Will my house blow up or cave in?

The gaping hole underneath my kitchen

 

I might have mentioned this before, but my house is apparently either ready to cave in, or blow up. Or both.

Last Thursday, a few construction workers started jackhammering, drilling and blasting their way through the cobblestones and asphalt in my street. Since this is a French village, what I mean by “in my street” is also translated to “Two feet outside my windows.”

They’ve been drilling ever since – except, of course, for Saturday and Sunday.

I have no idea what they’re doing — only that they have a miniature bulldozer and, using it, have created a gaping hole directly under my kitchen. They’ve done the same thing to the street a few houses down from mine.

There are large metal pieces over the holes in the street, so when cars drive over them, it sounds like an army tank is coming through the village. It wakes me up multiple times each night.

To give you an idea of how narrow it is...

Anyhow, today, one of the workers — who I feel as though is already intimately a part of my life, since he spends his days mere feet away from me — rang my doorbell.

I did my usual “Je ne parle pas Francais,” and he did the usual things French do when you say that, which is to say “Un peu?” and then continue speaking rapidfire French to me.

I heard “kitchen” and “counter” – and believe he meant “counter” as in the meter that my landlady (who, by the way, is out of town during this) reads to tell me my water and gas bills.

We stood there for a few minutes, until I gestured him in.

He took off his hat (how very cute) and looked under my sink, behind my ant-infested garbage (yeah, that’s right, guess where the ants go when someone drills into their homes? My house) and finally in the backroom where he looked at the meter.

Then he turned around, placed his hat back on and went outside.

A close-up of the hole

When I left 30 minutes later, I felt like all the construction workers knew that I didn’t speak French, and were all staring at me as I left. Uncomfortable… but they were very polite.

Upon returning.. they were still drilling.

 Thank God the French have unreasonably long lunches, because at least I get about two hours of non-drilling every afternoon.

Anyhow, as of tonight, there are not only gaping holes under the street, but also one under my kitchen. And someone put a rolled-up tarp in there to “cover it up” as though now no small child will want to go exploring in it or something.

I’m just a little bit worried they’re going to somehow cut off my water, or gas, or, God forbid, my Internet.

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Let the “au revoirs” Begin

And it’s started — all the goodbyes.

The bad part about the accelerated one-year MBA program D. is taking is that everything moves really fast. The students (and their wives) who started the term before him are already graduating – meaning several people I’ve just started to get to know are leaving Fontainebleau for good.

Also, because INSEAD has split campuses, students – and their partners –  often move between France and Singapore for classes. Unfortunately for me, several of my friends are moving to Singapore. Since we’re not taking that option, that means I won’t see them again. It’s sad! When D. returns to classes in August, it’s going  be a completely different group of people that I will have to get to know, all over again. Some of my old friends will be here, but many will not.

The awesome Indian girl who’s teaching me Hindi? Leaving.

Two girls – from Pakistan and Egypt – who have been an integral part of my new Interfaith Group? Leaving.

The sweet New Zealander with the amazing, Great-Gasby-esque house in the country? Leaving.

The Californian I first got to know over dosais in Paris’  10th? Leaving.

In fact, she’s the first one to go – my first goodbye. She’ll leave for the US tomorrow, and after that, she’ll be elsewhere in Europe for her husband’s internship. After that, she’ll be in Singapore. So, we met up for a coffee today to say goodbye.

Everyone always really hates saying goodbyes, I know I’m not the only one. So this week is going to be tough! It’s hard thinking that you meet people who you could really become great friends with, but you just don’t have enough time to do so. Oh well.

We won’t always have Paris – but we will always have Facebook 🙂

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I’m on a boat…

Blurry... like my recollections of the night

Last night, there was a party held in honor of the European “National week” at Insead. They organized it on a barge, which was anchored in the Seine River, in the heart of Paris.

It was awesome.

As we stood, waiting for the bus to pick us all up at Insead, there were bottles of beer and champagne being passed around. This continued during the 1.5 hour ride into Paris – champagne, freely flowing.

