Besides, think of how much cheaper gloves will be!

Does anyone need more baby-related blogging from me? Well, tough, it’s the only thing I got going on in this town until I go to a Conan O’Brian taping on Thursday.

Amynah and I have been slowly acquiring the considerable infrastructure seemingly required by babies – dressers, clothing, bassinets, car seats, diaper pails… the list is endless. While diaper pails, changing tables and bassinets are all very important, there are specific items I see as being relevant to Dad-specific-tasks. Strollers are one, largely because they have wheels, and therefore belong in the domain of things governed by the Y-chromosome.

In preparation for this purchase, both Amynah and I have been accosting random pram-pushing strangers on the street and asking them what they like and dislike about their wheels.

It’s been an interesting experiment in gender perceptions. Most of the women we’ve spoken to recommend strollers based on how easily they fold, whether they have a storage basket, and how heavy they are. Men, on the other hand, seem to like cup holders.

Personally, I seem to be attracted to carriages with big wheels, the better to go hiking in the local mountain parks. The other day, I stopped a woman pushing a stroller that seemed to match what I’d like – not too big, large wheels, fairly stylish. I asked the woman about it, and she said “Yeah, it’s great! Except it doesn’t fold very easily. And it isn’t car seat compatible. And my first child outgrew it very quickly. And it’s way too heavy for me.”

Needless to say, her husband had bought it for her.

I didn’t want Amynah transporting our child on a white elephant. Her choice of stroller, after polling friends and strangers, was the MacLaren Tech XT. I can’t help but laugh at the model name – whenever I hear it I can’t help imagine it in a commercial, zipping in slo-mo over the Salt Flats trailing a dramatic plume of dust.


_{Image from themaclarenstroller.com}

Saturday we drove out to the Babies R’ Us store to pick one up: no luck – they don’t carry it. This was deeply frustrating to me – I had decided to get a stroller, so goddamnit, I wanted to come home with a stroller. So yesterday, I headed out again, walking this time to a baby matériel depot.

I walked in and told the friendly woman at the desk the model I was looking – refraining from using my Monster Truck rally voice (“Maclaren Tech XT …xt… xt… xt… Versus… The Bugaboo Brawler! This Saturday! In the Diaperdrome!”) She immediately pulled one out for me, showed me the various features (it holds a baby… and rolls. No cupholders, iPod stations, or DVD players). Apparently, the promotional material for this particular stroller boasts that it was designed by aircraft engineers.

I would have been happy to have paid and wheeled it out of there on the spot, but she told me that the store had received a recall notice on the stroller just an hour before. Being more irritated at having had walked twenty blocks* only to be thwarted again, I didn’t ask why. The saleslady took my name and number, and promised to call when the strollers had been fixed.

It wasn’t until that evening that we learned what the recall was about. Amynah’s uncle called us in a tizzy, telling us that the MacLaren strollers were being recalled in their millions because they are apparently amputating the fingers of their passengers. Somehow, the saleslady neglected to mention this.

Now, there’s a certain amount of panic about this online , with plenty of people saying they’ll never use MacLaren strollers again. For our part, we’re still going to buy ours.** The defect is only relevant if the child sticks their finger in the hinge while the stroller is being folded – in other words, if they’re doing something they’re not supposed to do, something happens that isn’t supposed to happen. It doesn’t strike me as particularly onerous to keep an eye out to make sure that infant digits are out of harms way when folding the stroller, especially as the problem is now being fixed. Other things that will hurt your fingers when you stick your fingers into them include bagel cutters (me, age 22), car doors (my younger sister, age 3), and dogs (me again, age 7, 9 and 18). Not to downplay the trauma suffered by the parents and children involved, but the world is full of risks and, quite frankly, 12 non-fatal injuries out of the millions of buggies sold over the last several years is a better safety record than pretty much any other household item I can name, including telephones and houseplants.***

Nonetheless, I can’t help but be somewhat concerned. If the MacLaren was designed by aircraft engineers, I’m not quite sure that I’ll be comfortable flying ever again. Maybe next time, they should try using baby-stroller engineers.


* It would have only been 12 blocks, were it not for having to circumvent the iron fencing defending the enormous Mormon temple complex between my apartment and the store. That is, the enormous complex for the Mormon temple – it isn’t a temple complex for enormous Mormons. I think.

