snow!
Tuesday, January 3. 2006
looked out the windows a couple days ago, and there was straight-up snow coming down! living in mild portland after spending so much time in tahoe, i'm well prepared to be excited at the first flake. so i dragged missy into her coat to wander around and enjoy it while it lasted.there were a couple kids trying their best to make snowballs from the small amount that was sticking. mostly people looked confused and annoyed. i think it frightened a lot of people to stay inside. at least it kept the wind down. why does snow do that? i'm sure brady has a scientific explanation.
after seeing the cezanne studio and going museuming with april and missy, i was really in the mood to appreciate how radically different the quality of light can be when falling on the same objects. it's easy to forget that objects are invisible without light. you're really looking as much at the light as the object.
we had a silly game as kids when one of us found out that a red ball looks red because that's the only color that bounces off it. so really it's blue and green and everything else but red! we'd ask adults what color things were and then make fun of them for getting it backwards. that wore off quickly.
when you look at the credits in any 3D animation there's as many lighting folks as animators or modellers. it didn't make sense until i tried doing that stuff myself. it's very not easy.
anyway, it was a nice little link into monet-world, which i usually don't appreciate that much. then the sun went down and it got cold and a lot less fun. so we went inside for some tea.
april in avignon
Saturday, December 31. 2005
sorry, couldn't resist. missy's sis april visited us for christmas. i took a couple photos of the parts of it that i was involved in, which some of you might find interesting to look at. now with captions!no more spoilers since i think miss is going to cover things in a separate post. it was great to have her here. i got a deeper glimpse into the wonderful world of haywards and thankfully avoided getting my butt kicked at rummy 500!
every person...
Saturday, December 31. 2005
on the st. benezet bridge, the "pont d'avignon", there's a little area where the stone, earth, and water all meet. someone has arranged a little spot with a small stone wall, heart sculpture, driftlog, and sitting stone. i've been here a number of times; it's one of my favorite avignon places. it changes over time. the stone wall wanders like a snake yawning in the sun, but always protects the corner. the sculpture shifts. it's spotless though, free of the kind of trash that ought to float there and stay. it's being tended.
there's a note attached to an old iron spike just above. in one version or another it's been there for a long time. the fluttering white is what first drew my eye to the spot. it used to be an unprotected sheet of paper, but now for the winter it's got a plastic sheath. i think this version has got more careful lettering. i can't tell if the text has changed as well. it seems longer now.my rough google-translate-assisted attempt:
every person has the right to take part freely in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and participate in scientific progress and the benefits that result.
each person has the right to the protection of moral and material interests deriving from all scientific, literary, or artistic production of which he is the author.
seems a fair balance, and a nice new year's blessing.
also, miss uncovered some more info on the Cézanne studio. this page has a nice photo. here are some more from a different site. the "Panorama 360" link gets you a full spinning view of the main room. see why i want to live there?
new pix, a few words
Saturday, December 24. 2005
marvelous mikl sent us my camera that i left in san francisco before we left for france (d'oh!) so i've been taking more photos than writing words lately. i managed to put a bunch up for your viewing pleasure.a little backstory for some of the categories:
SF: i had to go back to san francisco last week to pick up my long stay visa. i hadn't given myself enough time for france to process the visa application before we had to leave, so beaurocracy being what it is i had to go all the way back to get it. worse, what we thought was a confirmed flight back somehow only ended up being a reservation, so when i got to the marseille airport at 4:30am i found out i didn't have a flight and had to buy it then and there, almost doubling the price. drat. still not sure what went wrong with that. anyway, i got the same flights i'd reserved before and it all worked out ok eventually.it was weird to be back. i didn't want to get re-sullied with my US thoughts so i tried to lay low and off the radar, with limited success. i'm almost back into the french swing of things.
