July 31, 2013
I awake sounding as though I have had a sex-change operation: my voice is definitely baritonal, and my lungs are spongy with mucous. My rheume de foins has turned into an old-fashioned respiratory infection, and it will take a few days before my symptoms clear.
I need to have the washing machine repairman return to try to fix it again. Calling his number, I am told he will be by at 11:30 a.m. My English guest and I decide that that might be enough time to hike the carriere du roy, the path along the marble quarry, which leads to a gorge on the far side of which is Notre Dame du Cros.
The path starts on the topmost part of avenue du Minervois, off the road that leads to Peyriac and Rieux. We soon find ourselves by the quarry, where monolithic blocks of marble stand neatly, one on top of the other, waiting to be shipped to Carrara, where they will be polished to a fine red hue and sold. The path, which is known as the carrière du roy because it was from that site that Louis XIV took the marble to make the columns of the Trianon at Versailles, turns away from the quarry and quickly climbs to one of the gorge's edges.
The view over the chasm and beyond, to the snow-capped Pyrenées (which can be seen clearly today) is surprising and wonderful. We are so near to Caunes, yet so far.
The path is being maintained by three young men, employees of the French Department of Forests, who widen the path, see to it that the markers on the path are visible, and that the wooden frames into which informational bulletins about the area are inserted, are maintained in good repair.
"Do you like your job? Do you like getting out of bed in the morning?" I ask them. They smile and affirm that they do, then add, in English,
"It is wonderful!"
My guest and I make it back to Caunes by 11:30 a.m., but no washing machine repairman ever arrives. Having had such a fine experience on the hike, I am not too upset by his failure to arrive. I call the number again and the repairman tells me no one told him of the appointment. (Which is funny, because I remember someone called out to someone over the phone, to ask whether he could be here at 11:30 a.m..) He will be here tomorrow after 2:00 p.m.
***
My guest and I drive to Declathlon Sports on the road to Foix to buy energy bars for bicycle rides as well as electrolyte-replacement drinks for each of us: the sun is beating down and it must be in the mid-90s, although there is not a trace of humidity in the air.
Having paid for everything, we get in the car and drive to the unfortunately-named FunSport. This store is a bicycle enthusiast's idea of heaven. One half --a separate building-- sells-used and inventory clearance bicycles, the other sells new ones. In their categories, prices can run into the thousands of Euros. A titanium frame might cost 4950 Euros, the wheels 1950, plus brakes, plus speeds. If you are serious about working on your bicycle, you can buy a heavy iron contraption that will allow the bicycle to hang suspended at eye-level, to avoid the back strain from having to bend down.
There are helmets that cost several hundred Euros, clothes, gloves, gears, shoes. We are there to buy one screw, which will replace one of the two on the steering mechanism on the Xootr Swift. Total cost: 50 centimes, but the staff member who handles the sale is as friendly as if we had bought an elite bicycle. FunSport is a store that reflects the French obsession with cycling, and the pursuit of technical excellence in bicycle design. Between the new, the used and the inventory clearance models, FunSport must have a thousand bicycles in its two stores, in small, medium, large and extra large sizes.
There are road bikes, track bikes, mountain bikes and every kind of gear that goes with them. All the parts for building your own bicycle are there, if you can afford the price of doing so. You can buy wheels whose rubber circumference extends halfway across the wheel's diameter, an innovation that gives the rider more aerodynamic advantage. You can buy tires for mountain bikes that look as though they would fit on mini-tractors.
You have to be seriously obsessed with bicycles to buy at FunSports.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
70 Kilometers on the Road; Zorro Washed Here; French Hay Fever
July 30, 2013
The day starts with a 70-kilometer bicycle ride through the Minervois as far as Aragon and Villegailhenc, starting at 7:30 a.m. Just before the end of the ride we have to mount a hill, and I almost crack. The bicycle I am riding will not allow me to change gears; when I do, the chain falls off. And it makes noises that only bicycles out of alignment make when I stay in the one gear I can manage.
Claude, the olive grower, and club president, saves the day. When I explain why I can't change to a smaller sprocket, he says, "Well, let's stop and we'll change the sprocket while you stop, and the chain won't fall off." Indeed, it does not, and I am able to crest the hill without difficulty, although by the end of the ride, I feel as though I have been on the Bataan Death March. Perhaps because a new rider, my English friend, is a stripling of 31, the older men want to put him on his mettle.
Patrice, the secretary waves his finger at me and says "Today I am your executioner, no?" (Au jourd'hui je suis ton bourreau, non?") He certainly is.
However, Claude's practical solution to getting me up the hill allows me a moment of glory on a hard day. For most of the ride I have been struggling to keep up. By putting the bicycle on the lower gear I need, Claude makes up for all the earlier hours when I thought I'd never stop huffing and puffing.
When I and my guest return home, I knock on Bob and Annabelle's door: the washing machine still isn't running, and Annabelle has offered to let me wash some clothes. While she is emptying her washing machine, I tell Bob, with reference to the ride, that "By the time I leave on September 9, I will either be in the best shape I have ever been in, or I will be dead --there's no in-between."
***
The washing machine repairman comes by just about when I was told he would, three-thirty p.m. Like the plumber David Martinez, David Chabbert is a youngish man who is accompanied by an adolescent boy acting as his assistant. The two of them move the washing machine out of the house and into the courtyard of the house to let the hose drain the water out. After this is done, David Chabbert unscrews a lid on the bottom of the back of the washer and finds...a sodden sleep mask with two ties, rather like Zorro might wear if he needed forty winks. The sleep mask has been living inside the tube a long time, until it reached its end and stopped up the drainage, is the explanation why the machine refused to drain. The machine is brought back into the house, and I pay 40 Euros for the service call. The repairman tells me to go ahead and wash the towels in the machine again, which I do gladly.
Unfortunately, when I return home a few hours later, the machine still doesn't drain. Perhaps Zorro left a few more masks behind.