** Nonetheless, in honour of its monster truck heritage, I’m going to call it “The Mangler.” Take that, Bugaboo Brawler.

*** Besides, don’t babies’ fingers grow back?

Legion Etranger and entranger indeed

From time to time the French Foreign Legion will set up a recruitment booth in front of the local shopping mall where Amynah and I do our grocery shopping. I’ve never popped in, but I was always curious: everything I knew about the Foreign Legion came from Snoopy cartoons.

Now that Amynah and I are entering into the home stretch of our time here in France, we’ve been looking for gainful employment back home (hint, hint, for anyone who wants to employ a writer or a neuroscientist. Or a dishwasher and a neuroscientist – I’m not fussy). As such, I looked a little more closely into the Foreign Legion. I wasn’t seriously thinking of enlisting (not least because they require a minimum of three-years of service) but I thought they might make for an interesting article.

And boy, was I not disappointed. Not only does the Foreign Legion still exist, it still operates more-or-less along the same lines as when it was founded – a way for young men in trouble to start their lives afresh. It is only open to foreigners: if you are French, you have to apply under another nationality (Canada and Switzerland are popular cover nations). You are not allowed to apply under you own name: the Legion gives you a new one when you sign up (thus foiling my half-formed plans to sign up as “Marc Renaud”).

At the end of your three years, not only will recruits have a new name, several murderous new skills, and proficiency in a presumably very salty French, but they will also have earned French citizenship: “If only we’d thought of that when we moved here,” said Amynah, to my horror. She was less keen on the idea when I told her that I would also have to deny our marriage.

The Legion has a long and distinguished battle history, and still attracts recruits from around the world, through their fairly slick website. It is possible to purchase books on the Foreign Legion there, as well as replicas of their famous kepi.

But, this being France, their offerings are considerably classier than that: alongside Legion branded t-shirts and ball caps, one can also buy their own wine and, my personal favourite, an official Foreign Legion Asparagus Serving Plate. Times have changed: you would never have seen Sergeant Snoupi allowing his troops such luxuries.

The Hairy Potter

_{The semi-reflective faces in this nativity scene allow you, if you look at them at the right angle, to put yourself in the scene. I found I make a rather fetching, if surprisingly hirsute, Mary.}

A couple of weeks ago, Amynah’s friend Ani and her husband Jean-Luc were kind enough to treat us to a lunch at their home in Marienthal, north of Strasbourg, followed by a shopping excursion. Faithful readers of this blog may well be able to predict what the shopping was for.

Ani is an enthusiast of Alsatian pottery, waking up every Sunday at 6AM during the summer to hit the brocantes (flea-markets) in the local villages to acquire older pieces. Her home is a museum of the stuff, and she can identify pretty much each piece not only by which village it came from, but which potter, and which generation of potter.


_{Betchdorf pottery, pre-fired. When it's done, it'll look like the stuff above.}

Needless to say, she is very well known in both Soufflemheim and Betchdorf, the two main pottery villages, and Amynah and I were very lucky to have her guidance. The day we went was an open house for all the potters in both villages, so Woerlings, the first place we visited, was packed with patrons. Nonetheless, both the owner and his daughter made their way through the crowd to say hi to Ani and tell us a bit their work. The duo were glowing: Woerling fille had made an all-pottery Nativity scene, that. earlier in the day, had attracted the local Cardinal (in full red-robed regalia), who praised it as being worthy of being displayed in a church. As such, the Woerlings were happy to press vin chaud upon us, letting us keep the tea-cups they came in.

Next stop was Betchdorf Christine Ruhlmann, a personal friend of Ani’s. She had turned in for the night, but came back to open up for us when Ani called. Her shop was nearly empty – Ruhlmann husband and wife being more interested in creating art than churning out beer-steins. There were a number of interesting items on display, as far as I could see through the cigarette haze, and when I was not distracted a love-starved cat that woke up from his cozy-slumber by the ceramics-oven to follow Amynah and I around like we were made of catnip-marinated-steaks.

