23 Monday Feb 2015
We have very little on our calendar, but the Saffron Fair (Foire de Safran) in nearby Preuilly-sur-Claise was an absolute must. I love making paella, and saffron is required. I always thought the spice was Spanish, due to the paella thing, but it turns out it flourishes in all kinds of places, including the rich agricultural ground around our French neighborhood. Every day I learn more about how ignorant I am.
19 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
I have been beating myself up for fourteen years for not having patented the wheel.
15 Sunday Feb 2015
da Vinci self portrait
Time was when French kings adopted Italian artists like puppies. François I adopted Leonardo da Vinci because François wanted Italy and kept failing to win it, but its bling was nonetheless irresistible. At the king’s invitation, da Vinci traveled from Milan to the city of Amboise via donkey in 1516, carrying the Mona Lisa in his saddlebag, and stayed there until his death in 1519.
09 Monday Feb 2015
Posted in Accommodations
I’m adding them up in my head: thirteen, I think. Thirteen restaurants explored since we’ve arrived here in the French countryside, none with too much success. Some were too confusing (Louise mistakenly ordered redundant courses of sausage at one, and she speaks the language); some were too loud, or too unsavory, or too expensive. Many were all those things.
No, that’s not right. There is one, the most recent one, the one to which we’ve vowed to return.
04 Wednesday Feb 2015
Posted in Sentiments
“How IS the country?” asked my friend Patricia after opening the door to her teeny tiny tony Paris flat.
I allowed how it was just fine.
“Je DETESTE la campagne!” she announced firmly, indicating that she was not about to come to Martizay to return my visit anytime soon.
29 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
It’s cold here. High-humidity cold. It seeps into your skin like a nicotine patch. It’s as persistent as a senate filibuster and as welcome as a letter from the IRS.
Today we were supposed to be under our favorite palapa in Puerto Vallarta, slurping margaritas and wiggling our toes in warm sand. You know the story. Instead, with hardly two weeks to adjust, we trundled off to live for three months in an eighty-year-old French farmhouse, constructed of solid masonry that retains cold like a numismatist collects stamps. Outside, a grousing heat pump tries to salvage heat from air that has none. Inside, eighty-year-old radiators, once bristling with steam from an oil-fired boiler, now circulate lukewarm water from the heat pump, warming the air with a whisper rather than the shout of ancient fire.
Thus, today we meet the second of five words that I’m using to describe our French experience: cold.
26 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Gallery
Tags
Loches dungeon (click to enlarge)
Right in the middle of the town of Loches there is a castle. And right in the middle of the castle is a marble stone indicating the room where, in 1429, Joan of Arc begged Charles VII to man up and go to Reims to get crowned.
21 Wednesday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations
Tags
After eight months of high society in Portland’s haute Pearl District, Louise and I now inhabit la France profonde, which is pretty much the Pearl’s opposite. We feel like pages ripped from a Fitzgerald novel, come to rest in deep France, where it’s quiet as a monastery and urban influences are as scarce as feathers on a frog.
19 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Accommodations, Travel
L to R: Stephen, Kay, Tom, & Louise. Just look at those desserts!
Of our 821 regular readers, about 800 of you totally ignored my birthday Saturday. Regardless, being old and creaky has not diminished my interest in celebrations, although the actual number is irrelevant.
15 Thursday Jan 2015
Field trip! Yesterday we left home to visit Jackie Fisher’s favorite village in the region: Angles-sur-l’Anglin, which is about 25 minutes away. The tongue twister of a name means “Anglos on the Anglin River,” because it is one of the many regions here occasionally populated by the English, usually post-invasion. Today, the British actually buy land and houses here, which is so much more civilized.
The Expat Almanac 