Life in America

End of the Road

2009-10-11T22:11:00.000+02:00

The end is nigh! Well, for this blog, anyway. After we moved back to the states, I had some hopes to keep this blog alive with reflections and observations about life in the US, and especially how it compares to life in the EU. Given that I have managed to make about three posts in the six months since we returned, I'd say that isn't working out too well. Mostly it is a problem of time - The crucial imperative to get working again and restart the pipe business here in NC has eaten up all spare time I might spend on side projects like this, and this is unlikely to change anytime in the near to middle future.

Another problem has been content, because while it is very nice to be back in the states, it is also pretty easy, and I can no longer count on getting entire humorous blog articles out of trying to mail a box at the PO, or getting lost in French backroads, or having to fight off mobs of gypsies with a walking stick. Being able to go have a fun meal at a Cajun restaurant is wonderful, but it does not a riveting read make. Ergo, about the only posts I have made since returning have been goofy humor or random web jokes, and this sort of thing works much better on my Facebook account. In fact, most of what I might have posted here has migrated to my Facebook page - It's just easier to update, and the micro-blogging nature of FB fits my limited time schedule much better than having to compose entire articles here. And if I want to just chat nonsense and bad movies with friends, I do that on our Pub Crawler forum... again, there instead of here.

The decision to kill this blog was made during yesterday's reworking of our main website. A lot of old content is getting yanked, and Emily and I decided it was time to pull the plug on this blog too. The Pipe Blog will carry on, since it gets all the hits anyway, and I will be much happier in only having one blog to keep updated

For those who have followed us through our last seven years of struggle, thank you for your time and interest!

NY Times on French Health Care

2009-09-14T20:01:00.003+02:00

I've mentioned previously that my main regret about leaving France is losing the excellent French health care system. Here in the states, we have NO health care - no insurance, no ability to get affordable insurance, and if I get injured in the shop, I may as well put a bullet in my head because that would pretty much be the end of things, with no means of paying for expensive hospital treatment. This is why it continues to surprise me that there is actually such a controversy over the possibility of national health care here, even though admittedly a lot of the resistance is based on outright lies and propaganda by the insurance and drug industries, not to mention fanatical right wing opposition who simply don't want to see Obama succeed on anything, no matter how much good it might do the country. The NY Times had an excellent article on this subject today:

Get Real on Health Care

Some snips below...

I don’t think there’s much to debate when France spends 11 percent of its gross domestic product on health care and insures everyone and the United States spends 16.5 percent of G.D.P. and leaves 20 percent of adults under 65 uninsured. The numbers don’t lie: The U.S. system is wasteful and unjust.
...
So I’m convinced there’s no real argument. As President Obama put it last week, “We spend one and half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren’t healthier for it.” Why would the United States cling to the dubious distinction of being the only wealthy nation that does not afford basic health insurance to all?
....

Toes

2009-08-27T17:27:00.002+02:00

What is life in North Carolina like, ask my European friends?

It is just like this:

This could be my theme song these days...
Oh, and here are the lyrics, for those who have trouble with country-accented singing vocals:

I got my toes in the water, ass in the
Sand
Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand
Life is good today. life is good today.

Well, the plane touched down just about 3 o'clock
And the city's still on my mind
Bikinis and palm trees danced in my head
I was still in the baggage line
Concrete and cars are there own prison bars like this life i'm living in
But the plane brought me farther.
I'm surrounded by water
And i'm not going back again

I got my toes in the water, ass in the sand
Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand
Life is good today. life is good today.

Adios and vaya con dios
Yeah i'm leaving GA
And if it weren't for tequila and pretty senoritas
I'd have no reason to stay
Adios and vaya con dios
Yeah i'm leaving GA
Gonna lay in the hot sun and roll a big fat one
And grab my guitar and play

Four days flew by like a drunk friday night as the summer
Drew to an end
They couldn't believe that i just couldn't leave
And i bid adieu to my friends
Because my bartender she's from the islands
Her body's been kissed by the sun
And coconut replaces the smell of the bar and i don't know if its her or the
Rum

I got my toes in the water, ass in the sand
Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand
Life is good today. life is good today.

Adios and vaya con dios
A long way from the lake
Its where all the muchachas they call me "big poppa" when i throw pesos their Way
Adios and vaya con dios
A long way from GA
Someone do me a favor and pass me the jaeger
And i'll grab my guitar and play

Adios and vaya con dios
Going home now to stay
The senoritas don't care-o when there's no dinero
You got no money to stay
Adios and vaya con dios
Going home now to stay

With my ass in a lawn chair
And toes in the clay
Not a worry in the world, a PBR on the way
Life is good today. Life is good today

Poorly-placed ads

2009-08-18T20:33:00.003+02:00

Well, if there was ever anything that summed up the amusing silliness of "Life in America", it would be this - a website devoted to collecting various surreal and often very funny examples of poorly-considered advertising placements:

15 Unfortunately Placed Ads

A few of my favorites......

North Carolina brews good beer

2009-08-06T17:40:00.003+02:00

Posted from the Greensboro News & Record:

North Carolina brews reputation for good beer

Welcome to the revolution. North Carolina is the craft beer state of the South.
.......Hang on any bar stool and you’ll hear a dozen reasons: the changing laws, the increasing interest, the supportive retailers, the growing number of festivals, and the natural tie-in to the homegrown food movement.

And of course, the brewers themselves. They’re making good beer here.

You’ll also hear barroom proclamations about North Carolina becoming more hip and hear how Beer Advocate magazine picked Asheville over Portland, Ore., earlier this year as the No. 1 beer destination in the country.

Imagine that. Asheville — a city once called backward by one of its own favorite sons, Thomas Wolfe — now has nine breweries.
........A change in the law helped. Four years ago, legislators overturned a law that dated back to 1935, the era of Prohibition, and allowed brewers to make beers that could exceed 6 percent alcohol content.
That change happened because thousands of people never involved or even interested in politics jumped aboard to help push what became known as “Pop the Cap.’’

And last August, brewmasters formed the N.C. Brewers Guild to help craft brew pubs go the way of the N.C. wineries: lobby, collaborate and get the word out about North Carolina’s homegrown brew.

Click the top link for the full story, I've just pasted some excerpts here.

The Lighter Side of La Roche

2009-08-04T17:11:00.003+02:00

Despite (or perhaps because of?) its resemblance to the village of the Burgermeister Meisterburger, La Roche-Bernard was probably one of the nicest, if not the nicest, little towns that we regularly visited. It's true that it was extremely scenic, and had a beautiful view from the river docks, but what we most often enjoyed was the hidden park walkway that wound around the town. Side streets that looked like back alleys would actually take you behind the buildings and into a rambling footpath that wove all through the town and took you in and out of gardens, parks, and old ruins - it was very much a hidden world, a la "The Secret Garden". It was pleasant all year round, but as my favorite time for going out walking is in the fall, that's when most of our photos and sketches were done. Here is Emily, relaxing on a bench on a cool Autumn day with a crisp breeze from the river blowing the dead leaves across the cobblestone pathway.

La Roche-Bernard

2009-08-01T23:43:00.003+02:00

I've been going back through our Brittany photos and tweaking them a bit, trying to capture more of the emotional feel of the places rather than the literal photographic versions. Here's the first halfway tolerable result of much fiddling, a street scene from the little town of La Roche-Bernard, which was not far north of Herbignac. The photo texture was taken from a multi-exposure of all our La Roche photos, to help give the picture the spirit of the town, literally. I'm generally pleased with the result, for an early attempt, and I think it captures the "feel" of a small Breton town, at least in terms of my reactions.

Sometimes I ...

2009-07-30T17:09:00.003+02:00

Since moving back to the states, there are some things I do now, just because I can. Sometimes I ...

... Go buy groceries at 11pm at night. Because the stores are open. Not only are they open, but the crowds are gone.

... Stare in wonder at the selection of biscuits and waffles and pancakes and sausages and breakfast burritos on the breakfast foods aisle.

... Get slightly choked up that the grocery store book and magazine section has more English language reading than I saw in the biggest bookstores in France.

... Can't help but laugh at the insanely huge and bloated vehicles that Americans drive. V8 hot rods I can understand, but why would anyone want to have to struggle around town in something as ungainly as a Hummer?

... Want to just lie flat and stretched out on the cool, air-conditioned floors everywhere. Last night a store manager came and apologized to us, and gave us free cinnamon twists, because the AC wasn't doing a very good job in his Taco Bell. He hasn't been in a movie theater in Nantes in the summer.

... Go to mega-bookstores like Barnes & Noble, and just sit in the magazine section and absorb the mass of English-language media, and revel in the sheer presence of it all. Can't do this for long, because people think you're weird if you just sit there, so I have to grab something off the shelf and pretend to read it while I sit being thankful. It is an odd world when you can have an entire magazine devoted to collectors of classic Datsuns from the '70's.

... Wish the USA had more political parties. I like the Libertarians and vote for them often, but no one is ever going to take them seriously enough to give them media coverage or put their candidates on stage for presidential debates. Why can't we have Greens and Tories and Socialistes and UMPs and a Centre Nationale des Independents et Paysans (a party for independents and peasants, literally - that's me on both counts). Europe can keep their National Fronts, though. We have enough of those nuts already.

... Am absolutely stunned by the variety of stuff on the frozen food aisle. Super U had eight kinds of frozen pizza. The Wal-Mart grocery has a whole aisle devoted to pizzas. And another for chicken wings.

... Reflexively point in delight every time I see an entire restaurant devoted to hot wings. Or Cajun food. Or Japanese, or Indian, or Jamaican.

... Am amazed by customer service. When you don't have it for a long time, it's a pleasant but bizarre shock. The guy at Woodcraft exchanged a power carving collet for us, without a receipt, just because he recognized us. And when a replacement wasn't in stock, he took one out of a packaged box from a carving kit and gave it to us, and took the box off the shelf until he could replace the collet on his own. In France it would have been a month before we got our replacement, if ever.

... Go out driving in the evening just to see the night life. Traffic is everywhere, people are out shopping and dining and seeing movies and generally running about. After 7pm, Herbignac was as dead and empty as the abandoned movie set of a 1940's Frankenstein movie. The only nightly sound was the creaking of the metal Super U sign as it dolefully clicked through its time and temperature displays.

... Wonder constantly what various friends in France and Europe would think of things. In the parking lots, "Gosh, what would Claudie think if she could see all these giant vehicles?" At the Fresh Market, "I wonder what Marcel would think of the selection of international spices and ingredients?" At the mall, "I wonder what Camille would think of all the odd fashions?" Out for dinner, "I wonder if we could ever get Beate into a Cajun restaurant?" One thing I do not have to wonder about is Pipe & Pint, because our French pipe collecting friends would love it. Guillaume, you need to fly over here just so you can enjoy open humidors of tobacco, cigars, good pipes, great beers, and wine and lambic all in the same shop...!

The Good Side of Brittany

2009-07-30T05:07:00.004+02:00

Emily thought my last post was quite hard on Brittany. I have little sympathy for the place - Brittany was quite hard on us, and I do not intend to sugarcoat my reflections on the difficulty of our lives there. But it wasn't all a horror, and I thought I'd put together another post to share the lighter side of seven years of hell...

(Click for larger versions)

Memories of Brittany

2009-07-29T04:27:00.002+02:00

It's already like a dream. This is my first attempt to put our experience into a combination of words and images. Click it for the full-size version.

Timecrimes

2009-07-10T20:20:00.004+02:00

Last night Em and I experienced something very odd, our first sense of homesickness for Europe, brought on by the most mundane sight one can imagine - a pan of a supermarket parking lot in a Spanish film. Suddenly we were there, recognizing all the familiar Renaults and Peugeots and Seats... a very strange experience. It was a parking lot as parking lots should look, meaning one where the cars were not outnumbered by trucks, yet at the same time, US parking lots also look "right". Multiculturealism is an exotic and confusing beast, it seems.

Our movie was the Spanish SF/thriller "Timecrimes", one of the best movies I have seen in a very long time and especially great after just watching the disappointing "Knowing" and "Mirrors". In a nutshell, Timecrimes is a Spanish SF flick that will fry your brain. I think it's interesting that so many of the better genre flicks I've seen lately are Spanish - must be something in the water over there. The poster misleads, making it look like some intense slasher film, which it most certainly is not. I can't describe it much without spoiling the whole wonder of the movie, but the very rough story is:

A guy on vacation is sitting in his back yard one day. He spies a nubile young woman getting naked in the nearby woods.

He goes to investigate and is attacked by a scary looking character with a bandaged head. (Note, again - This is not a slasher film. It may resemble one in screen caps and advertising, but it is a very different sort of beast)

Escaping, he finds a means to go back in time, literally zigzagging in and out of his own previous timeline. That's the first ten minutes and from there on out, your head will start exploding. What I loved about it was the fact that I kept thinking, "Oh, this is good but I can guess what will happen next", and then events would unfold in such an utterly different way as to make me cackle in delight. It was all, "Whoah" and, "WHOAH!" and, "Wait, pause that, I need to get my head around what's going on". Emily and I discussed it for a good fifteen minutes afterward (She had a difficult time fully getting her head round the structure of the time travel plot, while I was fascinated by the potential repercussions of the events).

It is certainly one of the very best movies about time travel that I have ever seen, and possibly the ONLY one that fits together so well - It is built like an extremely complex clock, and every little piece clicks into place.

Strongly recommended!

John Denver was right

2009-07-09T03:19:00.002+02:00

So, here we are again at last, back in North Carolina! And what a long, strange trip it has been. I've been across the ocean and right through hell; I can be forgiven for one hackneyed expression. I've given this blog a bit of thought, probably more than it was ever worth, and have decided to keep it running and keep writing in it from time to time. It was that or shut it down for good... I gave that idea some consideration, on the grounds that I already had the Pipe Blog to write and another blog was one too many, but in the end I opted to keep this going for the simple reason that it's open-ended. The Pipe Blog is a focused subject, with limits, while this one better fits a wide range of rambling and digression. The near future will probably bring a good bit of commentary on what it's like to be back in the USA after seven years abroad, but for this evening, I'll let John Denver sum up my feelings best:

There and Back Again

2009-03-20T21:39:00.000+01:00

Biz News - Fans of the more unusual Talbert Briars might want to take a look at this Ebay auction, on an odd piece done a couple years back for a special order. No new pipes from me, though, for reasons that are about to be obvious....

It seems like it has been a terribly long time since I have updated this blog, especially since the days when I could manage new posts each week, sometimes even every couple of days. Not so in 2008 - For us, like so many others, it has been a very difficult year and I have been too busy simply trying to stay fed and sheltered to keep up with my online writing. This may change soon, though, for today's picture is the harbinger of major news -

My wife and I are moving back to the United States!

We've lived nearly seven years in France. It's time. There are a multitude of reasons for the move - some expectedly angry and unpleasant, others fortuitous and perfectly timed. I may tell some harrowing stories in the future, but I don't want to dwell on specifics for the moment. Suffice to say that in one bright swoop, circumstances lined up ideally to enable us to make another transatlantic hop on our shoestring (nay, non-existent!) budget, and we chose to grab the opportunity. I write this sitting amidst packed boxes of books and clothes, and if all goes well, we should be leaving Brittany to return to North Carolina sometime in late April or May.

I depart France with the same jumble of extreme feelings I've had through all my time here. The people are wonderful, the bureacracy is a nightmare. The scenery is stunning, the communication is an eternal struggle. For every incredible vista of ruined castle overlooking rocky seaside cliffs, there are a dozen entreaties to government offices and business administration officials. It's nation where complete strangers will fly halfway across the country to bring you a bottle of their favorite wine, yet you have to literally scream and threaten violence just to get a fonctionnaire to acknowledge a fax. Living here has been like life with a beautiful trophy wife - lovely to look at, yet terribly difficult to maintain. But I know I will miss the place terribly, despite all the hassles, as we settle back into the relaxed, insular, Shire-like rythym of life in North Carolina. I can't help but think of Frodo Baggins, and wonder if I, too, will feel as though I'm "going back to sleep".

One aspect that I'm certain won't go back to sleep is my pipemaking - Talbert Briars will continue and carry on as always, and I look forward to once again being able to compete with the ranks of American pipemakers on an even footing, unhampered by the horrible dollar-to-euro currency imbalance that has dogged so much of our time here. It's also going to be a wonder to really be able to focus on my work again, without the pressures and immense weights of worry we have suffered for so long. All pipemaking will be shut down for the next several months, and our workshop is now closed in France. Some of the French machinery may be sold, some is definitely going with me, but it will take a long time to design and build our new workshop in the US, and until then there will be no new pipes (For those who may be interested, we have exactly two pipes remaining in stock for sale - one Ligne Bretagne and one Talbert Morta. Contact us soon if you're interested in either, before they get packed!)

I know the pipe community will probably have questions for us, but I'd ask that they be either posted here as comments, or held back until I can assemble a FAQ for this move, which will answer some of the obvious inquiries like, "Will Mortas and Ligne Bretagnes continue?", "Are you selling any of your stock and tools?", "Will your stamping change?", "Will your pricing change?", and so on. I have enough to do with the move, I'd as soon not have to type replies to the same questions many times over! And some questions have no answers as yet... The Ligne Bretagne stummels and hardware are going with me, for example, but I have not yet decided if they will change name. Morta pipes may continue if I can secure a reliable source of high quality blocks, but the material is hard to come by, and I am not interested in producing a substandard product. Time will tell...

In the very near future, the website will go offline except for a front page linking to this blog and our "Life in France" blog, where I hope to chart the progress of our move and our reactions to re-immersion in the American lifestyle and culture (Things I look forward to - KFC, good Mexican food, easy talking, and being able to get things accomplished without fifteen notarized attestations from the mairie and the préfecture plus stamped copies of every utility bill we've ever had and our marriage license. Things I do not look forward to - Loud, belligerent people, US non-health care, and Paris Hilton... though I think we have managed to foist her off on the Brits now). People interested in this social stuff may want to add us back to their Favorites for a bit, because the blogs are likely to be more active soon.

And speaking of, I'm currently looking for a good title for the "Life in France" blog if anyone has any ideas, since "An American Pipemaker in Brittany" won't work anymore. I'm going to miss sights like this being outside my front door...

Why do I never hear when they publish this stuff?

2009-02-19T16:40:00.002+01:00

Books, books.... My Amazon Wishlist has just gotten a bit fatter, giving me even more stuff that I can pine for and not afford to buy. "The BBook of Geek" sounds hilarious and probably extremely tangent-inducing, particularly if it's half as comprehensive as suggested in this Ars Technica review. But I will be extremely annoyed if they don't have some mention of Starblazers...

But even the BBook of Geek must bow to the marketing brilliance of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", the perfect gift for wives, girlfriends, and Jane Austen fans everywhere.

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action.

Hey, it's a book my wife and I can both enjoy!

A Valentine from Darcy

Dearest Elizabeth,

You above all others know how I detest this day. That we should be expected to lavish gifts and sonnets upon our nearest relations for no other reason than expectation itself! How preposterous! How infuriating! (Your flowers and letter arrived promptly and in good condition, thank you).

And yet there is no escaping the added sorrow hanging over this day. Pemberley ceases to live in your absence, my love. My own heart beats more slowly, and my morning patrols want for their usual liveliness. Yesterday I happened on a small herd of unmentionables in the woods, and could not bring myself to remit them back to Hell. My darling, there is no joy in killing without you.

I hope your stay in Longbourn has been a pleasant one, and I pray you return with no shortage of alacrity. Do be vigilant, though – and keep your Katana near, as there have been frequent reports of trouble in Derbyshire.

La Chambre des Morts

2009-02-15T17:38:00.009+01:00

Here in Brittany, we are currently deep in the grey rainy darkness of winter, when we get all the fun of week after week of overcast skies and heavy rain, but no snow. This winter has been sunnier than usual, however, so I'm thankful for small wonders. Today's pic is another photo from Carnac, this one suitable for use as desktop wallpaper. And if you're wondering where all these links suddenly came from, I've started using the Firefox blogging add-on Zemanta, which is proving to be very useful so far. Zemanta scans typed text and suggests one-click Wikipedia links for recognized terms, so in future our visitors will be able to handily look up things I might reference in posts. It also adds some handy sidebars to the Blogger window that allow me to search image hosting sites for publicly-available pics of whatever I need to show a pic of, for example, Godzilla:

Image via Wikipedia

So, mark this as one tiny step forward for the blog. But to get back to my intro about being mired in the bleak Breton winter, there just isn't a lot to do out here except stay in, TRY to stay warm, and keep the DVD player spinning with good movies. I've been going out of my way lately to hunt down a decent selection of French films, and I intend to try my hand at reviewing a few for this blog, starting today with "La Chambre des Morts".