_{Some of the Ruhlmann art. We bought a sugar bowl.}

As usual, we came home with far more pottery items than we could possibly use, or need. Half of it was wrapped for us at the store, so we’re going to slap each other’s names on the packages and call it Christmas. Nor do we have any idea how we’re to get this stuff back home when we eventually leave France. Perhaps a ceramic suitcase?

Little Petey's House of Holy Horrors

_{Cheery looking fellow, isn't he?}

So, I was going to the stuffed animal store that specializes in Wild Boars* the other day in order to pick up a gift for my niece for my imminent return home. On my way there, I wandered by the St Pierre le Jeune church. For the first time since I’ve lived here, the doors were open, so I wandered inside.


_{Mural of the Nations of Europe Marching Towards the Cross. FYI: "Germannia" on her steed was in the lead, poor old Lithuania straggling behind on foot.}

I’m sorry I didn’t discover this church earlier – parts of it date from the 4th century, most of the rest from 1250 or thereabouts.** Unlike either of the other major historically important churches in Strasbourg, this one has both a surviving cloister and many Medieval murals surviving inside. For a brief period in the 17th century, it was used by both Protestants and Catholic congregations, who were encouraged to mind their manners through the device of a temporary partition.


_{The cloister of the former chapter house. One day, when I have a back yard, I'm doing it up like this. Don't tell Amynah.}

Anyway, the highlight for me was the secret chamber (well, not so secret as hard to find) with the crypt, a chamber roughly 1500 years old. There’s a small recess in the wall that still contains some poor souls bones. I’m sure he didn’t expect, as he lay on his deathbed, that his mortal remains to be on display for the edification of ghouls like me several centuries later.


<sub>Ye Olde Bone Room. That's a vase in the head area of the body-shaped cavity in the floor, and an old stone coffin to the right.

* These people are very serious about their stuffed animals. I went in and asked for a Wild Boar, and the clerk, detecting my lack of facility in French asked (in French) “are you sure you don’t mean a Warthog?” and then producing fuzzy exemplars of both animals so that I could make my choice. They had a remarkable number of species represented with as much anatomical accuracy as the material and intended audience would allow. It was like being in pillowy zoo.

** As you might have surmised from the church's name, there is an even older St Peter's in Strasbourg than this.</sub>

Le stuff

_{Relax, this isn't about my Speedo. That said, I'm the guy on the right}

Sorry I’ve been remiss in blogging for the last couple of days… errr, make that weeks. Thanks to some prompting (Hi Peggy! Hi Victor!) I’m finally getting around to it now. I will have more and better stuff to write about next week, when I have returned from our trip to London to visit friends and family there. Back Tuesday!

Anyway, when I neglect the blog for so long, the stories tend to accumulate, leaving me with a surfeit of choice… no one wants to hear about my nascent career as a faux-scientist, I’m sure, and I don’t think I can get much narrative mileage out of our night at the symphony. I will save my Hot Underwater Speedo Adventures ™ for another day, which leaves me with… lemme see, something seasonal…. Shopping?

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but when Amynah and I moved here, we were suffering from “Stuff Shock.” When we quit North America, we had to store, sell or throw away everything we owned. We now have possessions scattered in the homes of friends and family across the country. Boxes exhumed from the nether reaches of our closets were emptied and parted with for a Loonie or two, not having been opened for years beforehand. It was stressful, and more than a little bit shaming: what were we* doing with all this crap in the first place?

On our arrival in France, knowing that we weren’t staying here forever, we were determined to not accumulate anything we weren’t going to be happy to part with later. On our first trip to Ikea, we got into an argument because I didn’t see the point of owning any more than two plates, two bowls, two forks… you get the idea. I was aiming to make the Spartans look like Caligula throwing a party for the Ottoman court.

We pretty much kept to this rule – we have enough dishes to entertain guests without having to eat in shifts, and a couple of wall hangings, but our esthetic has been “if we don’t use it, we don’t own it.”

And so things remained for the last 18 months. Right up until the weekend before last.


_{This has very little to do with the post, but these are traditional Alsatian costumes. Photo from http://hanau.folklore.free.fr/}

That weekend, we were invited out to a Christmas market in Dachstein** by Annie, a friend of Amynah’s from her institute, and her husband Jean-Luc. The market was much like Strasbourg’s, in that there were thousands of slack-jawed tourists wandering around not buying anything from a bunch of bored looking stall-keepers while Dachsteiners in period costume wandered around.


