Snowed In.....

Well not exactly...but for the first time since we've moved in to our new home we had a snow day today! Mid-morning I was called at work and instructed to collect my son from school as the school was closing. Unbelievable. Only a few inches of snow and the South of France grinds to a halt.

Apparently it's snowing in Corsica and Algeria as well. I can laugh, but they're not used to it here. And quite frankly after so many years away from snowy and icy winters, neither am I. Quite sensibly, schools were closed and people sent home before the snow really came down.

It is beautiful. We covered the orange and lemon trees in the garden and stood looking out at the garden filling slowly with snow.

My husband, born and raised just over 1.5 hours away is completely unused to snow, so his delight, fears and fascinations became mine as well. My son was running about within seconds of arriving home thrilled to be building a "bonne homme de neige" (a snow man) and be throwing snowballs. He was singing "Jingle Bells" and asking when "Papa Noel" was going to arrive. Who was I to crush their enthusiasm with criticisms of how wet the snow was? We were soaked instantly.

This photo was taken only a few minutes after the snow started. Ten hours later and we've at least 4-5 inches everywhere. Really quite something for this part of the world.
Hope we can get the cars up the hill tomorrow morning!

When in Rome....

The French are Roman. Civilized and yet barbaric.

Take for example our choice for a New Year's Eve meal. Quite by chance we ended up buying a last-minute "poularde" for which I looked up recipes and discovered one for which we could finally use the morilles my husband's uncle and aunt had collected for us from the forests near their home in the Jura. Poularde aux morilles, creme et Vin Jura--an earthy white wine which has taken my taste buds some time to get used to. (While I adore peaty whiskey, peaty wine has really been a slowly acquired taste...) Yum. As my husband considers mushrooms anathema, I was astonished tonight to get literal thumbs up after this meal from my son especially as the 'no mushroom' idea is one they hold vehemently in common. "Refined" my husband declared, scraping his plate clean.

Where does the barbaric come in? Sorry. It's been a late night (my son is not yet in bed) and I am busily picking away at the carcass--sorry vegetarians!!--of this poularde for tomorrow's proposed 'bouche a la reine'....hmm... Picking at the carcass of my "last-minute purchase" is not the barbaric I mean for I like to think I've raised her level of offering to the religious: her death was not in vain and, if she could attest to this as my husband can, I've thanked her nearly 10 times for her sacrifice throughout the cooking process.

Barbaric....back to the subject: Look up poularde. The French 'do' the same thing to the female chicken as they do the male rooster which they call a 'chapon' (capon?) and ADORE....it brings to my mind chubby eunuchs guarding the doors to harems in Turkey. Turkey, Turkey. The country. Castrati tenors....you get the picture?

Anyway....the bird was fatty, fatty, fatty. Poor thing. Makes me think of adolescents and acne...I'll let you connect the dots! sorry, bad pun. Raised "plein air" for 120 days, it had had a 'good life' as far as chickens' lives go.. (Sorry, again non-meat eaters) it was delicious. The Romans were right about a lot of things, especially about what tastes nice. They were able to overlook the barbarism of calves raised in tiny spaces, force-fed geese...all for taste. I guess it comes from having had an unclouded view from on top of the food chain.

Hmm... all this said, I still sure am looking forward to puff pastry and creamy chicken tomorrow.
But it does get one thinking....

On to dessert! and, oh the most civilized and incomparable of all drinks, CHAMPAGNE!!!!

Happy New Year to all, and to all a good night!

Autumn

The days are now growing shorter. Whereas in Antibes I used to note the coming sunset with the daily prayers of my Muslim neighbor in the apartment across the alleyway, the Allah-Is-Great bounding off the stone walls of the old town, I now mark the passing of each day with the steady clip, clop, clip, clop of the neighbor farmer's horse and rickety cart. The birds stop singing for a moment as the horse lets out a tired sigh. The neighbor slows him down just above our house at a crossroad and honks an old black rubber horn which is mounted on the paint-chipped wooden frame of his cart. I know then that the day is nearing an end. In the summertime, he wouldn't pass until nearly 8 or 9 o'clock and my son would let out a cheer as he honked his horn on the corner just above our summer terrace. (We only have one terrace, but it's too cold to use in the winter!)