***
The French term for "hay fever" is "rheum de foins" (literally catahrr-fever). I have "rheum de foins", and I have it bad. The sunflowers and the wine grapes and the fruit trees are all being sprayed and the harvesting of the grapes will be in two weeks for some varieties, continuing through the end of September for the darkest, reddest, most tannic wines.
"Then there are also plants to which people have allergies, in addition to the reactions to the spraying and the extra amounts of plant matter in the air", explains the pharmacist in town. Fortunately, I don't have to have a prescription for an antihistamine tablet, or for a nasal spray. I rode 70 kilometers with a swelled head rather than take an antihistamine, thinking that I would adjust to the environment. By the afternoon, I decided I would have to stop the sneezing attacks and the post-nasal drip and that I wasn't adjusting the environment.
What did people do before medicines that dried out runny noses and sinuses existed? We see Millet's The Gleaners without recognizing that it is a painting about the desperately poor picking up the leavings of the harvest to feed themselves. We forget, too, that some of them probably suffered horribly having to do so, due to la rheume du foins. Oscar Wilde once said he didn't like nature, that it was unnatural, a statement any hay fever sufferer knows rings true.
The day starts with a 70-kilometer bicycle ride through the Minervois as far as Aragon and Villegailhenc, starting at 7:30 a.m. Just before the end of the ride we have to mount a hill, and I almost crack. The bicycle I am riding will not allow me to change gears; when I do, the chain falls off. And it makes noises that only bicycles out of alignment make when I stay in the one gear I can manage.
Claude, the olive grower, and club president, saves the day. When I explain why I can't change to a smaller sprocket, he says, "Well, let's stop and we'll change the sprocket while you stop, and the chain won't fall off." Indeed, it does not, and I am able to crest the hill without difficulty, although by the end of the ride, I feel as though I have been on the Bataan Death March. Perhaps because a new rider, my English friend, is a stripling of 31, the older men want to put him on his mettle.
Patrice, the secretary waves his finger at me and says "Today I am your executioner, no?" (Au jourd'hui je suis ton bourreau, non?") He certainly is.
However, Claude's practical solution to getting me up the hill allows me a moment of glory on a hard day. For most of the ride I have been struggling to keep up. By putting the bicycle on the lower gear I need, Claude makes up for all the earlier hours when I thought I'd never stop huffing and puffing.
When I and my guest return home, I knock on Bob and Annabelle's door: the washing machine still isn't running, and Annabelle has offered to let me wash some clothes. While she is emptying her washing machine, I tell Bob, with reference to the ride, that "By the time I leave on September 9, I will either be in the best shape I have ever been in, or I will be dead --there's no in-between."
***
The washing machine repairman comes by just about when I was told he would, three-thirty p.m. Like the plumber David Martinez, David Chabbert is a youngish man who is accompanied by an adolescent boy acting as his assistant. The two of them move the washing machine out of the house and into the courtyard of the house to let the hose drain the water out. After this is done, David Chabbert unscrews a lid on the bottom of the back of the washer and finds...a sodden sleep mask with two ties, rather like Zorro might wear if he needed forty winks. The sleep mask has been living inside the tube a long time, until it reached its end and stopped up the drainage, is the explanation why the machine refused to drain. The machine is brought back into the house, and I pay 40 Euros for the service call. The repairman tells me to go ahead and wash the towels in the machine again, which I do gladly.
Unfortunately, when I return home a few hours later, the machine still doesn't drain. Perhaps Zorro left a few more masks behind.
***
The French term for "hay fever" is "rheum de foins" (literally catahrr-fever). I have "rheum de foins", and I have it bad. The sunflowers and the wine grapes and the fruit trees are all being sprayed and the harvesting of the grapes will be in two weeks for some varieties, continuing through the end of September for the darkest, reddest, most tannic wines.
"Then there are also plants to which people have allergies, in addition to the reactions to the spraying and the extra amounts of plant matter in the air", explains the pharmacist in town. Fortunately, I don't have to have a prescription for an antihistamine tablet, or for a nasal spray. I rode 70 kilometers with a swelled head rather than take an antihistamine, thinking that I would adjust to the environment. By the afternoon, I decided I would have to stop the sneezing attacks and the post-nasal drip and that I wasn't adjusting the environment.
What did people do before medicines that dried out runny noses and sinuses existed? We see Millet's The Gleaners without recognizing that it is a painting about the desperately poor picking up the leavings of the harvest to feed themselves. We forget, too, that some of them probably suffered horribly having to do so, due to la rheume du foins. Oscar Wilde once said he didn't like nature, that it was unnatural, a statement any hay fever sufferer knows rings true.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Chateau d'Argeres
July 29, 2013
There is a washing machine repairman in Trausse, a town nearby who can look at the washing machine and probably fix it. My mind is far more at rest now.
So much at rest that I happily take my English friend to the Château d'Argères for the tour of the vineyard. Which turns out to be a tour of the vineyard and much more.
The Château d'Argêres has been in the Cros-Mayrevielle family for generations. The present owner, Jean-Baptiste, gathers the fifty or so visitors and begins the tour by explaining that his great-grandfather began the restauration of La Cité in Carcassonne, and that there is even a street named after him in honor of his work on Carcassonne's behalf.
The property is large --about 32 hectares of cultivable land, or two and a half acres. The vines are primarily red wine grapes --grenâche, mourvedre, syrah, but a bit of semillon as well, cultivated on 12 hectares, all tended by hand. The wine is pesticide-free, and the fermentation process excludes all but a bit of sulfite, a percentage considerably below that which is necessary for a wine to be considered "bio" in France. Even under those stringent conditions one of the vintages has won a gold medal for Rousillon-Languedoc.
Jean-Baptiste is a man with stubborn streak, a tall, strongly-built man who leads the tour in a black t-shirt, khaki shorts and topsiders. He looks as though he just came in from trimming vines, and when he speaks of his methods, he explains every aspect of his thinking about what he wanted to produce on the land once he became responsible for the estate's production However, before he starts to speak about wine, he leads the assembled group of about sixty people (including about ten young children) on a hike across the property, which includes visiting a Gallo-Roman intersection of two roads, a Gallo-Roman cemetery, a pause along each of the varietals' vineyards, and stops to identify botanical specimens like wild asparagus and thyme. Jean-Baptiste is a fund of knowledge about the terrain in his little corner of the Minervois, and he speaks with deep love of the land he has inherited, land that has been in his family's hands since the 19th century when the land was turned to wine-growing and away from sheep farming.