Clarification: At the risk of being pronounced an artless heathen, I will say that the term "French film" did not initially carry a positive connotation for me. If I thought "French film", the mental image that sprung to mind was an arthouse movie filled with miserable couples who spend the entire running time sitting in cafés smoking and screwing each other's spouses while dourly pontificating on the emptiness of life. Films for Woody Allen fans, in other words. For myself, however, I want to see a good thriller, or horror film, or comedy, or basically anything that has a story and doesn't leave me wanting to slit my wrists by the end of it. Call me Ishmael.

I suspect I am not alone in the above impression of French films, which is why living here was a small revelation regarding the quality and range of French cinema, especially in regard to many of my favorite genres. Today, France is quickly on the way to toppling Japan & Asia as King of the Modern Horror Film - French shockers are starting to come out faster and faster, bringing a French cultural sensibility that breathes new life into even the most tired of genre styles. But today's review isn't really a horror film; it's more of a mystery/thriller, despite being called "the French Silence of the Lambs". Voila, let's talk about:

La Chambre des Morts

Plot - Joyriding jerks accidentally kill a man carrying a huge cash ransom to pay off the kidnapper of his daughter. The daughter is killed by her captor as a result. These events set off a complex suspense thriller about a young female detective (Herself traumatized by a childhood abduction experience) trying to catch the insane killer, who has abducted a new victim, while simultaneously the joyriders must deal with the fallout of their actions and their sudden acquisition of a bag of cash. Very creepy finale when all the storylines converge at the lair of the murderer.

It's somewhat fair to call it a "Lambs" clone, but compared to Silence it was less gory, slower-paced, more realistic, and with less focus on the "serial killer as superhero" theme. The killer was no genius madman, but just a thoroughly messed-up individual... yet to the movie's credit, not that much less frightening than Lector. We enjoyed the film very much. It only has a rating of 6 on IMDB but I'd put it much higher - It had well-developed characters and a creeping sense of escalation that were very enjoyable. It does NOT have action happening every three minutes, graphic gore, or shakycam - instead, the mystery unfolds quite gradually as the main storylines crisscross, and we really come to root for our heroine (played with all the same smarts, deduction, and insecurity of Jodie Foster's agent). If the "feel" of the film reminded me of anything, I'd say it was more similar to a 70's thriller than a modern one, at least right up to the climactic adventure in the killer's lair (which resembles more the good parts of Silent Hill). I'd definitely recommend this one to anyone looking to do some international cross-cultural movie sampling of films that AREN'T annoying arthouse fap. Oh, and for inexplicable reasons, the film is on DVD in the states as "Melody's Smile" - an odd title change from the much more accurate, original "Room of the Dead".

I'll be posting comments in future blogs on a variety of other Frenchie flicks, including La Moustache, A L'Interieur (said to possibly be the most horrifying film ever made), Jet Lag (Decolage Horaire), Ils, Malefique, Sheitan, L'Auberge Espangol, Les Poupées Russes, Fauteils d'Orchestre, Apres Vous, and a number of others in a multitude of genres.

.......................... But what I really would like to see is a French kaiju film...

Calvin & Hobbes say it like it is

2008-12-28T15:15:00.003+01:00

Calvin & Hobbes perfectly sum up the current state of our economic difficulties:

(I found this shortly after reading an article on Fannie & Freddie, where it was mentioned that the director made a 14 million dollar/year salary. I'm sorry, but unless you're personally bringing peace to the middle east, NOBODY does enough work in a year to justify 14 million....)

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-17T16:07:00.002+01:00

The Batman of Sheffield

2008-12-13T15:54:00.002+01:00

This is British news, rather than French, but it's just plain cool for the holiday season:

Mystery surrounds "Batman of Sheffield"

Direct article link
(from the UK Telegraph)

By Matthew Moore
Last Updated: 12:18PM GMT 13 Dec 2008

The identity of a Sheffield benefactor who hides behind a Batman mask and a fake American accent remains unclear

Dubbed the "Christmas crusader", the real-life superhero has been spotted lending a hand at a soup kitchen, charity job and children's hospital in Sheffield.
But despite his good works and charitable donations totalling £10,000, the Yorkshire Batman's identity is as mysterious as his Gotham City counterpart.
He is known to be a local entrepreneur, but wears a mask at all times and speaks with a fake American accent.
"I don't want to reveal my identity because it's more important to highlight the charities," he told the Daily Express.
"I don't care if some people think I'm bonkers. If I inspire others to give their time and money to good causes this Christmas, it's been worth it.
"My message is that you don't need to be a superhero, or super wealthy, to give to deserving causes. If you can give cash, or toys, that's fantastic. The most precious gift of all is your time."
Batman helped stack shelves and man the tills at Bluebell Wood Children's Hospice charity shop in the city, where staff said that his presence sent takings through the roof.
"At first we thought he was a joker, but he turned out to be a true superhero," said one shop worker. "We're thinking of getting a Bat light installed so we can send him a signal whenever business is slow."

The Heart Attack Grill

2008-11-30T17:55:00.006+01:00

People ask me what I miss about the states.

Insanity, that's what I miss...

France seems to me to be a very self-conscious country, very concerned to be taken seriously and where no one wants to risk looking foolish. Ergo, there is a distinct deficit in over-the-top lunacy of this particular American variety:

Gigantic quadruple-decker hamburgers served by "Naughty Nurses" with cigarettes and beer.

God bless America!

(Note - I did not believe these pics at first, figuring they must be Photoshop fakes. Oh, the burgers I could easily believe, but not the cigs ,not in today's world of inane anti-smoking freakout. Then I learned the place was in Arizona, and it all made sense. Go Midwest!)

How Sarko got his groove back

2008-11-15T17:36:00.003+01:00

The news is so odd these days. While most of the EU is now officially in recession, France continues to show positive growth - the only EU country that still is, IIRC. Today I just read that Sarkozy is taking advantage of this to press his case for a more controlled form of global capitalism, in this interesting NPR article. They have a lot of good ideas to take to the table, but can you spot the key problem that will make sure no serious changes are ever actually implemented?

Sarkozy and the Europeans want to change the rules of the financial game. They speak of more regulation, lower corporate salaries, global governance and binding multilateral measures enforced by international organizations — the kind of talk that makes American free-marketeers shiver.

Call me cynical.....

"Your call is important to us!"

2008-11-12T14:22:00.002+01:00

This has no connection to anything, but I wanted to post it because I thought it was hilarious. It's a TV commercial parody of what call centers are like... and pretty close to my mental image of them, too. How many classic TV and cinema robots can you spot?

The best election news so far

2008-11-05T14:25:00.004+01:00

One can only wonder how much better McCain might have done if not for the appalling choice to run with this creature...

Trever's Halloween movie list

2008-10-20T15:16:00.003+02:00

Just posted this on another forum, so I may as well copy it here too! Here's my recommended viewing list for seasonal October entertainment.

(I should note that my preferences in scary movies is that they actually be scary, rather than stomach-churning, so my favorites list is biased towards older haunted house movies instead of modern gore fests)

The original black & white, 1963 film "The Haunting" is one of the scariest flicks ever made. It is rated G. There is no gore, no profanity, and virtually no special effects of any kind. Nonetheless, I can safely promise that it will freak you out if you watch it in a dark room.

Once you have experienced "The Haunting", you will never again be able to hear its absolutely perfect literary introduction without having all the hair on your arms prickle:

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone

The first comment on IMDB sums it up:

There is no blood, there is no slashing, today this would be rated "G." But, this is the scariest movie, ever. Every time I watch this masterpiece (and I have watched it over 50 times), I see or hear something new.

The density of the black and white is incredible. The camera angles and reflection shots are unsettling. The score is appropriately terrifying, from the ringing of tiny bells to the cannon ball rocking down the hall.

The cast is excellent. The direction superb. This is horror at the peak of perfection--it is in your mind. The only thing better is to read the book by Ms. Jackson on a dark night when you are all alone, and "far from town." As Stephen King said about Shirley Jackson, "She never had to shout." Mr. Wise is to be credited with bringing her whispers to the screen.

Rent this for Halloween. Or, own it forever. I still have trouble getting to sleep after I watch this.

If you want other great haunting flicks that are big on the freaky and low on the gore, I can strongly recommend:

The Changeling

The Legend of Hell House

Scream of Fear

Night of the Demon

Haunted

Carnival of Souls

The Uninvited

I wish I didn't have to go back twenty to forty years just to find movies that could be scary without buckets of blood and SPFX.

French hold out against credit crunch

2008-10-08T17:36:00.003+02:00

An interesting article from BBC:

French hold out against credit crunch

Unlike Britain, the US and many other countries, France appears to be weathering the credit crunch storm in reasonable shape.

The BBC's Emma Jane Kirby asks if other nations should take a leaf out of the thrifty Gallic book?

If I had to use one word to describe France's financial system, the word I would choose would be "cautious".

French banks are immensely careful about whom they lend money to and, to limit risks, they spread their investments much more widely than those in the US or UK.

Only about a quarter of banking activity is related to investment banking and dealer-broker activity - the rest is all to do with retail banking.

This meant when the credit crunch bit, the French banks were hit a lot less hard than those in many other countries.

But it is not just about banking investments - this country as a whole simply takes far fewer risks.

Take the level of household debt. In France, it is at 47% of GDP, while in the UK it is well over twice that.

It's not that temptation does not exist in France - the lure of consumerism is just as strong as it is elsewhere.

But it is very difficult to spend money you do not have in France.

French credit cards are little more than debit cards, so there is no question of simply sticking a couple of flat screen TVs on your credit card and hoping to pay for them later - if there are insufficient funds in your account, your bank will immediately block the transaction.

In the wealthy suburb of St Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, I met Francois Artignan, a well-to-do banker who moved back to France two years ago after a long stint of living in the UK.

Francois admits he misses the buzz of London living but says he was alarmed by the way so many British people lived on their credit cards and never saved money.

"It's true that you can note a big difference in consuming behaviours between the French and the English," Mr Artignan says.

"People here don't believe you can just put your debts together and get them refinanced... But in London... it was as if wealth was something you could get from a bank, it's a sort of miracle people seem to believe in England.

"It seems to me people there are very keen to use up all the money they have, and that's a worry when you wonder how people are going to have money for retirement for instance," Mr Artignan says.

Sluggish growth

From his Paris office, the chief economist for market analyst Xerfi, Alexander Law, has been comparing the spending patterns of France and Britain.

Mr Law, who has dual nationality, believes that innate French prudence has saved it from disaster.

"Generally in France you spend what you have and not more," he explains.

"In the US and the UK, the economy has been driven by household spending, consumption has been driven by credit, and a lot less in France, so that's why when there were periods of expansion France grew a lot more slowly than the UK and the US but conversely when it's slowing down, it will slow down in a more moderate fashion than the UK or the US."

France's rate of growth is horribly sluggish - this year it looks set to hover around just 1%, meaning its likely to be way off target for meeting its promise to the EU to bring its budget deficit back under control by 2012.

But although its slow economy is hardly the envy of the world, its reluctance to tie its economy into the housing market in the same way the US did has also meant that when the American sub-prime market collapsed, it did not drag the French market with it.

There are far fewer household owners here than in the UK - about 57% of French people are on the property ladder, compared to 70% in the UK.

Although a high earner, Mr Artignan was 43 before buying his first home because in France, unless you have a big deposit, you can forget begging the banks for a huge loan.

Two conditions

President Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to push France into becoming a nation of house owners by building thousands of cheap new homes.

But France still believes in strict rules and regulations, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde says.

"Expect two conditions - a down payment of 20% of the value of the house plus mortgage [repayments] which will not exceed 30% of income.

"You already have a pretty good safety net there and clearly no real estate financing similar to the sub-prime market that has existed in the US and which has hurt the financial system so much," Ms Lagarde says.

France has long been feeling the pinch of the global rise in food and fuel prices and many people here complain that their spending power is falling fast.

In France, 46% of people chose to stay home for their summer holiday this year rather than splashing out on an expensive break away, and so many people are cutting back on dining out that some 3,000 cafes and restaurants went out of business in the first three months of this year.

Sparse spending means sparse growth - but should other countries take a leaf out of the parsimonious Gallic book?

"I'm not suggesting that we have the basic principles right, I'm not suggesting that we can teach the world lessons," Ms Lagarde says.

"But I think it will be for each and every category of players, traders, regulators, supervisors, to examine what they have done, what they should have done and what they should be doing in the future to bring a bit more morality into the system.

"I think we have let this world of fantasy and virtuality overcome reality... There have to be more principles, more discipline and a bit more reality," the minister says.

Tin Roof Blowdown

2008-09-01T13:49:00.003+02:00

I post regularly on a small, private forum devoted largely to chat about classic horror movies, SF, books, NASA news, Godzilla, MST3K, cryptozoology, and other misc sundries of interest to myself and other middle-aged geeks. There is a reviews board there, mainly devoted to horror/sf/fantasy movies & fiction, but I posted this review a year ago because the novel so thoroughly impressed me. It isn't often that one stumbles across crime fiction that transcends over the borders into "literature", but this was one extremely moving and powerful novel. I thought I would copy/paste it here today, given that we're all now counting the hours until Gustav makes landfall, to see if once again New Orleans is going to be devastated. So, my review:

Tin Roof Blowdown, a novel by James Lee Burke

Amazon link

"Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well."
-FEMA Director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [she chuckles slightly]is working very well for them."
-Barbara Bush, 2005

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
–President Bush, on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
–President Bush, Sept. 2, 2005

"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
–Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA) to lobbyists, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal

James Lee Burke's "Tin Roof Blowdown" is RIVETING. It is part of a mystery series, but it isn't cute characters solving village murders, it's on an entirely higher level. The reason I wanted to post on it was because it's set in New Orleans during and after the Katrina disaster, and is an eye popping read for its up-close depiction of just what living in New Orleans was like through that episode. The main character is a police detective trying to cope with the work overload, catch a gang, deal with a maniac, and stop organized vigilantes from shooting every black person they see. In short, the plot trappings are pretty much the same as most other police procedural thrillers, but the backdrop, the use of language and environment, and the sheer oppressive weight of the tragedy propel "Tin Roof Blowdown" far above the limits of its genre.

This is powerful reading for the stunning descriptions of the destruction of New Orleans. Seeing it through the lead's eyes as he wades to work in chest-deep water, surrounded by gruesome sights (a dead baby hangs in a tree for five days, a hugely fat man drifts past on a raft made of floats, surrounded by beer coolers and drinking as he sails the flooded streets, corpses piled like firewood and left to bloat and rot in the Louisiana heat)... It's a tough read, but an incredibly gripping one. The author pulls no punches concerning the incompetence of the disaster response (The scene at the hospital geriatric ward, where the lead character is warned not to even open the elevator doors on that floor, is truly horrific) It's a tough read, and will definitely upset more sensitive types, but it's one hell of a book.

Some comments from the multitude of five star Amazon reviews:

An Elegy for New Orleans - Burke's lush descriptions of the beauty of New Orleans and Louisiana bayou country are gone, replaced by "bodies wrapped tight like mummies in the gray and brown detritus left by the receding waters."

One of the things I like best about Burke's books is that he makes the locale a major player in his stories. He has a love/hate relationship with New Orleans and calls her the Whore of Babylon. When driving through the ruined streets, he muses "New Orleans had been a song, not a city. Like San Francisco, it didn't belong to a state; it belonged to a people." He describes southern Louisiana with lush brushstrokes, from the bayous to the wildlife to the marshes. But where he outdoes himself in The Tin Roof Blowdown is in his descriptions of post-Katrina New Orleans. No pictures that you may have seen will accurately tell the story of what happened to this historic city as well as Burke does in narrative form. It is that vivid and that horrible.

The ending of this book will stay with you for a long time - Robicheaux says, "When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.
"But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature."
Katrina is the most ominous character in this book because it was real. Burke shows us scenes of the storm's aftermath: bodies of old people left to rot in the streets by the city's convention center and survivors smashing their china to bits upon learning that their insurance companies will not cover water damage. And of course, there is the grim ghost of the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish, still in ruins two years later.

And finally, an excerpt from a UK review in The Independent:

‘It’s been a long time since a crime novel made me cry. It’s been a long time since a crime novel made every hair on my body stand on end. The Tin Roof Blowdown did both…In my opinion The Tin Roof Blowdown is more than a crime novel; more than a literary novel, even. It is a work of profound historical value and importance that should, no, must be read by anyone interested in what happens when a holocaust breaks loose and civilisation breaks down… There were moments when I wanted to put the book down, it was so painful to continue. But I couldn’t. Nor, I dare say, will anyone else.’

Big G

2008-08-31T16:55:00.003+02:00

Super U has gone American on me

2008-08-16T19:55:00.003+02:00

Wonder of wonders... I stopped by Super U to load up on junk food today and not only are they carrying Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies now, but they've got Oreos! This was the first time I've seen Oreos on a grocery shelf for six years. As you can see, I bought them all. :D They even had microwave popcorn, albeit salted only, no buttered.

(BTW, the selection of beer in front was some random experimentation with Breton microbreweries, plus Chimay. I'm curious to try this MorBraz beer and see if it's any good...)

Who says Americans don't follow world events?

2008-08-15T13:26:00.004+02:00

It's a common misconception that Americans don't follow world news. We're thought to be ignorant of international politics and events, but obviously this is wrong:

JibJab comes through again

2008-08-06T14:15:00.003+02:00

2004's "This Land" video was hilarious, and this one is just as entertaining. No matter what your political persuasion, you'll probably be amused. I especially love the Obama bit. And I can truly add that the best way to watch a US election campaign is from 3000 miles away across an ocean...

Time for Some Campaignin' | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Burgers take Paris, with Philosophy on the Beach

2008-07-17T22:24:00.003+02:00

A street scene from the river port of La Roche-Bernard, just up the road from us.

Haven't posted here for a while, but I did want to share two great articles I found online concerning life in France:

In Paris, Burgers Turn Chic

This is for anyone who ever wondered what a 35 € hamburger might be like. To me, they sound pretty good! Some examples -
“It’s not just a fad,” said Frédérick Grasser-Hermé, who, as consulting chef at the Champs-Élysées boîte Black Calvados, developed a burger made with wagyu beef and seasoned with what she calls a black ketchup of blackberries and black currants. “It’s more than that. The burger has become gastronomic.”
Yannick Alléno, who earned a third Michelin star in 2007 for his precise, rarefied cuisine at Le Meurice, serves a thick, succulent hamburger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. Mr. Alléno’s baker, Frédéric Lalos, a winner of one of the country’s fiercest cooking competitions, makes the buns. With smoked bacon, lettuce, dill pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and fries, the burger at Le Dali costs 35 euros, about $56.

If I ever find myself in Paris, this place is on the list solely so I can check off "Ate a 35 € hamburger" as a life experience. And for something completely different, the other article of interest is-

France studies philosophy and sex on the beach

ONLY in France would you find an entire market of summertime beach books aimed at adults who want to refresh their school system education on Sartre. To quote-

This year, there's a splashy new category of best-seller -- the phenomenon known as cahiers de vacances, or holiday revision guide. The idea is that, instead of wasting your beach time with Steven King or Marc Lévy (French pop novelist of the moment), you use it to bone up on Nietzsche, quadratic equations, molecular science or some other discipline.

Sounds lovely, but I get enough creative and philosophical challenge from my working craft on a daily basis. I'll be a bumpkin and stick with Carl Hiaasen, I expect...

Elections improve US image abroad

2008-06-05T15:58:00.003+02:00

Here's me waving hello from the beach at La Turballe. I love Brittany in June - perfect weather and empty coastline. I'm posting to share a good story I ran across on Digg the other day:

Democratic Primary Boosts U.S. Image Around the World

I can confirm the gist of the article. We've been somewhat startled and amused by the sheer intensity of the British and European fascination with the events of this election - Every tiny event has been headline news across France and the UK. There's a sense of hope and optimism that is positively tangible - No great surprise after the global disaster that the Bush presidency has been. On a personal level, I probably speak for a lot of US expats when I say what a huge relief it will be to no longer have to introduce ourselves at parties with, "Hi, I'm American, but please don't hate me, I didn't vote for Bush". It makes me a bit warm and sentimental to watch the sheer enthusiasm abroad over the possibility that the US may turn itself around on some of the policies that have made us international pariahs these past years. And I love the quotes from the article:

"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, a place that is open-minded enough to have a woman or an African American as its president," said Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.

