The Good Side of Brittany

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)

Knox Visit

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:

Picture Packs

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.

Batman is French?

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

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

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.

They Are Coming, Version 2.0

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.

Cracks

The funny thing about stress is that you often don't realize just how tense you are about something until some time afterwards - Well, at least I do not. Emily and I spent the duration of my parents' visit on high intensity alert, a state of constant watchfulness and wariness, trying to always stay one step ahead of any problems that might arise to spoil their holidays. My consciousness was a lot like our home videocamera movements, always jerking hard from one item to the next like a gnat on too much sugar - Keeping one eye out for pickpockets, tramps, and other accosters, another eye on potential travel stumbling blocks (strikes, gas, vehicle malfunctions, etc), a third eye on planning our spending and eating schedules so we could actually find food on an American timetable (We usually eat dinner at 6 instead of the European 9-10pm), a fourth eye on our surroundings, and, well... that's a lot of eyes! On top of this, some portion of my brain had to spend time processing an amusingly endless stream of questions. I've just finished assembling our DVD video of our travels, and it is particularly funny in that half of my parents' recorded dialog is, "What is..?", "How did they..?", "Where do we..?", "How is the..?", "What do we do with..?", and, "Why is this..?"

About five or six days into their visit, we are at Chateau Suscinio, and the first stress cracks show. We found our way here OK, Emily driving and me navigating our crinkled French roadmap, and we pull into the parking area under a bleak grey sky with the huge stone castle squatting on the horizon. Everyone exits and starts the trot in, when Emily realizes she's locked the keys in the car. It takes a second for this to sink in - Emily never does this, never, in normal circumstances, but there they are, taunting us from the steering wheel ignition and seeming to jeer, "See? See? See how easily your day can be wrecked?"

Because it isn't like locking your keys in the car back home...

My brain is still feeling numb to the potential enormity of the problem as small bits of data start to sprinkle in, as if from the grey clouds above. How will we explain to the staff that we've locked our keys in the car, in French? I know "voiture" but not "lock" or any variation thereof.
Lots of pantomime looms. It is two days before Christmas and we are the only visitors in the lot. Even if we can explain our situation, will there be a locksmith available, and not on holiday? How long will it take to locate someone who can help, and can they locate someone who can help?

In my mind's eye, I see the arrival of a locksmith like the electrician that our friend Lesley once described to us. Her house was half-wired, and the electrician had promised to finish the essential work on the weekend, even though it would be the day after a holiday. He did indeed arrive, so drunk he could barely stand, and after he'd vanished into the back room with a large power drill for a few minutes, she heard a loud crash. What she found was a ragged hole in the wall, and the electrician lying on his back, fallen over his own toolbox, feet in the air, gripping his running power drill in both hands at his portly middle - bit augering at the ceiling - and the man in a state of catatonic alcoholic delerium. In a blurry fast-forward of images, I see us there, waiting for three hours before anyone arrives, our precious vacation day ruined, only to end up with our window broken by the local "handyman" in clumsy attempts to jimmy the lock... riding home with freezing wind in our faces, the car unusable in the Brittany rain, and unfixable for the Christmas weekend.

Eegah.

My parents have walked on ahead and are blissfully unaware of this, as Emily and I stare at the car in dumb horror, both slowly realizing that the crushing "Thing Gone Wrong" that we've been trying to protect my parents from has indeed happened. Emily wonders, out of jittery curiosity, if the hatchback is open - We have been using it a lot for bags and luggage. This is one of those hopeless hopes that you think of to put off the inevitable collision with reality just one second longer, akin to, "Hey, maybe if I look away and look back, the keys will not actually be there in the ignition". We always lock the hatch. Emily pushes the button and it pops open freely, left unlocked for who knows how long.

It takes us a good two seconds to mentally process this new input.

I feel, ridiculously, unfazed - The reality of having to wrestle with key retrieval hadn't even sunken in yet, so the reality of being surprise-saved seems totally casual. Emily, by contrast, stares for a moment in blinking shock and then bursts into tears, sobbing on my shoulder after the crisis is averted. I know I have been stressed for the past several days, but so has she, and apparently this has just blown an emotional tension safety valve. Thirty seconds of intense crying ensue, after which she floats away in a giddy state of endorphine hilarity, emanating relief like grinning sunshine.

After walking halfway to the castle and realizing we aren't with them, my parents come back in time to see us taking the hatchback cover and seats down to enable anal entry into the car for key retrieval. Arriving after the fact, they have blissfully missed the trauma and only have to experience the annoyance of waiting an extra five minutes before we can all go see the big landmark. Emily and I look at each other, more conscious than ever of the level of secret tension we share in trying to ensure my parents have a Perfect Christmas in France.