Today, in order to make the land pay, Jean-Baptiste has reintroduced sheep farming on some of the land (50 lambs), created two gites (rural homes rented to tourists), and gives oenological tours, in addition to selling wine. His son, who shares his name, is now in charge of the day-to-day operations of the estate, but Jean-Baptiste and his wife remain the face of the estate to the world.
The tour takes three hours, two and a half of them a walk through the bracken of the estate. Jean-Baptiste walks through his lands as he probably does every day, but some of his guests think the tour more demanding than they expected. "I'll never do this again" says one American woman to her friends. "Wine tours are all the same."
This one is decidedly not, because this proprietaire loves his terroir and wants to tell you why it is so special, why the way he is making wine amounts to a moral choice as well as a practical one: he wants to leave his children something they can live from. At the end of the tour, a charge of 7 Euros is the cost of an assiette gourmand, a plate of patés, charcuterie and cheese assembled by his wife and served with glasses of wine made on the estate. "Yes", you have to understand French pretty well to appreciate all that Jean-Baptiste is saying (There are three hundred varieties of orchids that grow naturally in the Languedoc-Rousillon area--), but all things being equal, Jean-Baptiste is one vigneron who wants to communicate his passion for the wine of his land, which may not have the fame of the Bordeaux and Burgundies that are synonymous with fine French wine, but will be worthy of recognition so long as he has anything to say about it.
There is a washing machine repairman in Trausse, a town nearby who can look at the washing machine and probably fix it. My mind is far more at rest now.
So much at rest that I happily take my English friend to the Château d'Argères for the tour of the vineyard. Which turns out to be a tour of the vineyard and much more.
The Château d'Argêres has been in the Cros-Mayrevielle family for generations. The present owner, Jean-Baptiste, gathers the fifty or so visitors and begins the tour by explaining that his great-grandfather began the restauration of La Cité in Carcassonne, and that there is even a street named after him in honor of his work on Carcassonne's behalf.
The property is large --about 32 hectares of cultivable land, or two and a half acres. The vines are primarily red wine grapes --grenâche, mourvedre, syrah, but a bit of semillon as well, cultivated on 12 hectares, all tended by hand. The wine is pesticide-free, and the fermentation process excludes all but a bit of sulfite, a percentage considerably below that which is necessary for a wine to be considered "bio" in France. Even under those stringent conditions one of the vintages has won a gold medal for Rousillon-Languedoc.
Jean-Baptiste is a man with stubborn streak, a tall, strongly-built man who leads the tour in a black t-shirt, khaki shorts and topsiders. He looks as though he just came in from trimming vines, and when he speaks of his methods, he explains every aspect of his thinking about what he wanted to produce on the land once he became responsible for the estate's production However, before he starts to speak about wine, he leads the assembled group of about sixty people (including about ten young children) on a hike across the property, which includes visiting a Gallo-Roman intersection of two roads, a Gallo-Roman cemetery, a pause along each of the varietals' vineyards, and stops to identify botanical specimens like wild asparagus and thyme. Jean-Baptiste is a fund of knowledge about the terrain in his little corner of the Minervois, and he speaks with deep love of the land he has inherited, land that has been in his family's hands since the 19th century when the land was turned to wine-growing and away from sheep farming.
Today, in order to make the land pay, Jean-Baptiste has reintroduced sheep farming on some of the land (50 lambs), created two gites (rural homes rented to tourists), and gives oenological tours, in addition to selling wine. His son, who shares his name, is now in charge of the day-to-day operations of the estate, but Jean-Baptiste and his wife remain the face of the estate to the world.
The tour takes three hours, two and a half of them a walk through the bracken of the estate. Jean-Baptiste walks through his lands as he probably does every day, but some of his guests think the tour more demanding than they expected. "I'll never do this again" says one American woman to her friends. "Wine tours are all the same."
This one is decidedly not, because this proprietaire loves his terroir and wants to tell you why it is so special, why the way he is making wine amounts to a moral choice as well as a practical one: he wants to leave his children something they can live from. At the end of the tour, a charge of 7 Euros is the cost of an assiette gourmand, a plate of patés, charcuterie and cheese assembled by his wife and served with glasses of wine made on the estate. "Yes", you have to understand French pretty well to appreciate all that Jean-Baptiste is saying (There are three hundred varieties of orchids that grow naturally in the Languedoc-Rousillon area--), but all things being equal, Jean-Baptiste is one vigneron who wants to communicate his passion for the wine of his land, which may not have the fame of the Bordeaux and Burgundies that are synonymous with fine French wine, but will be worthy of recognition so long as he has anything to say about it.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
My dull weekend in Caunes
July 28, 2013
Today, Sunday, the Caunes-Minervois Cycling Club has arranged to meet a club in La Redorte, where the road turns towards Béziers, for an especially long ride through the area east of Caunes. Start time is 7:00 a.m. I just make it.
Last night Bob Thorp replaced my Shimano pedals with the original Look brand which with Jean Lacroix lent me the bicycle. I need a break from trying to ride with cleats, and the shifter is giving me problems: I can manage several speeds as long as I stick with one of the three sprockets, but if I move out of that one, the drive chain falls off. After the fall caused yesterday by not disengaging the left cleat, I had the drive chain fall off, too. Just my luck, Bob and Annabelle were driving by, and picked me up on the outskirts of Villegly. Otherwise it would have been 9 kilometers on foot in the midday sun to Caunes.