"I think it will be put down as a shining, historical moment in the history of America," said Fumiaki Kubo, a professor at Tokyo University.

"Obama is the exciting image of what we always hoped America was," said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London think tank. (Of course, he's probably also the presidential candidate most likely to be assassinated since Kennedy....)

"Germany is Obama country," said Karsten Voight, the German government's coordinator for German-North American cooperation. "He seems to strike a chord with average Germans," who see him as a transformational figure like John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. (*Cough*, see comment above)

For my own part, I'm pretty much happy with all three nominees, though it now seems Hillary may be out for good. I do believe that come November, regardless of who ends up in the oval office, the US may find the rest of the world is a much more welcoming place.

In honor of election season

2008-05-03T17:09:00.001+02:00

Some things actually do change with time!

Herbignac in Spring, and the Ultimate Hotdog/Hamburger

2008-04-20T21:55:00.010+02:00

Before I get to the pics, I really must post this link to the ultimate hotdog/hamburger combination creation. People always ask what we miss about the states, and when I answer, "Willful over the top insanity", they usually don't understand because they don't seem to have a culture here of things like restaurant chicken wings that are so hot that you get a free meal if you can eat just one. I am SO going to have to bug Emily into trying making some hamdogs as that recipe describes - the lure of a deep-fried chili-cheese hotdog wrapped in hamburger beef and topped with a fried egg is too potent to resist...

Now that it's sunny, we've been making a point to get out and take some pictures, so voila! (Note that while it is sunny, it is still cold, ergo our multiple sweaters and coats)

Anyone want to buy a butcher shop & home combination in the village center?

Busy downtown:

And nicely scenic:

The downtown cathedral never gets any less cool, even with bits of it blown off since the war:

Your humble narrator bids adieu!

Election 2008

2008-04-08T15:50:00.002+02:00

The Quimiac coast in March

2008-03-10T16:39:00.008+01:00

One of my various resolutions this year was to make a point to LEAVE THE DAMNED HOUSE during those rare days when the sun actually showed in the winter season, and yesterday was one of them. This is the problem of being self-employed and working at home in a land where it rains 60% of the year - We just get totally home-bound for long periods and it's easy to forget that we haven't left the house or workshop for two solid weeks except to walk across the street to buy groceries. Here are a few shots of the sunny coast on a VERY windy day.

I love the composition of this windsurfer shot:

The stone walkway above made a nice path for those who wanted to walk the beachfront without getting their shoes filled with sand (me).

Turned up a rather freaky discovery, too - a thoroughly torn and mauled heavy jacket, which we were not the slightest bit inclined to touch or investigate further!

Eventually and inevitably, the sunshine went away and Brittany quietly returned to its more accustomed winter seasonal color tones....

Brittany Videos!

2008-03-02T17:21:00.002+01:00

A couple of years ago, I assembled some of our moving and travel photos into little "music videos" to make them a bit more entertaining to our friends and family back home than just a ZIP file of pictures. I just stumbled over these again today while doing some hard drive cleaning, and since I now have a handy YouTube account, I thought I'd see if I could post them here. What do you know? It seems to work!

This one is the first I did, "The Far Side of the World", set to the Jimmy Buffett tune, of course. Most of the pics are from our moving over here, of the village and area when we arrived, and of our various adventures after the move. The purple-haired lady who sometimes turns up is our German friend Beate.

This video shows more local Brittany scenes, all things near our house and all photographed by Emily or myself. It's also set to local music, a bit of authentic Breton-Celtic fun from Tri-Yann.

I've got a few more of these, which I'll upload as I have the time and actually remember to...

Oh, and my apologies, but I did turn off the YouTube coments and ratings system, simply to avoid the usual blathering from those brain-dead YouTube residents who seem to have nothing to do but rant on every video's comments list.

Building the perfect homemade popcorn

2008-02-25T14:38:00.004+01:00

Since microwave popcorn is unavailable here, Em and I have made a project of finding ways to make our own popcorn. We have a hot air popper and the store does sell corn kernels, at least. But the popcorn produced was always so boring and tasteless, and applying melted butter to home-popped popcorn was a disappointing experience, with the hot butter just melting its way down through the fresh popcorn and not spread around at all. After some experimentation, voila, our recipe for tasty homemade popcorn!

You will need:
A hot air popper
A bottle of butter-flavored popcorn salt
A sprinkle jar of Greek seasoning salt
A slab of Breton salted butter, or your closest equivalent
A glass pepper shaker

Slice off some chunks of the butter and cram them inside of the glass pepper shaker. With the lid off of the thing (put a paper towel over it or something to prevent splatter), microwave it until the butter is melted to liquid, then let sit until you can hold it. Pop the lid back on.

Start the popcorn popping. As it begins to pour out of the popper, you need two people on hand so this is a fun and silly family experience. One person runs the pepper shaker full of melted butter - just sprinkle wildly as the popcorn is coming out. The butter droplets are small enough that they won't melt the popcorn the way just pouring butter over will do, and you'll get evenly-buttered popcorn all the way through the bowl. Keep sprinkling butter till it's done. When you're finished, if you have butter remaining, you can just run water through the shaker lid (to wash out the butter from the pinholes, otherwise it will harden and block them all) and then stick the butter-filled glass back in the fridge for use again later.

While one person is manically sprinkling butter, the other is sprinkling Greek seasoning. Yes, I know it sounds weird. But Greek seasoning salt is tasty and has a yummy garlic flavor that goes really well with buttered popcorn. We tried to also apply the butter-flavored popcorn salt here too, but it is so fine that the air exiting the popper just blows it all over the place, so it has to wait.

Once all the popcorn is popped, turn off the popper and, while sitting the bowl around, apply the butter-flavored popcorn salt. You'll end up with homemade popcorn flavored with two kinds of butter and two kinds of salt, with a hint of garlic. Yummah!!

Testing, testing....

2008-02-21T23:17:00.001+01:00

Am currently trying out different Blogging alternatives for Ubuntu. Please ignore, this is just a test posting, with further weirdness sure to follow.....

How embarassing!

2008-02-15T15:21:00.002+01:00

I've embarked on a rather complex project of "Getting things done" for 2008, much of which revolves around trying to better schedule my time using a couple of handy To-Do Linux apps where I can track what needs doing each day. One of my daily jobs is to spend at least five minutes doing something involving learning better French, be it reading & posting to French forums, studying my language books, etc. My lesson for today was to notice, with some horror, that there was a distinct difference between à and a, which I've been using interchangeably for around six years now, because I just couldn't remember which was which.

à = to, at

a = has

Elle a un chat. Nous allons à Nantes. This means that for years, my writing has been full of "She to the cat. We go has Nantes. I to a pipe new, from my friend has Paris." This is compounded by my lack of distinction between other similar accented words, like là (there) and la (the, her)... J'ai la pipe. Elle est là bas. As compared to six years of "I have there pipe. There pipe, there wolf, there castle. The castle is the. We are going her."

It's really no wonder my French friends think I'm insane! :D

Expat Motivational

2008-01-09T16:44:00.000+01:00

I haven't had much to write about in this blog for a while now, but today I stumbled across the hilarious "motivational" posters at Demotivator.com, and thought this one was absolutely perfect-o for an expat blog. At least, all the other expats who check in here should certainly get a grin out of it!

In the meantime, I will continue to keep my fingers crossed that I'll have nothing "interesting" worth writing about, though I'm sure a story or two will happen along eventually...

Knox Visit

2007-09-27T17:31:00.000+02:00

A very quick post - Emily's long-time family friends, the Knoxes, visited for a few days in September. I've posted a little web gallery here, and there are also a couple of tiny videos:

Visiting Rheinbach Pt. 3, Lille

2007-08-12T17:30:00.000+02:00

Tuesday saw us leaving Germany in the early morning for our drive back across Belgium to Lille, where we'd catch our train home in the late afternoon. The idea was that we'd have most of the afternoon to explore Lille and see what could be seen in six hours or so. This turned out to be quite a lot... So much, in fact, that we could probably spend a week just in the downtown area and still not have seen everything.

Downtown Lille is stunningly beautiful - Just look at the photos here and in the Lille web gallery to get an idea of just how much like a postcard this city can look. Or check out this little video I shot with our camera in the downtown square. In one blow, we are immediately swept back into the familiar beauty, elegance, and frustrating annoyance of France. We arrive hungry for lunch, and of course there are no places to eat. Well, let me rephrase... there are HUNDREDS of sidewalk cafés, but therein is our problem - We only have a few hours of free time to explore, and we don't want to spend that time sitting in a café for a solid three hours, first waiting twenty minutes for the waiter to acknowledge us and then another hour for our food, and at least an extra hour before we finally get our bill. All we want is a convenient fast food spot to nip into for a twenty minute lunch, and there's naught in sight. So far Lille is losing big to Cologne for convenient service, even while it stomps all over Cologne in the "looks and style" department. We couldn't move in Cologne without stumbling over a Pizza Hut - Here, we end up hiking for many blocks until we finally find ONE McDonald's in the downtown square.

Ugh. McDo. Why does the one fast food joint France seems to allow have to be the worst one of the bunch? I could really murder a Wendy's burger. Alas, it's all we have to choose from, so we wolf down our lunch burgers and dive back out into the city proper to see 17,000 works of art and architectural excellence in four hours and thirty minutes.

I quickly found it was virtually impossible to take a bad photograph in Lille - Basically, just point the camera in a random direction and you're bound to get a shot of something pretty. It's quite a different place from the Breton cities I know... Much more colorful, for one. Nantes is like some great grey, brooding stone monolith by comparison. Lille seems deliberately colorful and frilly. Wandering through it feels rather like you've stumbled into some French art film's background set. I keep expecting someone named Danielle to slap someone named Claude in an outdoor café, then storm angrily away as he yells, "Beeetch!" after her and then moodily returns to smoking his Gaulloise.

We didn't get to see nearly as much of Lille as I'd have liked, but that can't be helped. We did manage to find the tourist office, tucked away in the tower building of the Palais Royale, and on a more practical note, we were in awe of the Foret du Nord bookstore. It's a huge, multi-level affair that pretty much sells everything, and even includes one whole floor (gasp!) for English books! We're stunned again, because this isn't the France we know, and I'm beginning to wonder if the rest of France is as disconnected from modernity as we think, or if we just live in the sticks.

Before we know it, it's time to go and we're on the TGV homewards. All in all, one seriously excellent vacation. I think I'm ready to explore a bit more of Europe now.

Visiting Rheinbach Pt. 2 - Cologne, Germany

2007-08-12T14:41:00.000+02:00

Once more, I have a web gallery of photos specifically from our day in Cologne. Most include descriptive tags. Cologne was about a half hour from Rheinbach. It was also about halfway around the planet from Herbignac, because visiting downtown Cologne was remarkably like being back in the states. Let's see...

Wide open roads? Check
Modern buildings? Check
Burger King? Check
Dunkin' Donuts? Check
KFC? Check
English language all around? Check

All sorts of things surprised us, not least the sudden pile of US fast food restaurants that we hadn't seen since moving to Brittany. The bookstores had huge sections for English language books... and English language magazines! (Which were actually IN the book stores, as we're used to, rather than being exclusively sold in little corner bars) FNAC in Nantes supplies one measly wall slot for English books... Here, there was an entire bookstore area and different spots spread over the multiple floors. This mixed right in with the impression that Germans simply have embraced the English language more - As our host said, it is the international language, despite the French attempts to bury their collective national head in the sand and pretend the anglo-saxon tongue hasn't become the new lingua franca. I suppose it goes back to France and England's long and bitter rivalry, with other countries not suffering from this degree of reluctance to accept the world of today. In that respect, our chief worries about visiting Germany - linguistic hell - nearly evaporated, and we had no problems getting on with shops and clerks everywhere we went.

Cologne looks like an American city. This is largely due to the fact that it was totally devastated by Allied bombing in WW2, and was rebuilt ground-up much the same as our nearby St. Nazaire. This came with pluses and minuses - We had no trouble at all with finding our way around, but it was rather boring and there just wasn't a lot of architectural interest until the immense gothic cathedral reared up out of the sea of glass & chrome.

Travel Observation - Germans are like Americans in subtle ways. Downtown was extremely crowded and busy, yet not once did either of us get irritated or annoyed at the behavior of other people in the streets. The laws of personal space were back in effect. People actually looked where they were going when walking, and took care to not stand stupidly in the middle of busy thoroughfares. No one came and wedged themselves in between me and a window I was looking at, utterly oblivious to the fact that someone else was looking at the window. I never once found myself brusquely body-checking passers-by who I refused to move for because they had every opportunity to see where I was walking. I go to Super U in summer crowds for anger release. In Germany, the street traffic was like the automotive traffic - tidy and always aware of boundaries.

Words just can't describe how totally immense the Cologne cathedral is, or the impact that it has when you wander upon it in the middle of this thriving modern city. It was left almost untouched by the bombing raids - a genuine miracle. It is HUGE. In size comparison, I suspect it could swallow the big Nantes cathedral entirely within itself, spires and all. Unlike the Renaissance styling of most cathedrals we've visited, the Beast of Cologne (constructed from the 1200's to the 1800's, IIRC) is unrepentantly gothic. It's a visual explosion of pointy bits and sharp details (and reminded me strangely of the Nautilus from Disney's old "20,000 Leagues" movie). It really is a building which should come with its own soundtrack - Something deep and booming like the opening theme for the Overlook Hotel from "The Shining".

In the open square before the church, there was a fascinating scattering of human statues. I hope these folks collect a good living from their work, because they certainly must suffer for it. Emily and I were in jeans and short sleeves, and we were hot (Temps were around 84 degrees F). I really can't imagine sitting motionless under heavy costume and makeup for hours on end! But they were great fun to see, and most had some sort of marionette motion that they'd do if you dropped them a coin.

Inside, the cathedral was a maze of stained glass, amazing floor tile patterns (see plenty of pics of these in the web gallery), and tourists. While looking at the Shrine of the Three Kings, I was startled to recognize a familiar accent, and found myself chatting with two ladies from the US - one from Florida and the other from Kernersville, NC! Utterly bizarre.

We tried to climb the tower, but that turned out to be a Very Bad Idea. The outdoor temps had turned the narrow, spiral stone staircase of 500+ steps into an oven filled with roughly 2000 tourists all trying to get up or down, and it wasn't long before we gave up on the ascent when we reached the bell room, rather than carrying on another zillion spirals to the very top.

Eventually it was lunchtime, and we had our first KFC meal since the states. Our first onion rings... ! Of course, it was just fast food, but it was familiar fast food, and KFC still rules over most of the fast food chains. Yeah, yeah, I know... the snobs will look down their noses and call us philistines for eating US junk food instead of sampling regional cuisine (We'd already done that in Rheinbach and every evening with Jörg... and just for the record, German dishes are excellent). But I don't care. I remain very much a contented Cheeseburger in Paradise.

Reflections: I don't know what the rest of Germany is like. Cologne was like a marvelous mini-trip back to the US, with both the good and the bad that entails. It was brash, it was bright, it was new.... and a little boring, I must admit, especially when compared to the architectural grandeur of Lille (see next post). I think I'd find US cities pretty blah things to look at these days, I fear. The focus was definitely on shopping and consumerism, with plenty of mega-stores to suit every need. I dunno.... I've turned a bit French, I suspect, given how cozily familiar it was to get back to Lille and once again be in a Renaissance city filled with outdoor cafes and something to look at in every detail of gutter or cornerstone.

Visiting Rheinbach Pt. 1 - In Motion

2007-08-12T13:53:00.000+02:00

On August 3rd, 2007, we left Herbignac for our first extended, "beyond one day's driving distance" trip & vacation in over five full years. Ever since we moved here, we've had to work seven day weeks, round the clock, so we took the opportunity to do the pipe show as a sort of mini-vacation as well. The weekend was spent at the show, or seeing local Germany, and Monday and Tuesday were spent in the German city of Cologne and the French city of Lille. A two day vacation may not sound like much, and I'd have loved to stay longer in both places, but we were limited by time and budget.

Our trip kicked off in the scenic train station at La Baulle, where we hopped a first class TGV (France's high speed train) for a direct shot across France to the northern city of Lille. At the Lille station, we picked up our rental car and commenced our drive across France, Belgium, and into Germany. I'm dividing my posts up into three parts - This first will deal with the traveling, and then the next two will focus on our visits to the cities of Cologne and Lille. I've assembled web galleries to match, and you can see the first web gallery of our travel photos HERE.

I love traveling. There's something romantic about being in motion, and I like places that are hubs of people in motion.... usually (There are exceptions, such as the horrific Montparnesse train station in Paris, or the Chicago airport). Our friend Claudie dropped us off at the TGV station in La Baulle and we were off on our way, which as usual meant that we settled into our train seats, spent some minutes acclimating to the strangeness of being in first class (I could stretch my legs all the way out!), and then both fell fast asleep, lulled by the somnolent rocking vibration of the big electric train as it whipped across the countryside at 180 mph. In case you're curious for a window view, check this short video, which I shot as the train was accelerating away from a mid-country station stop.

The Lille train station is an impressive place. The pics in the gallery only show a couple of shots of the painted walls, but it was quite a sight.

All went just fine as we picked up our car (A funky bubble-shaped Citroen, shown in the gallery pics). It was so nice to be in a "real" car again, instead of our rattly 10 year old Clio. The Citroen had power, comfort, and enough headroom that I could have sat in the thing in a top hat. Of course, we promptly got lost trying to get out of Lille. Our Google directions didn't account for some highway destruction that involved numerous obscure deviations from the route, but soon enough we were back on the right road and plowing across Belgium.

Travel Observation: Gas is cheaper in Belgium than Germany. Why? Then again, why is gas cheaper in South Carolina than North Carolina?

I once saw a hilarious short animation comparing Italy with the rest of the EU. In my experience, the subject could just as easily have been France versus the EU - the situations and attitudes are remarkably the same. We started noticing differences in little ways as soon as we crossed the German border.... For instance, drivers actually stayed in their lanes! And, they even left proper following distances for braking (You can't leave proper following distance in France. It will only confuse the French, and they will try to fit their car into the open space). I'll touch on this more when I get to the post about Cologne, where Em and I were both boggled that we could walk through a crowded city street without feeling the urge to bash someone to death with a mallet.

All told, the traveling couldn't have gone better, especially when our host offered to drive us to the show each day in his convertible Jaguar XK8... A vehicle that was QUITE entertaining on the 100+ mph German highways.

When the show was done with, we spent all day Monday exploring downtown Cologne, which will be the next post...

The French never forget

2007-07-21T16:46:00.001+02:00

Summertime in Herbignac! The weather is a balmy 70 degrees today, with blue skies all around, on this very pleasant July 21st.

I get the Digg headline feed on my iGoogle homepage, so I keep up to date on the various bits of weird news that float through there, and today a headline grabbed my attention. "France will never forget" is a pretty neat tribute event for the Omaha Beach landing, and worth mentioning for the exact reason given by the Digg submitter - That any time one idiot Frenchman breaks a McDonald's sign, it hits the news as "anti-American sentiment in France", yet when 2,500 French people get together for a huge and meaningful tribute, it is totally ignored by the mainstream media. Even the Digg article comments make interesting and insightful reading, for once!

Public Healthcare breeds Terrorists

2007-07-06T21:41:00.000+02:00

We had a little surprise visitor in the workshop.

I have nothing of the slightest importance to say today, except to pass along a soon-to-be-classic example of how utterly insane Fox News is, "National Healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?"

Yes, truly, putting a question mark at the end of your inane headlines really makes it serious journalism instead of rank tabloid-ism, oh yes... "Fox News: Run by Marmits?"

Fortunately the strange-looking muppet they chose to be their talking head manages to dissolve any hope he had of making a point simply by how silly he looks. His babbling statements aside, who would look at that guy and think, "Here's someone with an opinion the nation should hear"?

My other laugh this week came from Charles Bremner's blog entry, "Jogging is not French, Mister President". The French are upset that our new president goes jogging. I quote Mr. Bremner: "As a correspondent, you try to avoid reinforcing national stereotypes but sometimes the French don't let us. Where else, for example, would people argue that jogging is a capitalist pastime that is designed to undermine serious thought and democracy? "

I find humanity endlessly entertaining! :D

In local news, I've just posted a gallery of pics taken from the air of our area. Enjoy!

Scenes from a Beach

2007-06-09T21:37:00.000+02:00

Lunch today on the cliffs overlooking Pen-Bé. This remains one of our favorite little "nook" spots around here to have picnic meals at. I'll keep the comments to a minimum and just post some of the pics we took on this glorious summer day. In this first pic, the clarity and color of the ocean really stands out, especially as there are hardly any waves.