aix: all the flights to and from the US were at awful hours and required staying a night close to the marseille airport either the night before i left or the night i came back since trains and shuttles didn't run early enough. so miss and i took the opportunity to take a little trip to aix-en-provence, a little town about half an hour away. it's not as ancient as avignon, but it's very pretty. cezanne did a lot of later work there, and we got to walk through his old studio. a little walk out of town and up a big hill overlooking the town is a small two-story building he had built. it used to be the only building on the hill back in the day, and it still has a great view. the same view of Mt. St. Victoire he used as a study over and over again. neat!
the second floor of the building was his studio. a huge sparse room painted in medium grey, with immense warehouse-style windows on the north wall for maximum light. there was a special tall skinny door to the outside that he could move the large canvases out when they were finished. the place still vibrated with the guy's spirit. i felt instantly calm and productive there and really wanted to stay. he knew a good work environment, and it's rotting fruit on the tables and pictures of naked women on the walls.
holidays: avignon is all wrapped up in bows and twinkly lights. maybe it's partly the progressive portland influence, but i really appreciate the benefits of high taxes spent well by the state. between this, the opera, and the library i feel like the normal citizen is getting a lot better value for money than say emptying the budget into halliburton's pockets. why do i pay taxes again?missy's sister april is visiting right now. she and miss took a trip to paris while i was in SF, and we're trying to show her the sights of avignon. (there's only like five!) there's a little ice skating rink set up in front of the main market we're going to go to later on. and maybe even go to a mass tonight, for old time's sake. i still get sentimental and soft on christmas eve, and they have churches here like you wouldn't believe.
well, joyeuse fêtes, as they say!
this entry is all about food
Thursday, December 15. 2005
there are some things that i really miss about america right now, and they all belong in the stomach. yesterday, feeling a lack of good food in my life, i went to the super sized hypermarché to buy some harder to find groceries. i know that i shouldn't expect much from prepackaged sauces and food kits from the ethnic isle, but tonight for dinner i made the "cantonese style stir-fried rice mix" and it was so salty and flavorless i almost cried. not exaggerating there. i'm trying to salvage my tastebuds now with some baguette, cheese, and sauccisson sec, but i fear they may be too far gone for tonight so i will drink some vanilla coke that i've been stowing and finish off the meal with something predictably, trashily, good.of course i should not be looking at grocery store isles for amazing food, but at produce stands and boucheries and my own imagination. but as of late i've been culinarily uninspired and the meals that i've attempted have been disappointing. and our kitchen is difficult to work in. we went down from a sad three square feet of counter space in portland to oh-so-very-very sad one square foot, so when cooking i often have to put things on the floor and the aforementioned echoey apartment acoustics when i do this, or any cooking activity for that matter, produce a jarring clatter that insures an unrelaxing cooking experience. we only have two burners that are very close together, and the bigger of them doesn't heat up as much as it should and we have a toaster oven instead of a regular oven. so while it seems that we got a bad deal somewhere, in actuality all of the places we looked at had measly kitchens, most even more so. for a supposed land of food, apartment dwellers aren't given much to work with.
this food homesickness, while usually low-grade, is exacerbated right now by seth's absence. he is in san francisco right now getting his visa and eating. he has been relaying tales to me of all the wonderful food there, with pavlovian effect.
when we've eaten out here we've had some good food sometimes, but not with the success ratio as say, portland dining. and portland is not necessarily a culinary capitol. but i'm realizing what makes american food so great is that the best of it isn't american. burritos and udon, green curry and chicken tandori, ethiopian stews and pho. i miss all of this so much and you just can't get it here. what you can get is moroccan food, which has been our favorite meal so far. but the asian restaurants have been, well, weird asian hybrids: thai curry with chinese vegetables and vietnamese shrimp chips. these cuisines are so good on their own, but it doesn't follow that they'd be good all melangé.