That afternoon I went to FunSport, the best bicycle store in the area. They have a used bicycle depot at 18 avenue Jean Monnet, which the GPS led me to without one wrong turn, a first. The bicycles available range from bicycles selling at 2000 Euros to 200. However, I am small relative to the size of most riders, so there was only one bicycle with dropped handlebars in my size. It has Shimano brand shifters and brakes in the handles, a much easier bicycle to ride, even with cleats. It would set me back 390 Euros, a considerable sum, although relative to the price of comparable new bicycles, not a large sum. Still, having only one bicycle to choose from might not be the best way to invest in a new bicycle. Maybe I can manage on a borrowed bicycle for the remainder of my stay.
Returning home in the late afternoon, I tried to address a mechanical issue: the washing machine, which had been running perfectly, has become stuck on the rinse cycle. Friday, David Martinez, a local plumber whose family started a plumbing business here thirty years ago, came by to look at the upstairs shower head, which had stopped sending out streams of water no matter what I did to try to get it to work. The problem was a cracked internal tube inside the cable connecting the showerhead to the faucet in the wall.
When David, who is half-Spanish, half-French, arrived, I was in the middle of doing laundry in anticipation of the visit of an English guest Sunday evening. To install the new fixture, he asked me to turn off the machine. From that moment on, the machine has not worked. Yesterday Bob told me how to unlock the top-loading machine's lid so I could pull out the wet clothes; after that, I bailed water for about a half hour. Hoping the problem was a too-large load, I tried washing a small one before leaving for a break in Carcassonne. Nonetheless, on my return, I found the machine again, stuck on the rinse cycle. That pretty much sums up my Saturday. David will be here Monday at 11:00 a.m.
I might have to pick out a new washing machine for my hosts, who are certainly entitled to a working washer upon their return next year. At least the breakdown has happened while I still have enough time to order and take delivery of a new machine, if necessary. One thing to consider if I do, is that stores are closed in the afternoon, and not open after 12:30 p.m. on Sundays. Indeed, some (like FunSport) close Sunday and Monday. Time is of the essence is a relative concept here.
With the annoying prospect of the machine being unrepairable on my mind, I join the cycling club and follow along. Within minutes, my mind unwinds: the big sky and rolling hills, the vines all around me are so beautiful to me. There was heavy rain last night, but the morning is dry and cool, with the wind light. Or should I say winds. Everyone is an expert on the winds, and they are a frequent topic of conversation: the marin, the tramontane, the mistral and the "grec".
Jeannot tells me that the marin is blowing today. If the wind is blowing from the west, he says, one ought to stay to the right on the road; if east, on the left, to minimize the thrust of gusts. Il faut se proteger (You have to protect yourself), he tells me.
We reach the soccer stadium at La Redorte in short order. There is a sign-up sheet and a 2 Euro fee, which covers a map of the route, espresso and breakfast pastries without limit. Introductions are made all around. Someone comes to find me and takes me to meet an older woman with short blond hair and blue eyes, seated at the registration desk. I assume she is French, that there is something I filled out incorrectly on my registration form. She looks at me, I say Bon jour and she says nothing.
"Je vous comprends. Parlez-moi, s'il vous plait." I try again.
She stares back: she is English. The assembled have a good laugh, and then I chat with the woman, who is thinking of buying a house here with her daughter. She is volunteering to help with the ride registration and collection of 2 Euros. After a few minutes of chat, it is time to ride. The group rides to a designated point, then Jeannot and I ride back, as the meet course is strenuous, and Jeannot prefers to do his 50 kilometers on the flats. Pedaling along, at one point, I try to use the shifter again, to see whether there is a knack I need to get. Unfortunately, the drive chain falls off again. I lose Jeannot for several minutes, while I stop and re-engage the drive chain.
I have all I can do to catch up with Jeannot, whose age does not keep him from rising from the bicycle seat and pedaling vigorously when he has to take a hill, or pedaling furiously if he wants to lead. When I am side by side with him he asks me,
Am I going too fast for you?
Today, Sunday, the Caunes-Minervois Cycling Club has arranged to meet a club in La Redorte, where the road turns towards Béziers, for an especially long ride through the area east of Caunes. Start time is 7:00 a.m. I just make it.
Last night Bob Thorp replaced my Shimano pedals with the original Look brand which with Jean Lacroix lent me the bicycle. I need a break from trying to ride with cleats, and the shifter is giving me problems: I can manage several speeds as long as I stick with one of the three sprockets, but if I move out of that one, the drive chain falls off. After the fall caused yesterday by not disengaging the left cleat, I had the drive chain fall off, too. Just my luck, Bob and Annabelle were driving by, and picked me up on the outskirts of Villegly. Otherwise it would have been 9 kilometers on foot in the midday sun to Caunes.
That afternoon I went to FunSport, the best bicycle store in the area. They have a used bicycle depot at 18 avenue Jean Monnet, which the GPS led me to without one wrong turn, a first. The bicycles available range from bicycles selling at 2000 Euros to 200. However, I am small relative to the size of most riders, so there was only one bicycle with dropped handlebars in my size. It has Shimano brand shifters and brakes in the handles, a much easier bicycle to ride, even with cleats. It would set me back 390 Euros, a considerable sum, although relative to the price of comparable new bicycles, not a large sum. Still, having only one bicycle to choose from might not be the best way to invest in a new bicycle. Maybe I can manage on a borrowed bicycle for the remainder of my stay.
Returning home in the late afternoon, I tried to address a mechanical issue: the washing machine, which had been running perfectly, has become stuck on the rinse cycle. Friday, David Martinez, a local plumber whose family started a plumbing business here thirty years ago, came by to look at the upstairs shower head, which had stopped sending out streams of water no matter what I did to try to get it to work. The problem was a cracked internal tube inside the cable connecting the showerhead to the faucet in the wall.
When David, who is half-Spanish, half-French, arrived, I was in the middle of doing laundry in anticipation of the visit of an English guest Sunday evening. To install the new fixture, he asked me to turn off the machine. From that moment on, the machine has not worked. Yesterday Bob told me how to unlock the top-loading machine's lid so I could pull out the wet clothes; after that, I bailed water for about a half hour. Hoping the problem was a too-large load, I tried washing a small one before leaving for a break in Carcassonne. Nonetheless, on my return, I found the machine again, stuck on the rinse cycle. That pretty much sums up my Saturday. David will be here Monday at 11:00 a.m.
