Waiting to get out of Paris

To be stuck waiting to get out of Paris is an experience with a long and storied history.  This should be a comfort to me, but somehow I don't think I am going to make it to Casablanca and Rick, at least not on this voyage...I will, God willing, eventually get out of here and back to California in time for Christmas, but it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would.

All week, while I was making my preparations to leave Cosne and Nevers for the holidays, everybody asked me, "Oh, quand est-ce que tu pars pour les Etats-Unis?" and when I said Sunday the 19th, the uniformly replied with something along the lines of "Euh, la neige aille poser une probleme pour toi, je crains!"  No, I thought, that couldn't possibly happen; there is no way the weather will wreck havoc on my flight plans--all these people are just being naysayers....Famous last words.   I got to to Charles De Gaulle airport on Sunday morning in the middle of a merry blizzard, and promptly joined a swelling crowd of would-be travelers, who were all trying to figure out what the hell they were going to do.  Apparently, while it was snowing in Paris, it was really coming down in London, and Heathrow was completely closed all day, and would be for part of the next.  My flight was, of course, on British Airways, which routes all flights through Heathrow, so I was not going anywhere.  I proceded to wait in line to try to get an alternative flight for the next six hours, all the while dealing with stressed-out fellow passengers and an incredible amount of missing information.  Finally, at 4 pm, after having been on my feet in various unmoving lines since 10 am, I made my disgruntled way back to Paris on a train that was, unsurprisingly, also delayed and overcrowded.

De Gaulle or the Louvre?

On the other hand, at least I had somebody to stay with.  It could have been so much worse.  My friend Hilary from Columbia, who has a charming apartment in the Marais district (i.e. pretty much close to everything) has generously been letting me stay with her for my unexpectedly-longer visit.  We have taken advantage of this opportunity to see some more sights, and yesterday we girded on our armor of cultural appreciation, and went to that bastion of the spoils of culture and empire--the LOUVRE (capitals are essential).

Festival de Lumières, and other excitement in Lyon

I can't even say that the holiday season is fast approaching...it's already here.  It's sort of unbelievable that I am two days away from Christmas break and three days away from flying back to CA, although I am more than ready for it.  The past few weeks--and really the whole fall--have gone by really fast, but I think it will be good for me to go home and fill up the tank a little bit.  Things have been fairly intense lately.

For one thing, there has been a lot of travel.  Coming on the heels of my weekend in Paris and then in Tours, I went back to Lyon last Friday to visit with Clara and see the Festival of Lights, an annual celebration in the city that centers around the 8th of December, the day on which--legend has it--the Virgin Mary saved the city from the plague during the middle ages.  Traditionally, the Lyonnais put candles in the windows of their houses to mark the occasion, but in the last hundred years or so, the festival has morphed into this huge outdoor spectacle featuring electric light shows that lasts a week and draws crowds from all over France (and, indeed, the world).  It was a sight to see.

so all these photos are from Therese.

Once again, I forgot my camera

I was glad to have gone, although I think that if I lived in Lyon, it would not be something that I would go out for every year.  I was somehow under the impression that it would be displays with candles, the way it was traditionally, and the displays of electric lights, while many were impressive (and some were truly bizarre--see below), were not really to my taste.  Having grown up with the luminarias of Albuquerque, I prefer lights that flicker to those that strobe.

Does this look like a giant desk lamp?  That is what it is.

I think that I was also less able to take in the glories of the light displays because it was the end of a long day.  The weekend was so packed with activities that we actually wrote out a schedule for Clara, me, and Therese to follow (I get a neurotic pleasure from checking things off lists).  Everything we did was absolutely worth doing, but the total impact was somewhat more than we had bargained for, especially since some of the individual events proved taxing.  Not everything went according to plan, but we did manage to do everything we meant to.

Case in point: part of the day's activities included cooking a fabulous dinner of new (tajine) and traditional (souffle) French recipes.  The piéce de résistance was to be the desert, crème brûlée.  Although our attempt this time was more successful than our previous efforts, there were still a couple setbacks.  More specifically, the torch Clara had bought for brûlée-ing turned out to be a bad bargain, since it refused, either to light easily or stay on more than a few minutes at a time.  We exerted ourselves, however, and discovered that, even when the sparker was not working, the butane was still coming out, so we were able to jury-rig a technique whereby we used an electric lighter and the torch with a two-man approach that worked, in a Macgyver sort of way.  Despite the unorthodox flaming, the brûlée ended up tasting delicious.

