Monthly Archives: August 2014

Sometime between the ages of 14 and 30-almost-1, I grew a fear of heights. As a child, I would climb these giant pine trees in our front yard all day in the summer, and they were HIGH. You could get 30 feet up there. I had no problems then. Later my dad cruelly cut them down, but that’s a story for a different kind of post. I also remember climbing this rickety fence in our backyard to then climb a mulberry tree to eat 1297402 mulberries in the summer. Also no problem.

I suppose my fear of heights sprouted when I traversed the Canopy Walk in Kakum National Park in Ghana when I was 18. That thing is 1080 feet long, includes 7 bridges, and is 130 feet high. This is what it looks like. I did walk across the whole thing in the end, but it took me a very long time, and I’d rather not say whether I cried the entire time. (Ok, I cried the entire time. And not pretty tears, either. The kind with snot.)

So anyway. We’re staying the week in Chamonix in the French Alps, because Nic’s wonderful and lovable but crazy brother Chris is running a 62 mile race in the mountains. To entertain ourselves between trying to help Chris carbo-load, we took a train up a mountain, then we hiked down the mountain, walked across many stairs and bridges (RICKETY, METAL-GRATE STAIRS WHERE YOU CAN SEE RIGHT DOWN THE MOUNTAIN TO YOUR DEATH IN THE ROCKY VALLEY BELOW) and then:

Walked into an ice cave in a glacier.

I did my best to behave as though I do not have a crippling (though in my opinion totally practical) fear of heights.  Only 95% of the reason for this fortitude was because Nic’s mom would have called me a wuss otherwise.

This is the Mer de Glace glacier near Chamonix, France. It is the largest glacier in France. It probably will not be for long though, if they keep drilling frigging ice caves into it. On the hike down to the ice cave, which is maybe 1000 feet down, there are signs showing where the glacier level was during various years. I’ll sum it up: it’s receded a LOT in the last 100 years and climate change is ruining everything, the end.

This glacier moves, I shit you not, 1 centimeter per hour. There are signs in the ice cave being like “we do a lot of work picking the spot in the glacier for the ice cave to make sure that it is perfectly safe”. Buuuuuullshit.

Everything in the ice cave, including these sculptures of chairs (?), was lit with colorful LED lights. I guess to make everything seem like the college dorm room of a dude you were definitely never going to sleep with.

This is what the glacier ice actually looked like when not lit by absurd lights from 1996. I looked for ancient aliens entombed in the glacier, but alas, no dice.

Working Title of Next Post: Ultra-Running is a Thing, and the People Who Do it are Exactly as Nutty as They Sound

– C

Cat is obviously the funny in our relationship. Anyone reading this knows that. She’s also a better writer, which is why I’ve let my blogging ambitions be waylaid and have contented myself with doing all the driving to the interesting places Cat then blogs about. And that has been a lot of driving.

Recently, though, Cat has decided to learn to drive a stick. I know, right? I told her that probably something like half of cars in the US are sticks, so she argued in the way I taught her: she Googled it. It turns out it was something like 6% of cars sold last year. I’m sure those numbers were different in 1984, the year my trusty Volvo and I came into this world together, but I digress…

Well, we’re in France now, where automatic cars are still only something like 10% of the market, and we (I) didn’t want to pay the American tourist tax on an already expensive rental to get an automatic transmission. Plus, what better way for her to learn than on the clutch of a rental car?

So, yesterday, with nary 10 minutes of instruction on a back road, she was ready to give the open road a try. So she drove for an hour straight, up and down hills on windy roads, in and out of towns, around roundabouts… I was honestly impressed.

Which brings me to her willpower. She has proven time and again that she can and will do anything she puts her mind to. A week ago we visited Mont St. Michel, and I was trying my best to get a panorama picture of her, the monastery, and a rainbow that had fortuitously sprouted up as we were walking toward the monastery. Everything lined up perfectly, except for one thing.

She had made a terrible face for a picture with ample warning to make a decent one. She immediately defended herself when I brought it up, “I can’t help it! I always make terrible faces in pictures!”

“BULLSHIT!” I said, with more force than I would have been able to muster before meeting Cat. Back in those sad days before we had met, I thought quiet confidence was the best way to convey an idea. That was, of course, until Cat proved that she wouldn’t listen to a single thing I said unless it was said with vehemence.

Since I have learned well, I went on a brief yet passionate diatribe about how she could most definitely make reasonable faces, that she really had no reason not to, and that I was tired of her ruining pictures.

So in every picture since then, she has made very cute and reasonable faces. When I mentioned it a few days later, she laughed. “You really just have to show that you care about the thing more than I do, and I’m happy to do it.” Now I just have to figure out how to apply that to getting her playing video games with me.

