Oh jeez, one of these

All right, I have nothing intelligent or interesting to write about right now, plus I should be working. Therefore I will indulge Julie, who “tagged” me to fill this out. I am not doing it in good humour, as it is 28 degrees here, forcing us to sleep with our windows open. This, in turn, means that I was woken up several times over the course of the night, the last time at 3:45 AM by a drunken Neanderthal who was yelling at the top of his lungs while walking up our street. Not yelling anything in particular, mind you, just hollering like a six-month-old that just discovered they can make loud noises with that big hole in the front of their face. So, I’m under slept and thinking unkind thoughts about humanity right now.

Three Names You Go By:
1. Mark
2. Marc
3. Mr Reynolds

Three Parts of Your Heritage:
This makes me cranky. At what point do you get to just say “Canadian?” How many Brits point to their Norman heritage and say they’re part French? Anyway, if “Canadian” isn’t acceptable:
1. Irish
2. Scottish
3. German/Austrian

Three Things That Scare You:
1. Failure
2. Internet message boards
3. Canned peas

Three of Your Everyday Essentials:
1. Air
2. Food.
3. Water.

Three Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1. A moccasin on my left foot.
2. A matching moccasin on my right foot.
3. My watch

Three of Your Favourite Songs Right Now:
(These are all Johnny-come-lately’s, - I’m not putting perpetual favorites up here, because what’s the point?)
1. Bleeding Heart Show, New Pornographers
2. Mes Emmerdes, Charles Aznvour
3. The Crane Wife, Decemberists

Three Things You Want in a Relationship (other than Love):
1. Sense of humour
2. Patience
3. Intelligence

Two Truths and a Lie (in any order):
1. I love doing Internet quizzes
2. I hate doing Internet quizzes
3. The first one was the lie.

Three PHYSICAL Things About the Opposite Sex that Appeal to You:
1) The parts between the top of the head and the bottom of the feet
2) The parts between the back and the front
3) The parts between the left and the right.

Three of Your Favourite Hobbies:
1. Making up answers to lists like this to make me seem more interesting and well rounded
2. Banjo construction
3. Helper-monkey training

Three Things You Want to Do Really Badly Right Now (But Can't):

1. Shoot an accordionist
2. Fairmount bagels. Cream cheese. My stomach. Now.
3. Stop that damn helper monkey from playing my banjo before the glue has set.

Three Places You Want To Go:
1. A world where I’d get the last five minutes back
2. Japan
3. Congo

Three Things You Want to Do Before You Die:
1. Make sure I’m wearing clean underwear. I’d hate to disappoint my Mom.
2. Remember that my last words have to be clever and/or mysterious. I’m thinking “Shmidt! You bastard!”
3. Umm… clean my desk? No one deserves that burden.

Three Ways That You Are Stereotypically a Girl/Guy:
What’s a girl/guy? My cross dressing days are long behind me, thank you very much.

Three People I Would Like to See Take This Quiz:
Nelson Mandela, Charles Manson, Ringo Starr

Further to the driving permit

Interestingly, Amynah's permit has my name on it as her husband. Mine has no space whatsoever for a spouse. The fact that she's the scientist and I'm here on a spousal visa doesn't matter. She's MY woman, because France says so.

Also, French drivers permits are the cheapest things I've ever seen - it's a pink piece of paper with my photo taped on and a crappy lamination job. My university was making harder-to-counterfeit I.D. cards than that a decade ago.

Clairvoyance

Well, I called it. That is, I called my inability to call anything. With a record turnout (40-odd million, or roughly 75 percent) France chose right-leaning candidate Nicholas Sarkozy (31.1 percent) and Socialist Segolene Royal (25.8)to be their candidates for president.

It was ultra-nationalist Le Pen that tanked, coming in with ten percent while centrist François Bayrou came in with 18.5 percent. None of the other fringe candidates even managed the five percent they require to be reimbursed for their expenses.

In Alsace Sego’s near local-girl credentials got her nowhere: she pulled in 17 percent to Sarkozy’s 36 percent here. Both Bayrou and LePen also did better here than in France overall, with 21 and 13 percent, respectively.