Parent Opinions of France

I am trying to convince my mother to write a blog entry about their impressions of France. I seem to have gotten emails or calls from virtually every French friend we know recently, all wanting to know what my parents thought of France. This morning I wrote a reply to our friend Sophie, and thought I would copy it here as well, just for a quick rundown of what seemed to be the basic impressions:

My parents had a great time, and already want to come back. They liked it here very much, and though they were happy to go back home, they said it also felt like leaving "home" too.

They really loved the bakeries here, and the chocolate shops everywhere - every place we went walking, they always had to go stare through the windows of the chocolate shops and smell the bread shops (An entertaining recurring theme in the video we shot). I think they got quite addicted to having fresh bread for breakfast every morning. It is just a shame that we can't ship chouchettes by mail!

It was funny seeing things through "new eyes" again. We got very frustrated with them when they seemed hesitant about EVERYTHING... We kept saying, "Just try it, eat it, it won't kill you" but they seemed convinced that every food dish was secretly made from snail testicles. (Probably they take too many of my jokes about French food seriously)

They were really impressed by the TGV (despite it breaking) and the tram lines in cities. One (if a European reader) must understand that we don't have much public transport in the US, and what we have is usually so god-awfully bad that it just makes you want to drive your own car that much more. We even nicknamed our own high-speed train Amtrack "the Death Train" because it crashes so often.

My parents were horrified by the medieval toilets in villages, and thought that new French houses were frighteningly conformist (they all really look identical) but they loved the tile roofs and dad was impressed by the widespread use of hot water heating. Mom thought all the "tiny cars" were cute. I suspect they both had an eye-widening experience at the cost of gas here. Oh, and there was much amusement about the miniature sizes of everything - the showers, the fridge, the stove, the washer & dryer, etc. Yes, we live in an HO scale house.

More to come, if I can convince my mother to write it herself...

Excavation Time

We have spent the last day digging in our house. Well, perhaps "stashing" might be a better term, as the task of finding homes and storage space for the hoard of stuff my parents brought has been quite a job! I'm going to make today's entry brief since I wrote such a long tale yesterday (TGVictims), and instead just post this quick pic of Emily and my mother and father all relaxing in our now-familiar living room. I suspect that pipe buyers are going to find their boxes packed with lots of wrapping paper filler for some months to come.....

TGVictims

(Photo: AFP - And note that this is an older photo of a different accident. I sadly did not have our camera along to take pictures of our experience)
So there we were on the train. We'd picked my parents up at the Charles de Gaulle airport without hassle, and hadn't even had to do a last-second race to our train thanks to some early scouting around for the right platform. All is going well, and we are on the TGV blitzing happily through the French countryside and looking out the windows at the green grasslands.

Suddenly, the entire train shudders slightly and the side window is obscured by flying gravel and dust. For the first second we just think we've hit a dust cloud, but the gravel seems to be striking the windows awfully hard and should normal bits of dirt cause large starred cracks in the shatterproof windows? Outside, the green view is gone and there is nothing but opaque grey dust cloud for several very long seconds as the smell of burned electrical components fills the cabin and the train continues to shudder. For a brief half-second as I look out the window, I very calmly think, "I wonder if this is a bomb? We may be about to die in a 160mph train wreck." It's funny just how detached one can get in the middle of something potentially life-threatening.

Fortunately, nothing so dire has happened - We are not in a disaster movie nor a Steven Seagal train hijack movie, we are in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles". The train grinds slowly to a total halt in open countryside.

We wait.




We wait some more.

Eventually someone comes on the intercom to announce that the train has a "problem" and we should all remain in our seats (Possibly to avoid all those nasty dramatic news photos of flaming passengers leaping out the windows, but more probably to give the conductors time to assess the damage without being followed around by hordes of angry passengers demanding answers). Looking out my battle-scarred window, I see a railway employee walking the length of the train, peering up at it in disquieting consternation, and talking a lot into a portable phone. Eventually we are told that our train is dead, mort, pushing up the daisies.... In short, it is an Ex-train.

At this point we are all having John Candy visions of dragging our five bulky suitcases across miles of open fields in search of the nearest road, all so we can be met by a guy in a rusty pickup truck who will let us ride in the back for the next four hours into Herbignac. My parents brought an incredible orgy of Christmas gifts for us, including roughly forty-seven new outfits, board games, puzzles, toys of all sorts, and enough microwave popcorn to fill a lawn & garden bag. Suddenly this rich hoard of goodies is taking on a distinctly ominous air of menace as we wonder just how far we will be hiking.

Fortunately for us, we are not in flames, nor about to explode, nor under attack by generic foreign terrorists - It seems an engine has blown apart somehow (We are never given the exact details of what happened, at least such that we can make out from the all-French intercom announcements which are as intelligible as Jacques Clouseau singing through a helmet full of Jello). We sit tight and enjoy the excellent French approach to the situation ("Please remain calm and do not try to open the outside doors. The bar car is open for business. Enjoy!").