Tours

I totally forgot my camera, again, this weekend

I just got back from another traveling weekend (my feet are really itchy this month--I am going to be going here and there pretty much every weekend until the middle of January, if you count going home to CA).  This time my wanderings took my to the city of Tours.  I like to think of myself as living in the Loire valley here in Cosne--and, indeed, I am right on the river--but Tours is in the valley proper, if you think of it as the place of expensive wine tours, medieval towns, and chateau that inspired Jean Cocteau and those crazy kids at Disney.

Minus the wine tours, which will have to wait until my ship comes in, I think we did a pretty good job of touring Tours.  I say "we" because I went with Therese, one of my fellow English assistants of the Nièvre.  We were only there for less than 48 hours, but in that time we managed to fit in tramping around the old-section of town--which is, as you can see, medieval and very nicely preserved--going shopping at the Christmas market, visiting a proper chateau, going to the local musée de beaux arts, and eating some really fabulous local food...

It had been very wintery for the past week or so (in fact, I had almost no students on Friday because the buses were not running and it was snowing like crazy) but fortunately we were still able to use the tickets we had bought in advance, and our train Friday evening was only slightly delayed.  It is now raining sloppily, and the weather was warm enough over the weekend that everything was sort of drippy, but that did not prevent it from being very picturesque.

Saturday afternoon we took another train outside of town to visit the local Chateau de Chenonceau.  Actually getting there was something of a misadventure, since we were just settling into our seats on the train when I looked at the guidebook and read the fateful words, "The chateau of Chenonceau is not to be confused with the village of Chenonceaux..."  Chenonceaux was of course where our train was heading.  Therese and I hurried off the train and went to ask the station agent which route we should actually take, and he assured us that we should, in fact, take the train to Chenoneaux.  We rushed back, only to have the doors slam in our face and the train pull off without us.  Turns out the chateau of Chenonceau is in the village of Chenonceaux.  Poor wording, Lonely Planet; poor wording.

so all these lovely pictures are courtesy of the internet!

When we actually got to the chateau by the next train, and hour later, it was quite lovely. The village was even smaller than Cosne, so the chateau was pretty much just surrounded by its own fabulous gardens, stretching out into and blending with the forested countryside.  As I said to Therese, I felt as if we should be strolling through the grounds in riding habits with our dogs, or else rattling up the long tree-lined approach in a gilded coach.  It was very "to the manor born."  The chateau itself was pretty impressive, since it is built actually on the river Cher, with a long, black and white paved gallery spanning the waterway.  The alternate name of the place is the "Chateau des Dames," since it is famous for having been the residence, and the design project, of a number of powerful women, including Catherine di Medici, who ruled France as regent during the minority of Henri III, and Madam Dauphin, a great salon hostess and society leader during the revolutionary period.  The whole place was very well-maintained; historically restored, but not to the point where it felt like a theme-park.  It was especially nice to be there when it was decorated for Christmas, since many of the rooms were filled with great aromatic bouquets and buckets of dried orange slices, cloves, and other spices.  The downside of going to such a fabulous and touristy place is, well, the tourists, though.  Therese and I had the misfortune to arrive at the same time as a huge bus-full of Asian tourists, which was a little overwhelming.... Even after years of dealing with crowds in New York, it is still a challenge to fight through them when you are on a spiral staircase!

The one part of the experience that was not crowded was the musée des cires, or wax museum, which was hidden off in a side building, away from most of the tourists, attention.  Therese and I went over to check it out before we left, and the whole thing was, as you might imagine, totally creepy.  There were no human attendants, just an automated turnstyle that let you in after you swiped your ticket, and then motion sensitive lights and music that played as you inspected half a dozen degenerate wax recreations of the various famous residents and visitors of the chateau, including such luminaries as Rousseau and Voltaire.  You could totally imagine them coming to shuffling life and chasing unsuspecting tourists through the woods.  "The return to nature," indeed!

After we finally got back to Tours that evening, we had dinner at a place called "Comme AutreFouée" (since bad puns in restaurant names apparently are not limited to California) which specialized in the local dish, a sort of little flatbread called les fouaces, which is baked in a wood-burning oven and then brought hot to your table, where you cut it open, put in butter, meat, or vegetables, and eat it immediately--yum.