Mont Saint-Michel is beautiful, and also overrun with tourists like ourselves. Still more than worth the visit, though. If you do go, eat a crepe at the Sirene restaurant, tucked in above a souvenir shop, with awesome cider and reasonable prices compared to the rest of the place.

– N

After a not-that-fun jaunt through Brittany (apparently we missed everything good except Mont St. Michele, about which Nic insists he will write a post, probably titled Hot Pics) and a few days in Dordogne (go there, it’s wonderful), we have arrived in Auvergne. Auvergne is one of the 27 regions of France, in the sort of lower middle. Also, I think it is my favorite.

Presented of course with comments are the reasons why:

I’m sure you think you’ve been to beautiful places. The Oregon coast! Italy! Flerp! You’re wrong. This is as good as it gets on planet Earth. Everywhere looks like the Shire!

The ruins of Apchon Chateau in the village of Apchon. Built sometime in the 11th century, it’s been abandoned since the mid-1700s, though according to a badly translated history I read online, it was active in a conflict roughly every 3 months in the intervening 700 years.

Here we are at the top of Puy Mary, one of the highest peaks of the Cantal Mountains. You drive up and then walk up a VERTICAL, UNPROTECTED, OPEN SLOPE for 1000 feet to get to the summit. I’m not *super* good with heights, so on the way up I used the word “barfy” perhaps a dozen times while grumbling at the 8 year olds sprinting up the slope without a care like god damned mountain goats.

Here I am, trying and failing to make it work in a hat again. You can tell from my face that I know the truth.

Ok. Finally. In Auvergne, they have a local specialty, called truffade. There are many ways to make it, but this picture is of the way that a particular restaurant, La Grange Aux Fleurs in the village of Sarran, made it when I had the best dinner I’ve had in France, both trips included. It’s potatoes fried in duck fat until golden and crisp, then a large amount of local Cantal cheese – Cantal is the aged and pressed version with a  stronger taste, Tomme is a fresher first pressing of the same cheese also used in truffade – is melted in the pan and folded into the potatoes. The whole lot is topped with a little persillade, which is chopped garlic and parsley. It is made “at will” or to order, so you eat it ripping hot when the cheese is melty and the potatoes are crisp and tender. GOOD GRAVY IT IS SO GOOD. Cantal cheese, by the way, is so famous that apparently both Pliny the Elder and Gregory of Tours wrote about it. That is a famous cheese.

Working title of next post: I See Kale in French Gardens, But Not On Any Menus, What is That About

– C

Perhaps you, like me, remember La Rochelle from the Three Musketeers. Upon visiting it, perhaps you, like me, would say incessantly to your husband “but which of them would you be? I’d be Athos. Porthos was such a windbag. I think you’d be Aramis, minus the religion.”

La Rochelle is AWESOME, and full of fascinating history. There are medieval towers to visit with graffiti from the 17th century (exactly as florid as the Three Musketeers), the 19th century (lots of pictures of women’s shoes, of all things) and WWII (it was the last city to be liberated by the Allies. Parts of Das Boot were filmed here!).

there were many prisoners in the tower over many hundreds of years. i’m not sure, but i think enemy sailors were routinely captured, imprisoned for 30 days and then set free? they could walk all around the tower and apparently were free to carve things into the stone, like LOUIS WEARS GIRLS’ UNDERWEAR. Just kidding. They carved things like WILLIAM BARRETT, CORK, 1741.

Today I spent a bunch of time reading to Nic about Eleanor of Aquitaine, an extremely interesting lady. She was queen of both England and France in turns, gave birth to 10 children, 3 of whom became kings, lived to be 82 and made La Rochelle a free city in 1182 (it would not remain so, and after being English and French and English and French, would finally become officially French after the Siege of La Rochelle in the 17th century – the backdrop of the Three Musketeers). She was queen regent while Richard the Lionheart failed at crusading and then came back for Kevin Costner’s wedding to that lady from the Abyss.

this tower is older than Eleanor of Aquitaine by about 350 years, but i feel like she would have lived in something like it

Also:  MUSSELS. Vagina-y looking, sauced with mariniere, curry, roquefort, cream, chorizo or garlic, served in a giant vat. Salty, beautiful, tasting like seawater. In French, moules.  La Rochelle is chock full of moules, and I only ate maybe 50 or so pounds of them! I love mussels. I will admit, however, that eating them is a bit like eating crab. You need a really big pile, because you do so much work to get them while you’re eating that by the time you’re finished, you’re basically ready to eat again.

ok, i didn’t take this picture myself, because i was too busy eating moules like a fiend to remember to take pictures.