Both the Dernier Nouvelles d’Alsace (DNA) and Le Monde attributed these results to the Le Pen effect: No one wanted a “humiliating” repeat of the 2002 election, where he made it into the second round and voters were confronted with a choice between the right-leaning and ineffectual Chirac and the ultra-right Le Pen.

The right-leaning DNA put a positive spin on it: under an editorial titled “Au revoir le XXieme siecle!” (Goodbye, twentieth century!” they hailed the development as historic for France. The Socialists, they wrote, have never been weaker, Le Pen repudiated and the centrist Bayrou who claimed to beyond the old left-right divide (and who has, as yet, endorsed no one) “though eliminated, will be at the heart” of the second round of campaigning.

His endorsement will be key: one can presume Le Pen boosters, will go to Sarkozy, even as the latter tacks more to the centre in the second round. Segolene has picked up the endorsement of all the leftist candidates, though their combined tally of ten percent of the vote isn’t enough on its own. It’s a measure of how disliked Sarkozy is, as a person, that no party to the right of him (including Le Pen) has endorsed him.

As usual when elections approach, I am in the “a pox on both their houses” category. In addition to a general fuzziness on policy, several foreign policy mis-steps (including endorsing Quebec separatism, not that it did the PQ any good) Royal has called for mandatory singing of le Marseillaises for immigrants and giving a French tricolour to every household. What is this, 1848? Sarkozy, for his part, has chased after LePen’s cadre of troglodytes with unseemly enthusiasm, saying things to immigrants along the lines of “If you don’t like it here, you can just leave.”

Unbowed, I will post another prediction here as we get closer to May 6, the second polling day. I fully expect said prediction to be wrong. However, you’re welcome to throw brickbats my way, or post speculation of your own here.

La presidentielle

_{Boards specially erected for elections posters in front of Strasbourg's city hall. I photographed these in particular because they're just across the street from where La Marseillaise was performed for the first time. Yay historic resonance!}

Today, I became a little more French. I am now the proud owner of a French driver’s permit.* I did so for a few reasons – first, because it is a straight exchange when you have a Quebec license and it will save me from needing to bring my passport every time I want to rent a car. It should also relieve me from having to pay the two parking tickets and accumulated court fines that are attached to my Canadian license. Mark Reynolds – fugitive from justice!

In honour of this auspicious occasion, I bring you my thoughts on the French election.

Several years ago, a combination of youthful idealism, free time and desperate need for money led me to work for a certain political party for a few provincial and federal elections in Halifax.

I was pretty much at the bottom of the chain – my job, along with several dozen other mercenaries and idealists was to do what is called “push polling” on the phone. We’d read a script that would associate our candidate** with grandmothers, apple pie, puppies AND kittens (unless you’re allergic, in which our candidate really likes teddy bears).

Then we’d ask something along the lines of “do you agree with ______ that puppies, apple pie, blue skies and grandmothers are good things?” Then we’d rank them on a scale of 1 to 5 of support. A ranking of 1 meant you were with us, and would then be pestered to take a sign, a ranking of 5 meant you were confirmed for another candidate in which case we’d ask the Sisters of Mercy to pray for your soul.

The poor suckers who said they were undecided were worst off – they’d get called again and again until they gave an answer. This was not a good idea, because half the time in NS when people say they don’t know it really means “no” and they’re just being polite.

The point of all this nostalgia is that even though I was doing mindless, repetitive work, there was a feeling of energy. People talked about the campaign, the “boiler room” was always high energy, even when we all hated the work, and many of us volunteered on other parts of the campaign – putting up signs, doing door to door work, stuffing envelopes and the like. The city – especially in competitive ridings – were plastered with signs. Whole neighbourhoods would go orange, or blue or red.

This is in sharp contrast to France. Electoral rules here are extremely strict. For instance, the media is required to give every candidate – even those running with no organization and unlikely to get 2 percent of the vote – equal time. Given that there are 12 candidates running for president, that means if Sarkozy, (currently leading with 27 percent of the vote) says something worth two minutes of air time, every one of his opponents need to be given two minutes of air time in the same program.