It’s pretty cool driving into Paris at night. We could see the Eiffel tower all lit up and everything.

We partied on the top of the boat, looking at the Paris skyline, for several hours, and eventually made it home around 4 a.m.

Needless to say, when I was awakened early this  morning by a jackhammer directly outside our door ripping up the road… ugh. Felt like my head was ready to explode, for more than one reason!

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Spammer with poor grammar and spelling skills strikes again!

Hello everyone,

So, I meant to write about our awesome weekend getaway to Bruges today, but instead, I’ve spend the entire day dealing with the fact that my primary email account was somehow hacked into this weekend.

Nothing major happened, but somehow I got a little bug on my computer that we had to remove. The spammer also sent out emails to EVERYONE on my email contact list (a lot of people, considering this account has been around since 2002) trying to get them to shop at some online store – except the “link” is a virus. Ick.

Fortunately, I can’t imagine anyone actually clicking on the link, OR thinking that I actually sent the email – especially considering the poor grammar and spelling this person used. Honestly, spammer, if you want people to actually think I sent the email, why don’t you at least clean up your very poor English skills? Or use Google translate?

 “Also the price is good enough!

“If you have free time you can visite the site by yourself”

“I hope you have good mood shopping from the site”

“I am very satisfeaid with it!”

 Really? My contacts know I was a journalist, spammer!

Still, it’s annoying, because now, I feel like I have to shut the account down. So I’ve spent the day going through the nearly 800 emails I’ve collected over the years and either deleting them, or cutting & pasting them into files (a lot are things like recipes, sentimental emails, work-related emails I want to keep, etc).

On a happy note, I’ve been down memory lane now for a few hours. And, the spammer has helped at least one old friend get back in touch with me.. so, thanks? I guess?

So, I’ll be back tomorrow, hopefully, with some photos for you all!

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Wanted: Romancier

A while back, D. and I went into Paris with some friends and paid a visit to the famous Cimetière de Montmartre. This above-ground cemetary reminded me of the one in Recoleta, in Buenos Aires, where Evita Peron is buried.

Except here, you can visit the graves of such famous Frenchmen as Emile Zola and Jacques Offenbach. At the front of the cemetery, there is a large sign listing many of the deceased and their claims to fame.

Look below and guess what caught our eyes:

The list of graves

“Romancier.”

In case it’s too small for you to read, the number 72 grave spot, between a “poete” and a “danseus”  is occupied by “Stendhal: Romancier.”

Really? That’s a job?

We all four sat around trying to figure out what kind of a country lists being a romantic lover as a career. Ha ha ha, we laughed.  I liked imagining this Stendhal character, whoever he was, wandering around in a red velvet bathrobe, smoking a pipe, reeking of a strong eau de toilette and spitting out Byron quotes at every turn.

So,…it turns out “romancier,” is just a French term for a novelist. Oops. Jokes on us.

But it also turns out I was right on the second one – Wikipedia tells me that “Stendhal was a dandy and wit about town in Paris, as well as an inveterate womaniser who was obsessed with his sexual conquests.”

He later suffered miserable physical problems later in life from complications of (and treatment of) syphilis.

I wonder what it says about the French that “novelist”  has the same root as “romance.” Linguistics people, where are you?

And, are you still considered a romancier even if you write novels about, say, mountain climbing and survival?

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Stuff goes bad here…

I’m not sure if my refrigerator is just old and out-of-shape (too many croissants, perhaps?), but my food spoils a lot faster here in France. When I buy things, I’m never certain that they won’t be rancid when I open them — even when the expiration date on the package is a week or more away!

D. says this is because the French put fewer preservatives in their food (by the way, if you ask a French person, don’t actually say “Do you use preservatifs in your food?” because, if you did, you would be asking him if they place condoms in their food supply. That’s a mistake you only make once).