On a clear day, one can see across the bay to the far shore of Brittany, the area known as the Morbihan.

Emily rummages in our handy collapsible cooler bag - It actually keeps drinks cold. Oh, the miracles of technology!

She can't keep her feet out of the water, which was quite warm.

I am amazed that I managed to get the above shot framed so nicely. Our digital camera lacks a real viewfinder lens, having only the display screen. This is fine in most circumstances, but on bright sunny days the screen washes out to the point that it's illegible - I simply have to point the thing in the general direction of what I'm hoping to shoot and hope for the best. I managed to get the hovering bird just seconds before it dove down on its prey.

Emily: Standard Beach View. We need lots of friends with children who collect shells, to send our Breton seashells to, before they overwhelm the whole house.

Finally, I shot three tiny videos:

Emily wanders into one of the many cliffside cave-nooks

A panning view from the top of the cliff

Emily waves hi!

Making Happy-Happy

2007-06-03T21:37:00.000+02:00

The election of Sarkozy has sparked off plenty of press on the other side of the ocean, most of it positive, from what I can tell from here. I ran across two very good articles on the gradually-improving relations:

The France-America Honeymoon
Charles Bremner's blog on life in France is always excellent reading, and this dissection of the improving relationship situation makes for a good read.

Hillary equals France
Bill Maher's frequently hilarious article kicks off with, "I don't want to be French, I just want to steal what's best from the French".

Digital Art

2007-05-04T15:37:00.000+02:00

My recent graphical work on the computer caused me to stumble over a previously-unknown (to me) feature of Google's Picasa - the ability to create multi-exposure pictures. One simply chooses the photos to combine, and Picasa melds them seamlessly into one image of shared exposure. This is a fun toy, and it led me to wonder what sorts of modern digital art I could create via multi-exposing some of my photo collections. This is the first multi-exposure of a set of pipe photos, the Talbert Briars and Mortas of 2003. It's a neat effect.

Following on from that, here are some images of France from our travel photos. It's interesting how each collection of (sometimes fifty or more) photos of the different locales lends each place a distinctly unique character in the final image.

The beach and coastline of Quimiac, not far from here, where we enjoy taking picnic lunches in the summer:

The stone, grey, ancient Breton riverside port of La Roche-Bernard, a short ten minute drive to our north:

The city of Nantes, in its somewhat nervous glory:

And, finally, our village of Herbignac in autumn:

Two good articles

2007-04-28T23:51:00.000+02:00

Emily and her mom wander through Herbignac.

I've just come across two good articles on the general sense of nervousness in France over this election, which has seen an 80% voter turnout already and looks to set the country in an uproar whichever way it goes.

First, a BBC article outlines how the French want to reform their economy, but keep their two hour lunches. It's a pleasantly thoughtful article, unlike many of the international articles on the desire here to cling to a French sense of family and culture, improving employment without "going Wal-Mart"... the majority of which seem to carry a slight (or not so slight) snide tone about having one's cake and eating it too.

Secondly, Charles Bremner's blog (always a good read) has an excellent article on his interview with Sarkozy which (thanks to copious reader replies) sheds further light on why 'Sarko' is such a controversial figure here. Personally I find the perspective hilariously jarring, hearing our French friends talk of Sarkozy as if he were the devil incarnate and fretting that he's too right wing. Being from the US, I know from right wing, and Sarkozy barely registers, for me - Across the ocean, he'd be solidly centrist. I'm not sure if this should scare me or not!

Off to the voting booth!

2007-04-22T13:33:00.000+02:00

Watching someone else's presidential election is fun. It's like a grand party where you have no control but also no responsibility either - If everyone has a good time, you can join in, but if someone burns the house down, you can get the hell out too. France has roughly a dozen candidates in the running for president, and today is the day of the first round, where two will be chosen to go on to the final vote. The front runners are Sarkozy, Royal, Bayrou, and Le Pen, whose political positions can be summed up as follows:

Bayrou - "I believe in governmental gridlock, and I like cows"

Le Pen - "France is for French people as long as they're white"

Royal - "I am the Blairite Socialist, no, I am pro-business, no, wait, I hate business, more welfare for the people, more state money! Vote for me, I am pretty"

Sarkozy - "Start working harder, you lazy fuckers, and let's put this country back on the world map again"

For my part, I'm just happy and bemused to watch an entire presidential campaign where no one even mentions religion, family values, abortion, or whether anyone ever smoked pot as a teen. And there's no "Swift Boat" bullshit, either. It's weird. I'd almost call it civilized politics for adults if Royal would stop comparing herself to Joan of Arc (She should maybe think that story through a little further before she uses that comparison again, considering how the story came out...).

On the plus side, if Ségo wins, we'll have the world's prettiest president!

Remodeling

2007-04-12T14:25:00.000+02:00

Voila, a new look for the blog! Blogger has changed their system around further, and now allows some pretty easy blog customizing - easier than going into the template code and manually swapping HTML around, at least. Note that the link to this page has changed - It was required to move this blog to the Blogger hosting service in order to use their new services, so the old link is dead.

The French presidential election is in full swing here, and the BBC has an excellent article on the subject here. It's fascinating to me to have twelve presidential candidates all getting equal air time, even the obvious crackpots. It's also quite strange to have virulently anti-capitalist Marxist parties fielding candidates being taken seriously in the 21st century, given the success record of closed-market economics, but it's oddly entertaining as well, and even the loopier ideas can sometimes provide new ways of dealing with real problems.

Picture Packs

2007-03-06T15:03:00.000+01:00

This post is pretty much dedicated exclusively to those friends and family who have fussed because Emily and I are never both in the same picture, since one of us is always doing the photography. Emily B sent us the scans of all her photos from her visit, and voila! Multiple Trever & Emily pics. In this one, we are giving each other rabbit ears for the camera, except that apparently Emily seems to believe that my head must grow out of the center of my back. For more photos of Brittany and our immediate area than anyone could possibly want, I've uploaded two zipped files to my web server.

Click HERE for our compressed file of digital cam pics.

Click HERE for Emily B's compressed file of scanned photos. Yes, she still uses film. Isn't that strange? Do they even make film anymore? Anyway, this is the photo pack which has all the T&E shots.

My New Shoes work, and It's a Good Thing

2007-02-22T19:45:00.000+01:00

Breaking News - Headline! Colossal Squid caught TODAY!

It's funny - Last time I posted, I thought I had two full blog posts of stuff to write about. One for the hospital visit, a second for the shoe hunt... But in reality, the shoe hunt was startlingly minimal. We visited Chausseland, a French shoe mega-store, and managed to find exactly four pairs of shoes in the entire store that were my size, 47-48. One pair were running shoes, and resembled nothing so much as giant tentacled amoebas trying to wrap themselves around a colorful neon sign. When did running shoes get so weird? I would have been happy with plain white "tennis shoes"; I don't really want to pay an extra 40 € to have 3" thick rubber bubbly soles and more slathered-on cladding than a mid-80's Pontiac.

Anyway, long story short, one of the pairs of shoes that fit was an excellent plain pair of brown leather walking shoes. I assume from their designation that I am not allowed to run in them, so I will try my best to be steady and non-stressful in my locomotion. It's strange to think that my feet have enlarged since moving to France. I thought it was only my waistline! But, alas, for whatever reason (I personally wonder if it isn't some sort of "foot spread" brought on by five years of life in a house and workshop with a tiled concrete floor), I no longer fit my American shoes. It's a little eerily symbolic, that - as if now it's time to drop the old American shoes completely and start contacting the ground in real French shoes........Never mind that all pairs in question were almost certainly made in China!

I also got myself a set of arch supports in the process. I'm flat-footed as your average duck, and I don't think the cement workshop has done much to improve matters, so we'll see if some artificial enhancements will help a bit. The new shoes got their first big test almost immediately this week, when we had a visit from an old friend of Emily's for several days. We decided to take the time off together, and go and see a bit of the countryside, so for the past three days I've been walking the length and breadth of Nantes, Guérande, Vannes, La Roche-Bernard, Carnac, and a little slice of the Quiberon coastline. My cheerful new French shoes took it all well, and I'm happy to report that I didn't get even a single blister, unlike the painful toe-abrasions that had started occurring every time I put my old shoes on. It was a great visit, probably the most fun one we've had so far, with nary a disaster to be had, and lots of beautiful sights and good company and great eating all around. We had the opportunity to marvel at our own total adaptation to French navigation when we purposefully flung ourselves through Nantes with no map at all (Really, it's easy! Just follow the signs!). Five years ago we were petrified, trying to spot the tiny road signs and know where to turn. Today, we ignore the road signs altogether and just relax and go towards "centre ville" or "direction: Rennes".

In closing, here are some pics from our adventures of the past three days:

Here, Emily and Emily wander the cobblestone streets of Guérande in the rain. Of course, in the rain.

Dinner at Herbignac's restaurant "La Bigouden". When we arrived, it was one of the best crèpèries around. Then, it changed owners. Luckily, it has now changed owners again, and is once more quite good. I even had an andouille crepe and it was delicious - That's how good it is. My first andouille. This coupled with French shoes is positively unsettling...

For those who don't know us, that's our friend Emily B on the left, and my wife Emily Emily on the right (in both pics).

Here they are out rock-climbing at La Roche Bernard. Absolutely beautiful day.

Hide and Seek at Carnac. These two are very silly when they get together!

Infected Bigfoots in the Land of Tiny Shoes, pt 1

2007-02-17T16:31:00.000+01:00

Two stories today, intertwined.

I mentioned in my Pipe Blog that Emily had managed to impale her palm on a workshop carving tool the other day. Ouch. This provoked some mild fretting on her part, because she couldn't recall her last tetanus shot. This worried her considerably, enough to brave a doctor visit for a new shot. Unfortunately, this launched us off into another strange encounter with French health care...

She called the doctor's office, explained her problem, and the secretary made an appointment for her. So far, so good. However, on arrival, she found herself talking to the replacement doctor (They shuffle offices to maintain service at odd hours and weekends), who gave her the classic default answer here - "Non, ce n'est pas possible ici', or, "No, we don't give tetanus shots here... What do you think this is, a doctor's office?" Now, the secretary could have told her that over the phone instead of making her an appointment for the doctor to tell her that, but it gets sillier. In the states, you'd call your local doctor, run by, get jabbed, pay $65 for the visit, and be on your way. Here, he explained that we would have to go to the hospital in St. Nazaire for the jab.

OK...

The thought of trying to navigate our way through a French hospital, asking people at forty different windows where we were supposed to go, was enough to have made me shrug and take my chances with dropping dead, had it been me (After all, if the infection killed me, I'd still be saved an encounter with French bureaucracy and Em would be showered with insurance money, so I'd call that a better outcome). Emily, however, is a cautious soul by nature, and opted to tackle this strange new experience. Besides, we had to go to St. Nazaire anyway to find me some new shoes (more on this later).

I must take a moment here to mention the sheer creepiness of the two French hospitals I've seen thus far. I hope they're not all like this - Maybe all the others are pristine and gleaming, but both the one in Nantes and the one in St. Nazaire seem stuck in a time warp - Huge rambling monoliths of state-approved 1970's architecture that surely looked quite snazzy in 1973 but unfortunately haven't been painted since. The overall impression I had of both was crumbling grime held together with bailing wire and tape (Right down to the swinging doors that one passes through on the way to the emergency room, which seem to have door pulls retrofitted from random planks of wood someone had in their back yard). They aren't shiny, they aren't white, and they certainly aren't confidence-inspiring as places to be treated. However, this gothic feel seems quite at odds with the high tech interiors, which are stocked with fancy new equipment and - to our shock - really bright and helpful and friendly staff. Well, mostly... I remind myself of France's better health care conditions, hospital care, and lower infant mortality rates to the US and wonder if the American hospitals aren't perhaps spending cash on looking shiny that might better be spent on new equipment instead. But, I digress..

We go in with NO idea where to go or what we're after. There is a bewildering maze of windows with bored people sitting in them, and we're told to take a number from a ticket machine and wait to be called on to explain our problem.... This despite the fact that there is a sleepy fellow just sitting and yawning in a free window three feet from us. We puzzle over the instructions on the ticket machine for a few minutes, long enough to inspire one of those very objectionable French types to come by and fire off a rapid flurry of high-speed français explaining just which button to push for a ticket, as we're obviously dolts. Fortunately, around this time Emily realizes that we don't want this ticket thing at all, and off we go to an actual service desk where a smiling and helpful lady points us to the emergency ward for the shot.

(Cue more walking through the hospital admiring the grim peeling pea-green hall paint and scuffed .. well, scuffed everything)

"Urgences" is another help window with a young woman who directs us to a very helpful and smiling young woman who tells us that we don't come to the hospital for shots, that isn't how it's done.

!!!

Yes, normally a tetanus shot is handled exactly as it would be in the US - it's given by your local doctor. Easy peasey. Emily explains that the doctor claimed to have no stock of the tetanus vaccine (He said no small doctor's offices carried this in their stock). Hospital lady laughs at this and says the normal procedure is to get a prescription from the doc, then go to the drugstore to pick up the medicine, than cart it back to the doc so he can give it to you in a shot. She's really quite boggled by the fact that our doctor didn't do this, and the story quickly circulates all around the Urgences area about what a maroon this temp doctor is... I don't know the French word for "hick", but there is much eye-rolling and their impression of our stand-in visiting doctor is pretty obvious. To my eyes, it's just another example of the French administration at its most classic - We didn't already know the process to ask about in order to get the shot, so the information wasn't provided because we didn't know the question we needed to ask. Information Retention is the one facet of French character which I still find insanity-inducing, and these experiences never fail to make me want to throttle the next state employee I see.

The people at Urgences more than make up for this, though, by being quite friendly and helpful and extraordinarily quick - Emily was in and out before I covered ten pages in my book in the waiting room, and all to the tune of 9 euros. Victory!! And then, we were off to try and find a new pair of shoes for me.......a size 47+, here in the Land of Gelfling Feet. More to come in part deux.

Misc Nonsense

2007-02-11T19:38:00.000+01:00

It seems every blog eventually has to have at least one posting devoted to collections of silly tests and sillier test results from all over the net. Well, lacking a better subject, this is it. Enjoy, or tremble in fear, as the case may be...

(Oh, and today's photo is Emily on the streets of La Roche Bernard at Christmas, a couple of years ago)

You're a Total Grinch

Ouch! You make the Grinch seem like Santa Claus. Holidays definitely aren't your thing.
Just relax, and create your own tradition. Even if it's drinking spiked hot chocolate and heckling carolers.

Are You a Grinch?

Why do I have such trouble in France? Apparently, it is because...

You Belong in Dublin

Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions.
You're the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl... or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.

What European City Do You Belong In?

But then again, I should be happy, because...

Your Life is 65% Perfect

Your life is pretty darn perfect. You don't have much to complain about.

Of course, your life is occasionally less than perfect. But you're usually too happy to notice.

How Perfect is Your Life?

Fussy, fussy, fussy!

You Are 70% Perfectionist

You are a true perfectionist. You are both demanding of yourself and others.

While it's great to have goals and standards, they don't need to be sky high!

Are You a Perfectionist?

This no doubt explains why I have the continuing urge to kill people wh0 type N "TXT sp3Ak"...

Your Vocabulary Score: A

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary!

You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

If the results of this next test are true, why do I have such trouble coming up with subjects for my blog postings?

Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well.

An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly.

You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view.

A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary.

You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?

This was just scary:

You Are Modernism

You tend to be oriented toward the future and technology.

You like art that signals how the world might change in radical ways.

As far as art goes, everything in the past is obsolete - and it's time to carve a new path.

You prefer art that doesn't follow any rules - even if the art doesn't make much sense.

What Art Movement Are You?

Pretty accurate:

You Are 72% Brutally Honest

Most of the time, you tell it like it is. Even if it's hard for people to hear.

Sometimes you hold back though, because you never want your honesty to be hurtful.

How Brutally Honest Are You?

This explains my fondness for caves and lurking in shadowy places:

You Are Batman

Billionaire playboy by day. Saving the world by night.

And you're not even a true superhero. Just someone with a lot of expensive toys!

What Superhero Are You?

Like I didn't know this one already...

You are 93% Scorpio

How Scorpio Are You?

Who's my "Inner European"? I didn't even know what this meant, but was amused to find I'm Irish. Hey, it matches the Dublin destination above!

Your Inner European is Irish!

Sprited and boisterous!

You drink everyone under the table.

Who's Your Inner European?

I'm in the wrong job:

You Should Be a Painter

You have the vision, patience, and skill to bring your unique visions to canvas.

And you're even tempered enough not to cut your ear off in the process!

What Sort of Artist Should You Be?

And, finally.... I have no idea what this means, but I probably lost points for finding that "Proud to be an American" song extremely cheesy:

You Are 54% American

Most times you are proud to be an American.

Though sometimes the good ole US of A makes you cringe

Still, you know there's no place better suited to be your home.

You love your freedom and no one's going to take it away from you!

How American Are You?

The Wonderful Miracle Pizza Box

2007-02-03T21:03:00.000+01:00

Wow. It's been quite a while since the last time I updated this thing! Alas, the Christmas season will do that, but it's more than that, it's the growing degree of frustration inherent in trying to think of things to write about. We're going on five years here now, and there just aren't that many startling and strange adventures anymore. My observations of the differences between French and American cultures seemed to have reached their zenith with, "There are nice people and real assholes wherever you go. They just wear different hats." Without Indiana Jones-style tales of getting lost in Nantes to relate, the only purpose for this blog would seem to be to make it one of those ongoing loggings of the minutia of our daily lives, and that seems an awfully dull subject for reading, since most readers probably have quiet daily lives of their own.

So, I'm strongly considering just closing this blog down. Or perhaps I'll just turn it into a travel photo site with light comments, we'll see. It really will boil down to what I have the time for. But, I did want to post a pic of this new arrival in our fair village - the pizza vending machine!

France is awash in vending machines for things that I've never seen state-side, such as this video rental vending machine. When we moved here I had no idea what it was, having never seen such a thing before, and someone actually had to explain to me that one could rent DVDs from it without human interaction. I don't know why the French have such fondness for unusual vending machines, though I'd wager it's partly related to the French working hours. In the US, video stores are open till midnight. Here, nearly everything closes at 7, making life quite difficult for those working daytime jobs. Also, perhaps, it may be in part a sort of vast, chagrined realization that friendly customer service may not be the strongest trait in the French character, and such work might better be left to machines... ;)

In any event, the things are a wonder! I'm all in favor of anything that lets me avoid having to deal with other human beings, so naturally I've taken to them quite well. The new pizza machine is a real marvel of technology, offering a wide range of pizza choices and four minute cooking. You stick in your credit card, pick from the video window, and voila, within minutes you have a fresh, steaming, boxed pizza sliding out the slot and ready to eat. Good pizzas too, and very generous on the toppings (We like the "Ferrari", which is loaded with around six pounds of chorizo and other hot sausages). After thousands of years of human challenge and achievement, I'm very tempted to pronounce the instant pizza machine as the pinnacle of our accomplishments. Especially since it is within walking distance of my house... along with the video machine! Ergo, walk to the machine, rent a movie, walk to the other machine, get our pizza, go home and enjoy. Life is good.

Though, when pizza machines are the only thing I have to write about, blogs get quite dull...

Translation Funnies

2006-11-19T16:24:00.000+01:00

Here's a little random scene of downtown Herbignac taken back during the blue sky months, though, oddly enough, the skies are blue today too! It's been grey for so long now that it seems really weird.

My only update for today is this hilarious article by Charles Bremner. It's the definitions of popular terms, the French version! Charles' blog can always be counted on for both entertainment and insight, and it's just getting more and more interesting as the French presidential election approaches.

Cheese, Gromit!

2006-11-08T17:34:00.000+01:00

An appropriately cheesy pic (from the Utopiales gallery of goofy old movie posters) to accompany a quick post. We got a strange letter in the mail today from an artisan cheesemaker who is retiring and selling his shop and workshop in the seaside town of La Turballe, about fifteen minutes' drive from here. WHY he sent this to us, I can only guess - Most likely, he's heard of us as "more of those rich foreigners who like to come in and buy little quaint French businesses" and thought we'd know someone who might be interested. I figured, what the hell, I'd post the notice on my blog, so if anyone out there has ever wanted to buy a house/workshop/retail shop combo in a beautiful seaside Breton town, to spend your days making cheese, get in touch and I'll connect you.

Weird...