I might have to pick out a new washing machine for my hosts, who are certainly entitled to a working washer upon their return next year. At least the breakdown has happened while I still have enough time to order and take delivery of a new machine, if necessary. One thing to consider if I do, is that stores are closed in the afternoon, and not open after 12:30 p.m. on Sundays. Indeed, some (like FunSport) close Sunday and Monday. Time is of the essence is a relative concept here.
With the annoying prospect of the machine being unrepairable on my mind, I join the cycling club and follow along. Within minutes, my mind unwinds: the big sky and rolling hills, the vines all around me are so beautiful to me. There was heavy rain last night, but the morning is dry and cool, with the wind light. Or should I say winds. Everyone is an expert on the winds, and they are a frequent topic of conversation: the marin, the tramontane, the mistral and the "grec".
Jeannot tells me that the marin is blowing today. If the wind is blowing from the west, he says, one ought to stay to the right on the road; if east, on the left, to minimize the thrust of gusts. Il faut se proteger (You have to protect yourself), he tells me.
We reach the soccer stadium at La Redorte in short order. There is a sign-up sheet and a 2 Euro fee, which covers a map of the route, espresso and breakfast pastries without limit. Introductions are made all around. Someone comes to find me and takes me to meet an older woman with short blond hair and blue eyes, seated at the registration desk. I assume she is French, that there is something I filled out incorrectly on my registration form. She looks at me, I say Bon jour and she says nothing.
"Je vous comprends. Parlez-moi, s'il vous plait." I try again.
She stares back: she is English. The assembled have a good laugh, and then I chat with the woman, who is thinking of buying a house here with her daughter. She is volunteering to help with the ride registration and collection of 2 Euros. After a few minutes of chat, it is time to ride. The group rides to a designated point, then Jeannot and I ride back, as the meet course is strenuous, and Jeannot prefers to do his 50 kilometers on the flats. Pedaling along, at one point, I try to use the shifter again, to see whether there is a knack I need to get. Unfortunately, the drive chain falls off again. I lose Jeannot for several minutes, while I stop and re-engage the drive chain.
I have all I can do to catch up with Jeannot, whose age does not keep him from rising from the bicycle seat and pedaling vigorously when he has to take a hill, or pedaling furiously if he wants to lead. When I am side by side with him he asks me,
Am I going too fast for you?
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Wind
July 27, 2013
The weather all over France has been extreme this July, with floods, hail, and winds dangerously high. This morning I went out to try to ride to Carcassonne, but turned around after reaching Villegly, a mere 6 miles. I was tired of having the bicycle swerve to one side or the other on account of the 40 mile an hour gusts.
The road to Carcassonne is across farmland: sunflowers were growing in the place where I stopped. There are ditches on each side of the road, a few inches from where I was cycling. Meanwhile, cars were passing me at a good clip, locals doing Saturday morning errands. --And the occasional truck.
It occurred to me that one good gust to my left could push me right under a vehicle. A gust to the right could land me in the ditch. There are moments when it is easy to see how serious injury, even death could be hastened by foolish persistence. This was one of them, so I stopped the bicycle, walked over to the other side of the road when traffic permitted, and started to walk back.
I'd also already fallen once, thanks to a cleat that would not release. The cleats may make pedaling smoother, but if the smoothness comes at the price of falls, I think I will go back to pedals. My knees are beginning to look like I got into a swordfight with a dwarf.
The weather all over France has been extreme this July, with floods, hail, and winds dangerously high. This morning I went out to try to ride to Carcassonne, but turned around after reaching Villegly, a mere 6 miles. I was tired of having the bicycle swerve to one side or the other on account of the 40 mile an hour gusts.
The road to Carcassonne is across farmland: sunflowers were growing in the place where I stopped. There are ditches on each side of the road, a few inches from where I was cycling. Meanwhile, cars were passing me at a good clip, locals doing Saturday morning errands. --And the occasional truck.
It occurred to me that one good gust to my left could push me right under a vehicle. A gust to the right could land me in the ditch. There are moments when it is easy to see how serious injury, even death could be hastened by foolish persistence. This was one of them, so I stopped the bicycle, walked over to the other side of the road when traffic permitted, and started to walk back.
I'd also already fallen once, thanks to a cleat that would not release. The cleats may make pedaling smoother, but if the smoothness comes at the price of falls, I think I will go back to pedals. My knees are beginning to look like I got into a swordfight with a dwarf.
Friday, July 26, 2013
I Started A Rumor
July 26, 2013
I think that my comprehension of French is improving, but sometimes I get big things wrong.
An example of this is the rumor I have started regarding the "Femen" stamp that has just been released by the French postal service, a new stamp to commemorate the presidency of François Hollande.
The symbol of the French Revolution which the French live with year-in-and-year-out is the postage stamp of Marianne, the image of a woman wearing a Phyrigian cap. If you don't know what a Phyrigian cap is, it is a sock-like head-covering, a sort of loose-fitting sailor's watch cap. The Phrygian bonnet is always red in its French iteration, and it is synonymous with liberty.
Many beautiful women have modeled for Marianne, including Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Inès de la Fressange, and Laetitia Casta. The designers of the latest Marianne stamp, David Kanewa and Olivier Ciappa, declared when the stamp was released, that an inspiration was Imma Shevchenko of the radical feminist group "Femen".
Imma Shevchenko is a radical feminist from Ukraine whose stock in trade is going topless in protest. As the French have always had an easy relationship with small-breasted topless women on beaches, the fuss over Shevchenko's inspiration is hard to fathom. She is not French, but she has French residence, and the French do not object to young, gorgeous blonds going topless for what they believe in.
Yet a great deal of ink has been spilled over the latest Marianne. I have been trying to make sense of it, but at some point my grasp of what I was reading in the newspapers fell behind what seems to actually have been placed on the page. I thought the controversy was over the fact that the new Marianne was a transvestite! I drew this conclusion from the frequent references to Femen in the press.
