”) Charmant!
(I know that “mouche” means “fly” but in this case it’s a “mouche a miel” – honey fly.)
On the way home we stopped at Brou. The church there is all in flamboyant Gothic.
More Family Guests
Then a week later our niece and nephew, Dylan and Kesley; their mother, Noelle; and, at the last minute, Larry’s cousin, Nancy, arrived for two wonderful weeks of visits around and about Geneva, a day’s trip to Paris (can be done of one catches the 6:09 from Bellegarde), a drive to Gimmelwald to drop Noelle off for a week of hiking with a trip to the top of the nearest peak, a visit to a chocolate factory and nearby Gruyère for the cheese and double cream, a professional soccer game, good meals, and more. Nancy actually made it through Heathrow just days after the terrorist plot was revealed although her luggage did take a week to arrive – sent by truck from London. Kesley practiced her French by buying bread and stamps!
Price B&B
Then I went back to Illinois for two weeks to visit and to get the house ready for new tenants and Larry came for a week of work at Argonne. We did get to drive to Madison to see Webb relatives – Diana and Tom -- and Tom gave us a copy of his delightful book on his grandfather, Thompson Webb.
A week after we got back here our “bed and breakfast” guests, Jay and Joyce Van Cura and Curt and Barbara Simonsen, arrived for five more days of adventures. (We had offered our home for five days at our annual church auction in Illinois and someone actually bought it.) In those five days we managed meals at our local one-star restaurant and a two-star near Lyon, a wine-tasting festival in the La Cote region of Switzerland complete with a cow-bell band, the Roman ruins in Lyon and the charming medieval French village of Perouges where The Three Musketeers was filmed as well as sites in Geneva and the environs. We stopped at a winery in Choilly, a Swiss town on a hill between us and the Alpes, and got a tour, by chance, from a young man who had spent a year working at a winery in Napa. Curt’s avocation has been learning about wine and now he works for a wine store in Chicago so we enjoyed introducing him to Swiss wines which rarely get to the US.
UU’s
When I told my cousin Joan that I was moving to France, she asked what I would do with my time. Besides dealing with the house, the garden, French lessons, AWOJ meetings, exercise classes, sightseeing and entertaining a lot without a dishwasher, I’ve joined the local UU group. It was a thriving group some years ago, meeting twice a month, but key people went back to the States and so we are down to a precious few. But we got ourselves together enough to have a table at the first ever Geneva Expat-Expo and had a great time discovering some other UU’s and people interested in the group. So we may be growing a bit. We meet in the Quaker House on Sunday afternoons once a month. I miss a “real” church but feel good having UU friends here. And I’ve become familiar with the Church of the Larger Fellowship which provides resources for those not in a church.
Vipers
To add a sense of excitement to gardening here, my neighbor Isabelle and her younger son Samuel rang my doorbell one afternoon last spring to ask if her husband could go into my yard. My other neighbor, Christoph, had seen a “serpent.” (Pronounced in the French way (ser – pon), the word strikes a more ominous note.) Samuel, who is about six, said it was “très grand.” Isabelle said something about “vipers.” (vee-pears) I, of course, said anytime they wanted to chase snakes in my yard, they were welcome. (My actual words were more like “okay.”) Our landlady had mentioned something about snakes down by the stream that marks the border of the property.
That evening I spent on the internet learning about the serpents and vipers of our region. Vipers are rare here but exist and are, of course, poisonous. More importantly, I read about what to do if bitten. All the advice I learned in the past is not true anymore. It is not known for certain that snakes will depart if you make enough noise. There may be territorial snakes. Tourniquets are out, bands above and below the bite are in. If the snake gets a blood vessel, you’re gone; but, barring that scenario, the aim now is to stop the venom from getting into the lymph system. The most important advice is to stay flat and get to a hospital with a careful description of the snake. I assume the description should be in French. Ah, well. The good news is that we did not spot any serpents this summer.
(P.S. The middle section of our house is own by Mme. Minier who, unfortunately for us, left before we arrived to go to a nursing home at the age of ninety. She kept a careful eye on the place and would have been a friendly face to greet each day. Her grandson, Christoph, lives in a small apartment below her apartment and now his girlfriend lives there, too. Mme. Minier’s granddaughter, her husband (Fabian) and two sons live in her apartment. One of Mme. Minier’s daughters, the grandmother of the two children, and her husband live up the hill a bit and Isabelle and Fabian are building a house next door to them. They are friendly people and we speak our halting French with them from time to time. The end unit has been empty for more than ten years.)
