Walking

When it comes to weather, Burgundy is in that tricky time of year. The sun has been rising bright and cheerful each morning, and lingers in the evening sky, covering the landscape in pinks and oranges. From inside the house, it is easy to think it is shorts and t-shirt weather. But it is still winter, and there is frost on the windshield most mornings before eventually heating up. Yesterday, we experienced a 68 degree temperature swing in under 10 hours. Regardless, after the cold we had in January and February, it is most definitively hiking season. In the past few days I have climbed up logging roads, down narrow woods trails, scaled rock faces, and, of course, walked trough some of the most famous vines in the world.

As noted in a previous post, French people like to brag about the diversity of their geography. As un-noted elsewhere, it can be extraordinarily annoying for an American to concede that the French are right. The problem isn't with the substance, it is just that they are always so blasé when you tell them they are right. "Beh, oui," they say, shrugging off any compliment you pay to them about their food, history, traditions, landscapes, wines, or architecture. It is as if you have just told them that the Sahara can be hot and dry.

Road Trip

Gorges d'Ardèche

French people love to brag about their country. Their favorite claim is that France has everything that America has, just in a much smaller area: mountains (Alps, Pyrenees, etc.), sea and ocean (Cote d'Azur, Biarritz, Normandy, etc.), rivers (Seine, Rhône, Dordogne, etc.), a world capital (check). But dig past these obvious ones, and one does discover amazing variety. In our recent 10-day vacation, we saw the chateaux forts perched on the rocks of Périgord, the deep gorges in Southern Ardèche, and the crowded Rhône river valley at Vienne, a town I had never heard of before arriving. 

In addition to memorable sightseeing, nice walks, and a big-time bike race that leapt up out of nowhere to surprise us in the hills around Vallon Pont d'Arc, we learned a lot about food and our children's ability to handle life on the road. 

Our French adventure started in December 2013 in Sarlat. We stayed with the family that hosted me in Paris in 1995-96. They closely monitored the way we fed our children -- aged 3 and 8 months at the time, who had just left the only home they had ever known, all their routines, all their extended family, their native language -- and found it woefully lacking. Our hosts deemed an innocent chicken sandwich as backwards as broccoli for breakfast. "Why are they eating dinner at 5:30pm? Children eat at 7:00pm." You get the idea. 

Now, back at the scene, our boys had mastered the schedule and were happy with their breakfast of cereal and chocolate milk, family lunch at noon, the nationally-mandated afternoon goûter at 4:00 or 4:30, and dinner before their parents. I confess I was a little proud of them.

Time and Again

In the 1600s, a man invented the pendulum clock and permanently eradicated confusion when one human being asked another, "What time shall we meet?" Henceforth, there are so many fun ways to respond: 10:10, quarter 'til 7, midnight, half past 4, at the top of the hour, in 20 minutes, high noon, eighteen hundred hours soldier! When a little less precision is necessary, our good friend Pope Gregory XIII hooked us up with an awesome calendar, so that two parties can easily agree on the date they will meet (August 12th). Over time, people and their governments have found other nifty ways to let us say a specific date without using any months or numbers: New Year's, Veterans, Bastille, Independence, Labor, Memorial, Boxing, Thanksgiving, Christmas Days, for example. There really is no reason nor excuse for obfuscation. The witches' answer to "When shall we three meet again?" is actually easy: Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at 6:45pm. Just about everyone on planet earth could understand that.

Except, of course, the French. Even though I have tried to eliminate it from my vocabulary, I still ask, "What time?" or "When?" with regularity. And my Burgundy friends calmly, coolly, and consistently foil my efforts to get a precise answer.

Let's list some of the possible answers (not necessarily in increasing levels of difficulty):