This is not as wild an idea as it sounds. The female gender is femelle in French, the male, mâle. Femen suggests something beyond the feminine, something that might offend the French sense of the strictness of gender roles. Although perhaps that is not a sentiment that can be easily reconciled with Liberty Equality and Fraternity in the 21st century.
On the other hand, maybe I got it wrong: maybe the protest was a picayune snipe by the Right, protesting the use of someone other than a Frenchwoman as the inspiration for Marianne.
However, if you look at the stamp itself, one thing immediately strikes you: Marianne has huge hands, the size of transvestites'! Kanewa and Ciappa admitted to being inspired by images from the Renaissance, bandes déssinés (French hard-bound comic-strips), and manga, eroticized comic books from Japan. And Femen sounds --at least to my ears-- like a merger of feminine and men --a word that bespeaks androgyny.
It was with that in mind that I went to the post office in Caunes-Minervois today, to see whether it had any of the Femen stamps, as I called them. The man behind the desk is a quiet, unassuming, friendly person, slender in build. He wears small wireless eyeglasses and has a retiring, but cheerful demeanor.
"I would like some of the new Marianne stamps, the Femen stamps?"
"We don't have any yet, but eventually we will."
"I want to buy a sheet of them--"
"They come in large and small denominations--"
"I want to frame a sheet, since the new Marianne is so controversial--"
"Oh? Why controversial?"
"It's a femen, a transvestite--"
"I have a flyer here that announces the issue--"
"There she is. Do you see how large the hands are? It's a man! --Or it's half-man, half-woman --or it's a transvestite, I don't know. All I know is that it's a scandal!"
"Where have you read this?"
"In Le Figaro and other newspapers. It's very controversial."
"Well, if you want to buy a sheet, you can buy a sheet of 100 stamps at the centime level, which will cost you a Euro."
"Great! Then I can frame it!"
Has Caunes-Minervois ever heard of such a thing? Inadvertently, I have passed on misinformation. Yet if you look at the image on the stamp, that girl has some big hands.
I think that my comprehension of French is improving, but sometimes I get big things wrong.
An example of this is the rumor I have started regarding the "Femen" stamp that has just been released by the French postal service, a new stamp to commemorate the presidency of François Hollande.
The symbol of the French Revolution which the French live with year-in-and-year-out is the postage stamp of Marianne, the image of a woman wearing a Phyrigian cap. If you don't know what a Phyrigian cap is, it is a sock-like head-covering, a sort of loose-fitting sailor's watch cap. The Phrygian bonnet is always red in its French iteration, and it is synonymous with liberty.
Many beautiful women have modeled for Marianne, including Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Inès de la Fressange, and Laetitia Casta. The designers of the latest Marianne stamp, David Kanewa and Olivier Ciappa, declared when the stamp was released, that an inspiration was Imma Shevchenko of the radical feminist group "Femen".
Imma Shevchenko is a radical feminist from Ukraine whose stock in trade is going topless in protest. As the French have always had an easy relationship with small-breasted topless women on beaches, the fuss over Shevchenko's inspiration is hard to fathom. She is not French, but she has French residence, and the French do not object to young, gorgeous blonds going topless for what they believe in.
Yet a great deal of ink has been spilled over the latest Marianne. I have been trying to make sense of it, but at some point my grasp of what I was reading in the newspapers fell behind what seems to actually have been placed on the page. I thought the controversy was over the fact that the new Marianne was a transvestite! I drew this conclusion from the frequent references to Femen in the press.
This is not as wild an idea as it sounds. The female gender is femelle in French, the male, mâle. Femen suggests something beyond the feminine, something that might offend the French sense of the strictness of gender roles. Although perhaps that is not a sentiment that can be easily reconciled with Liberty Equality and Fraternity in the 21st century.
On the other hand, maybe I got it wrong: maybe the protest was a picayune snipe by the Right, protesting the use of someone other than a Frenchwoman as the inspiration for Marianne.
However, if you look at the stamp itself, one thing immediately strikes you: Marianne has huge hands, the size of transvestites'! Kanewa and Ciappa admitted to being inspired by images from the Renaissance, bandes déssinés (French hard-bound comic-strips), and manga, eroticized comic books from Japan. And Femen sounds --at least to my ears-- like a merger of feminine and men --a word that bespeaks androgyny.
It was with that in mind that I went to the post office in Caunes-Minervois today, to see whether it had any of the Femen stamps, as I called them. The man behind the desk is a quiet, unassuming, friendly person, slender in build. He wears small wireless eyeglasses and has a retiring, but cheerful demeanor.
"I would like some of the new Marianne stamps, the Femen stamps?"
"We don't have any yet, but eventually we will."
"I want to buy a sheet of them--"
"They come in large and small denominations--"
"I want to frame a sheet, since the new Marianne is so controversial--"
"Oh? Why controversial?"
"It's a femen, a transvestite--"
"I have a flyer here that announces the issue--"
"There she is. Do you see how large the hands are? It's a man! --Or it's half-man, half-woman --or it's a transvestite, I don't know. All I know is that it's a scandal!"
"Where have you read this?"
"In Le Figaro and other newspapers. It's very controversial."
"Well, if you want to buy a sheet, you can buy a sheet of 100 stamps at the centime level, which will cost you a Euro."
"Great! Then I can frame it!"
Has Caunes-Minervois ever heard of such a thing? Inadvertently, I have passed on misinformation. Yet if you look at the image on the stamp, that girl has some big hands.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
A Visit to the Notaire's in Ariège; The Thursday Cycling Meeting
July 24-25, 2013
After much thought, much investigation and much consultation, I decided to buy the house I first looked at near Notre Dame du Cros. When I first came to Caunes-Minervois, the last thing I thought I would ever do was buy a house. Yet the house I have bought overlooks the forest and offers wonderful views, as well as being in mint condition. Thanks to the downturn in French real estate, the house is affordable. My sellers, a couple who have moved to Minerve, have done all they can to leave everything in working order so that I can turn the key in the lock and move in without further ado once the paperwork is completed.
