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)

Infected Bigfoots in the Land of Tiny Shoes, pt 1

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.

Indoor Rain

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 ;)

Grocery Wars

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

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...

Beware the Murky Frogpits

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!

Showered

This little adventure is an excellent example of why I never leave the house. People ask me, "Why is your production so slow? Why can't you make more pipes?". The answer is, "Because I spend a third of my life doing stuff like what I'm about to describe."

For some time now, one of the doors of our downstairs shower has been slowly breaking. It's a cheapo (OK, "entry-level") enclosure with doors that just hang on plastic rails instead of rolling on wheels, and the rails began to split off on one door. This brought us to an interesting question - We've never had to do this before, and had no clue who to call. For that matter, we weren't sure if it was possible to replace just one door (with no idea where the enclosure came from or when it was installed). Time for a trip to Castorama, France's version of Home Labyrinth.

The idea of trying to explain, en français, to a clerk at Castorama exactly what we wanted... and get what we wanted.. was harrowing enough that we decided to call in help in the form of our friend Claudie. She went along with us to the megastore back in December. After some prowling through the bathroom section, we found a shower enclosure that looked vaguely like ours, and whose doors measured exactly the same - price 100 € for the whole enclosure.

Claudie found an employee and reeled off a long string of lightning-fast français. Occasionally, Claudie or the store employee would look at us, and we would nod and look wooden, merely non-French-speaking tide markers bobbing in her wake. Yes, it is possible to order a single door, but it must be ordered special. A single door costs 70 €, a blatantly obvious attempt by the manufacturer to convince people to just buy the whole darned thing please.

But, unfortunately, we choose to get just one door, initiating yet another utterly ridiculous encounter with efficiency in action....

A deposit is placed, the order is entered, and we are told by the cheerful help-desk person that our door will arrive before Christmas. This is about two weeks away, and sounds reasonable given the fact that Christmas had cast its giant chaotic shadow over the world at that time. Of course, anyone can guess what happened next.

Cricket, cricket.

We are too busy in January to even worry about where our shower door is, but we're nonetheless amused when we finally receive notice on February 3rd that our door has arrived (You know, the one that would be there before Christmas). Off we go - Day #2 taken off from work - and eventually find our way to the pickup desk, which is of course deserted. There's a bell, which Emily politely dings. We wait. Time passes. I rrrrrrrrrrrring the bell obnoxiously. Again, we wait, and time passes. Eventually a smiling, cheerful fellow shows up who must be North African, because we absolutely cannot understand anything he says. Imagine hearing a hard-core Rastafarian or deep Cajun accent laid over a foreign language, and you have an idea just how incomprehensible this fellow is to us.

"Bjjjjrkleyhfrrrnnecc luu paouppyiuh?", he asks.

We smile politely and pass over our item ticket.

He eyes it suspiciously, like we were bounty hunters delivering a court summons. "Ggrrthhling nuzz efflight shhuv ngginth pauuppiyuh cahhunla bip?", he asks. We smile like idiots and point to our ticket, hoping it will answer all questions. "Hjjurrpl cmme liejjloipla frnurp.", he comments, no doubt thinking we must both be mentally handicapped. He vanishes into the back room and returns with a long box on a cart. Wow, how easy! "Thyjjkling liueh frgling teeekuh pajhunkah.", he adds, gesturing to the box and to our ticket. We pick it up and wheel it away, not entirely sure if we've been served by a Frenchman or a visiting extraterrestrial.

It isn't until the checkout that things go wrong. The equally smiling girl at the register rings up our door at 299 € - Yeow! "Ce n'est pas la porte vrai, msr", she adds, as we thank the heavens that she at least speaks in a foreign language that we sort of understand. It isn't the right door. In fact, according to the item ticket, it is an entire shower enclosure assembly for a totally different setup. Cashier girl gets on the phone with ... well, someone, and the most amazingly long exchange ensues..... We literally wait for ten solid minutes while every possible iteration of the situation is discussed, apparently with great enthusiasm. At one point our girl exclaims, "Mais oui!! Mais oui!! Mais oui!! Mais oui!! Mais oui!!" ("But yes!") repeatedly, leading us to wonder if our door has somehow brought her to orgasm. Tired of just standing around, I determine to apply the American approach to the question of exactly what we have, and I tear the box open while our cashier sighs in post-coital bliss.

Inside the box is a beautiful, obviously expensive single door off of a very nice shower assembly - not even remotely like what we ordered. Our cashier finally gets off the phone (no pun intended) and tells us we must go back to the help desk and speak again to the Being Of Exotic Speech. Back across the store we go, but of course he isn't there. At this point we're both hungry and have lost two solid hours of working time (not counting the previous trip in December). I am ready to just dump the thing on them and leave for home, letting them "Oui oui" their way through whatever the fallout might be, but Emily wants to wait a bit.. and, magically, Mr. Blfgghltl returns one minute before we're about to depart.

"Bgflljklly ghhtulgly fhtagn ullthilyyll cmwymwymwylln thangkling fghtlu nnthlasgh.", he says earnestly. Fortunately, we have passed the Blinking-Stupidly stage and eased into the Cold-Dead-Stare-of-a-Potentially-Psychotic-Postal-Worker look, and he somewhat nervously gestures for us to follow him back across to the other side of the store. There, in the bathroom section, other employees converge and apologize, and offer to let us take a door right off a model if it will fit. Unfortunately, the display that matched our shower has vanished! Beaten by the system again. We get a refund of our deposit and depart, starving by that point and resigned to being forced to buy a whole new shower enclosure simply because it's going to be too much of a damned nuisance to try to order a part. We've already lost much more than the 30 € price difference just in lost working time, so we opt to wait until Spring when we will (hopefully) have more money and just buy a very nice, totally new shower then.