and then there's breakfast. i know, i've mentioned it, but i love big breakfasts and the french just don't understand. seth and i went to aix-en-provence the day before he left, and my lonely planet revealed that there was brunch at one of the restaurants. i was so happy because the only brunch in avignon is 55 euros. but then we got there and it was 28 euros which is just really hard to justify spending, especially since only one of us is a brunch hound, but then again we used to go to breakfast nearly every sunday, so if you add all that up.... okay, so instead we had some italian for lunch, provencal for dinner, and during both seth ended up with the better meal. and the next day i awoke, hours after seth left to catch his flight, and went to have a breakfast. saw a sign advertising brunch for 9.50 euros. finally. but it was an otherwise traditional french breakfast - bread, butter, jam, coffee or cocoa, and juice - with the addition of a savory part that filled a hot-out-of-the oven ceramic dish: two runny dippy eggs, one broken, and two big fatty bacon slabs all mangled together. don't they understand? bacon is only good because it's fried and crispy!
i will soon be praising french cuisine, i know it, but for the meantime i think i will long for the food that i cannot have. ye salad roll, ye yakisoba. eggs benedict, you soft pillow of bliss.
p.s. okay, as stated, i'm needing a little cooking inspiration. so if anyone has suggestions for cooking sites they swear by, or favorite cookbooks or even personal recipes they'd like to share, do let me know. what i'm looking for are good simple recipes that, given our limitations, involve a minimum of preparation steps and not too exotic ingredients. pastas need not apply.
new wine
Wednesday, December 7. 2005
on the third thursday of november each year (mandated by french law) the new wine is released into the world. and everyone parties. apparently half of all the beaujolais for the year is shipped or drunk that first night. this is the same fruit that was celebrated as grapes only a couple weeks ago during the harvest festival (we just missed that one). i didn't know you could make wine in that short a time, but i guess there's a little urgency.
most of the hubub is about the beaujolais nouveau. but avignon is a little farther down the valley than those guys. our area makes some similar wines, and so the focus is on the region's own produce, calling it primeur, which apparently means generically "first fruits". i sensed a little rivalry.
that night, the whole town floods into the main square in front of the pope's (old) palace. winemakers set up tents and hand out thousands of small glasses of wine for free. we got there a little late and had to settle for tiny plastic cups. no matter. and they sell cases and cases of wine in the process.it's a madhouse. it's like arena rock for middle aged french people. we squeezed up and got our first samples and quickly found out why everyone was so extra-loopy at 7pm. it's really strong! our french teacher had warned us about it earlier that day. she wasn't going because she didn't like new wine. too much alcohol and it tastes too young.
well, really what do i know about wine? what does "young" taste like? but we (ok, *i*) have been doing a fair amount of firsthand research on wine since we got here. estimates close to the mark are about 45 bottles so far. recycling piles up quickly. there's a little 8-slot wine rack in the kitchen that i try to keep well-maintained. the main goal going in was to get used to it, get accustomed to it quickly so that understanding could come sooner. miss and i love to dissect good food now, and i was looking for the same thing with the national icon. well it worked, and i have a fair idea of wine qualities now, even if i can't remember particular regions or vinyards exactly.
but i told you all that to tell you this: new wine really tastes new! like a brash young meerkitten it's all scraggly and feisty and bites your tail. it's bouncy and prickly and troublesome. not something i'd buy every day, but pretty fun when you roll with it.there was also a samba band playing! they came from marseille and were dressed in construction workers outfits, with hard hats and flourescent vests. very reminiscent of the ice cream socialists, but with rhythm. they were a small outfit, but really fun. they had a capoeira group with them that dance-fought on the steps of the palace (that's the first photo). very exciting. and speaking of small outfits (yuk yuk) we felt worried for them since it was winter coat weather outside and they were in pretty skimpy duds. not south american climate, but they were moving enough to keep warm.