Working title of next post: Turns Out Root Beer is Not a Thing in France

– Cat

The other night, Nic ordered a salad for dinner. While deciding, he said “I just had that steak last night, so I feel like a salad is a good choice.” Here is what was on the salad:

– Foie gras

– A confit duck leg

– Confit duck gizzards

– Several large pieces of cured ham

– A few pieces of extremely overworked lettuce

Across the way you can see what I ordered, a steak. Obviously.

– C

We finally went to the Musee D’Orsay! Much like my experiences with the Met in New York, it had seemed to me that the Musee D’Orsay was never actually open to the public. (Just now I went to the Met’s website to do some joke-checking and it seems that it is only closed 4 days a year. This is stymying because I have tried to go there on two separate occasions only to find it closed. I know for a fact one of those days was New Years Day, but I can’t recall the other. Perhaps it was International Too Hungover to Go Anywhere, We’ll Just Say It was Closed and Order a Pizza Day.)

Like literally everything in Paris, the museum itself is beautiful. It was a train station, the Gare d’Orsay, until the 70s when it was redesigned as a museum, finally opening in 1986. It has the largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist pieces in the world.

Out the clock and across the Seine you can see the museum I wished I was in.

Perhaps I am just uncultured (I am definitely uncultured) but I can’t say the impressionists are my favorite (except you, Renoir). I believe Nic put it best when he said “if you scrunch your eyes, it looks like something”.

Impressionism: Just like a Magic Eye.

Based on the countless signs around the museum featuring a picture of a cup with a line through it (NON BOISSONS [my French is getting better and better!]), a picture of a hand with the index finger extended with a line through it (meaning either don’t point at anything because it’s rude and/or don’t touch the paintings- both good advice in my opinion) and pictures of both cell phones and cameras with lines through them, I gathered I was not supposed to take pictures of the art. I’m a rebel though, so here’s the best picture I took while visiting the Musee D’Orsay:

I couldn’t even say what this painting is or who painted it. What I do know is that I looked around real furtively before I took it while holding my phone in the vicinity of my belly button so no one would catch me. It’s photography a la the dudes in Eastern Europe who go to the movies and surreptitiously take video from under their coats and you can hear them laughing and muttering in Russian during all of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which you made your now-husband download illegally for you even though he said the quality would be terrible.

Working title of next post: I Think it’s Time to Graduate to Ordering My Steaks Cooked Bleu

– C

Lessons learned after 2 days in Brussels:

1. Belgians REALLY want people to know they invented french fries. They have little shops called friterie. It would be funny if there was a Belgian law that every time you bought fries in a friterie, you had to say “Belgians invented frites and also the Dutch language is real and not made up to make people sound hilarious”.

it’s a funny irony that i like taking pictures of the outsides of churches so much, and yet dislike any activities that go on in the insides of churches

2. Everything is photogenic in Brussels. I took the picture above on 30 hours of no sleep and a French lunch. (French lunch, or in France, lunch, is when you have wine with lunch.)

3. Airbnb is better than hotels by an indescribably huge margin. The other morning we were visited by a little gray kitten who came wandering up the stairs. (6 flights of stairs. In the listing for one of the Airbnb places we stayed in, it says ‘note to Americans: it is 6 floors up and there is no lift’. As though of all the people in the world who might stay here, Americans are the ONLY ONES who complained about the lack of elevator. To compensate for this, I only complained about the stairs approximately half as much as I wanted to.)

4. Belgians are so cultured! This morning Nic and I went out bright and early to find coffee and pastries (thanks, jet lag). In the coffee shop we chose, we went to the end of the line where a dude was standing sort of in line, sort of against the refrigerated area where there was bottles of juice and water and desserts and lunchy items in little containers. He chivalrously gestured us to go ahead of him in line, which I thought was nice. And then he picked up a bottle of carrot juice from the shelf and walked out of the shop without paying for it. He stole a bottle of CARROT JUICE. Belgium: Where everyone makes good choices, even the criminals!

5. There are many opportunities to buy hats. Nic’s reaction to each hat I tried on was an enthusiastic “hmm!” Like, he knew it was horrible but he isn’t a liar so the only thing he could honestly say while not being a jerk was a neutral “hmm”with a sort of exclamation point on the “hmm” so my feelings wouldn’t be hurt. I like to think I’m the kind of person who can successfully wear a hat, but instead I believe this picture accurately depicts how good I look in hats.

i feel as though this photo encapsulates so much of my personality

Working title of my next post: I Have Packed All Wrong, Again

– C