The only other bit of news is that our article came out this month in Brit Mag. I'll cross my fingers and hope this does not generate the usual annoying flood of touristy-curious type calls and inquiries that these things usually do.

Parliament of Oddballs

2006-11-05T22:30:00.000+01:00

We just attended the French science-fiction convention Utopiales, in Nantes, and I wrote a new article of stories and photos for our "French Adventures" website area. It was great fun, but I'll let anyone interested go and read the article, which goes into more detail.

Also, wonder upon wonders, I finally wrote our article "Four Years On", about our fourth year of life in France. It's only about six months late, but that's a good sign, in this case.

Back when we moved here, our friend Trish told me something very portentous. I'd said something to her about other expats, and she gave me the somber warning that most expats were, by and large, horrid. IIRC she commented that dark secrets were the norm. So, I've been curious as the years have passed to meet and observe other expats, and see what I think of them. And, by and large, I've come to agree with her.... people who go off to live in other countries are a weird bunch.

Not all of them, though - In fact, I can pretty much divide 95% of the expats I've encountered into a few simple categories: The Vacationers, The Posh, The Dreamers, The Retirees, and the Insane. I've spent a good bit of time recently on the Brittany forum for English speakers in France, and find I have virtually nothing in common with the majority of them. There are a few folks there that I like very much, but also some real wankers, and overall I've concluded that it isn't a forum that I'll ever participate in beyond the "information exchange" level - That is, where to find good prices on this, or best times to buy tickets for that, etc.

Anne from BlueVicar.com wrote me with this: "I am interested in your comments on community...or lack there of...amongst other expatriates. Just because someone hails from our homeland doesn't make them a pal, that's for sure. I often feel quite the opposite, but there does seem to be something about people who are willing to live abroad...and the way they see the world. I find it fascinating! The more stories I read, the more interested I become." I've found that the simple fact that someone has moved to another country is no guarantee I'll want to spend five minutes with them. Show me a fellow who has a full bookshelf collection of HP Lovecraft and it's hot odds we'll get on like a house afire, but introduce me to "This is So-and-So, who moved here from California, so you two have something in common" and I'm likely to regard the person more like a suddenly-discovered bodily growth.

I speak from experience. Truly, there are some expats, a very rare percentage, who are genuinely fascinating and intelligent and sane, but for the most part they tend to lump together like so:

The Vacationers
These people are in France for work. Yeah, I know that seems like the wrong term, but through their jobs they are essentially experiencing France as a vacation. Their corporation has transferred them here and paid all their expenses, plus probably handling the details of renting or buying them a house. This is not an experience of living in France, this is a paid vacation, and they very very often have really skewed views of just what France is, based on their blinkered experience of it. Tell-tale signs - Lots of talk about wine and cheese and how much paid vacation time they have here, coupled with random griping about anything that isn't like it was "back home".

The Posh
Wealthy, usually British folks who aren't really expats, they just have a "summer house" in Brittany. Easily identifiable by their Range Rovers and yacht club insignias, not to mention accents, no one in their right mind wants to get stuck at a party trying to talk to these people. Their view of France: A giant personal playground that exists to furnish them with good wine and cheese, if only they could do something about the "help".

The Dreamers
This is where, I hope, I fit best (either here or 'The Insane'). That narrow slice of the population that have their heads in the clouds and try to follow their dreams as best they're able. They're not stupid but usually also not rich, and if you luck into meeting one at an expat gathering you can be sure to have a good conversation.

The Retirees
France is in danger of becoming the UK's old age home. I'm amazed at the number of Brits I hear who want to retire to France. I barely survived the cultural transition at the flexible age of 36... Do these people have any clue what they're in for? Obvious signs - Grey hair, sandals and socks, and lots of overheard mumbling about the things they don't like in the UK these days. Amusingly, plenty of retired Brits seem to think that rural France will be more like the England of their youth. I say "amusingly" because, well, I'm usually amused to witness the results of this misapprehension.

The Insane
Yeah, Them. If you've been to any gathering of expats, you know them. Too bat-shit to be accepted at home, they've gone abroad hoping that their personal brand of lunacy won't be noticed as much in another language. Unfortunately, as expats they keep getting introduced to more expats like themselves, and their bizarre behavior finds fertile soil and just gets more entrenched. Crucial warning signs include tinfoil hats, furtive & obvious paranoia, and very loud and totally one-sided opinions on anything and everything under the sun, regardless of whether they actually know anything about said topic...

So, this is why I'm much more likely to be enthused when a French friend says, "Hey, let me introduce you to Pierre Marceau, you'll like him, he's a big fan of sci-fi films" than when someone says,"Hey, I have GOT to introduce you to this guy Bango Jinkers that lives near here, he's American too, and you're sure to have lots in common!" To which I say, "Yikes."

Happy Halloween!

2006-10-31T17:46:00.000+01:00

Emily and Freya wish everyone a Happy Halloween! To our total amazement, we had real actual Trick or Treaters this year - Granted, they were kids of friends and friends-of-friends of ours, but still. Hopefully the word will drift out that we give serious candy and in years to come we'll be able to introduce the French kiddies to a little American-style Halloween fright... :D

Indoor Rain

2006-10-20T17:16:00.000+02:00

Sometimes it's easy to forget just how much we've managed to get accomplished in the past four years. The pics today are the before and after shots of our upstairs library/office/study/studio, first as it was when we bought it, and then after we repainted & totally re-vamped it. We continue to have 'adventures' with the roof, however.

Our roof is rather mangy - an old, slate-tiled thing covered in moss (one can easily guess the age of a roof in Brittany by how many pads of moss have sprouted on it, and how thick they are). When we bought the house, the owner assured us that, "No, never, it had never given any problems!" so you can imagine our surprise a few months later when the first hard rain of October created a miniature waterfall down the stone wall of the spiral staircase.

Insert displeased face here.

What we've found over the past few years is that the brief periods of hard wind we have almost reliably take off a shingle or three, leading immediately to odd adventures in indoor rain. The day before yesterday, it blew so hard the trees were bending, and after this we were taken back four years by seeing a familiar thing, a nice stream of water running down the stone staircase wall again, stemming from an open hole about the size of my hand. So, we installed our giant bucket and wailed for the roofer, and today all is well. Odd, though - no call or advance warning or doorbell ring. I simply heard this mystery thunking from outside and opened the window to see a ladder coming at me, and roofing guys scrambling all over. They had the whole thing sorted in two hours, with numerous little holes and problem areas patched up. And I was amused, because it led me to another cultural observation - contractors are different in France, but they all seem to look like each other in the same way that US contractors do.

Call an electrician, or a roofer, or an HVAC guy in North Carolina, and what you'll get will almost always be: a great big guy, lots of gut and exposed butt crack, talking at full-blast volume, driving a huge pickup with a logo on the side and bumper stickers for NASCAR and Bush on the back. In France, the standard seems to be: a little short guy about 5' tall who looks like a Slim Jim meat stick come to life, with a weathered and wrinkled face like a saddlebag with eyes, smoking a Gaulloise. It's these things that make our cultures special ;)

In Today's Headlines

2006-09-30T19:54:00.000+02:00

This photo was taken along the western coastline of the Guérande peninsula, where we pulled off to the roadside to watch the sun set into the ocean... again, a weird sight for a US East Coaster. This pic has been "enhanced", thanks to:

Picasa!
I just wrote about this in today's Pipe Blog posting about useful software, but wanted to mention it here too because of its incredible usefulness for anyone with a crapload of travel photos. Don & Carolyn, if you're reading this, you might want to download this program - It's amazingly handy for organizing the photos on your computer and presenting them in an easy-to-sort, easy-to-print way. One click of a nice big button will take you to online print services that can produce glossy hardcopy photos of your digital pics and mail them to you, just like a traditional developer. Finally, there is a simple solution for my eternally-leaning horizon lines! Et voila:

These are just a few "Version 2" shots from around our area of Brittany, after being run through the auto-lighting correction of Picasa. Trés cool!

Woof!
Apparently I'm not the only person who's noticed the peculiar French aversion to spicy foods, according to this article on Expatica. Having witnessed the exact arm-waving behavior described, it made me grin.

Brit'Mag-ged
We had a visit the other day from a photographer for Brit'Mag, an English language bi-monthly magazine for everyone living in Brittany. It's a beautiful magazine, with the usual nice travel photos and local culture articles, and apparently our article will be in the December issue. I can't say I'm very excited, because what these sorts of articles usually mean is a lot of random calls and surprise visits by total strangers who've read about us and find our story "just fascinating". Yes, thanks, glad you enjoyed, move along...
Although, they did get some nice photos of the 2006 FdP pipes in progress, so FdP members might be specially interested.

Grocery Wars

2006-09-26T16:12:00.000+02:00

Yeah, that's me, from a photo taken in 2000 while I waited at our old house for Halloween trick-or-treaters. Sad that I can't pull this stuff on French children, but I'd probably leave them scarred for life...

I posted a quick article on BlueVicar.com over the weekend and thought it was worth copying over here too, just for entertainment value. The discussion topic was grocery stores, and how the shopping experience differs here from everyone's various homelands. For once this was an easy question to answer, because hordes of French people in big stores can just be astoundingly rude until you learn to play the game their way. And so:

Trever Talbert Says:
September 25th, 2006 at 8:14 pm

I relish grocery store trips as an anger release. Seriously!

On arrival here four years ago, my wife and I were both terribly put off by the sheer rudeness of French behavior in grocery stores, especially as they got more crowded. The people walking right into you, standing two inches behind you, squeezing directly in between you and the shelf you are obviously staring at just to stand there and stare themselves…. the whole American “body bubble” was terribly lacking and basic manners nonexistent. My wife still finds such trips annoying and frustrating, and gets easily offended by the rudeness of others.

I, however, have accepted that this lack of manners isn’t deliberate rudeness, it’s simply culturally-ingrained that it’s perfectly OK to shove, push, etc, and isn’t personal….. so I take a delightfully malicious thrill in shoving right back. Yes, I’ll stand there in the middle of the aisle blocking the carts. When the old lady behind me in line shoves against me, I shove her right back and give her my best, “I am a psycho foreigner, do you want me to gnaw your arms off?”-glare. If someone steps in front of me when I’m looking at something, I’ll reach over their head and knock off their cap to get what I want, or just shove around them. I don’t step aside when walking down the aisles, as my American politeness would dictate.

I love it. There’s a wonderfully vicious thrill in just going, “To hell with polite behavior. GRAGHH!!” I think my ultimate dream now would be to go shopping at Super-U during the holidays, carrying something like a really long rake or shovel around the aisles, just for the fun of ‘accidentally’ whacking annoying people with it as I turn this way and that.

The secret of adaptation - making your fun where you can find it

The Giant Spider Invasion

2006-09-23T21:57:00.000+02:00

No, this title isn't a reference to that incredibly cheesy 70's drive-in flick that featured a VW bug dressed up with monster spider legs, it's a reference to what we experience each summer. Spiders! Giant spiders!

Seriously, we just didn't have shit like this back in the states - in North Carolina, there were plenty of things that would bite you or poison you, but they were almost totally outside the house. Around this time each year, we can count on capturing and ejecting at least five or six beasties like this. They're getting bigger as "spider season" rolls on, too - this guy was the size of Emily's palm with legs spread out. Supposedly they are completely harmless, if one discounts the shock and surprise of seeing a creature the size of a mouse go scurrying across the floor you were about to step onto.

Want creepy? They are big enough to make noise. Set them down in their cups, and you can hear them tapping and clattering on the walls from six feet away. Fortunately they're pretty easy to catch (in our officially-designated "Bug Cup") and we've gotten polished at snagging them and carrying them out into the yard, from where they probably run right back in. We don't kill them if possible, since neither of us believe in killing anything just for convenience or sport (with the exception of mosquitos).

Today's recommended October horror film is the 1978 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". Starring Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, and Leonard Nimoy (!), this is one of the few remakes that equals or surpasses the original. Modern audiences weaned on "OMG-Something-must-be-happening-every-second!!" will probably lose interest, but those who enjoy a leisurely pace coupled with gradually-mounting unease and eventual terror should love it. Almost seems like an art-house flick, by today's standards, and it has one of the best endings in all scare pics (My favorite horror movie ending? John Carpenter's version of "The Thing", no question). I'll leave off with another shot of our own little unwelcome visitor...

Let's All go to the Movies

2006-09-19T16:53:00.000+02:00

Halloween season is here. The air's turned cooler, the skies are getting that different sort of light, leaves are turning, and all of Brittany is getting ready for the next three months of solid rain. I keep a hoard of "Halloween Season" movies in a stack under our cabinet and they've now built up high enough that we could watch a horror film every night for about sixteen months without letup.... but this is a good thing! We've had a nice low-key opener to this year's six-week fest of monster movies - "The House that Dripped Blood", a classic Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee film that also rolls in Denholm Elliott and Jon Pertwee (in a role that humourously foreshadows the character of Peter Vincent some sixteen years later).

Last night switched gears for a replay of "28 Days Later", a fun modern semi-zombie flick that offers some very creepy moments and a better experience the second time around. Thinking of movies spurred me to look up some info on the latest Peter Mayle expat fantasy "A Good Year", and I thought I'd write a little about expat movies.

I mentioned this topic already in an article on our regular site, but thought I'd toss in a couple more cents. Most expat movies are utter rubbish - sometimes entertainingly silly, like "Under the Tuscan Sun", but as often as not they're over-romanticized fluff aimed squarely at bored housewives wanting to fantasize about moving to faraway lands. For anyone who really wants to put their head into the experiences, feelings, and struggles of moving to a foreign country, I suggest the following films:

Lost in Translation - Already written about, as mentioned above. Nails the experience perfectly in every detail.

Spirited Away - Probably the best animated film I have ever seen, and one of my absolute favorite films of any kind, the film sums up well the life of the working expat. It's marvelous in conveying the sense of alien-ness, the surreal experience of watching different rituals and modes of behavior without really understanding them. Add in the need for resigned acceptance that there is no running away or going back "home", and each new day's battles must be tackled head-on, and it's a perfect mirror. Especially touching is the depth of feeling displayed in the story for the kindess of strangers, those random folks we encounter who decide to help out when they've no reason to. The same themes and "leaving home" feelings permeate "Kiki's Delivery Service" too, and I like it equally, but overall it's a bit more of a Feel Good film that shares SA's victories but not its terrors.

Jacob's Ladder - What, a horror film?! Yet the similarities are unmistakable in the overall subtle sense of unease.... Things aren't quite right. You can't hear what those people are saying, you don't know if the person you're depending on is behaving properly or intentionally causing problems, you don't know the customs, you feel plunged into a bizarre world where everything feels just a little bit off. We tried watching this one too soon after we arrived here, and had to turn it off. Everything was going wrong, we seemed to be losing massive amounts of money with no end in sight, we'd had all sorts of horrible problems, and, like Jacob in the film, I was occasionally plagued by vivid dreams at night that I was back in the US... that none of what seemed to be happening actually was happening, and that everything was still OK. In those days, waking up to the unpainted walls, bare flooring, and escalating mountain of debts and problems was like being punched in the stomach.

I'm sure I'll have more to add in future....

We are Not Alone

2006-09-09T21:17:00.000+02:00

Today's photos were taken at Pen-Bé, our favorite nearby spot (exactly 8 miles from our house) to go have picnic lunches on the beach. Or the rocks, as the case may be. I had the interesting experience of putting my finger into a tidal pool and having about forty tiny shrimp come out from under shells, all to "feeler" my finger and then try to climb onto it! Emily is sitting here next to our collapsible cooler bag, which is a wonder for insta-picnics.

We've been Blog-Spammed!
I guess it's a sign of finally making it in the blog world. Got my first blog spam today after nearly a year of running this thing. I'm still going to keep it as a free-comment blog for the time being, as I find those word verification tests annoying. We'll see how it goes. If I wake up one morning and find 400 comments about the effectiveness of Viagra on Paris Hilton, this may change.

I'm now on MySpace
I posted this news over on the Pipe Blog some weeks ago, but eventually realized that the two blogs are two very different audiences and it might be smart to post it here also. Yeah, I resisted it for as long as possible, but I finally gave in and set up my MySpace page when my friend Mark Rainey got one. So, now you can go view this pointless site, and see what comments have been left by passing fourteen-year-olds. For those who may be interested, however, I did at least post a mix of pics - Some personal pics, some pipe pics, and some of my artwork. Somebody go add me so I'll have more than one friend, LOL!

We are Not Alone
We live as immigrants but NOT in an "immigrant community" (Those enclosed conclaves of foreigners who carry on their own culture, language, architecture, etc... Like Asians in Chinatown or Brits in the entire south of France...). Thus, it's sometimes easy to forget that we're not the only people doing crazy shit like this, there are plenty of others. I thought I'd make a little list of some similar blogs and sites I've visited recently:

American Spoken Here
The blog site of an American family who moved here a year ago to run a B&B. I had a laugh when I first saw their site because their house picture looks almost exactly like ours! A nice place to go for the wife's-eye view, and she seems to have a devoted following. Her article on her first year in France was fun, and boy, does the vast distance between the daydreamers and the experienced stand out in the comments to that article (Loads and loads of "You're an inspiration!" and "Live your dreams!" contrasted with my dry, "Good job surviving. If you really want satellite TV, here's how:"). :D

A Pretty How Town
Another site by a US lady - To quote her byline, "Florida Girl meets Norman boy". Beautiful photography in this one.

Sam de Bretagne
A Minnesota lady moves to Brittany. Why are so many travel blogs written by women? It's bizarre. It seems to be a thriving female subculture vibrant with co-reading and commenting on each other's articles. I hope this isn't going to make my testicles drop off.

Blue Vicar
Not a blog, per se, nor centered on Brittany, but instead a themed collection of the stories and adventures of foreigners in France. As with all such things, some are funny, some are tragic, and most are interesting in one way or another. God forbid life should ever be "dull" again...

Brittany Life Online
And finally, here is a thriving online forum in which I participate (to some extent), populated by hordes of (mostly British) visitors to Brittany. Like all unmoderated online forums, it ranges all over the place, from interesting bits to utter rubbish, but it's a nice exchange center for useful information, plus it's a way for English speakers in Brittany to connect and get together on occasions.

That's all for now, from Trever on the rocky coast of Pen-Bé!

And So It Begins...

2006-09-06T20:37:00.000+02:00

How will it end? In fire...

And if you've never watched the TV series Babylon 5, don't feel confused for not recognizing this quote. What this refers to is my current dedication to improving my French.

At about ten minutes a day, granted, but at least it's something, and something I make sure to do every day.

Over the past few years, I've had too many distractions and not enough free time to make anything more than disjointed, cursory stabs at learning français, and a repeating cycle had quickly become apparent: I would begin to feel settled and OK, and turn a bit of energy towards actually trying to learn some more of the language, and then some new disaster would hit and throw us month's behind on our income, forcing out all other concerns. Worse still, many of the major problems we've had have been very "French" in nature - delays of months getting parts or work done, instead of a few days... Startling bills for otherwise inexpensive supplies... Minor problems becoming huge hassles due to the overcomplicated paperwork mess here... Etc etc. Each time, I'd be left with a seething resentment of French administration or French attitudes, which would quickly translate into an absolute total disinterest in learning the language, and it would take months or a year before my disgust had settled down enough to begin to take an active interest in learning again.

Which, thus far, has been a universally reliable predictor of near-future disasters. !!

But, I'm daring the fires again. No lessons this time, though, at least not yet... Going to a lesson a week didn't help much, as I'd forget everything I learned one week by the time the next lesson rolled around. This time I'm focusing on learning to read first, a little at a time, and a little every day - coupled with consistent writing in French every day. My personal notebook is now filled with several weeks' worth of scrawlings like, "Tirez le chat!" and "Je peut lire en français, unpeu" and "Emily a beaucoup des petits oiseaux, et ils sont tout mort".

I've timed myself, and I have a consistent lesson burnout after between ten and thirty minutes - I very quickly reach the point where too much new input all begins to get jumbled up and the brain cache has a buffer overflow, dumping big chunks of the new knowledge. This, no doubt, stems from my genetic predisposition towards being monolingual - unlike Emily, I've never had a shred of interest in learning other languages, and even now, my focus and energy is entirely predicated on using the language as a tool, and the fun stuff I'll be able to do with it, rather than on any enjoyment of learning the language itself. Kind of like how everyone else in the world feels about being forced to learn English...!

