Vouvray and Rochecorbon

Last weekend we took a stroll in Rochecorbon with Elodie. Although only 5 km from Tours, you get the feeling of really being out in the country. Rochecorbon is notable for its magnificent troglodytic homes (houses built partially into the limestone cliffs), many of which belong to the proprietors of the Vouvray wineries. Vouvray is a regionally-produced sparkling wine, and Tourangeaux proudly point out that it can be superior to Champagne.


Courtyard of a home near the Vouvray wineries.


Rochecorbon is also home to a former monastery from the Middle Ages, which is now a large private school called Marmoutier. The grounds contain ruins of one of France's largest cathedrals, which is the site of an ongoing archaeological excavation.



Former wine caves in Rochecorbon.








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Noël à Tours

All the Christmas decorations went up last weekend around the city; trees in front of the Hôtel de Ville, lights strung across the streets, and loud-speakers blaring a constant stream of Christmas muzak.

We put our decorations up, too.

Sanksgeeving à la Français

We had a nice Thanksgiving in France with our friends Damien and Elodie, and two other teachers from Lycee Bayet, where I work. This was the first time that either of us had ever cooked any traditional Thanksgiving foods.

We found the only whole turkey available in November in Tours - when we bought it, the woman at the butcher looked at us like we were crazy! Here, when you buy a whole turkey, it still has the head and feet attached. It took the butcher about 10 minutes to pull the feet off while we watched in horror. Roasting a whole turkey in a French oven was also difficult, as it just barely fit inside.

After a lot of searching, we also found cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and something that resembled a pumpkin for our pie. Overall, we were able to cook a convincing American meal for our friends, who enjoyed this meal a lot more than when we made meatloaf.

Elodie, the librarian at Lycée Bayet organized the Soirée Thanksgiving for us.

Brendan carves the turkey in style.

Damien serves the cranberry bread.

Books I've read since coming to France

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

Hard to describe or do justice to - but I will definitely be reading it again.  I didn't know anything about Faulkner when I picked this up - I guess I thought he would be a more tasteful, less sappy Tennessee Williams (lumping all Southern writers together unfairly) - instead, it was truly mind-bending, weird, and great.

All The King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Continuing my tour of Southern writers - incredibly readable and very sad.  The New York Times called it "The definitive novel on American politics" - I'm not so sure today - the kind of populist demagogue figure represented by Governor Stark (actually Huey Long, then-governor of Louisiana) isn't nearly as typical in American politics today as they were in the 1940s and before.  Reading All the King's Men, the contemporary figure I was reminded of the most was Hugo Chavez.

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami

First thing I've read by Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, and lots of other stuff - and I wasn't disappointed.  Until the last 50 pages, when I was disappointed by a kind of sappy, unsatisfying ending that killed all the suspense and intrigue that had been building until then.  Still quite masterful, though.

Savages - Joe Kane

Pretty good investigative journalism about one of the last undiscovered (and uncivilized) tribes of the Amazon, and their attempts to preserve their culture in the face of oil companies, the government, and globalization.

Primitive Rebels - E.J. Hobsbawm

Hobsbawm takes an interesting and much-needed look at pre-political political movements (not a contradiction in terms, as you will learn if you read this book) - that is, social movements among the poor and illiterate of Europe before socialism and Communism were known of.  By looking at banditry, mobs, the Sicilian Mafia, and millenarian movements such as Andalusian anarchism as social things (across the political spectrum - apolitical, radical, and reactionary) - we see (or at least I did) peasant self-organization as an alternative to state power.  I thought his analysis of rural anarchism in Spain from the 1800s to 1936 was excellent, and functioned as an interesting parallel historical current to the much better-known urban anarcho-syndicalism during the Spanish Civil War.

IV - Chuck Klosterman

I bought this to read on the plane, and I finished it before the plane ride was over.  My book/dollars ratio was kind of skewed - if I had bought a Harper's, as I often do in the airport, I could have read it for about $9 less than this book.  A few of the essays were worthwhile - Klosterman's insomnia driven, 24-hour VH1 Classic music video saga made me laugh out loud - but it felt like I had bought a book that was really an overpriced, heavier magazine - which it was, since he wrote all of the essays for magazines.  

Montbazon

This is where I work Mondays and Tuesdays - Montbazon.  It is home to France's oldest castle, which is in fact a dungeon built in the 10th century by the dread Count of Anjou, a notorious jerk from French history.  The Count, aka 'The Black Falcon' aka 'Fulk Nerra' celebrated a happy first millenium in December 999 by burning his wife at the stake in her wedding dress for sleeping with a goatherd.  

According to the Engrishy inscription at the castle site, though, he "was also a man of great vision.  To seize the Touraine at the end of the 10th century, he ringed his prey with revolutionary stone towers."

Montbazon is a really pretty little town, though - I work at College Albert Camus (middle school), mostly with sixieme (5th grade) and cinqieme (6th grade) students.  

Agathe Cléry

We've been seeing lots of posters for this  new French movie, Agathe Cléry:



Which is apparently a musical about a white woman who magically turns black.



The tagline is: 'Elle est blanche. Elle est raciste. Elle va devenir noire'. (She's white. She's a racist. She's going to turn black.)