The paperwork involves a visit to the notaire in Mazeres, Ariège, in the Midi-Pyrenées region, two hours away. The notaire is one the sellers' famlies have dealt with for generations and rely on. Ariège is the poorest of France's départments, with l'Aude one notch higher on the list. Although l'Aude is fertile, this part of Ariège is dry: this is cattle-country. To get to Mazeres will be a challenge, though. My Michelin map is only for Languedoc-Roussillon, and the GPS does not recognize Mazeres in the Ariège, only one in the Haut Garonne, five hours away.
The notaire's e-mail asked me to meet the sellers at 10:30 a.m. at the house to check on a promised repair, then meet in Mazeres at 2:00 p.m. I mistakenly thought that we were driving together, but the sellers are staying overnight in Mazeres, where they have relatives, so I have to drive myself there. With the GPS not cooperating and map-less, Madame volunteers to sit in the passenger seat with me while her husband leads the way.
The trip turns out to be much more simple than I thought it would be: there is a turn-off towards Foix where the péage splits off, but from there I have only to follow the exit to Mazeres. The two cars arrive timely at the notaire's.
The buildings in Mazeres are three-story rose-brick structures without much ornamentation. There is an austerity about the landscape and the shape of the town that reminds me of Spain, which is not surprising, as we are edging towards its border. (We are also only two hours from Andorra, the kingdom in the Pyrenées that lies between France and Spain, and which is ruled jointly today by the Count of Foix and the French President.)
The notaire's office is a storefront above a residential building around the corner from the church, an enormous brick building without ornamentation inside or out. The office is spare, two women are now in charge, having taken over from the man who originally had the license de notaire. After a wait of five minutes, the notaire whose name is on the firm's official documents comes out to greet us. She is about forty years old, and is wearing a one-piece playsuit over a white t-shirt and platform heels. She conducts us down the hall into her office.
The office is dominated by a large bureau plat, a desk table in front of which three chairs for clients have been placed, with the notaire's chair opposite. All the bureaus plats in lawyer's offices in France, indeed, all the desks of government officials of high rank, are in the style of pre-Revolutionary France. Which is funny when you think that even though France is a Republic, all the desk furniture is in the style of the monarchy that the revolution overturned, the grander the better: Louis XIV, XV or XVI.
To the right of the table is a large computer screen on which the contract appears. For the next three hours all of us go over the terms of the contract and the mechanics of the sale transaction. That task completed, buyer and seller have to initial or sign every page of the contract, including the reports of electrical, lead, asbestos, and energy experts. The transaction cannot be finalized until the mairie, the City Hall in Caunes-Minervois, declares that it has no interest in the property for public purposes; or, in stopping the sale and exercising its right of first refusal.
The latter occasionally happens. Sellers often want to get out of paying taxes on the sale and will report a sale price that is unusually low relative to the assessed value of the house, while taking the balance of the actual purchase price of the house as a payment for "furniture". In the case of one commercial property in Caunes, the sale was stopped by the mairie, which exercised its right of first refusal. After the property was transferred to the mairie, it sold the lot to a local for a price near the assessed value, but less than the total sum that would have changed hands had the original transaction gone through. The seller lost the difference between the price the mairie paid and what the cost of the "furniture" would have been.
The contract reviewed and signed, the purchase price paid, all depends on the mairie, which could take up to three months to decide whether to exercise a right-of-first refusal. We are all hoping that, with the real estate market so poor, the mairie will produce the necessary document permitting the transaction to close sooner. I will give the notaire a power of attorney to complete the transaction if all the paperwork is not completed by the time I need to return to the States. In any event, the sellers will let me store my belongings in the house, which is a great favor.
Within twenty-four hours the news I am to become a Caunoise of sorts will be all over the village: the neighbors across from where I am staying include a gendarme who just retired. Bob and Annabelle Thorp, who take me out to dinner in Villeneuve to celebrate the house purchase, introduce me to him and his family (three generations living together under one roof), as a new neighbor. Everyone remembers the house as having belonged to the curé, although he died decades ago.
***
The cycling club sets out at seven-thirty as usual, this time heading towards Peyriac and further on to L'Auriole. Everyone is happy to see that I now have cleats on my cycling shoes along with the new pedals into which they have to snap in. The group is smaller today: Bob, me, Jeannot, Patrice and Claude.
We start pedaling in the cool, early morning light: the fields glow in the sunshine. As I pedal past row after row of Minervois vines on both sides of roads mainly used by farmers, I take such pleasure in the land's fertility: la belle France, one of the most arable countries in the world, trying so hard to resist the force of bigger and bigger forms of organization, so suspicious of the world of economies of scale, which threatens the intimacy of life at the local level.
For example, while pedaling through one of the villages early into the ride, a woman crosses our path, followed by two dogs, one of which lags behind. I try to go around it, but its movements throw me off and I cannot disengage from one of the cleats fast enough and tumble to the ground. I am able to get up, but a bit bruised, and one of my knees has a scrape. Everyone stops riding and comes back for me. I get up and say I want to drink something, walking over to the wall of a house to lean against it and drink. One of the club members moves my bicycle over to the wall, while everyone makes their assessment of what I did wrong, and whether I am capable of continuing.
While this is happening the woman with the dogs comes up, clutching a bottle of Betadyne antiseptic and a bag of cotton pads. She cleans my scrape and adds a bit more Betadyne for good measure, making sure I have no other abrasions before letting me go.
"Only in the villages will you find that", says Bob. "People look after each other."
We ride on and I fall one more time, this time on the other side, without injury.
Not wanting to make much of this second failure of coordination, I joke that now I have fallen once on each side.
Vous êtes équilibrée! (You're well-balanced now!) laughs Claude and we ride on.