What I don't get is why human language should be so difficult, and computer language so easy. I've also begun to set aside about twenty or thirty minutes a day for "personal fun time", and have started playing with the Adventure Game Studio package with the vague potential idea of writing my own PC adventure game. Or not, it really doesn't matter... I am having a fun time just learning the building blocks of the software's scripting. And I'm positively flying along - In little time I have already begun designing and importing my own backgrounds, creating hand-drawn animations, and learning cutscene animation. C'est façile!

Which really sounds unutterably geeky.................

Dam! We meet the fish ladder, and ignore it

2006-09-02T16:34:00.000+02:00

Today's post will be largely photos, all taken a couple of weeks ago when we visited the Barrage d'Arzal (the Arzal dam) and went to the fair. To the left, c'est moi on the walkway that crosses the river to the drawbridge. I must point out that white socks and sneakers, worn by Americans, look cool and adventurous, unlike the brown/black socks and sandal combnations that so many British seem to prefer, which instead look staggeringly nerdy. That's my obligatory teasing of the British for the day.

Here is a nice photo of the entire bridge and drawbridge section:

There's an interesting contraption in the left foreground that is part of a "fish ladder" (direct translation) - It helps the fish transition from the salt water just downriver to the fresh water on this side of the bridge, plus keeps them out of heavy traffic areas. How this works, I have no idea - there were some complex illustrations and explanations in French, but we were too distracted by the pretty sights to try and figure it out. I am left forever with the mental image of an under-bridge conveyor belt lifting fish and dumping them off on the other side.

There were cormorants everywhere:

I could kick myself for not getting all of the main mast into this colorful picture:

That's all for now, but I'll try and post more pics soon.

Edit: Late-Breaking News!! The McFlurry is now hedgehog-friendly! Go, go, British hedgehog preservation society :)

My Spam Story

2006-08-26T20:00:00.000+02:00

Note - Today's post has absolutely nothing to do with life in France.....

Having a very long-standing commercial email address, I get about 300 spam emails per day. Recently, I've been marveling at the growing sophistication of the spam creation software, as it continues to try to insert random sentences and phrases into spam to fool filters into believing it is real email. Fortunately, I use Mailwasher and love it, and it easily filters all my mail to leave me with just what I want.

The best spam subject I ever received was titled "Welcome the Incorruptible Gopher Senate" (Incorruptible Gopher Senate would be a great name for a band...). With all these odd word arrangements, I began to wonder if it would be possible to assemble an entire story out of spam. I began to collect random lines from spam emails into one text file, and then assemble the sentences together. Before long, I had....well..... something....a story created entirely from sentences in spam email, now given life in assembled form like some loathsome Frankenstein creation. Thus, I present:

Baby, kill your envy
(A short story written entirely from spam)

Tuesday appeared alongside senator Mitch McConnell.
He said,”Has your stamina level been down of late? Are you still probing the objective of getting toned? All you need’s here! She wants a better sex. Any med for your girl to be happy! I clearly am, that is why i am gleeful. I lucked upon the undeliverable archaeologist. Be realistic – you always wanted it. Take advantage of this immediately, before it’s null.”

“I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh. Visit your aunt, but not every day of the year”

It was exceptional finally having someone to benefit me. I had become of the tribe, and the fitful purple lights were fluttering. The magnitude of this news cannot be overestimated. We had a clue now to the whereabouts of the alien artifact. A clue that was useless until we started looking. But we dallied with chauffeur adhesive, and there was no sign of Kim or the lama.

“They get mutated at the right place, where the flowers are always a-blowing. Pass close to one of their rabbit number. There is always symbolism involved. The boys resist -and the rite of passage helps this resistance. You would not know it, since you are untutored in science. Stand aside, to see the phantoms of those days go by.”, I said, meaning it to be a calm statement but listening to myself in horror. I had too much on my mind to drift off as easily as they did.

“What’s that in your back pocket?” he asked casually. “Just loose it and you’ll be re-born. You will see for yourselves.”
But he knew that it wasn’t lower taxes that reinstate death. He knew that millions upon millions of theory origins need Yet Another Paradigm Shift.

“It’s probably the most valuable thing in the Zone! And who should have it?”, I asked in a weak voice.

Kim lifted up his voice and wept outside the carriage and climbed into his own stall, growling in his beard. “I wish you only peace, oh strangers.”, he muttered. “Don’t miss Potassium Bicarb & Chloride, It’s as fresh as they come and is so tight.”

‘He spoke of these?’, asked the senator, mumbling over the cakes that Kim offered. Of course he knew that much, as he had known all evil since the acetone campground. His eyes filled with tears.

‘Assuredly. Else why should we come?”, said the lama, and They all unloosed their Buddhist invocation - “Up! Feel life spirit! Evil vampire out! Discontinue grasping the postal address!”

The senator had latched onto woman’s waist, but they unloaded it into the market where almost anything could be sold. They could not understand what it was, and ignorance meant fear.

“Blimey, it was lucky you thought of a Buddhist invocation! She’ll worship you for that!”, said George in a low voice. I nodded.
“Do you know what Im talking about?”
“No. But I have read my mythology. Its better that you see the rest. Finish your story, and go."

So - End of story.

Riding the Ghost Train

2006-08-21T22:43:00.000+02:00

Overhead, the plastic banner crackles in the evening breeze, advertising, "Nouveau! Train Fantome - SPOOKY". We're at Luna Parc, a traveling amusement park that sets up near Guérande in July and August, looking for all the world like some misplaced cutting of American culture that's been broken off and dropped wholesale into the French countryside without any alteration.

But that isn't entirely true, as it turns out. You see, French "county fairs" aren't quite like US fairs... They're better.

Our car starts forward with a lurch and the carnie man gives us a doleful, "Au Revoir" as we bump open the doors leading into darkness. We're the only ones on the ride ... It's early yet, the fair doesn't open until 9pm and we arrived at 8:30, accustomed to US fairs that run all day. Lights flash in the dark and strange monsters appear, lunging at us half-glimpsed from every shadowy corner. The car jerks and twists, speeding us around the tight black maze. Beasties keep flashing up in a constant stream, barely lit and timed to the flickering strobe, when we round a corner and my eye catches sight of something odd. Yes! Yes, that's no mechanical thingie, that's a man! I have only a second to realize this as a black-garbed figure melts out of a corner shadow behind us. There's a yell and we both jump - a glowing green face is trailing our car. We laugh and turn away, but a few seconds later Emily squeals again as green fingers wriggle in her hair. Something grabs my shoulder and I jump, twirling around to see that our ghoul is happily chasing our car and flapping his painted fingers at the backs of our heads and necks. He pursues us past a couple of motorized monsters before finally giving it up, and we burst out into the evening sunset blinking and laughing.

A few minutes later, we realize we've been touched, a very strange experience. When I watched Amelie, I'd assumed the fairground ghost scene was purposefully overdone, drawn as surreal as the rest of the film, but we've just had an encounter nearly as physical. This would never have happened in the US, where any physical contact during a ride would almost certainly generate one of two responses:

"Aiii! He touched me! I can't believe he touched me! I'll sue! I'll sue for distress - I'll bankrupt this carnival!!"

...or...

"Shee-it, that sumbitch just laid his hands on me, I'm gonna hafta go whup his ass now!"

But the French aren't as litigious as Americans - A Frenchman who trips and breaks his nose is more likely to make a joke of it to tell his family than to sue the sidewalk construction company for negligence. And they're certainly not as violent. These traits benefit an amusement park in some very fun ways...... The rides are longer, MUCH more dramatic and scary/rough/wild, and you can buy malt whiskey at the concession booths if you really want to test your projectile-vomiting range on the rollercoaster. We got lost in the multi-level mirror maze for about a half hour, bumping our way through the mix of glass panes and reflections and strobe lights and sudden near-darkness until we finally emerged nearly as freaked and dizzy as Miss Foley in "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (Possibly the best 'autumn fair' movie ever....)

There was one odd loss - they have cotton candy, candied apples, and of course chi-chi's, but there were no caramel apples in sight. A curious ommision, considering the French passion for all things caramel. Are caramel apples another puzzling non-entity in France, or was it just this one fair that lacked them?

I will close by posting a selection of photos from the fair, but first I wanted to mention two local cafés of note. In my last article, "Beware the Murky Frogpits", I was pretty (deservedly) harsh on the rather dank and nasty village cafés scattered all around here, that supposedly serve as local "fast food", but there are exceptions. The pirate café by the Barrage (dam) d'Arzal was great fun, with a young staff who greeted us on entry and a waiter who turned up promptly and actually smiled . The decor was fun, the food was good, and overall it was a drastic improvement over our usual "village café" experiences. Another nice spot for a semi-fast bite is Herbignac's own "Bar Roseau", a tavern that doubles as a tasty sandwich shop. It does tend to have a bit of the "locals staring like frozen guppies" effect, but it's minimal by comparison. Now, on to the pics!

This is the three-story Funhouse, filled with all manner of bizarre devices including a top-to-bottom spiral tube slide, huge whirling grabbers that will sieze you and fling you through what resembles a car wash buffer, and many other semi-lethal tricks and traps that would never be allowed in NC because, well, "somebody would get sued"....

Emily becomes, on her very first try, the only human being I have ever known who actually won something from one of those fairground "pick up" machines. And she got a Nemo, no less!

I'll sign off of this blog entry from the front of the Mirror Maze, snacking on my chi-chi's. A bientot!

Beware the Murky Frogpits

2006-08-19T15:49:00.001+02:00

This is me up near the river dam at Arzal. For once I have a lot to write - yesterday we visited the dam for the first time and got a lot of good pics, and last night we went to Luna Parc, a traveling fair that stops here in the summers. It's a lot like a US county fair, but it's actually better in a few key ways.

That isn't today's post, though! :D

I thought this was worth an article after talking with our friend Marie-Blanche about the lack of fast food outlets in France. We often find ourselves missing easy fast food - There are only three McDonald's joints scattered across our entire region, and only one alternative chicken place. Ergo, when we find ourselves out running errands and we're hungry on the road, it isn't possible to just pull over somewhere for a quick bite. Everyone turns their noses up at fast food, but the lack of it can be a real nuisance on a very busy day.

Except that, according to our friend, it isn't lacking..... We just aren't seeing it. In France, she says, fast food is at cafés, not glittery McDo's, and if we want a quick bite we can just stop at any café for a sandwich. Unfortunately, trying to drag Emily to these places is like trying to get an iguana untangled from a fishing net - ever time you get one claw unstuck, another one hooks in, and when all is said and done, you've just wasted a lot of time and energy annoying the iguana.

Why the resistance? French cafés are scary. Emily is a lot more bothered by them than I am (bolstered by years of male restroom conditioning, where one often sees bacteria the size of Border Collies loping around). I'll try to relate our typical experiences so far.

Imagine if you will.....

You've just run errands to several different places and spent the afternoon driving through roughly thirty-five idyllic little stone towns filled with thatched roofs and all named 'Ker-something'. You're starving, and you spot a sign saying, "BAR - CAFE - SANDWICHES" (There are places like this in virtually every little village). You think, "Ahh, food!" and pull over. But the horror begins to set in quickly...

The creaking wooden front door hasn't been painted since the 70's, and when you open it, you're rewarded with several popping sounds as various bar tenants explode into dust from their first exposure to sunlight in years. The interior is dank, musty, shadowy, and no matter where you go, there are always at least four or five half-sodden locals lurking at the bar looking unshaven and disreputable. If you've ever wanted the "Cowboy enters the saloon" experience, this is the place, because all conversation will inevitably stop dead as these sullen characters all turn to inspect you. Except, of course, the owner/barkeep, to whom you do not exist, as his family has not known yours for generations.

Dare to pursue the experience further, and find a wooden chair. Your table is decorated with an unemptied ashtray containing the fuminous remnants of eighty-seven Gaulloises, and you are the center of attention for the room. France doesn't seem to have the, "It's rude to stare" code of conduct that the US has, as the locals will simply sit and openly goggle at you for as long as you're there. You may as well be wearing a motorized neon beanie for the attention you'll get. No smiles, no welcomes, nothing to suggest friendliness, just sulky glowering.

Of course, you don't know what to expect... Do you sit and wait for a waiter? Do you go to the bar and ask for a menu? Do you actually want to eat anything that is cooked here? Regardless of what you do, you're stuck, because a good thirty minutes will pass before the barkeep peels himself away from deep conversations on village incest to come and ask what you want. The choice is pretty limited, typically... You're not getting curly fries and BBQ roast beef sandwiches here, your options are more like: Sandwich. Beer. Fries.

If you haven't run shrieking by this point, you'll eventually (roughly 45 minutes later, after enough time for all the regulars to spit in your food) be served some sort of mystery meat in a foot-long bun of the most durable bread you've ever encountered. Chewing doesn't work, biting doesn't work - you're eventually forced to hold the thing in both hands and saw your incisors into it, really using your neck muscles to tear loose rough chunks, which you then chew for the next ten minutes.

And after a couple of these experiences, you'll never, ever want to go back to one of these joints again, and if you even start considering another try, your wife will threaten to set fire to you in your sleep because she is so repulsed.

So, that's been our experience with using cafés as "fast food". Why do I love American fast food places? Let me count the ways:

*Reliability. I can go to a Wendy's in North Carolina or Michigan, and know I'll get the same food.

*Variety! Hey, some of us like sourdoughbread hamburgers...

*Cleanliness. I've been in some dingy fast food joints, but no McDo I've ever seen even begins to compare to the Innsmouth-esque quality of some of the small-village cafés I've visited.

*Prices. Hamburger, fries, and a coke - $6. Mystery meat sandwich, frites, and..... Ugh.... "Zee Coka, monsieur?? You would not prefer un whisky wizh your lunch?" - 9 euros

*Speed. Go in, stand in line five minutes, get your food, eat. At café, go in, sit, wait fifteen to thirty minutes before your existence is acknowledged (if you're lucky, that is, and you don't look too British, in which case you may truly Never Be Served....), then another thirty minutes while they kill the animal in the back room, add the "foreigner's exxtra spice", and finally bring it to you. Tack on an extra fifteen minutes when you're done for trying to get the bill.

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but there's just something about having five unshaven, obviously drunken guys at a bar (at noon!!) watching you eat with all the rapt fascination you'd give to assembling a $3K home stereo system, that just puts me off a bit...

This has run a little long, so I'll wrap up here, with another part soon. We have found a couple of cafés that are....well, OK...even pretty nice... and they'll get their due in the next post!

SuperFrenchie

2006-08-17T20:26:00.000+02:00

A photo taken while Emily's parents were here visiting - Em tries a French specialty, intense lemon liqueor. Very intense. As in, "Fall backwards from the table and crawl across the floor gasping and groaning for oxygen"-intense. Everything that our friend Marcel makes is so rich that it's in a class unto itself. The man could probably make a cheese sandwich jazzy.

I found a funny blog the other day that offers the opposite perspective from mine - SuperFrenchie, the online ramblings of a French fellow living in the US and coping with American culture. His blog is a LOT more popular than this one, but then he gets into all the controversial issues that people love to log on and argue about, like politics, religion, and the best pizza toppings. I tend to avoid that sort of stuff just because I don't want my comments threads to become long strings of ad hominem attacks from both the right (I believe in personal rights and responsibility) and the left (I believe in personal rights and responsibility. Plus, I smoke). I try to be apolitical, or perhaps "realistic", exotic as that term may be in application to politics. I'd describe myself as a left-leaning centrist, but a little world travel quickly illustrates how wildly one's position changes based on local attitudes, since by US standards I'm probably a pinko America-basher (to the O'Reilly's of the world) while in France I seem to be a capitalistic greedmonger (I'd like slightly less stifling regulation of private industry).

I will say, however, that there was a loud cheer in Brittany today when I read that the NSA's illegal wiretapping was just ruled unconstitutional (Well, duh...).

Another, considerably less contentious site that I found recently was Culture Breizh, a tourist-focused site all about Brittany and its culture and history, with a lot of fun photos too. It isn't exactly a deep look at Brittany, but it provides some nice info on the various aspects of Breton culture, from the traditional dress to the modern wackiness of groups like Tri-Yann. A good thing, since Breton musical culture in the US is extraordinarily rare.

In closing, another bit of good news... We've now accumulated enough points from shopping at Super-U for Emily to get a free bicycle!

Piper at the Gates of.... La Turballe?

2006-08-06T20:16:00.000+02:00

""In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
- JRR Tolkein, The Hobbit

Somehow I doubt that this hole is quite so comfortable! I have no idea where this is - I've never been there, though it can't be too far from here, as our friends Beate & crew stopped by there on their vacation in Brittany. Still, I doubt our old house in the states will look quite so good after a couple thousand years...

But this has nothing to do with the title!

We saw this fellow on our way to the Marie-Gallant restaurant down in La Turballe. He's playing an instrument called a Veuze, or Breton bagpipe. These things are local to Brittany, along with the accompanying flute-type things, called Bombardes. I know nothing about either of them, apart from them being traditional instruments and also ungodly loud when they get going (though I don't believe they are as skull-splittingly insane as Scottish bagpipes at close range). B&M were even kind enough to shoot this little video for us, as I had forgotten our camera and left it at home.

That's about it for the moment, not much interesting to write about. Most of our time has been devoted to improving our money situation lately, so this summer is pretty much a write-off already as far as fun activities go... Besides, we do our best not to leave the house in August, when the beaches are infested with tourists. September, however, should be very nice indeed...

The One-Way Culture Door

2006-07-30T17:10:00.000+02:00

Emily and I just recently watched the French TV series "Engrenages", a terrific and complex mystery/cop show. It took it a bit of time to get going, but it quickly turned into a noir thriller that rivalled the best (IMO) US crime series ever made, "Murder One" (First season only...). I wish now that I had recorded it, but maybe they'll air the eps again. Seeing it aired on BBC was both fun and startling - They don't show much French TV or film (Though they are multicultural paragons compared to the US, which would likely never, ever get the show as US viewers whine like mules when presented with subtitles).

Which leads me to the question of why so much US/UK TV and film gets into France, and why so little French TV and film get out. If I flip on TF1 (France's ABC/BBC), I see an unending stream of dubbed US TV shows - Lost, Survivor, even Walker, Texas Ranger - all of these are played here and no one seems bothered by the dubbing, or occasional subtitling. But if I turn to BBC... well, we've had the satellite for a year now and this is the first French TV series I've seen aired. It's frustrating for me, because I want to see more French TV yet I need it subtitled, which means I have to watch what British TV is willing to show. Grr. It leaves me to wonder if it's an attitude problem (Are British viewers as resistant to subtitling and dubbing as US viewers?), an interest problem (Does France just not make that many shows and movies that would interest a wider audience?), or a quantity problem (If BBC has 500 American shows available to run and 3 French shows, the imbalance could simply be in available numbers).

I can attest that there is a lively undercurrent of fun movies here that the outside world seems oblivious of. For better or worse, France has developed an international image as a producer of "art" movies a la française, which can usually be boiled down to "Miserable French cast have affairs behind each others' backs, protest the futility of existence, and then all go out to a restaurant together". (Lest I be accused of being low-brow, "My Dinner with Andre" remains one of my favorite films) But there is a lot of fun stuff here too, that just doesn't seem to make it to English-language screens except in rare instances (Amelie). Taxi, Bloody Mallory, Les Visiteurs, Crimson Rivers, Haute Tension, Wasabi.... France really does do genre movies, and they're both fun and fascinating in their cultural "differentness". I wish there were more French horror films! I can't help but think that something like Wasabi has a better chance of grabbing attention outside France than "yet another restaurant movie".... but then, I suppose if you've established a certain image, perhaps it's best to focus on exporting just that image, instead of superheroines fighting goblins and vampires.

The frustration for me, though, is that my only view into the world of French film and TV is through an English keyhole - There may be a lot more films and shows like Engrenages that would interest me, but I'll never know they exist if they don't turn up on English-language TV channels. And again I say, grrr.

French Malaise

2006-07-10T17:50:00.000+02:00

"While the French are trying to take their defeat philosophically, the result has reinforced a sense of gloom here - and the feeling that France itself is no longer a lucky nation."
Quoted from BBC News

I guess by now everyone knows that France lost the World Cup last night, by the narrowest of margins, and in the process had their star athelete go berserk and get booted off the field for his final game before retirement. Yesterday evening the entire country was excited - lots here were filled with cars as people waving red, white, and blue flags went to pubs to cheer their team. Nobody had expected anything of the French team this year - Their own media had jeered them as being too old and poorly coached, so it came as a pleasant surprise that they went all the way to the final game without much real encouragement going in.