I guess D.  could be right – I’m not really knowledgeable enough about it to say one way or the other. If that is, indeed true, then great. But I’m not sure that it is – I mean, let’s not forget this is the country that somehow gets milk into a state where it can sit in boxes, unrefrigerated, for months at at time. Au naturel? I think not.

Among my most disappointing spoilage stories is The Great Champion Milk Fiasco.

When our local grocery store was changing hands (From a Champion to a Carrefour) the store was undergoing a thorough reorganization. During this time, I went to buy some actual “fresh” (a.k.a. “refrigerated”) milk from the dairy case. The date on the bottle was a week or two in the future. I got it home, opened it up… and it was curdled.

I think the grocery store workers had been moving stuff around and weren’t exactly careful enough about keeping the products refrigerated, but I guess I’ll never know for certain.

Here’s another example of what I’m talking about: 

The offending English Muffin

I bought these English muffins well before the expiration date listed on the package. I ate two. Three days later, I went to finish them and, as you can see, there is mold all over them. Even though I kept them in the fridge!

 Then there’s just the daily stuff – my veggies seem to go bad very quickly. Lettuce has about a 2-day turnaround, and even that’s stretching it. My potatoes often are already sprouting by the time I get them home. And even the weird non-refrigerated milk (which I’ve started to buy after the Milk Fiasco) starts smelling funky after about three days.

Baguettes, and other French bread, are, by law, not allowed to have preservatives in them, so they go hard after one day. I’m not complaining about this one, though – their bread is great, so whatever they are doing, works!

I suppose one might say I should just shop “fresh” going to the market everyday for my produce and dairy. However, since most stores are open such odd hours, and close so early, that really isn’t a practical way to live here.

I’m not saying I really like preservatives… but I could say that I’m slowly developing a greater appreciation for them  😦

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“Blow fort! For seven seconds. I say stop.”

Those were the words that greeted us from the French policeman’s mouth late Friday night, as D. and I were driving home from a very yummy Tunisian dinner at a friend’s house.

As we drove through the center of Fontainebleau, two cops had blocked the road and were herding cars into a small parking lot, shining their flashlights at us and making us roll down the windows. They were the Drunk Driving Patrol. We’d heard about them.

One of them instructed D. to blow into the little machine, but he wasn’t doing it the right way.

“No, blow fort…fort…strong!” the cop told him. “For seven second! I say stop!”

Ok then.

Fortunately for us, our lovely three-course meal with friends had – for once – not included alcohol. Our hosts were a Muslim couple, and another guest was in labor  (no, I’m not making that up. She went to the hospital that night and they basically told her to come back later, so she thought, “Ok, why not get dinner to pass the time?” and delivered several hours after our dinner party ended). So, obviously, it wasn’t an alcohol-saturated event.

It was very nice to know that we weren’t in danger of failing the breathalizer test, since the ramifications for DD in France are pretty strict. D. passed, the cop told him “Oh, zero. That is good. That is very good!” and let us go. He gave D. the mouthpiece to keep, and it’s now sitting in our car as a reminder to NOT drink and drive.

Still, the event provided an interesting point of discussion between us, on the way home. I was somewhat shocked to see, firsthand, that here in France, the police can just pull you over with no reason whatsoever and test you for alcohol. D., on the other hand, thought it was brilliant. In his mind, if you aren’t drunk, you have nothing to worry about, and, if you are drunk, you shouldn’t be driving.

It made me realize, once again, how very American I am, and how, culturally,we think so differently. Because, while I really am against drunk driving and think there should be stiff penalties, I’m really just not comfortable with the police being able to pull anyone ever whenever they feel like it, with no reasonable cause.

D. said, “Well, it keeps people safe!”

And I said, “True. But you could say that drug traffickers make everyone in Phoenix unsafe. At the same time, would you be OK with the police setting a policy that said they can pull everyone over and search their cars, randomly, to make sure they don’t have drugs? I mean, how far are you going to take this ‘safety’ thing? How many rights are you OK with it infringing on?”