After much thought, much investigation and much consultation, I decided to buy the house I first looked at near Notre Dame du Cros. When I first came to Caunes-Minervois, the last thing I thought I would ever do was buy a house. Yet the house I have bought overlooks the forest and offers wonderful views, as well as being in mint condition. Thanks to the downturn in French real estate, the house is affordable. My sellers, a couple who have moved to Minerve, have done all they can to leave everything in working order so that I can turn the key in the lock and move in without further ado once the paperwork is completed.
The paperwork involves a visit to the notaire in Mazeres, Ariège, in the Midi-Pyrenées region, two hours away. The notaire is one the sellers' famlies have dealt with for generations and rely on. Ariège is the poorest of France's départments, with l'Aude one notch higher on the list. Although l'Aude is fertile, this part of Ariège is dry: this is cattle-country. To get to Mazeres will be a challenge, though. My Michelin map is only for Languedoc-Roussillon, and the GPS does not recognize Mazeres in the Ariège, only one in the Haut Garonne, five hours away.
The notaire's e-mail asked me to meet the sellers at 10:30 a.m. at the house to check on a promised repair, then meet in Mazeres at 2:00 p.m. I mistakenly thought that we were driving together, but the sellers are staying overnight in Mazeres, where they have relatives, so I have to drive myself there. With the GPS not cooperating and map-less, Madame volunteers to sit in the passenger seat with me while her husband leads the way.
The trip turns out to be much more simple than I thought it would be: there is a turn-off towards Foix where the péage splits off, but from there I have only to follow the exit to Mazeres. The two cars arrive timely at the notaire's.
The buildings in Mazeres are three-story rose-brick structures without much ornamentation. There is an austerity about the landscape and the shape of the town that reminds me of Spain, which is not surprising, as we are edging towards its border. (We are also only two hours from Andorra, the kingdom in the Pyrenées that lies between France and Spain, and which is ruled jointly today by the Count of Foix and the French President.)
The notaire's office is a storefront above a residential building around the corner from the church, an enormous brick building without ornamentation inside or out. The office is spare, two women are now in charge, having taken over from the man who originally had the license de notaire. After a wait of five minutes, the notaire whose name is on the firm's official documents comes out to greet us. She is about forty years old, and is wearing a one-piece playsuit over a white t-shirt and platform heels. She conducts us down the hall into her office.
The office is dominated by a large bureau plat, a desk table in front of which three chairs for clients have been placed, with the notaire's chair opposite. All the bureaus plats in lawyer's offices in France, indeed, all the desks of government officials of high rank, are in the style of pre-Revolutionary France. Which is funny when you think that even though France is a Republic, all the desk furniture is in the style of the monarchy that the revolution overturned, the grander the better: Louis XIV, XV or XVI.
To the right of the table is a large computer screen on which the contract appears. For the next three hours all of us go over the terms of the contract and the mechanics of the sale transaction. That task completed, buyer and seller have to initial or sign every page of the contract, including the reports of electrical, lead, asbestos, and energy experts. The transaction cannot be finalized until the mairie, the City Hall in Caunes-Minervois, declares that it has no interest in the property for public purposes; or, in stopping the sale and exercising its right of first refusal.
The latter occasionally happens. Sellers often want to get out of paying taxes on the sale and will report a sale price that is unusually low relative to the assessed value of the house, while taking the balance of the actual purchase price of the house as a payment for "furniture". In the case of one commercial property in Caunes, the sale was stopped by the mairie, which exercised its right of first refusal. After the property was transferred to the mairie, it sold the lot to a local for a price near the assessed value, but less than the total sum that would have changed hands had the original transaction gone through. The seller lost the difference between the price the mairie paid and what the cost of the "furniture" would have been.
The contract reviewed and signed, the purchase price paid, all depends on the mairie, which could take up to three months to decide whether to exercise a right-of-first refusal. We are all hoping that, with the real estate market so poor, the mairie will produce the necessary document permitting the transaction to close sooner. I will give the notaire a power of attorney to complete the transaction if all the paperwork is not completed by the time I need to return to the States. In any event, the sellers will let me store my belongings in the house, which is a great favor.
Within twenty-four hours the news I am to become a Caunoise of sorts will be all over the village: the neighbors across from where I am staying include a gendarme who just retired. Bob and Annabelle Thorp, who take me out to dinner in Villeneuve to celebrate the house purchase, introduce me to him and his family (three generations living together under one roof), as a new neighbor. Everyone remembers the house as having belonged to the curé, although he died decades ago.
***
The cycling club sets out at seven-thirty as usual, this time heading towards Peyriac and further on to L'Auriole. Everyone is happy to see that I now have cleats on my cycling shoes along with the new pedals into which they have to snap in. The group is smaller today: Bob, me, Jeannot, Patrice and Claude.
We start pedaling in the cool, early morning light: the fields glow in the sunshine. As I pedal past row after row of Minervois vines on both sides of roads mainly used by farmers, I take such pleasure in the land's fertility: la belle France, one of the most arable countries in the world, trying so hard to resist the force of bigger and bigger forms of organization, so suspicious of the world of economies of scale, which threatens the intimacy of life at the local level.
For example, while pedaling through one of the villages early into the ride, a woman crosses our path, followed by two dogs, one of which lags behind. I try to go around it, but its movements throw me off and I cannot disengage from one of the cleats fast enough and tumble to the ground. I am able to get up, but a bit bruised, and one of my knees has a scrape. Everyone stops riding and comes back for me. I get up and say I want to drink something, walking over to the wall of a house to lean against it and drink. One of the club members moves my bicycle over to the wall, while everyone makes their assessment of what I did wrong, and whether I am capable of continuing.
While this is happening the woman with the dogs comes up, clutching a bottle of Betadyne antiseptic and a bag of cotton pads. She cleans my scrape and adds a bit more Betadyne for good measure, making sure I have no other abrasions before letting me go.
"Only in the villages will you find that", says Bob. "People look after each other."
We ride on and I fall one more time, this time on the other side, without injury.
Not wanting to make much of this second failure of coordination, I joke that now I have fallen once on each side.
Vous êtes équilibrée! (You're well-balanced now!) laughs Claude and we ride on.
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