During the past week, the news had shifted - Suddenly papers were writing stories about the renewed sense of optimism here; the sense that something good was happening again. Now, I didn't watch the game, and personally don't give a damn about most organized team sports in general, but I'm highly annoyed that the French team lost for one simple reason:

It means a lot more news reports about "French malaise".

I am sick beyond tolerance of the twisted fascination that both the French and the British media seem to take in over-examining, and endlessly commenting on, a sense of gloom in France. Yes, they're stuck with Chirac. Yes, they lost the Olympics. Yes, they experienced some nasty riots. Growth is slow, unemployment is high. And now they've lost the World Cup at the last minute, which I'm sure is going to produce another torrent of navel-gazing analysis about just why the French are glum and confused, mostly by talking heads cashing paychecks. It begs the question - Are the French really miserable and sullen, or do they just think they are because that's what their own media keeps telling them they are? !!

My own observations are that there are as many smart, hard-working, savvy people here as there were in the US, and also as many assholes (They just have a culturally different style...). It feels as though the whole country is just treadmilling - ticking off time until Chirac gets booted from office and replaced by... who? A lot of the French dislike Sarkozy, but he's probably the best choice for turning the country around - providing that he isn't blocked at every step by striking unions, which seems most likely to happen. Royal easily wins the popular vote and lots seem to like the idea of a female president, plus her less-confrontational style may actually make her more effective than the in-your-face Sarko.

Personally, I don't care, I just wish A) the media would shut up for a bit about how depressed everyone is supposed to be, so everyone might B) realize that this is a country filled with intelligent people with excellent education and a highly sophisticated social system, be proud of themselves, and get the hell on with working and making things better. Jeez!

There's my outsider's rant for the day ;) Now I'm off to the beach!

EDIT: Well, that didn't take long - It was less than a day before I ran across this article on BBC. Though, it has a bit of the curiousness that sometimes creeps into the Beeb news site - "Zinedine Zidane has managed to unite the nation in a way that no politician French can dream of doing." It is good that they English speak.

Moule Quest 3

2006-07-02T23:07:00.000+02:00

We did something entirely unusual today, and took a whole Sunday afternoon off, to go play at the beach and have dinner out at an oceanfront restaurant before the tourist hordes really descend after the 14th. Our summer experience is a shuffle game - pre-July 14th (and post-September 5th or so) we enjoy the tourist areas to the max, then through late July and all of August, we hide out at the smaller, less-known beach spots where the locals congregate while La Baulle fills with British Range Rovers.

When I moved here, one thing I missed terribly was chicken wings. They do have them here - we can buy three flavors at Super U - but they are not an ingrained, celebrated part of the food culture here as they are in the US SE. No one would ever dedicate an entire restaurant to chicken wings, for example, and forget spicy ones... the Magma wings from Davidson County (Eat one whole wing and you get your dinner free) are a distant silly memory. And, they're just not as good here, due to lack of the more interesting sauces. I found a replacement passion during my second year, however, in the form of "moules-frites"... that is, mussels and fries. This is served everywhere here.... in fact, it virtually is the area's version of hot wings, at least in terms of ubiquitous cultural placement. And mess! As with good wings, it's impossible to eat moules without covering yourself in sauce, which is half the fun.

I've probably eaten enough of these things to fill a hot tub since we got here, and have had them from utterly bland to positively orgasmic, with all shades in between (Though they are nearly always quite good, since they are mostly harvested right here off our shores, and extraordinarily fresh). They are very seasonal - they only really appear in force in the summer - and the region then descends into a moule-devouring frenzy comparable to a pack of hungry Lexington locals turned loose on fresh BBQ. We rove around trying them at different places in my ongoing quest for the perfect moules. To date, this restaurant holds the title - the Marie Galant, by the docks at La Turballe. Their "Moules-Frites Marie Galant" house specialty is so good that it actually made me dunk my fries in the sauce just to get more of it, and anyone who knows me will know the odds against my willingly mixing my foods.

Luscious.

Who's Better?, Round Deux

2006-06-28T15:08:00.000+02:00

After stubbornly refusing to upload any photos last night, Blogger is once more working perfectly today, now that I've forgotten what I was going to write. C'est la vie! We encountered this fellow in the picture while driving out to visit a local dolmen - Someone had discarded a broken flip-flop (Yes, people are just as trashy in France as in the states), and the local fauna had decided it would make a great tanning bed. Now that it's summer, we have hundreds of these little guys all over the walls of our house. They pop out from between the stones and sit on the outer edges of each stone, soaking up the sun.

For a quick continuation of the "France vs. USA" posts that I started a while back, I thought I'd run through some interesting news links and add my comments. If I recall correctly, the current score is France:2, USA:1.

Getting Things Done
USA, No question
I recently read this fascinating and funny article which attempted to explain how anything ever gets done in this country of 35 hour work weeks and constant vacations. I still don't get it, though I have come to accept the reality of a country that moves on "Island Time". The biggest problem is explaining this to outsiders, such as my customers in the states, who don't understand why a package tracking number won't be any more specific than "In our system" for four solid weeks....

Innovating
USA
This, admittedly, is drawn from limited experience of observing tech developments in France, but I am perpetually frustrated that the current French government seems to A) regard every new US technological advance as a personal affront, and at the same time, B) be unable to do better than simply produce second-rate copies of the leading US innovations. This rather pointed article addresses this issue nicely. WHY they would waste billions developing a "French" alternative to Google (when there is already a Google.France en français) is stunning - I would much rather see that money going into new projects that would lead and expand the field, rather than simply following. The writer mentions online translation, and if ever there was a need for a genre-defining app, that is it. A conquest there would put France back on the internet map as a leader, not a follower. French Google copy, French CNN copy... Why?

Bread
France!
We just had a new bakery open up within walking distance. Freshly-baked bread and croissants, yum!

Varied Cultures
Tie
French people say, "You americans! You are all...". Americans say, "The French, they are all...". I say, "Well, which part of each country are we talking about?" North Carolinians aren't Californians (We burn books, they burn smokers), and Bretons aren't Parisiens. Yet, both countries insist on looking on each other as one unified lump, despite the sometimes-vast divisions in culture and attitudes that exist in each. Americans tend to assume all French must be the same because it's a small country; how can the people vary much from one side to the other? (They should hear the bickering from the UK sometime, where accents and mentalities change from one town to another..) I don't really know why French people assume all Americans are alike, especially after the bloodletting of the last presidential election, but they often seem to. For a funny take on our shared regional differences AND consistencies, read this.

Note - I did not have sweet tea in my bottle as a baby. At least, not that I know of...

This would have been a post...

2006-06-27T22:57:00.000+02:00

... Had Blogger not mysteriously stopped uploading my photos to this blog AGAIN. The Pipe Pic blog works perfectly, but this one will not upload, or rather, it (in theory) uploads and shows a link in HTML, but no picture appears or ever reaches the FTP server site. Settings being identical between the two blogs, I am now giving up, as it is nearly 11pm and I'm too tired to screw with this for no pay. Bleagh!

Bird Gone

2006-06-12T15:03:00.000+02:00

Well, after some considerable struggle and several nights of no sleep, our baby bird expired last night. It had stopped eating as much yesterday, for no discernible reason, and apparently just ran out of energy. Emily had put a hot water bottle wrapped in blankets in to keep it warm, and that was where we found it this morning.

This puts our bird rescues at about 50% survival - We've reared a good number of nest disasters in the past, and this is probably decent odds. Baby birds at this age are unbelievably fragile, and there is always the hanging question of whether the bird fell from the nest accidentally, or was rejected for some unseen-but-crucial health reason. I certainly would not recommend anyone else to attempt this. Emily is fortunate in coming from a lifelong birding family, and having contacts with professional ornithologists to help with proper advice and handling suggestions.

And the best suggestion, always, is simply to put the bird back in the nest if you can reach the nest. Myths about the parents birds rejecting the chicks after handling by humans are just that - myths. Just be sure to wash your hands afterwards!

Anyway, we'll have a bird burial under the hedge, and then it's back to "normal" life.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

2006-06-11T16:54:00.000+02:00

Here is definitive proof that not everyone in France is stylish and elegant :)

Emily salvaged this fellow from our yard. Birds nest under the eaves of our house, and chicks often fall the two story drop to the paved yard. This critter survived by miracle, probably by bouncing off a nearby bush. Emily the bird expert is now once again enmeshed in chick-rearing. The little fellow is already capable of eating on his own, and we're taking pains (despite the pics) not to over-acclimate him to humans. With luck, he'll be off and away in a matter of days.

I'd meant to post another list of France vs. USA babble, but that's got a bit derailed by the number of side projects we've had. At times of much distraction like this, my wobbly French suffers the worst. I had been taking private lessons here in town, but my professeur had to break them off because her final exams are this month, and she has to spend all month studying to get her English teaching degree. Then, there will be summer vacations, we'll be outside, it will be too hot for sitting indoors at lessons, other projects will pop up demanding attention (The long-delayed FDP Pipe of the Year is seriously beginning to lurk...) and what little progress I've made in French will fade away completely. Aside from buying groceries, I don't think I've spoken French in a month now.

The gap to conversational-level French seems larger than ever. Worse, we've actually, finally met a few people here in town that we share a lot of interests with, but can't talk to... or at least I can't, and that successfully cramps our entire socializing. But, I realize how long and how much hard study would be needed to reach the point of actually being able to participate in after-dinner chatter, and just don't see myself having the time (or money!) to invest in such education when so many other, more-pressing issues are at hand. Grrr...

On a tangent, socializing here is still something we can't quite get a grip on anyway. We can't invite French people over for dinner because they'll hate the food we make, so they invite us over and probably wonder why we can't return the fun. In the US, dinner wasn't the point of a gathering, usually - we might go for dinner but that was just a marker on the road to everyone ending up in the den laughing. Also, there was movie watching, which I'm not sure is even done here (Friends would phone us up, we'd go over for dinner and a rented movie afterwards). Meal times seem to prohibit this, with the French eating so much later that by the time dinner and dessert is finished and everyone has talked for a while, it's often midnight! I can't imagine inviting any of our French friends over for movies and popcorn - I suspect they would find it weird. Or perhaps not, I don't know - Like my lingual abilities, my window into French casual life remains extremely small, very tight, and very focused.

But in the meantime, there is plenty to keep us busy!

Who's Better?

2006-06-04T16:22:00.000+02:00

I came across this wonderful cartoon on this entertaining page about France and the US, and it inspired me for a blog post. What an accurate picture, eh? ;)

People are always asking me which I like better, France or the US, and this is an impossible question to answer with a Yes or No because there are so many nuances to both, and I find various bits of each more or less desirable than others. So, in the interest of cross-channel debate and a bit of fun, here is the start of my 100% biased (but observed through direct personal experience) observations on who is better at various topics:

Movie Theaters
France wins, hands-down. I stopped going to the movies in the US because I always seemed to be spending my $6 to sit next to some fat, loud mouthbreather who spent the entire film describing it blow-by-blow to his buddies on his cellphone, while cybersex-texting his girlfriend with his other cellphone. The last movie I saw in the US was Fellowship of the Ring, just before moving, during which I had to walk back and threaten the spinal cord health of a pack of teens who somehow couldn't resist talking in full volume about their friends and their date scene throughout the film. IMAX may be nice, but I don't think I could put up with an American theater audience just to see it. Over here, theaters are lower-tech (Our favorite just has two vending machines instead of a concession stand, for instance) and they thankfully haven't discovered the concept of selling chicken wings and steak dinners to moviegoers. Instead, you buy your little bag of malted milk balls and then go in and try your absolute damnedest to not rustle the plastic as you munch, because if you do, it will be the only sound in the theater. We went to see V for Vendetta a few months back, and there wasn't a cellphone buzz through the whole movie.

Cheese Variety
This one is closer but I'll have to go with USA, simply because you can get all the French cheeses there also, and you can actually buy cheeses from other countries as well. I don't know if it's economic protectionism or simple snobbery, but it's hell trying to find cheese from anywhere outside France here - Where do I get my Stinking Bishop? Doesn't seem to be an issue of taste, as every French person we've had over who has tried our imported Nacho cheese & chips has loved the stuff (Unlike their consistently horrified reactions to peanut butter). I'm prone to guess that there's a regulation out there somewhere spurred by the French cheesemakers to keep out all those dangerous imports that might actually compete with them. Who knows?

The Child Factor
Sorry to all my American friends, but France just has better-behaved kids. The old saying, "Better seen and not heard" is still in force here, and I am often amazed at how polite and deferential French children are. Our friend Claudie's teenage son breaks off from street soccer games with his friends just to come over and shake my hand when we visit, whereas it seems US kids have to be forcibly pried from their Playstations just to elicit a grunt. I've forgotten what it's like to go out for a nice dinner and have to contend with the undisciplined sprogs of mass breeders stampeding unchecked through restaurants. Between this and the movie theaters, it's like heaven.

More to come....

Dolmens and Wine

2006-05-26T18:05:00.000+02:00

While I don't have anything particularly interesting to write today, I do have a few nice pics to post. Shown here is the Dolmen of Kerbourg, one of the best-preserved and most interesting dolmen sites on the Guérande peninsula. We didn't even know it existed until we happened over it in a guidebook, and found it was only five minutes' drive from here. Unlike the bigger, more commercialized sites, this is just standing freely out in a field, and one can crawl all over it, touch it, and go inside of it if one doesn't mind a bit of crawling.

Emily wanders around in the large end cave of the interior, probably trodding all over the six thousand year old remains of some ancient Asterix.

The only other bit of news today is the repeat of the shocking international wine debacle of 1976. I suppose I should probably stay out of the wine shop for a few days lest an irate French wine seller start screeching at me about the subject. It could be worse - Imagine the horror if they'd been beaten by some of the emerging new North Carolina wines!

More Medieval, and the Brits still hate France

2006-05-22T16:19:00.000+02:00

I ws very happy with this nice shot of an old Tabac sign at the Guérande Medieval Fair. Too cool! I still have a lot of photos to post, and a new selection of shots of the Dolmen of Kerbourg to upload some time in the distant future. For now, here are some more pictures from the fair:

The tents stretched around the walled city along the tree-lined path, and made for some nice photos in combination with the walls and the moat. I don't actually know the size of the walled city in square miles or kilometers - It is hard to guess at, because it isn't very large but the interior is such a maze of tiny twisting streets that it is difficult to get an idea of the overall scale of the place.

A fun open-air sausage vendor's stall. Complete with swarms of insects lighting on all the displayed sausages. Did it make a good picture? Yes. Did we buy any sausage to eat? No. I remain too deathly afraid of most French sausages to sample them - One look at the insides of andouille is enough to put anyone off - though I've grown to love chorizo. Also, our village butcher makes a yearly mountain of something he calls "Mexican sausage" which is fantastic. Where the "Mexican" part comes from is anyone's guess, but it is the only sausage I've had here which is really similar to what Southerners think of as sausage.

It was a blustery day, and we took many big blows of buffeting from the magnificent multitude of billowing blue and black dresses.

In other news, it seems the British still hate the French. Granted, I read just as much anti-anglo gibberish in the French press, but I really don't understand this poll. The French are the rudest people on the planet? I did get a laugh out of the Frenchman's defense that they were a nation of sulking romantics, but really... I've lived here for four years now and can categorically say that French people aren't any ruder than people back in the US (and at least they're polite enough to never walk right up to you and start talking about their religion!). Neither of our sets of visiting parents seemed to see much French rudeness, especially in such experiences as the big family dinners, the nice English-speaking locals who helped us evacuate the TGV disaster, the Fresnis and their bodacious breakfasts, the hotel staff, and on and on. I don't get it. Granted, Paris is a hell-pit of savage assholes, but that can be said for most really big cities on the planet. I'm sure Beate will be thrilled to know that the Germans ranked #2 for rudest, as well as Most Boring and Most Ungenerous. How anyone can call a 6' tall pipesmoking woman with purple hair "boring" is beyond me...

Oh, and one other thing - Do any of you techie readers know of any freeware utility which can batch-modify multiple JPGs to smaller dimensions? I have roughly six folders filled with photos taken during Emily's parents' visit, but each photo is 1600x1200, and quite a bear for them to download on their 56K modem connection. With 200+ photos, individual resizing and compressing is out of the question. I do most of my photo work in Paintshop Pro, which can do batch format conversion but not batch resizing, so if anyone can point me to a freeware utility that can handle this task, thanks in advance!

Medieval Fair at Guérande

2006-05-20T18:34:00.000+02:00

Owing to a surprise windfall of income over the past few days, we decided to take off about four hours this Saturday and pay a little visit to the Guérande Medieval Fair(e)(sic). They've had this every year but we have always missed it - usually too busy, or we'd forget and only see the signs until a week after it was over. Guérande is an ideal location, and made the medieval fairs I attended in the US look rather bland by comparison. US fairs are typically open-field events with pavilions and tents everywhere, and plenty of enthusiasm, but it's hard to compete with having a fair wrapped around and through a genuine medieval walled city.

There were plenty of folks there in costume, both workers and visitors - In fact, we were surprised at how many wandering princesses and wenches and knights and pageboys kept drifting in from the parking lot. It made the whole city a little surreal, driving down cobblestone streets past parked cars and scooters and small clusters of young people furiously texting away, while Rapunzel-esque costumed Ladies-in-Waiting (for what?) drifted down the sidewalks trailing long ribbons and often disparate parts of their outfits (It was bloody windy).

They did a great job of tarting the place up, and we didn't see half of the full production. When we arrived after lunch, they were still setting up the main exposition area, where it looked like they might have jousting (and probably a fair bit of wenching) this evening. There were some excellent huge dining halls being assembled too, though I didn't have the chance to check out what might be the main course for dinner. We refrained from spending any money that we didn't have anyway, though the smell from the on-location breadmaker's stall was enticing - Huge round loaves of hot, just-from-the-oven bread were piled in rowdy jumbles.

The dance troupe shown below keep popping up all over the city inside the walls, singing and doing various routines to medieval music (and modern medieval, such as Blackmore's Night's "Fires at Midnight"). This served nicely to remind me that I need to get some more Blackmore's Night CDs someday, to provide an elegant balance to thrashing away in the workshop to stuff like Send More Paramedics. We took a huge pile of pics, and I'll post more in coming days as I have the time. At least now my parents can get a glimpse of Guérande when the sun is out!

Batman is French?

2006-05-16T14:35:00.000+02:00

Having either set of parents come to visit is fun for many reasons, one of which is that we get to see this country with new eyes all over again. The in-laws stayed here in town at the local hotel, a place within easy walking distance of the bakery, shops, and our house. Needless to say, it was not an American hotel. The place is really very nice - for those who may be interested, they have a website. It appears to be several houses purchased and connected together, with the result that, instead of identical uniform corridors, the interior is a maze of tiny hallways, unexpected steps, side corridors, and hidden rooms. Great fun!

While the room itself was pretty much like hotel rooms everywhere except for its camper-sized bath and shower, it did give us one surprise - the bizarre coathangers pictured above. I've traveled all over the east coast of the US and have never encountered such a thing, and it left us wondering just what one is supposed to do with them. They wouldn't hang shirts properly, and the bizarre clips at the ends seemed intended more for mountainclimbing use than clothes storage. I've never personally thought it would be useful to hang a dinner jacket in such a way that it had permanent Dracula shoulders, with the bonus of being able to hang a tie from the clips down the inside of each sleeve. We concluded that it must be meant for some bizarre garb with which we were unfamiliar... and this despite the fact that Emily's mother has traveled to Israel, Brazil, the Galapagos, and all over the US. I can only guess that Batman must be French, and spend a lot of time on layover in Herbignac. I had to suppress a strong urge to grab one of the things, yell, "Batarang!", and hurl it weapon-like at an invading British tourist...

Dazed and Confused

2006-05-11T16:13:00.000+02:00

Emily's parents have departed back to the states, and landed safely in NC after a grueling 25 hour day of travel. This is why I dread the idea of flying over - People say, "It's only seven hours, come visit!" This, of course, leaves out the rising at 3am to drive an hour to Nantes, the three hour TGV trip to Paris, the two hours in the CDG airport, the two hour wait for a changeover flight in the US, and the hour+ flight to NC. Ugh.

We, luckily, got to drive them to the train station and then come back and go back to bed. Today, we're conscious but a little bleary and dazed. Having family over for a long visit is a strange experience in cultural reversionism. For example, I spent the whole week speaking English again and found out at a dinner party that suddenly I'd lost all my French, and was completely incapable of assembling even simple sentences. I'll write more, including lots of travel photos, when we are a little recovered and recuperated.