Only in France...

Belated Election Thoughts

The election has been big news in France: even our 7th graders know the "yes we can" chant and are die-hard fans of Obama, though if you ask them why they have no idea.

While it seems like Americans came to terms several months ago with the reality that we could have a black president, the French couldn't believe it would actually happen. They seemed much more shocked up to the very last moment. Several teachers remarked on the irony that the French are dying to see Obama become president of the U.S., while they are sure that a person of color or someone from the Maghreb could not become president in France at this point.

America has also always been viewed (by the French) as being more deeply racist because of its history of slavery and segregation. But I think this election has shown people that race issues have just taken a larger place in the public eye in the U.S., meaning, that progress has been much more rapid.

La Nouvelle Observateur published a special issue on United States last month in which one columnist wrote that he sees Obama's election as a renewal of the image of the American dream--a dream that had all but disappeared in the minds of the French.

I have been playing Obama's acceptance speech for all my classes, which they really enjoy. I also made copies of my absentee ballot and have held mock elections in several classes. One class in particular took full advantage of the write-in option. Santa Claus won with 4 votes. None of the kids seems to have any idea who McCain is-- their only comments about him have to do with the fact that McCain name is most closely identified with a brand of frozen french fries...

It is sad to think that I spent much of my life under Bush, and was only politically aware for the last 2 disappointing elections. I wish that I could have been in the U.S. on this occasion.

Foix and Ax-les-Thermes

Train travel is easy and cheap here, so we took another day trip during our visit to the Midi-Pyrénées region. Heading south from Toulouse the landscape changes quickly from pink bricks and busy streets to vast stretches of farmland and the green hills of the Pyrénées.

Our first stop was the tiny mountain town of Foix, a picturesque village with winding cobblestone streets and a fairy tale castle that overlooks the city from a high peak:



The village of Foix hardly looks real tucked in this valley with the snow-capped mountain peaks as a backdrop. Foix is the capital of the Ariège region, the least populous region in France. The region was historically isolated because of the mountains, and even today, there exist significant cultural differences between these small towns in the Pyrénées.

We climbed into the mountains a bit to see the picturesque farmhouses and terraced fields that surround the city in the hillsides.



The castle is one of a few in France that was never conquered by invaders - the same ducal family occupied it for over 200 years. It's literally perched on a rock, with a hundred vertical feet of cliffs separating the castle from the town. Earlier in history, in the 1200s, Foix was one of the last hiding places for Cathar priests, after the Albigensian Heresy had been crushed by the Catholic Church. Catharism was a religious sect that arose during the 10th century in southeastern France - one of the other Cathar strongholds, Montsègur, was called "the Synagogue of Satan".

A view of Ax-Les-Thermes from above. Ax-Les-Thermes is a small community only 10km from Andorra whose main attraction is a series of hot springs, which have been diverted into fountains throughout the town.



The water from the springs is 170 degrees Farenheit, smells strongly of sulphur, and will cure what ails you. It is supposed to be particularly effective for liver problems.



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Carcassonne

Brendan on the ramparts overlooking the city of Carcassonne.

The castle in Carcassone is perched on a hill-- you can see it in the background. There is a functioning city with about 100 inhabitants within the castle walls. We had lunch at a restaurant in the medieval city.

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Toulouse

We decided to try and escape the cold, damp weather in Tours by heading to Toulouse for our Halloween vacation (here they call it Toussaint, and you're supposed to visit the graves of your deceased relatives).  When we arrived it was cold and rainy here, too, but we've had some nice weather during our stay.

Toulouse is very different from Tours.  It is a much larger city, a university town, and more cosmopolitan than Tours.  It is called the Ville en Rose because all the buildings here, even the churches, are in red brick.  The Spanish influence is evident in the architecture and we often heard people speaking Spanish and Catalan.  

The regional specialty is a dish called cassoulet- a stew of white beans, duck or goose meat, sausage and pork.  We had it twice during our stay- delicious.  

On Saturday night we went to see a concert- Gangpol und Mit, who are worth checking out.

Here are some of the pictures we took:

Mailboxes near Saint Sernin.

L'église de Saint Sernin.

The Place du Capitol in Toulouse is reminiscent of a Spanish plaza.  It is surrounded by an arcade with shops and restaurants.  The day we arrived there was a large flea market going on; with people selling used books, clothing, and other things.

View across the Garonne River in downtown Toulouse.

More photos around Tours and our apartment

The remains of a chateau along the banks of the Loire.  The river is flanked on one side by these high white cliffs, which some people have built their houses into (maisons troglodytiques)

"Where is Brendan?  Brendan is here."  All French kids learn English by cassette, and one of their first lessons is finding a guy named Bryan : "Where is Bryan?  Bryan is in the kitchen."  One of the teachers at lycée Bayet, upon seeing my picture posted in school, started asking everyone (including me), "Where is Brendan?  Where is Brendan?"

By popular demand, here are some of our French cooking successes.  First, beef tournedos with crème fraiche and green peppercorns sauce, with sautéed chanterelle mushrooms on the side.  Next, salmon with the leftover crème fraiche, fennel and zucchini on the side.  

Our apartment window from the street.