• "Come over at the fin de la matinée." I generally get end of the morning: before noon, after 11:00. But is 11:15 too early? 11:45 too late? When this order is coupled with an expectation of alcohol, mass confusion can result. See: "Come over for apéritif."
• Recently, I dropped my son off for a play date at a friend's house at 2:00pm. I asked the mother what time my wife should come back to pick him up. "Fin de l'après-midi." Ok, end of the afternoon. I started to walk away and then wheeled around on one heel saying, "Actually, to my American ears, I have no idea what that means. 3:30? 4:30?" She laughed and said, "How about 5:30? That way we can have a coffee together." For once, bizarro French time constructs were working in our favor. You want our four year old until 5:30? Take him.
• "Come over for apéritif." As a college graduate, I have some experience with cocktails, and am generally game for coming over for them. But my USA-ness is hard to shake. Nobody invites anyone over for cocktails before 5pm in the Land of the Free (brunch bloodies potentially excluded). So when I hear "come over en fin de la matinée pour prendre l'apéritif," I confess to being boggled. If I am going to be offered booze -- including whiskey, wine, or homemade moonshine -- in the morning, I would prefer to push it to 11:59am. However, everyone here eats at midi, or noon, so if you show up one minute before twelve, you risk disrupting them as they shuffle to the table for lunch. However, of course, midi is a term that could very well designate 12:30, 1:00pm, or even 2:15pm. It's a hazardous guessing game. In the evening, this invitation means, generally, between 6:30 and 7:00pm and it can last anywhere from 1 to 7 hours.
• Today a got a double-dip in a voicemail: "We should get together un de ces quatre" and "let's try to see each other en fin de semaine." It's Tuesday, and my correspondent thinks we should see each other "one of these four days" and/or "at the week's end." How do I schedule "one of these days/end of the week"? Thursday morning is too soon...but what about Thursday afternoon? And if we are talking about "one of these four days" literally, well, we're into the weekend. That cannot be right.
• "Oh, my son and his family are coming to spend huit jours with me." So they will be spending one full seven-day week, plus one additional day? Wrong. "Not sure. They will figure it out when they get here. Could be three days or three weeks."
• On Saturday, February 7, a man said to me, "See you in quinze jours." 15 days. In fact, we were scheduled to meet on Sunday, February 15, precisely huit jours away. As usual, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, France was right and I was wrong. 
• Both huit and quinze jours are in the laborer's Hall of Fame. Plumbers, tilers, electricians, mechanics, farmers, and, mostly, public servants employ these terms with great regularity as a defense mechanism. It allows them to not work for an unspecified period of time, yet also gets the hopes up of the foreigner in front of them. "We'll look at that again in quinze jours," they will say, and, despite myself, I circle the date 15 days away. When will I learn?
• "Snail season lasts from July 1 until Easter." What a great juxtaposition of specific and vague! Easter changes every year; that cannot be the law of the land. Just don't tell my friend that.

Nowadays, I am starting to get the hang of it. Éventuellement rolls of my tongue pretty easily. Soon, I'll invite someone over without uttering a number. When do I expect to be a master? Before too long. 

Lunch, Church, and Politics on Sunday

One of the rules we follow here is to spend time with French people every chance we get. If you think about it, that is a wild departure from our American lives. We never said, "Jeez, I really need to see some Americans today!" when we lived in the Land of the Free.

On Sunday, I found myself in a trifecta of French situations: hunting cabin for lunch, 15th Century church for a concert, small town meeting with the mayor for the annual galette des rois.

This was not my first time in a French hunting situation.

The cabin, where there is one rule: no guns, dogs, or women allowed inside

I had been invited for both the hunt and the lunch, primarily for the latter. As one of my friends here had described this type of deer and wild boar hunting, "You don't talk, you don't move, you don't smoke, you don't fart." As I would be armed with only a camera, this sounded like something I could pass on this time, so I just went for lunch to the cabin.

I had stopped by my friend's house at 11:30 to pick up the lunch. I know what you're thinking: Perhaps a basket of sandwiches and some chocolate chip cookies? Maybe a pot of chili and a few brownies? Surely a dozen men would appreciate a bowl of pasta salad and some snickerdoodles, right?

Wrong. 

It Rains Here. A Lot.

When we arrived here a year ago, it rained part or all of every day for 60 days. We knew not a soul, both our kids were frequently sick with gastro, ear infections, conjunctivitis, or fever, and we had no knowledge of what to do with two kids under 4 when it rains. It was a trying two months. 

This winter is shaping up to be more of the same. Oftentimes, in a cruel tease, a pink sunrise and a fiery orange sunset will serve as brief parentheses for an otherwise wet day. Burgundians say that the typical winter here is cold but bright, usually with some snow. Now that we are in mid-January, however, I am becoming increasingly skeptical of these claims, especially because it was 60 degrees on Tuesday. 

Regardless, we've come a long way. We have memorized the hours at three different libraries and no longer curse when we arrive to find them exceptionnellement fermées. My wife discovered a ludothèque, a sort of toy-brary, where the children can run and romp among a sea of games, puzzles, and, thank heavens, trains. Grandparents have furnished us with buckets of Legos. While a rainy day is far from a welcome sight, it is no longer a surprise, and we manage our way through the day with relative ease.

Throughout, we have Charolais cattle, those who provide the region's beef, as our steady witnesses to the moisture. The photo above shows the view from the boys' bedroom. Each morning, I hold the baby in my arms and say, "It looks like some of your friends are there! Do you want to say hello?" And he will scream "Moooo!" at these hulking beasts. The cows tend not to return the greeting. The more it rains, the closer they huddle together, trying to get a snitch off an ever-dwindling bail of hay. During a stretch of dry, clear weather, these animals are beautiful white jewels on the Burgundy landscape, dotting green pastures like gigantic cotton balls. When it rains, they turn to mud. Slop covers their hindquarters, their faces, their underbellies, and, as you can see, their shins. 

If self-doubt and existential bewilderment are the emotions dominating my day, their melancholy lowing rattles the windows, a universal cry of misery and confusion. But if optimism and excitement have thwarted those negative thoughts, I confess that their sounds make me think just one thing:

Better you than me, guys.