France report: Days 1-2.

[lollardfish]

Our journey to France began in the sterile halls of the Minneapolis, and then Chicago, airport, and was accompanied by the hopefully sterile food they serve there. Lousy and expensive, impressive. Since then, things have only been improving, to put it mildly, despite my dealing with a minor head cold.



First, we both feel very lucky to have missed the horrible traveling conditions that have resulted from the terrorist alert in London and the U.S. It may make our upcoming flight to Bergamo (on Ryanair) more complex. On our return voyage, we'll be flying from Milan to London to Chicago, and that last flight will definitely be difficult. We'll just have to see how things change over the next week and a bit.

For pictures of all this below, see: here.

Anyway, our flight to Paris was just fine. Shannon and I had two seats in a 2-3-2 setup, so basically had our own little world. We ate brisket, which is an excellent airline meal because it involves turning lousy meat into something quite tasty, watched Ice Age 2, which neither of us had seen, then tried to sleep. She slept a little, I slept less, I sort of watched October Sky (young Jake Gyllenhall tries to build a rocket, win a science fair, get a scholarship, while his dad works in the coal mine, blah blah blah), and we arrived in Paris. Passport control, customs and baggage took less than 15 minutes, we found money, the train station, and a phone fairly easily, and took the metro to the Gare Mt. Parnasse in Paris. There, we got on the TGV (a train of "very great speed") and were at Tour by 11:45 in the morning. Our friends, minnehaha found us quickly, and we went to their gite for lunch.

For those new to Chez Minnehaha, the two of them, B. and K. rent a little vacation spot in Azay-le-rideau, a town in the Loire valley to which we have now been introduced. They spent three months there two years ago, two weeks there last year, and are halfway through their five-week stay this summer.

After lunch - a lovely feast of saucissons, various cheeses, wine, and other delectables - the girl and I took a brief nap, then went out for a walk. Caves have been a major delight of this trip; unbenownst to me, the rock of the hills in the Loire is uniquely useful. One can carve it out into blocks with hand-tools; dried, it serves as excellent building material, and then one ends up with a cave! So many of the houses here in the valley have caves, or just are caves (with windows and chimneys). The gite has a cave, many vineyards have caves, everyone around here has a cave! So our first visit was to the "Groupillaries de les Troglodites," or a little agricultural village carved into the rock. It's set up to serve as an exhibit to the modes of life of peasants around here over the last many hundred years - they have farm-caves, wine-caves, defense-caves, stable-caves, vegetable gardens, goats, donkeys, a horse, pigs, fowl. It's run by some lovely people who also make excellent apple juice, and was the perfect way to start off our trip. Dinner included a local squash-sausage curry, salad, and some blood sausage (with more wine).

Shannon and I agreed that if we woke up at 6 or so in the morning, we'd just go into town for coffee and croissant, but both of us slept very well indeed. We all were up by eight, and headed to Chinon for a day of shopping. Chinon, like most of the old towns here, commands a spot on one of the rivers here. The Loire is the main river, and is broad and lazy, but unmanaged (so the channel moves). Many tributaries flow into it, and Chinon sits atop a hill on the Wienne. In almost all of such spots, it seems, there's a chateau. A chateau can mean a castle - think medieval, turrets, big walls, moats - or a stately manor home. Usually, if the stately home exists, it's built where there used to be a castle. Sometimes you get both, as is the case in Chinon. Fulk Nerra, one of the first important counts of the region, built a castle there. The Plantagenets (i.e. the Angevin Empire) expanded it. Kings of France weakened it when they got more control over the County of Anjou. There's all sorts of interesting medieval history sites here, although one has to dig beneath the Renaissance and even Napoleonic material to find it.

But on Thursday, our first full day here, it was market day in Chinon. Whoa. All kinds of cheese, veggies, spices, breads, seafood, and more, each with their own cart and a vendor who specialized in the subject. We bought 6-7 types of cheese, some big squid, some very, very, fresh mussels, and all sorts of other wonder. Then we hiked up a majestic hill to the great castle of Chinon (with a few delays for me to duck into an antiquarian bookseller in a medieval house, and other gawking). This is still a massive compound, even after the passage of so many years. The halls are vast, the towers mighty, the reconstruction ongoing (it's great seeing archaeologists and students surveying and working on putting the crumbled part back together. And since all the buildings here are built of the local stone, called le truffeau, and were built of it in the past, reconstruction is very possible without disrupting the look. At any rate, this is the best castle that I have personally seen outside of Wales, and I was most pleased.

After the hike back down the hill and the drive home, we were starving, and devoured much of the food that we had just bought. Of particular note was a camembert de lait cru (raw milk) from a family-run cheese-aging business in the region. The invited us to visit them on Saturday, so more on them later.

In the afternoon, we went to Langeais. Langeais has a little remnant of a medieval keep (also built by Fulk Nerra), and a great 15th-century cheateau built to impress the locals (it looks fortified, but a canon could knock it down, so it's all about the style, not actually the military fortification). By great fortune, the English-speaking tour guide at Langeais is a woman named Amy, a student of medieval art who married a local and now lives here. She's extremely knowledgeable about the art in "her" castle, but also about how it fits into larger history. I interrogated her, I'm afraid, and learned a great deal that I didn't know. Fascinating. Tea, coffee, coke followed, then home, then dinner. I cleaned squid for the first time, while K. and Shannon made mussels (Belgian-style: leeks, carrots, and white-wine). I made some fresh pasta, and we rolled out "pici" in our hands, making a noodle that was roughly the same size and consistency as the squid tentacle. I also found the ink sacks, and used them to make the sauce. I would hav prefered a tagliatelle, but absent a pasta machine, this was pretty good.

We drank much wine, including the Chinon brew (the vintage from the region that is most famous), and went to bed much satisfied with our day. The next day would be even more momentous.

Comments

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Jalouse. I thought that ending was wrong. Merci beaucoup!