Needless to say, that means that most of the coverage of the election tends to stay away from the specifics of any one candidates platform and focus more on generalities, like poll numbers. For instance, Radio France International’s Presidentielle coverage this morning – two days before the first round of voting - consisted of a statement from a professor who complained that no one was talking enough, or honestly about the economy. Even then, there was nothing about what any candidate was saying about the economy, just that it was insufficient and wrong anyway.

I’m not sure if election signs are covered by these rules or not, but I am blown away that there are so few. The only ones I’ve seen are on central billboards mounted for the purpose, meaning that Sarkozy, Royal (26 percent) get exactly as much space as the Trotskyites and single-issue “tear down the EU” type candidates. I’ve yet to see a single bumper sticker or sign in a private dwelling. Politics seems to be something that is practiced and regulated by the state - the people have very little to do with it.

The political discourse – and the view of politics – is also very different. In the U.S. the word “liberal” is a political slur, implying a left-ish total lack of morality. In France, “liberalisme is also a slur, but implying a right-ish embrace of free markets, globalization and big business. That all of those thing or evil is taken on face value, even by the right. Both interpretations are a bit bizarre for a Canadian who takes small “l” liberal as a compliment and equates (usually) big “L” Liberal with “government.”

Here the left is very left. Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate, is an actual red-blooded socialist – not the domesticated NDP or British Labour version. Remarkably, she has a half dozen candidates even further to the left of her to worry about.

On the right you have Sarkozy, who in North American terms is about as right leaning as Paul Martin or Hilary Clinton. Further right than him you have Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man generally seen as a crypto-fascist, and yet polls at about 12 percent.

For anyone following the election might have heard of François Bayrou, the “centrist” candidate. He’s doing well – just shy of 20 percent of the vote right now, but no one likes him. Why? Well, someone in Amynah’s lab (echoed by an editorial in today’s le Monde said that it is important to have “a clear vision of society.” In other words, it’s the ideology, not the ideas, that matter. Bayrou, in promising to take the best ideas from the left and right, isn’t playing by the rules. Again, very odd for someone who comes from a country where that is exactly how any government gets in power.

In any case, predicting this one is driving the pundits nuts. Lots of people are ashamed to admit they are voting for LePen (Alsace apparently likes him, though all of his posters are heavily vandalized) and therefore claim they’re voting for Sarkozy, so his numbers might be lower than they look and LePen’s higher.

In turn, Royal has impressed no one during this campaign (she suggested France create a "Sixth Republic" - why not? Why stop at five? And how else are you going to get to the lucky seven?) , but people may abandon Bayrou for her at the last minute rather than risk the embarrassment of having LePen reach the second round again, as he did in 2002. Similarly, the other leftist candidates might bleed support to her for the same reason.

The general feeling seems to be that no one particularly feels that Royal is very impressive, or even competent, but no one likes Sarkozy either, especially as he’s been pandering to the right in order to scoop LePen’s votes (he's also considered a fiscal conservative, even though his spending pledges are, at €72 billion, only €2 billion less than the "free spending" Royal's). That’ll drive off the moderates. There is a huge number of undecideds, and no one has any idea where they’re going to go.

Despite the futitlity inherent in analyzing these numbers, I’m going to indulge in some punditry, based entirely on what I’ve read in the local papers, Amynah's lab gossip, and a random number I found here in the rear area of my pants.

Royal will win it with just over 30 percent. Sarkozy will come in second, also with about thirty. LePen will score less than 20. Bayrou will drop to about 15.

I fully expect to be completely wrong in all of that – I’ve never predicted an election accurately in my life, and being a semi-hermit hasn’t given me any particular insight. However, I’m posting my opinions here if only so people can come back here on Monday and mock me. Enjoy!

*We applied Monday. French bureaucracy is frustrating, but holy heck is it quick. When we went in on Monday, the woman at the kiosk immediately told us to come back with the proper paperwork. When we told her we had the proper paperwork, she almost fell off her ergonomically correct chair. No etranger had ever before accomplished this feat.

**and we called for candidates all over mainland Nova Scotia. Cape Breton had its own phone centre, presumably on the theory that voters there would be put off by mainlander accents trying to tell them what to do.

Rock climbing

It has been a while since I updated, but I have a very good excuse. I have been completely unable to move my arms.