He didn’t really have an answer.

I get that this isn’t America. It’s France. So they can do whatever they like. But I’m glad that, imperfect as our drunk driving laws are in the US, we don’t try to take care of it this way. 

What to do?

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New Photo + Obama

D. showing off in the forest near our house

Some of you   may have noticed that I finally changed the photo header at the top of this blog. I felt like the “Winter in the forest” scene no longer accurately depicted the forest I live near.

Unfortunately, the photo for the header I posted now looks a bit blurry. Not sure why… D. and I went for a forest hike the other day and I snapped these photos with my camera phone, so they’re not of the highest quality, I guess.

Looks like northern Wisconsin, doesn't it?

In other news… I woke up this morning and realized that Obama had just started giving his speech in Cairo. I assume it was too early in the morning for most Americans to catch it live, but since it was about 11 a.m. here, I turned on the TV and quickly realized it was being broadcast on every news channel.

I decided to watch it on Al Jazeera, English, because I wanted to see what kind of commentary they would have afterwards. It was cool because, as opposed to having, say, a Democratic Party person or a political science professor from Harvard on, they interviewed Hamas leaders and the like at the end. It’s very interesting to be able to see the different perspectives from around the world, whether or not I agree with them.

New York Times Photo: Stephen Crowley

 Overall, I was really impressed with his speech, especially with his ability to draw similarities between the world’s major religions, while at the same time not backing away or hedging on what he stands for – he’s such a good speaker, too.

One of the most intriguing facts I learned during his speech was when he was trying to show that the USA has had ties with the Muslim world for a long time. He stated that Morocco was the first nation to officially recognize the United States after the Revolutionary War. Interesting, non?

I also, particularly, enjoyed it when Obama criticized certain countries for:

“Impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.

Indeed, faith should bring us together.”

Oh, Snap! France, you know he was talking to you!  Because you know you ban headscarves in public schools under the cloak of “secularism,” while at the same time giving everyone off work for national holidays like Pentecost and Ascension Sunday.

(Since 2004, France doesn’t allow “conspicuous religions symbols” in it’s public schools, meaning teachers and students can’t wear large, Jewish skullcaps, Sikh turbans or headscarves when in class).

Did anyone else watch the speech in its entirety? What did you think?

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Biking in Bourgogne

Me, on the bike trail leaving Beaune

On Sunday, D. and I decided to follow in the tiremarks of some of our friends and take a bike-riding trip through the vineyards of Burgundy.

Beaune, a lovely town at the heart of the winemaking region, is just two hours south of our home, so we decided to make it a day trip – which meant getting up at 6:30 a.m. and hitting the road early. We arrived around 10 a.m., and rented our bikes (27 speeds, of which I used 2?)  from a great shop “Detours in France. ” The staff gave us a few recommendations of where to go, and we hit the road.

The trail leaving Pommard

Within about 10 minutes we were outside the city limits and in the midst of an absolutely amazing landscape full of vineyards, as far as the eye could see. The sun was shining, the light was amazing and the view was really indescribable. We rode on like this for a while, stopping every so often to take photos, until we hit the town of Pommard.

There, we stopped into a place called “Caveau de Pommard,” where we were given five different types of red wine (all Pinot Noirs, which is the only red wine made in Burgundy. And all the white wine is Chardonnay) to sample for free. We really loved the third we tried, which was a Gevrey-Chambertin from Domaine Maume. It was delicious. And cost more than we spend on wine. However, D. and I decided to buy the bottle anyway and keep it for a special occasion – hopefully, when he gets a job offer at the end of school. We figured that was a better investment than buying a bunch of cheap bottles and carrying them around on our bikes! Leaving Pommard, we biked through to Volnay, but the only restaurant in town was full. So we found a small market and the friendly owner, figuring we were “picnic-ing,” gave us a suggestion for cheese, salami and a fresh baguette. We rode out of the small town, sat on the edge of the trail, and ate. As people biked past, they’d yell “Bon Appetit!” at us, which was kind of cute.