This, then, is another great example of why, when customers ask me if I can finish a pipe by the end of the week, I give replies like, "Well, maybe, possibly... if nothing weird happens....."

Carnac, and the Adventure of the Camera-Eating Toilet

The subconscious is a powerful thing. I've been working on assembling the video clips from our Christmas vacation with my parents, and this involves all sorts of image manipulation, title creation, etc. The image here is a photo taken at Carnac, the oldest site of standing stones in the world (predating the Egyptian pyramids, in fact). I created this as the intro-title for the video segment on Carnac, and only afterward did I glance at it sideways and think, "Ye gods, I've created a 70's progressive rock album cover!" As a friend said, I expect to open it up and find a bunch of black and white photos of sulky-looking twenty-somethings in spandex outfits and long hair. It is, I must say, a terrific photo though - I don't know if I'm being unabashedly bragging or not, as I have no clue who took this (Either my father, Emily, or myself). We kept passing the digital camera around all day, which led to Holiday Incident #2 (#1 was the spectacular disintegration of our TGV train en route) - The Camera-Eating Toilet.

I must digress - Public toilets in France are, to an American's expectations, anything from terrifying medieval pits to fascinatingly arcane exercises in exotic plumbing. The former can still be found scattered through any number of villages, and are best described as sheds erected to hold in the smell of a round hole dug in the bare earth, or chipped through bare rock. You squat, do your business, and flee before anything you've disturbed in the dark pit comes up to investigate why the sun was blotted out. Other designs are positively 23rd century, like the mirror-walled pay toilets in some big cities. At Carnac, the public toilet resembles what we think of as a shower - A sort of tiled-bottomed recess with foot pedals that one steps into and (apparently from the look of the place) fires wildly.

My father is a long-time plumbing and heating man, and was understandably fascinated by this exotic arrangement - more fascinated, in fact, than his jacket pockets were up to, and the next thing we knew, he appeared outside holding a dripping and very dead digital camera and one last battery (The case had popped open on impact with the tile and the other three Ni-Mh rechargables had all vanished into the maw of the basin). We held a brief ceremony for the death of our faithful camera, which was a bit of a stupidly sentimental favorite since we started the pipe business with it, and it was one of our few belongings to survive the original move to Brittany - and then got on with business, ordering a new one from FNAC which arrived nearly before I'd gotten up from the computer chair. Kudos to FNAC for excellent service in the busiest of seasons! And now we have a new digital camera, an Olympus FE-120 - Less than half the cost of our old one new, with three times the megapixel count and resolutions, easier use, and a sharper macro mode. Blog visitors may have to get accustomed to new pictures opening HUGE now, as the camera defaults to something insane like 2600x1600 res.

Now that I've typed all of that, I'll have to leave the actual description of Carnac itself for tomorrow...

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.

Breaking News - In Today's Weather...

A friend of mine sent me this and I had to post it, it is too silly for words......

A Little of the Old Ultra-Violence

Bonjour! In answer to the various folks from the US who keep emailing us, yes, we are still alive and doing fine so far as we ride our way through this bizarre wave of violence that has seized France. I thought today's picture was a nice choice, since we may all end up living in such places! This is a little museum down near La Croisic. It was originally a German artillery emplacement in WW2, and it's quite an interesting historical oddity. The thickness of the reinforced solid concrete walls is as astounding as the paranoia-inducing interior is claustrophobic - The place seems built to be staffed by dwarves, as the ceilings were constantly scraping my head. The funniest bits about it are the painted windows on the exterior (visible when the pic is enlarged). Fearful of naval shelling from sea, the wily Germans built a quick roof on the thing and painted fake windows on the sides, hoping to fool Allied warships into believing it was an ordinary house!

I don't know what to make of the wave of riots that has hit France. At first, we brushed it off as normal Paris craziness, but as the ripples of violence have spread out through the country, we have grown increasingly cautious. Over the past few nights there have been riots in Nantes and Rennes, both barely an hour's drive from here even though they are different worlds from our rural area. What has boggled me the most is the near-total non-response from the French government - A UK paper recently ran the headline "French government fiddles while Paris burns", and it isn't far off the mark. When the LA riots occurred in the US, the National Guard was on the spot almost immediately and there was no joking around about the use of lethal force. I am very surprised that this has been allowed to run so long without military intervention, but Chirac seems to be slipping into a near-catatonic disconnect with the populace he supposedly governs. The whole country feels, to me, momentarily like a huge ship whose helmsman has just decided to take an unannounced break... Sheer inertia keeps things moving forward, and everyone still has to get to work, but there is a palpable sense that no one is quite in charge. Sarkozy and Villepin keep pulling the situation first one way and then the other (I told my mother it was like putting Dick Cheney and Ted Kennedy in co-charge of a US crisis, and giving them equal authority). To put it mildly, the message is mixed... First they want to negotiate with the rioters, then the rioters are scum, then the government is announcing massive welfare spending to help these people, and then the riot police are given powers to raid any homes at will. I hope to write more on this later - I have invited some of the locals here in Herbignac to contribute their thoughts, so perhaps I'll have some interesting insights to pass along the next time I post. In the meantime, we'll just keep the window shades cranked down and a hefty crowbar near at hand!