things started thinning out as the wine dried up. the square slowly emptied, with people carrying home white boxes, six bottles each, of the new stuff. lots of broken stepped-on wine glasses all over the cobblestones.we walk to the main central square, the place de l'horloge ("clock square" that doesn't actually have a clock). lots of restaurants. we decide to eat at a nice looking moroccan restaurant that's not too pricey. each table has a bottle of primeur on it. oy! it was a fantastic meal. mine was braised lamb, prunes, and sliced almonds. missy got a huge couscous dish. it came in three bowls, each enough to feed two people, that you assemble on your plate. also excellent. lamb and veggie stew and couscous. it turned me on to turnips, which i've been making a lot since then. we were too hungry and amazed to get a photo of it. maybe we'll go back! we had a chat with some nice french women at the next table over who had ordered exactly the same two things.
that was about it for the night. eating took us two hours, which was pretty neat. no one pressures you to vacate, and we were in no rush. it's a nice pace; nice to give a meal that amount of time. our dinners are getting longer at home now too.
on the way i snapped the photo of hobbit-clothes, then it was quick to bed. a new early night record for me, for sure.
bread crumbs and hobbits
Wednesday, December 7. 2005
i've come to accept that for the next months i'm going to be living in a world of bread crumbs. it's ok, it's the price of eating yummy crusty fresh bread every day. it's just a little shocking, the things you never expected to be shocked by.it does make some things easier. miss was making chicken parmesean the other night. all we had to do was drop the cutlets on the dining room carpet, flip, and fry.
suresure they're all over the kitchen and dining room and all in the keyboards of our computers. that's to be expected. but i find them in stray corners of closets and in the bathtub. maybe they're mobile. maybe they attach like burrs to your clothing to gain farther reach. or catch and ride the drafts through the halls.
we've got an inside joke that it's mice. seems every time one of us buys tasty bread or chocolate when we get it home there's a small bite taken out of it. it never happens to the turnips for some reason.
anyway, this photo is about another mythical avignon creature: the halfling. there's stores that sell 1/3 scale adult outfits. and i've actually seen tiny people in the stores and in the streets. like sub-4' sized. and there's a number of them. if the archeological remains of a race of small humans was recently discovered in indonesia (and they were pretty recent), it's not unimaginable that their relatives could be living amongst us now.
thanksgiving
Wednesday, November 30. 2005
it seemed a bit lonely to split a turkey breast between seth and i. there are some fellow english teachers that i hang out with here, so i decided to have them over for thanksgiving. one girl brought mashed potatoes. she was going to bring sweet potatoes too, but couldn't find any sweet potato or yam-like produce. another girl brought a mixed vegetable dish. one guy brought flan, his french roommate lasagna. and then we sat down on our rug, the one that doesn't cause an allergic reaction, and ate and ate and ate. and when we were all finished we watched a charlie brown thanksgiving. so the turkey. they don't sell whole turkeys here, at least not that we've seen, and even if they did we wouldn't be able to fit one into our toaster oven. so our only turkey option was to buy it in parts. the last time we went grocery shopping i noticed little paupettes de dinde, which looked like little turkey breasts tied into a small serving-size ball with string. but then when we went shopping for thanksgiving dinner i actually read the ingredients: the first thing listed was 68% assorted pork meat. i did not want a turkey with an ingredients list, especially if the first thing listed is not turkey. so we settled on a rôti de dinde which is an all turkey roast, well, except for the big band of pork fat holding the whole thing together.
we finished off our meal with some chocolate, cheese, beaujolais, and some eau de vie de poire. yes, it's called water of life. it is this pear liquor and it's amazing. when i think of fruit liquor i think of schnappes, but this is not that. there is no thick syrupy sweetness; it's just pure alcoholy goodness with the a radiant hint of pear.*
hmm... what else? we splurged and spent 11 euros on christmas decoration for the event and for our own sheepish christmas streak: tinsel, little silver balls, a garland of red shiny beads and a string of christmas lights.