Eventually, another TGV, already full of puzzled passengers, arrives from somewhere else to pick up We Stranded Many. The switchover car is up at the front (The trains are side-by-side, with passengers hopping across the gap) so we get to haul our fifty pound bags of luggage the entire length of our train.... and then the entire length of the other train, all while the previous passengers look on in a combination of pity, wonder, and smug contentment that they already have their seats. For we refugees, the lodging is more adventurous - Every joiner section is piled floor-to-ceiling with luggage and people, and we are packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Emily and I are trying to do double-duty as we watch bags, listen for the garbled announcements, and then translate every bit of news to my worried parents who are learning just what we've meant when we've described past experiences as, "We had a French Travel Adventure".

After four stops and several train changes, we are finally on the way to our home station via some wizardly re-routing of the lines. It wasn't all unpleasant - I got to share standing room crammed into a train toilet compartment with an attractive young lady, we met a few friendly fellow TGVictims, and I got a good story out of the experience. Eventually we rattled our way into the St. Nazaire station straddling our bags in the joiner compartment, three hours later than scheduled, hungry and frazzled but victorious.

It was December 18th.

My parents had officially arrived in France.

They are Coming

I write this on Sunday evening, December 12th. Next weekend at this time, my parents will be here - the first time that we have seen them since we moved to France in 2002. To say that we are all a little frazzled is an understatement. There seem to be hundreds of details to attend to, and they are not even here yet... This includes a mandatory cleaning of the house. My mother is legendarily tidy and clean, and her house looks like it popped off the pages of "Better Homes and Gardens" - a far cry from our habitually messy place which always seems on the verge of being overrun by half-complete creative projects, wandering home restoration, or what I will kindly refer to as "cat crap" (About seventy five stuffed mice, stuffed snakes, rolling balls, strings, scratching posts, not to mention the semi-mobile hairballs themselves).

When I was in my teen years, my grandmother Talbert (Who was often amusingly messy herself) told me, very seriously, that, "Any woman you marry is going to have an awful time if she tries to live up to your mother in housekeeping, because she keeps her house perfect". I didn't understand this sagely bit of advice at the time, but years later I've come to be entertained by the whole "Wife/Mother-In-Law" relationship. The dichotomy between my reactions and my wife's is particularly funny this week - since I grew up with mom, I long ago came to accept that no housecleaning I did would be up to mom's standards, so I generally don't bother. I sweep, I straighten, and if anything beyond this is unsightly, too bad for the offended. Emily, by contrast, might well burn up like a mouse on an industrial transformer this week, as she races around the house scrubbing the edges of under-sink piping with toothbrushes.

On the other hand, I wonder what mom will make of the fact that Frenchmen urinate in public...

Memories of Summer

Here's a little reminder of summer weather, now that we're mired in the rains of autumn. This was taken at a backyard lunch with our friend Marie-Blanche and her family. MB's husband Marcel is a professional chef, so one can imagine what his "picnics" are like! This is also a funny pic because it's one of the few that show both Emily and myself, since normally it's always one or the other of us taking the shot.

Like the pipe pic blog, this is a bit later than intended in being updated, because of me trying to finish up the four pipes I just posted. I am going to be so happy (and so exhausted) when all the Halloween pipes are finished and we can relax...

The last few days have seen a frenzy of transatlantic emailing as my parents finalize the details of their trip here for Christmas. We are trying to cover every detail and provide back-up plans for the back-up plans (Which reminds me, I need to find an English speaking member of the pipe club in Paris who is willing to be an "emergency number", in case Emily and I are abducted by aliens or something en route to the airport). Helping them plan has brought back memories of our final trip over. It's impossible to describe what it's like to be looking out an airplane window knowing that everything you own is on your back or on a boat, and you are leaving an entire life behind. It was exhilerating and terrifying - mostly, it just felt like being genuinely 100% alive. We don't have a lot of moments in life that are frozen in our memories forever. Most of the ones we have seem to stop as we finish with childhood and our adult lives become one long hazy corridor lined with grey doors and bills, without a lot of genuine moments to punctuate it, so it's nice that I've picked up a few more vivid memories to decorate the walls with. People always ask me, "WHY did you move to France?" There are about a hundred answers to that question, but maybe the most essential one is, "Because I did not want to be lying in my deathbed at 85 or whatever, looking back and thinking that I didn't have the courage to live a little more".

And the Halloween movie of the day is............ "Undead". This low budget indie film from Australia was clearly an attempt to do a modern day Peter Jackson flick, sort of "Bad Taste" with CGI. It's a very over-the-top horror comedy, a genre quite hard to do well, and I can say immediately that Undead has some of the silliest and funniest scenes I've seen in anything SINCE "Bad Taste". That is, at least for the first two thirds of the film. Had the last part been as excellent as the first two acts, it would have been a masterpiece of low budget cinematic zombie cheese, but alas, it goes downhill and in about fifteen random directions and by the end, we were just sort of staring blankly at the screen as "stuff" kept happening louder and louder. Overall, a fun flick, worth a rental if not a buy-al.