Parking Lots
I lost it a few weeks ago. I was shopping for a dinner party at our local hypermarche
(supermarket + appliances and clothes and more.) On the way there I tried twice to get into places to drop off my recycling only to be foiled by cars on my tail. (There is not recycling pick-up but large containers for paper, plastic bottles, and glass are all over the place.) Then in the store I made the mistake of going into a checkout line without anyone in it with a “chariot” filled with food. Since one packs one’s own bags, I got behind because I was putting items on the conveyor belt as the cashier was ringing them up to be bagged on the other side. I hadn’t brought quite enough bags for all the groceries (bag management is a still undeveloped skill), there were people waiting in line, and I got frazzled. Then I tried again to drop off the recycling on the way out and in leaving the area with the containers nearly got hit by a car coming from the left because there were bushes that obscured the sightlines. Meanwhile a car was coming up from the under-ground parking lot on the right not to mention a car advancing on an exit road just beyond the underground garage entrance/exit lane. Five lanes in a row! I got safely on to the road and then screamed in frustration.
Which leads to the topic of parking lots. I have been trying to figure out why French parking lots are designed in such a way that you have to drive around something before you are able to park. A classic example was a lot at Leclerc (a hypermarche chain) near Roanne last summer. We pulled into the lot with empty places straight ahead but we faced a barrier that made us turn right for about 50 meters before we actually entered the lot with a left turn. The LeClerc nearby is more complicated. I could spend two paragraphs trying to explain the intricacies of our Val Thoiry lot.
Why is driving in parking lots so hard? I have several possible explanations. One comes from a Dutch acquaintance who said that the French always make simple things difficult. Another is that the first priority of the designers is not “easy-in, easy-out” but traffic/speed control. All that turning makes you slow down. A third is that the designers may be operating in smaller places, trying to fit parking spaces into cramped areas although Val Thoiry was built on former farming land outside the village. But I also do think that the medieval road patterns may play a role here with scattered farm sites and cow paths setting the original patterns. That’s the way roads are supposed to be in the French imagination. Straightforward is sterile.
Learning French
That task has turned out to be more frustrating than I imagined. First, it is easy to get by here with a little French. Since I read French at probably a fifth grade level, I can “get by” with letters that come in the mail and the newspapers and even directions on household cleaners. I still need a dictionary but I usually get the drift. I’ve also become adept at finding the English speakers at the classes I attend. But hearing and speaking and writing are much harder for me. I wanted to offer our kitchen to a local group for cooking classes but realized I don’t know the words for “sink” and “stove-top” or “countertop.” At our AWOJ meeting yesterday, Yola started to say “When you open your mouth to speak French,” I interjected a spontaneous comment “you are wrong.” I am really discouraged. I find it so difficult to hear where words begin and end. I think that I need to have lessons every day. I now go to CERN for lessons twice a week for five hours total. A dinner guest told me that it takes two hours a day to learn a language and, I’m afraid, I’d rather do other things.
French Practice
But Larry is pushing us to get more practice. He agreed to attend a play sponsored as a fund-raiser by my gym group. It was a farce, done by a group that seems to travel from town to town in the Pays de Gex putting on the same play. Its humor was broad and physical enough that we figured out what was going on but missed the fine points.
The past Tuesday evening we attended the Village council meeting. The meeting took place at tables arranged in a rectangle in a multipurpose room at the local school. There were name signs and bottles of water and wine glasses on the table. In attendance were three other observers seated to the side and the mayor (since 1995), and potentially seven adjoints or assistants and nineteen conseillers. The meeting started fifteen minutes late (waiting for a quorum?) and several council members arrived even later. The first item seemed to be the budget. An adjoint presented it and only one council member raised any questions. I heard the word “voiture” or car and Larry, whose comprehension is much better, heard “quatre millions” or four million euros. That seems to be the amount of the local budget. The mayor then presented the “permis de construire” or building permits. We are not clear if they were for approval or just changes. Whenever the council was voting on something, the mayor or adjoint would ask “all opposed” and “abstentions.” No “ayes.” I guess silence implies consent. At the end were some communications including one that was quite hard-hitting. Larry heard words like “liars” and I heard “vote again.” The whole thing was over in an hour. But I felt, as I often do, like one of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. We did not get the whole picture. Tomorrow we’ll go to the annual Armistice Day event and next week we’ll attend the Beaujolais festival in town.
Factoids
The website for Thoiry, which is in French but features pictures, is at:
http://www.cc-pays-de-gex.fr/mairies/thoiry/sommaire.php3
Some French parking lots have blue spots designated for handicapped people and pink spots for parents with children.
There is virtually no mustard grown around Dijon now. Almost all mustard seeds are grown in Canada. There is a Mustard Museum in Dijon but we did not get to see it.
Hemp oil At the festival in La Cote, I noticed a display of edible oils. One bottle had a leaf that I recognized from student presentations in my psych class. It was a marijuana leaf. I did a double take. It was actually a hemp leaf and the oil is legally sold. I bought some but it’s not so good on salad.
The list of the mayors of Thoiry goes back to 1790. Many seemed to have served for 20 or 30 years.
The French word for turkey is “dinde” or “of the Indians.”
Happy Thanksgiving!!!!