Autumn is my favorite season in the year but like the fleetingness of the season itself, time passes all too quickly and I have to remind myself to stop and literally smell the roses. Yes, they are still in bloom here in the South of France. Incredible. I was playing pirate and wheeling my son around in his rowboat (wheelbarrow) when I thought to stop, bend the pink blossom to his nose, and mine, and remember how fast time goes. Carpe Diem.

Red Tide

When I first arrived in the South of France ten (gulp!) years ago, I took a new friend's advice and spent the first summer away from the heat. I drove my shiny blue Ford KA around northern Europe and returned just in time for the "rentrée" (back to school time). Ten years ago everyone I told thought it was perfectly normal to have found myself stuck on the highway in a sea of automobiles. The travel advisory, had I understood it at the time, said that the roads were "red" if not "black" which means, stay home. I do remember the word "bouchon" repeated over and over and it wasn't hard to work out what a cork was while creeping along like a shark, slyly shifting lanes trying to move- just- one- more- car- ahead.
Today, the tradition of the Juillettistes or Aoutien I wrote about earlier is becoming a thing of the past. Families in France thankfully still have the holiday time, but not the money to travel for more than a week at a time, certainly not a month at a time. So the roads are not only clogged on certain days as they used to be, like August 15 when half of France was returning from holiday and the other half was beginning it, but every weekend.
Vive les vacances!

Speed-dating was like a day at the races...

Life in a couple has its challenges. French-American. Men and women have enough troubles communicating so add a language and culture barrier and it's mighty interesting at times. Still, our relationship probably resembles many and when this morning, I stooped to pick up a pair of underpants which had made their way pretty close to the laundry hamper this time, I stopped, dropped them and thought about what it was it was like to be single. In France....

Speed-Dating: A Day at the Races

A friend of a friend and I arrived for our maiden race, our first and for me, my last, speed dating experience. The men breezed and snorted in the back corners of the bar's upper room while the women trotted off to the restroom to get saddled and ready to parade themselves before the race began. I had a long look at myself in the mirror, adjusted my black-framed glasses, which looked more like a horse's blinkers, goggles to keep me from shying away from objects and other horses, and wished for the umpteenth time that I'd bothered to order new contact lenses. Ding. A bell sounded. I felt like I was in still in school.

"What do you do?" asked my first "date".

I didn't think Frenchmen usually asked what one does for a living. That's what I read before moving here, anyway. It's meant to be rude. And there it was, out in the open. The din of the bell still ringing in our ears.

"I'm a teacher."

Uh, oh. I'd done it. How much more un-sexy could I make myself. I just can't lie.

"Tell them you are writer who is supplementing yourself teaching. You can make yourself sexy and alluring. I've seen it when you sing. That's you," my sister Skyped me from Chicago as I was getting ready to leave."

Out of thirteen men Sunday night, I marked four as being potential matches. Men who were funny and intelligent and in five minutes managed to somehow engage me.

"What were they like?" my sister asks, again on Skype the following evening, half listening to me as she cradled my little nephew in her lap.

There was a nice guy with whom I laughed and laughed and laughed. A guy who asked me over and over and over about me. And a guy who was so nervous he shook, I took pity on him and another guy who looked me steadily in my eyes as he answered my questions. Good bloodline, nice pedigree, at least 14 hands high...Well, of those four men, I had NO matches. That basically means that of four men, not one of them chose me as a potential second date.

"What the hell is my problem?"

"Well, what was wrong with the other nine men? Who didn't you write down?"

I did not put down the non-starter, the gorgeous gelding who was about as dull as a lead balloon. I left his badge number blank on my betting card. I did not tick off the springing young colt who laughed at everything I said as if I were a comedian on Saturday Night Live and threw back his mop of a mane anytime another filly caught his eye. I left off the dark horse who insisted we speak French while the whole experience was geared toward English speakers. And I did not put down Mr. Also-Eligible who when asked about his background proceeded to talk about himself and only in the last few seconds bothered to ask something about me. And in a dead-heat for last place, I managed to leave off the long shot who smacked his bubblegum like a cow chewing its cud and never once looked in my direction.