Annie is a collector of the local pottery, of which Amynah and I are also big fans. We had a couple of pieces already, both of which were completely functional: a tea-set, and a pot designed for choucroutte in which Amynah cooks her briyani. Annie is personal friends with the potter who made our tea set and so, after the Dachstein market, invited us to an open house he was having in his workshop in Betchdorf, north of Strasbourg.

Amynah and I were, as far as I could tell, the only people there who were not already friends of Monsieur Remmy, who, entranced that such exotic Canadian creatures as us would know and appreciate his art, introduced himself to us and spoke to us for a good ten minutes, despite the other sixty-odd guests demanding his attention.
In any case, with that kind of treatment it behooved us to buy a few items, and so we walked out with a vase, two ornaments, a soup bowl and a second teapot (“For guests!” says Amynah).

The problem, we discovered on coming home, was that we had no place for all these lovely items. The window-sill is too risky a spot for the vase, and there’s no spare shelf space for the teapot.

And so we discovered the first law of stuff; namely, stuff begets more stuff. In order to display the lovely pottery to best advantage, we needed to purchase an end-table or shelving unit of some sort.

And so, the following weekend, we trudged off to Emmaus, the French equivalent of the Salvation Army thrift store. From there we purchased an end table… and why not another end table? And why not a small lamp to put on the end table? And why not a few more glasses while we’re at it? And so, after living a year and a half like monks, in the last few months of our expected time here, we finally cracked and moved in.


<sub>One of the end tables, with some of the pottery. Consumerism has given my life new meaning.



* By we, I mean me. Amynah had no extraneous crap in her life until I came along.

** Though Annie and Jean-Luc are from Alsace, I was the one who ended up giving directions to get to the village, as I had been twice before and it was their first time. This, combined with my recent Speedo acquisition, has confirmed me as a true Frenchman.</sub>

Deja vu

_{Where Donna Summer goes to pray}

Amynah and I have now been here for a year, meaning that we’re now experiencing things for the second time. For instance, each year the city sponsors a light show on the Cathedral, synchronized with classical music. It lasts about fifteen minutes and happens three times a night, every night, for the whole summer. Last year’s was all-Mozart, in honour of the 300th (I am not going to check that for accuracy) anniversary of his visit to this city.* Last year, before we had a lot of books or friends, it stood in as our t.v., playing plotless re-runs at top volume every night. This year it’s a mix of twangy modern stuff and bits of Beethoven’s Ninth.

They also have a nightly light show on the river – last year there were laser fountains and vomiting gargoyles. I regret not taking pictures, because this year there are strobe lights and bad French poetry. When my cousin Stephen was visiting we wandered the length of the island, looking for something even marginally entertaining, only to be accosted by a city volunteer who asked us what we thought. Being Canadian, I told her I thought it was great, and that we don’t have things like this in North America, when really I should have told her that I’ve had more entertainment with a flashlight and shadow puppets.


_{Before the crowds. View from our window}

This weekend was the Braderie, which I understand is a French tradition. Effectively, it is a giant yard sale for retailers desperate to get rid of their summer stock, not to mention itinerant merchants hawking cheap sunglasses and skanky lingerie.** It makes the St Laurent street sale in Montreal look like a kid's lemonade stand. In any case, good deals are possible, if you can get to them. The entire island turned into a giant outdoor mall, and people from all over Alsace and the nearby bits of Germany packed into the streets, wandering like stunned cattle while being hectored by mega-phone wielding mop salesmen.

I ended up getting myself some new shoes, which I purchased and continue to love despite the fact they pinch my toes and will make to me walk like C3PO.


_{Your feet want to be my feet, admit it}

* He stayed in a building down our street known today as La Mauresse or, in English “The Black Lady” named after one of the owner's more exotic servants in the 1500s. Strasbourg wasn't exactly the most cosmopolitan place back then: "Hey, you guys remember that black lady who used to work in the house where that Austrian fiddle player stayed? She sure was black, weren't she? Let's name the place after her!"

** Nothing against skanky lingerie, but who the heck buys from a sidewalk vendor in front of hundreds of bargain-hunting French grannies?