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*i just did a google search and the first hit was for a distillery in oregon. ah, the exotic discoveries we are making.
ice cream mandate
Friday, November 18. 2005
found an excellent solution to our need for plastic food storage containers. it's like a decree to eat more ice cream. it's for the good of the state!poor missy only got to see it briefly. i must be man-struating because it hardly had time to make a home in the freezer before untimely end.
the chocolate flavor uses 70% chocolate. it actually sacrifices some creaminess to fit more chocolate into the ice cream. that's the kind of compromise i can live with. it makes good choco-economic sense — i can get my fix with 1/3 less ice cream. no need to down a pint at one sitting. i think that's representative of a lot of food here, and may be part of the french paradox of rich food == skinny people.
oh, we just found another great idea: crème brûlée ice cream! i've got a case of it on dry ice shipping to jon right now. honestly, this version isn't as good as it could be, but i've got my eyes out for other brands. there's a great love of caramel, nougat, praline and the like here, which i fully support. people must have done some crazy sugar-related experiments back in the day to get some of these great inventions. relatedly: i'm doing extensive research on chocolate bars here and will have something at a later date.
interior shots
Friday, November 18. 2005
here's something that will make you happy every single day of winter: in the morning, after you shower, lay your pajamas on the radiator. when you're ready for bed at the end of the day they'll be toasty.i feel the process of aging is accumulating knowlege like this.
that's our sparse bedroom. the blanket is made from old dinosaurs and i'm convinced it gives me allergies. we have two. the other isn't as ugly but is worse for allergies because it was in the room when i beat the rug senseless. so it's in a corner crumpled up.
the drapes are short like that on purpose. that's what missy says.
here's the "dining room" area, with the kitchen-closet behind. we have one table and it's skinny. you can tell in the photo how missy feels about skinny tables. it holds laptops mostly, and sometimes food. there's a great stone tile floor that really gets the echoes going.the kitchen has two hot plates. we bought a big toaster oven and we're thinking about what size turkey can fit in there for thanksgiving. one of the shelves has a big gold "Ralph Lauren" imprinted in it for some reason. gives the place some class. the microtable we got for under the oven has a couple wine rack shelves in it. good thinking! i've been trying to keep a decent selection on hand, but it's not easy.
and the living half of the main room, of which the dining room is the other. that's corey text messaging on the phone in the foreground during his visit. so euro!the glass (french?) doors close letting the room double as a guest bedroom. missy's sitting on the little fold-a-bed contraption they call a clic-clac, for the sound it makes when you operate the folding mechanism. so far three of the springy wooden slats they use instead of box springs here have been broken just from normal sitting. now it's kind of tricky to sit in without falling in. plus the foam part was really chintzy to start with and the slats are pretty far apart so it's more like sitting on a horizontal ladder for all the enjoyment you get out of it. we're tracking down leads on where to find a supply of backup slats. i hate getting what you pay for.
and what tour would be complete? this is one of the two half-bathrooms. the big munga water heater is perched right above and kind of overlapping the toilet, getting into its space. you can't really sit up straight. i'm only somewhat conscious of how mass and volume and all that other sculptural and architectural stuff affects your mental well-being, but man if that isn't a foreboding unsettling arrangement. you don't have to be any kind of aesthete to get spooked in there.there's pipes for the water meter and vents that seem to only work backwards, pumping in smells from other flats. it really feels like the room with the least attention paid to it. or with the most malicious attention maybe.
this is the stairway leading down to the street. pretty bourgeois but pretty tattered too. there's a whole host of old ladies in the building that seem to run things around here. one is about 80 and rides a heavy steel bicycle around town, all full of energy. she's awesome. they're all wonderfully friendly and helpful. they're insistent on helping to the point that i feel i'm missing some obvious social cues of some kind and not upholding some part of the neighbor bargain. but they haven't bitten me yet. sometimes one or another will have a large dinner party in their lavish apartment. we'll hear all the guests at night in the hall leaving. boisterous crowd noise sounds the same in every language.
welcome
short accounts by missy and seth, at least tangentially relating to life in avignon, france.
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