I did, however, want to post this entertaining photo that turned up in our local paper. A careful examination of the pic should reveal a familiar landmark, for those who have been here and seen our house! This photo was taken around 1915, IIRC, not long after our house was built. Our original permit is written on something like oilskin, a slippery, heavy paper, and spells out the fact that permission was granted by the town to build our house on this spot in 1910. Apparently construction carried over into 1911, so our 100 year anniversary may be a little vague.

Travels in Brittany

2006-05-02T23:02:00.000+02:00

We are still vacationing with Emily's parents; thus no new blog entries of much depth for a while yet. However, I have been snapping pics like mad and thought I would take this chance to upload a few. To the left, we have the bridge over the river Vilaine at La Roche-Bernard, about 7 km north of here. A beautiful sight, especially just after it's been painted! At least, that is what we think, since the pristine white columns were spotless.

Carnac, with blue skies for once! And here it is again, this time with a tour group among the stones for an idea of scale.

Very small on the left, one can see Emily and her parents boggling at the size and sheer 5,000 year old massiveness of the Giant of Manio.

Europe and the US - Odd Ducks

2006-04-27T14:54:00.000+02:00

BBC is currently running a poll on "Who do you trust?", in regards to who the public trusts the most to have the best intentions for society. This sort of random data is usually useless but entertaining, and sometimes insightful. After filling out their quiz, I sent in my region, language, etc, and got to look at the final breakdowns of votes split in a variety of ways.

21% of those who selected "Showbiz Personalities" as being the most trustworthy were from North America (second only to North Africa), while Europeans were bottom of the list at 9%. I do see a bit of this in the media over here, where articles regularly blast Bono's crusading for the poor as good for nothing but glorifying Bono. Because he loves it so much, I'll type his name again. Bono.

Moving on...

A little surprise was that marginally more Europeans (10%) trusted business leaders to have the community's best interests at heart than did North Americans (9%). Likely because Americans have been living longer with the results of trusting business leaders to have the community's best interests in heart.

They're about even on religious leaders, with Americans trusting them a bit more, and on their opinions of the national media - again, with Americans trusting it more. The biggest difference (and one which I see every day here) is in their trust of the national government to safeguard the people's interests - Europeans are second from top with 37% of the vote, and Americans are second from the bottom at 21%... trusting our government only marginally better than North Africans at the bottom of the list. I think this is a big part of my astonishment at the thinking of people here that the government should fix everything - if there are no jobs, the government should make jobs, it should provide education, six weeks of vacation per year, etc. Of course, we actually have good encounters with government concepts here, like our state health care, as opposed to in the US, where one's encounters with government are nearly entirely negative (giving you tickets, restricting your rights, passing laws allowing megacorporations to dump toxic waste in your backyard, and so forth). It's really no wonder that so many Americans are just a few MRE's from the survivalist mentality.

Lest the Europeans start to feel superior, however, there is this amusing fact - three times as many Europeans (17%) think TV news is trustworthy compared to North Americans (6%). Of course, they have BBC and we have Bill O'Reilly..... maybe there's reason for this...

Get your French munchies here!

2006-04-22T21:30:00.000+02:00

A very, very quick note today for our US friends. I was just browsing through the new Amazon.com listings for food, after learning that they were now moving heavily into dry goods to compete with the big supermarkets. Popcorn, obviously, was my motivation, but I discovered in the process that they have some really interesting sections on ethnic foods, and even a decent selection of French stuff.

(And yes, I know this sounds like a commercial, but unlike with my AdSense ads and book account, I don't get paid jack for this - I just wanted to post it for the interest of our francophile visitors who might not otherwise know that they can buy Brittany caramels from Amazon!)

These caramels, shown in the pic, are terrific. We can find them all over our immediate area but I never expected to encounter such a cardboard-boxed, homemade-looking candy on Ye Internet Megamart. If anyone wants a little taste of Brittany, there you are. Another very local item is this selection of Guérande sea salt, which is harvested by hundreds of salt flat workers not fifteen minutes to the south of our house. I've heard many chefs say it is the best cooking salt on the planet. Our friend Claudie's parents have their own stretch of salt farm in the marshes - I think I even posted a bunch of pics from our visit there sometime in the past, though now I can't remember for sure.

Madeleines have a special place in our hearts because they were our staple food for the first six months that we lived here. We found out early that they were plentiful, inexpensive, and we could eat them without suffering the upset stomach that nearly all French food gave us during our first year of adaptation. I can't say they're especially good snacks, and I don't think I ever want to eat another one myself personally, but they are an integral part of our "French Experience".

I don't eat a lot of foie gras because A) our budget doesn't allow it, and B) it is so rich (the good stuff, anyway) that I simply can't consume a lot of it without rolling into the floor. This foie gras with truffles, however, sounds tempting. I am, however, most likely spoiled forever on eating storebought foie gras because I've had the good fortune to be able to have some homemade by a French master chef. Marie-Blanche, if you're reading this, tell Marcel we want more! :)

Of course, for the genuine French family meal experience, there is Nutella. I read an amusing account on another expat's blog once about her encounter with a scolding French teacher, who told her that she was ruining her child's health by sending him to school with peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. He was supposed to be eating that healthy Nutella instead! The French revulsion for peanut butter is charming and funny - I can only hope they feel the same about my reactions to andouille sausage...

Adventurous souls can try rolling their own crépes using this buckwheat flour. From what I have seen, making crépes at home (of the non-microwave variety) is something akin to conducting a symphony under the duress that, if you miss a note, your orchestra players will begin burning to briquettes.

It is a strange world today, when Americans are ordering Breton caramels from Amazon while I, sitting in Brittany, shop for crates of Orville's Ultimate Butter Popcorn...

They Are Coming, Version 2.0

2006-04-16T16:52:00.001+02:00

Today's pic is a nice shot I snapped on the way back from our Sunday at Quimiac. While France is not as experimental in the use of wind power as some other countries, this particular windmill is really operational, though I suspect it's usage is more scenic than practical.

A lot has happened since I last wrote. The government has completely scrapped the CDE employment contract in a humiliating climbdown that proves the current administration really is as toothless as international jokes make it out to be. My own feelings were best summed up in the Expatica article on the hysteria surrounding "Le Précarité" - the total shock evidenced by people's reactions here to a bill that would likely greatly reduce youth unemployment by making it easier to fire poor employees. Heavens above! I might have to survive through a two year period when I could be fired! How can anyone live with such stress??

Ahem, sorry, my sarcasm is showing...

In other news, Em and I are braced for Parental Visit 2.0, or "Emily's Parents Strike Back", or "Parents 2, Electric Boogaloo". In theory, they are coming at the end of this month. I say "in theory" because Emily's parents utilize a planning and traveling style that is so diametrically opposite to my parents as to be impenetrable to me. During the lead-in to my parents' visit, my mother would email me nineteen times a day questioning every tiny aspect of the trip - Is this pre-paid, is this reserved, have these tickets come yet, how do we get from X to X, etc. It was a fully prepared, micromanaged, highly scheduled operation that ran like a tactical military assault (and pretty much left all of us dead from exaustion once their ten days here were up). By contrast, Em's parents don't even seem to have their plane tickets yet, and their date of arrival is supposedly barely two weeks away. We're not sure exactly when they're coming, where we'll be meeting them, or whether they will actually come. Emily seems content with this vagueness, so I assume it is normal operating procedure and simply float along making pipes, expecting at any moment for them to turn up without notice on the doorstep.

The nice thing about this more-relaxed approach is that I expect their visit to be the same - a peaceful couple of weeks of casual walking about and birdwatching, instead of the hardcore Griswold's European Vacation experience of my parents' visit. ("C'mon kids, we've got nine thousand three hundred works of art to see, and the Louvre closes in fifteen minutes!") So, if people wonder why the website goes quiet for a few weeks of early May and there aren't frequent new pipe updates, it will be because we're all sitting in an outdoor café somewhere in a tiny rural village finishing up our lunchtime crépes and trying to figure out what European bird variant is nesting in the steeples of the gothic church tower.

Sunday at Quimiac

2006-04-02T20:19:00.001+02:00

While, from the news reports I read, it seems that half of France is rioting or striking or burning things, it's pretty quiet out here in Brittany. I've been following the growing chaos surrounding the government's CPE law with lots of amusement and absolutely zero sympathy for the protestors (My own thoughts on this were well-represented in this Expatica article). Hearing people with a 25% unemployment rate screeching over a law that would allow employers to fire them at will for two whole years before job entrenchment sets in is like.....well, a lot like hearing my American friends complaining about their "high cost of gas". One nods in polite sympathy and struggles to hide one's giggles. It's really difficult to take someone's complaints seriously when they're sawing their own feet off as they protest, though.

Em and I took off for the coast this Sunday afternoon, with the sun bright and the weather warm. One of our favorite little hidden spots is the Baie of Carbonais, a fantastic rocky beach with some fascinating stratification and erosion patterns to the stone. We had to get out of the house - Non-stop work lately has pretty much made mushrooms of the both of us. It was really odd to see that big blazing bright thing in the sky again, whatever it was called. Not much more to say for the moment, though here's a classic photo of Em clambering around on the rocks, and those interested can also download a brief 16 meg video of what this beach looks like (Supply your own salt spray):

What I Crave

2006-03-27T11:13:00.000+02:00

This is a photo of the honey maker's house in La Roche-Bernard. It's a sort of museum/factory/shop devoted to the art of making things with honey and beeswax, and really a neat place to visit. The fellow who runs it makes an award-winning Chouchen, which is a really sweet Breton honey mead... accent on "Sweet"! Chouchen is a bit of a Love-It-or-Hate-It drink, but I'm fond of it, especially since I can drink it from an authentic mead horn gifted to me by kind friends from across the border :)

As to today's title, here is what I crave . My French friends should find this amusing. They keep complaining about the quality of McDonald's "food", and I keep telling them that McD's is really the bottom of the barrel in American food, the problem is that the good stuff doesn't seem to get exported. What I would not give for a Ragin' Cajun, with spicy Pepper Jack and Cajun sauce, or a Firehouse Chicken or Red-Hot Buffalo Chicken sandwich. Arg!

It seems Chirac has made a fool of himself on the world stage again. I can't help but wonder that he does not realize such antics as this only make him (and France, by representation) look rather pitiable and pathetic, not proud and offended as he seems to think. Yes, English is the language of international business. The French can laugh at us once Chinese becomes the language of international business, but for the moment it would be better to just deal with it and use it to their advantage, rather than continually whining and trying to turn the clock back to 1900. C'est la vie...

And finally, my friend Steve sent me this link to what he described as "the scariest pictures he had ever seen on the net". No, they are not graphic or bloody - This is a professional photographer's page, but he does have a unique visual style with color and re-touching that lends the gallery a really disturbing look. If only I could make pipes this creepy...

More of La Roche-Bernard

2006-03-22T17:27:00.001+01:00

I love this picture. I got really lucky taking this one, with a nice combination of lighting and subject. This is a boat on the River Vilaine, taken from the riverside path that runs along the docks. Go straight down that river, and only a few turns away one will pop out into the Atlantic.

Once one turns from the river back up into town, there is a bit of an uphill hike! La Roche is really hilly, very much a three-dimensional city, unlike so many of the lowland "flat" villages spread out around here.

Here also is a glance back at the harbor, with a view down the river to the big suspended bridge that connects us to the rest of Brittany. And finally, here's a little "Hello" from our travel guide!

Un Jour à La Roche-Bernard

2006-03-21T20:32:00.002+01:00

La Roche-Bernard continues to be one of our favorite places in the Loire-Atlantique region. It's only seven minutes' drive north of here, and only minutes from the sea, yet it has an odd sort of highland mountain village character , all hills and stone streets. The best part of the city is the vast garden park that sprawls through it, replete with footpaths, benches, small gardens, ponds, and occasionally even a bit of birdie wildlife. One can walk the park for some time, eventually finding one's self down by the water's edge, where La Roche meets the Vilaine river. Rather than do a lot of writing, I'm going to mostly post photos today, all taken yesterday during a brief relaxation visit which found us wandering all through the city looking for interesting things to shoot.

Here is a photo from the park. Some of the architectural features there date back to Roman times, including a communal bath & washing area. Also, one sees Emily screaming into the window of a jewelry shop. In the background, one can see Smart.Com. For our first three years here, when we had no English-language TV and only some worn-out videotapes to watch, we would occasionally rent DVDs from Smart. Since they all had multiple language tracks, it was the only way we could find a movie every once in a while that we could understand!

Above, one sees a beautiful view down across the city garden park, continuing out over the tops of the masts of the river yachts, to the opposing riverbank topped by a house that I really, really want.

Here is a nicely-composed shot of Emily wandering the downtown cobblestone streets. I have plenty of photos, and will probably post more tomorrow, so check this space again!

Thomas Wolfe was Right

2006-03-17T18:13:00.001+01:00

" And again, again, in the old house I feel beneath my tread the creak of the old stair, the worn rail, the white washed walls, the feel of darkness and the house asleep, and think, "I was a child here; here the stairs, and here was darkness; this was I, and here is Time." Thomas Wolfe, 'Return'

Today's photo is a shot of Emily hiking around in the Briére marshlands birdwatching, down near the coast of Mesquer. Heron city!

Last week my old friend Paul sent me the links to their family's house-for-sale, and a link to the model of the new home they're buying in Alabama. It was a bit of a shock - when you move far away, you inevitably freeze-frame everything about your previous home and when it changes, it's more unsettling than normal. This was a bigger reality shift than expected, however, because it caused both Emily and myself to realize that we now have virtually no roots left in what we think of as "home", except for our parents. For the past four years, we've both entertained vague ideas of eventually flying back over for a working vacation - a visit to the Richmond pipe show followed by a leisurely drive down to North Carolina to visit all our old friends... except that now, they are all gone. Virtually every last person I knew and was close with has moved out of state, which brings the realization that a visit "home" will be solely a visit to our parents (and a stop at Pipe & Pint, of course!).

My last remaining grandparent died the summer before we moved overseas, and with his passing I also lost my connection to my childhood in the form of his family farm, where I spent a lot of adventurous hours as a kid. It's funny to look back at this timing now, because I was really unaware at the time of just how utterly severed I was from everything in my life previously. No more farm, no more white painted house with creaky floors, no more gates and ponds and outbuildings. My parents moved around the time that I left for college, and I never really had any roots in their second house - later, they moved again to a house with which I have no emotional connection at all (It is a perfectly nice place, but it is not "home" to me in the sense that my childhood house in Welcome was home - it is simply the place where my parents happen to live). Ergo, when I now think of revisiting Davidson County, I come up blank. There is literally nothing there for me to see again, nothing familiar that would feel like "coming home" - people, yes, but not places. Odd, that. When the closest remaining place you can get to a familiar childhood haunt is Hanes Mall (undoubtedly also changed from end to end), one questions the idea of trying to revisit the past at all.

Turnabout is Fair Play

2006-03-08T21:33:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I posted a joke about how French people speak English. Thankfully, my French friends all found this funny rather than insulting, and have not stormed the house with torches (yet). Since I got away with that, I will try offering up a really funny link about our German friends too!

Amidst all this language silliness, I should note that tomorrow I start official regular French lessons with our village friend Claudie, which I hope will be a help in my mangling of français. A little at a time...

For fairness and equal humor for all, here are some of my favorite jokes about Americans:
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When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in 0 gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C.

The Russians used a pencil.

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Q: What do Americans call a TV set that goes five years without need of repair?

A: An import.

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Q: What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages?
A: Tri-Lingual.
Q: What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
A: Bi-Lingual.
Q: What do you call a person who speaks one language?
A: American!

Joke of the Day

2006-03-07T19:45:00.002+01:00

"Bonjour!", dit les hommes aux FumeursdePipe.

Who, I suspect, will never speak to me again after I post this joke. But, I want to stress immediately that this was sent to me by a French person, so don't blame me!! :)

Un petit test proposé lors d'un entretien d'embauche...

Trois personnes sont convoquées pour un  entretien d'embauche en Angleterre.

Au moment de tester leur maîtrise de la  langue anglaise, le recruteur leur
dit :

"Faites-moi une phrase avec les 3  mots suivants :green, pink, yellow. "

C''est d''abord le Belge qui se lance :

"I wake up in the morning, I eat a yellow banana, a  green pepper and in
the evening I watch the Pink Panther on  TV".

C''est ensuite au tour de l''Allemand :

"I wake up in the morning, I see the yellow sun, the  green grass and I
think to myself: I hope it will be a pink  day".

Enfin, le Français s'avance et dit :

"I wake up in ze mornink, I hear ze phone: «green.....green...green»... And
I pink up ze phone and I say  «Yellow?»"

A Little Snow, Not Much Else

2006-03-06T22:17:00.001+01:00

In our four years here, we have been lucky to get one snowfall per winter, so you can imagine our surprise to find it snowing huge flakes a couple of days ago - in March, even - the second time this winter. I grabbed our new camera and shot a little Quicktime video clip of the snow on our border hedge, and another of snow falling across the road from us at the Salle d'Europe building. Outside of this odd and unexpected event, I have absolutely nothing to write about. We've been stuck in the workshop like ticks for the past few weeks, and when you never get to leave the house, there isn't much room for interesting things to happen that you can write stories about.

Which does spur me to comment that, at the best of times, I prefer for this blog to be about things - events, people, culture, ideas - instead of a stream of consciousness about myself. I've read a good number of blogs; good, bad, and occasionally very ugly, and have noticed what I consider a disturbing trend among them... Something that I'll dub "ego masturbation". It's a process that seems to set in as the writers drift more and more off the theme of their blog and begin to toss in more and more of their lives, likes, dislikes, etc. I've seen many a blog written to excess by some unknown twenty-something who's absolutely convinced that their opinions about music, movies, hot guys/girls, or whatever, are so utterly engrossing that surely it's worth writing fifteen thousand words about them (God forbid if they try their hand at a little poetry...).
So, if this place gets quiet for a long time, it's likely that I just don't have much to talk about.

On that idle ramble, I'll leave with a joke for the day.

Adam was walking alone through the garden and wishing he had a companion to talk with. God came to him and said, "Don't be lonely, Adam. I will make you a companion called woman. She will be beautiful, sensuous, intelligent, lusty, and kind. She will obey your every command without question. She will prepare all of your meals, clean the home for you, and iron your fig leaf once you realize you're naked. She will always be happy and never, ever have headaches."

Adam said, "This all sounds great! What's it going to cost me?"

God replied, "An arm and a leg."

Adam gulped, considered, and asked, "What can I get for just a rib?"
And the rest is history....

Representing America

2006-02-26T17:35:00.001+01:00

Now that the Olympics are winding up, maybe I'll have a chance to reflect on some murky bits that have been stirred to the top of my puddled brain. One of these is the sheer oddness of being a walking representative of your home country. Out here in the French countryside, a lot of people have never even seen an American outside of TV, so we are the country. Constantly in the back of the mind is the worry, "Am I going to make my whole country look bad if I do this or that?" I can't begin to know what impressions about the US we must give to the locals, though my guesses would be:

"She's really nice and polite, but isn't it odd how she doesn't wear makeup or take pains to dress stylishly?"

"That American fellow seems very reserved. He's polite when he talks, but he doesn't talk much, and he always looks kind of unshaven and scruffy."

"They have good manners but they really keep to themselves." (Of course, when you can't communicate well enough for casual socializing, this is the unavoidable byproduct.)

At this point the reality behind the impressions diverges sharply based on one's cultural predispositions. In the US, one could read these descriptions and hear that Em and I both have a strong sense of identity, are confident enough not to bother with supercilious "dressing up", and are probably decent characters because we have good manners. I suspect that French folks put a lot more weight on appearances than we do - especially regarding proper dress and grooming - so I doubt we would rate so well in their eyes. However, I hope we make a better show for our country than some of our other US exports.....

....Such as, for instance, Tonya Harding. The Olympics this year brought back memories of that utterly revolting experience, and Em and I were very happy that we were not living in Europe during her Olympics. Seeing this classic example of redneck trailer trash (Pardon my crude directness, but, well, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it..) representing the United States to the world would have had both of us refusing to show our faces in town for months! I still think back on her blubbering performance at the skating events and mentally cringe. This year's crop of athletes made us proud, though - at least with the exception of Bode Miller, who came off in BBC interviews like a bored frat boy "too cool for his shirt". For me, the most incredible Olympic moment belonged to the Chinese skater who suffered that terrible crash, then paused, rested a moment, and carried on her couples exhibition to such extraordinary results. I doubt I will ever do anything that would cause our local friends to be equally impressed with American resolve, but her determination really gives everyone else something to shoot for.