Us, lunchingLeaving Volnay

Next, we rode to the town of Meursault, where we visited the “Caves Ropiteau Freres,” which was located in a really large, really old building. The only tourists there at the time, the two men working the building told us to go downstairs and explore the caves at our leisure. The large cave was from the 1600s, and one behind it was from the 1500s. It was pretty amazing to be in a cave that old, full of barrel after barrel of wine.

Each barrel listed what type of wine was inside, when it was from, and, interestingly enough, the exact plot of land where it came from – so when we were leaving Meursault and biking along the path, for example, I actually noticed one of the plots of land “Genevieves,” that had been marked on several barrels of wine. Talk about country-of-origin labeling, these guys have it down to “acre by origin,” or less…

The caves at Ropiteau

We tasted several wines, but Ropiteau specializes in white wines and, since D. doesn’t like whites, we opted instead for the amazing Crème de Cassis we tasted – it was much spicier and thicker than what I have usually tasted, and I can’t wait to drip it over some ice cream of panna cotta later this summer.

We continued on Puligny-Montrachet and a bit beyond, but I suddenly realized I was getting a little tired – and VERY sun-burnt. We started our long ride back, and I covered up in D’s long-sleeved dress shirt that he chivalrously gave me, since he had a shirt on underneath it. I was hot, but at least my arms weren’t continuing to burn.

Vineyards

Leaving Meursault

Toward the end of the ride, I started getting too lazy to bike up the hills (I told D. I could almost swear that this trail went uphill both ways, but then we realized that coming back, we were just going against the strong wind gusts – which made it slightly more difficult to “coast” downhill. Oh well).

Me, being lazy

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Creepy-Crawlies and “organic” poison

 Our house is pretty much infested. I think there’s little I can do about it at this point.

It all started about a month ago, when a colony of ants decided to take over our entryway, marching up a battle line from our front door to a crack-ridden wooden beam in our kitchen. They love that wood beam.

I bought some Raid ant bait traps and put them in two strategic locations on our kitchen floor. One location was in the middle of the line they’ve chosen to walk down to get to that wooden beam.

They just go around it.

Then, when researching what to do with some rhubarb my landlady gave me last week, I found an idea: Rhubarb leaves are poisonous. So, apparently, if you make a spray out of rhubarb leaves, it kills bugs. Why not? I thought. So I got a big rhubarb leaf, boiled it with a bit of water, and used spread the mixture on the floor where the ants were.

And then I thought: “Hmm… I’m spreading poison around my kitchen.”

I mean, sure, it’s not chemical ant spray or something, but it’s poison nonetheless. Would I spray rattlesnake venom around my kitchen floor, for example just because it’s “organic.”?

Anyhow, it turns out it doesn’t rally matter because the ants, while kept at bay for about 24 hours, returned.

The "golden" beetle... in poor lighting

There are other creepy bugs, too. Last Saturday I came downstairs and saw this thing struggling to turn itself over smack-dab in the middle of my kitchen floor. I quickly covered it with a colander and waited for D. to get home to take care of it.

When he lifted the colander, though, he just kept going on and on about how “beautiful” the bug was and how I had to “Come see it.” No thanks. Then he brought the camera out. Turns out the bug was actually gold, it looked like one of those ancient Egyptian scarabs or something.

Kind of cool.

Ok, now, get rid of it.

He took it outside.

Then there came the ultimate icing on the cake. The next day, I was making a salad and shredding up lettuce that I had bought at the grocery store, washed and kept in the fridge for a few days. What I do see in the  bowl but?

An inchworm. Ew.  We threw all the lettuce out because D. was convinced they’re toxic. They’re not, but I really couldn’t stomach eating inchworm-feces-laden-lettuce. And we really didn’t need lettuce for fattoush salad anyway, we just used more veggies.

So, basically, it’s really hard to get away from nature when you’re living about 100 feet away from a huge forest.

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