Monday 10.11.2010

Another Player Down


The French are taking their toll on our team. Pat has succumbed to the 24/7 restaurant food and strange germs and was laid low for most of the day today. Surprisingly it rained all day (Hah!) so Mary and John were more than happy to take another day to rest up. It’s a marathon not a sprint.

John went out in the drizzle at about 8:30 for his morning pastry run, but the pickings were slim. The two closest patisseries were closed which forced a return to the house for a map and more research which led him to a third patisserie a few blocks farther away. Alas, no chassons du pomme. After 45-minutes out in the rain all our intrepid warrior had to show for his efforts was a bag of croissants and a box of pain du chocolat. Sometimes when you lose a player, the rest of the team has to step it up. And we have coffee here.

John and Mary walked to the tourist info center to help with plans for the rest of the week and then on to the post office. The only guided wine tours in the area are headquartered out of Avignon so we decide to save that for Bordeaux which leaves us a free day (today) to do nothing. We keep walking around the city in a drizzle and climb the ancient city walls into a new-to-us section of the old city. We wriggle around in the warren of back streets until we find something we recognize and figure out our way home.


We stop for sandwich makings at a little grocery store and have lunch at home. We also need a supermarket run which is the next chore for this afternoon. Parking spots are hard to find and we hate to leave, but know it will have to happen sooner or later. We are only lost in some industrial park for about 15-minutes when we see the “Geant” sign and cut cross-country into their lot. Mary cornered some guy asking direction to the “ouefs” which is a word he doesn’t recognize. After much repetition and restarts she finally resorted to “eggs” and he pointed “right over there”.


A word about the language. We are now able to conduct simple purchase or restaurant transactions in French and are adding a couple handy words each day. In the northern countries earlier in the trip virtually everyone spoke English and even here most folks have a couple words they recognize to keep an interaction moving along. What we miss from our visits to other English-first countries are the TV news shows, the newspapers, the radio programs and all the other little information providers that help us get inside the heads of the locals. We don’t have a good understanding of what they’re fighting about, or happy or sad about. This trip is much more about the visual rather than the immersion into the culture that we enjoy. With nine countries and nine languages, there isn’t much we’re going to do about that, but it is decidedly different. In 11 more days it will be Spanish so there is no sense crying over spilt lait, or is it leche?

We score the parking place right in front of our front door when we get back from the store. Now we can’t leave for the rest of the week for sure. A bit of reading and some bookwork fill out the afternoon. Pat is much improved but not interested in dinner out. She will forage through the leftovers from lunch to see if there is anything appealing.

John and Mary have a list of a few good restaurants near each other about a ten-minute walk away and figure one or all of them will have room. No chance. The three we look at are all full with happy people inside laughing, eating and sipping wine while we stand at the window looking forlorn. We resort to the massive tourist spot on the “forum,” an historic Vincent Van Gogh café. We get a nice appetizer Provencal which is encouraging, but it was downhill from there. Mary has the Dorado (fish) with a hollandaise type sauce, all an unappetizing lukewarm temperature. John orders the beef stew which turns out to be another Waffle-House steak with cold french fries on the side. Tomorrow we make reservations.

Pat is back in bed when we get home, and we will be soon.


Stupid Vikings!


Today’s weather: Cloudy and rain all day, low 58, high 66