My sister is reassuring. "Some women would do really well in that five minutes but you, you're complex. There's no way you can reveal who you are in five minutes. But perhaps other women that's all they have in them: five minutes. They can appear sexy, vulnerable, vivacious and available in five minutes."

"Me, no. I just scare them."

"Please tell me you didn't smoke your pipe?" my mother pleads, her face becoming pix-elated as our Skype connection breaks up. I hang up. It's no use explaining why in my mid-thirties after living overseas for ten years I'm still single. She's convinced I'm gay.

I honestly feel I did well. Tried hard not to seem too intelligent. Too scary. I remembered to ask questions and most of the time I was the one listening and not the one talking.

But what about the men I judged in five minutes? What of the Dutchman who was amusing in his challenge to see who'd visited the most countries in the world but who when we stood up at the end of the evening managed only to come up to my chin?

Who am I to judge anyone in five minutes?

It's not the environment for me says my sister. I am not a "five minute" girl.

Well, then. I need to find myself a non-five minute man. And when I find him, I'll be betting on him to win, place and show.

Juillettiste ou Aoûtien?

The French work hard. Let's be clear about this. I've lived in a few places where, I'm sorry to say, I'm not sure I could say this about most of the population, most of the time. Places too hot to move or places too macho to lend a hand...while France can be hot and France can be macho, they are most certainly not lazy.
But as I've waxed on about already in earlier blogs, they do have a lot of holiday time. And as they are "chauviniste" (which in French means nationalistic) they quite often love to travel to another part of France. Taking advantage of this trend, the government staggers holiday times by a week here and there to allow the sea and ski resorts to flourish. While students are slogging away in one department, another department's students are flinging their way down the slopes. It all works out nicely, unless you're in a place like the South of France to which most of France seems to migrate throughout the year.
The French, if they've a choice, do this in two waves--July and August. Traditionally workmen and craftsmen take off a few weeks in the month of July to spend time with their families and while white collars take the month of August as it's believed no important decisions are made in the month of August so their vital presence in the office can be missed... following suit, stores, restaurants and bakers shut down. Paris becomes a ghost town. Which suits the returning juillettiste just fine!
Doesn't the President of the Republic head for the beach in August? Yes, he comes here, to the south of France. Like everyone else! And I can tell you, and I have done so, it's madness.

For Carnivores Only

Intent on ordering a rack of lamb for Easter, I ended up in line behind a burly old man at the butcher counter. The butcher was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear sounds of heavy chopping and banging from behind the glass paned door to the refrigerated store room behind, so I waited patiently. Judging from the volume at which the man in front of me was speaking, he didn't hear the butcher at work so he started complaining. Loudly. In French. "He's never here?! Where is he?" A surly woman and the delicatessen end of the counter heard him, but kept her head down, plastic wrapping celeri remoulade and beet root salads...finally the butcher emerged. The stocky man ahead of me waved his arms around asking what sort of animal was lying in huge chunks on the counter in front of him, another sign the butcher was hard at work. The butcher lifted a huge hind leg and announced it was a kid. Yes, a baby goat. The old man marveled at the mass carnage before him and announced he'd take a 'gigot'. Would he like it prepared? No, my wife will deal with that. But he didn't say this politely..."s'emmerder" was used..."merde" being the key to understanding that expression and the nature of the task he was expecting his wife to handle. The butcher, one step ahead, suggested he prepare it or his wife would be "pulling a face" all evening. Good thing someone is thinking of the wife, I muttered. Apparently the old man used to have 60 some goats 40 years ago. He started talking about how sweet and cute the kids were...drinking milk from their mothers, tottering about like toddlers, playing, bucking, scampering about the countryside. Kids. Yes, got it. OK. Enough, I thought. I thought of the sheep in Turkey I'd see each year marked with fluorescent paint, like diseased trees, indicating which was to be fattened up, felled and feasted on. Thankfully the butcher worked quickly, his hatchet swinging away, shrink wrapping huge chunks of meat into sterile plastic bags held tight with a simple staple and the former goat farmer was on his way to find his wife somewhere in the cheese. If he had kept on talking I would have had to leave the counter and buy some beet root salad instead. We've come a long way from the flight from Egypt and painting lamb's blood above lintels, thank you very much. Still, this time of year with all it's new life and new chances does make one stop and pause.