No, I haven’t been attacked by Argentinian water rodents again (that’s a great story, for those who don’t already know it). Rather, I went rock climbing.

We had been invited a couple of weeks ago by Audrey and her boyfriend Greg. Both have been doing it for quite some time – over a decade each. I had idly been asking Greg about it over the aperitifs and he said “You seem really interested. You should come out with us!”

Now, there were two kinds of miscommunication going on here. I was doing what we in the English speaking world call “making conversation.” That’s clearly different from expressing interest.

However, either because Greg misinterpreted my questions or because he is insane (events bear out the latter hypothesis) he told us to come out with him and his rock climbing buddies.

He then pulled out a black and white photo of the cliff to which he wanted to take us. As he handed it over, he assured me that this rock face had all sorts of easy “lines” on it, suitable for a beginner.

“Besides” he said “I’m a fully certified instructor.”

The photo looked innocuous enough – a long line, several different routes, some of which looked like steep hills. How hard could it be? It’s been a while since I did anything manly like this so I said, sure! Let’s do it!
_{Greg in action}

Now, half of me fully expected that nothing would come of this – why would these guys want to go out of their way to drag a couple of newbies up the bunny slopes when they could be doing their Spiderman routines on a hard wall? On the other hand, I started to get kind of excited: it was something new, we’d get out into the country and get some exercise.

Well, two weeks after that dinner (the wine fondue, for those who are interested) the invitation came through. Saturday morning we were to put on those clothes to which we were least emotionally attached and meet a man described to Amynah as “a tall guy with a green Opel” in the Auchon parking lot (Auchon being a steroid-taking result of a WalMart breeding with a Superstore. It’s big, is what I’m trying to say).

So warned, I dragged my camping pants from the bottom of clothes where they’d been hibernating, Amynah put on some crappy capris she hadn’t worn in a year and we were off.

We managed to find the large man and his small car with no problem, oddly enough. WE piled in and introduced ourselves. Phillipe, it turns out, had been doing this rock-climbing (escalade, en Francais) thing for five years. His friend Karim had been at it for six months, and this was to be his first outdoor climb. Niether spoke a word of English.

As we set off, Phillippe turned around and looked at our clothes, ratty and wrinkled as they were.

“Do you have something to change into? Because those will get ruined,” he said.

Otherwise, the drive to Ottrott, where we were to meet Audrey and Greg, was pretty quiet. During the half hour I had time to contemplate things, like, if Karim has been climbing for six months, and this is the first time he’s done so outdoors, is it really a good idea to do this? Also, both Karim and Philippe looked to be in pretty good shape. I type for a living. Am I really ready for this?

Actually, that’s a lie. I didn’t think any of that until we arrived at the quarry. The cliff was a huge drooling beast, way bigger than the picture, in which it was a mere two inches. In reality it was thirty metres, straight up. Thirty metres, for anyone who is counting, is precisely thirty metres more cliff than I’d ever climbed in my life.

We all got harnessed up and Greg found an “easy” run to set the ropes up on. Now, Greg is an ordinary human being, to a casual observer. Get him on the bottom of a cliff, however, and you will very soon have him on the top of the cliff. That’s it. He climbs like Gretzky scores points, like the Habs miss playoffs, like Newfoundlanders club seals – like he was born doing it.

So, after seeing Greg scoot up a vertical face like he was fetching the mail, Audrey turned to me.

“Ok – it’s your turn!”

What? No lesson? Nope. Greg threw down a rope, they attached me to it and told me to climb a wall. So I stepped up to the cliff. I look up – no handhold there. I look down. No foothold there. I look to the side. No elevator button there.

“Now what?”

Well, I managed to get up about three metres on my own. On the first “line” I got up about four metres before Phillippe had to climb up and bodily haul me over a rock face. It got easier after that – if by easier you can ignore the banged knees, abraded arms, strained muscles, bruised abdomen and lumpy head.
_{Me - I'm the little speck in blue pants. Phillippe's in red. Greg is in white, way up there.}

Once I got to the top I was rewarded with a view of the Ottrott castle on the hill facing us. Pretty cool. However, I barely had time to catch my breath before Greg turned to me and said “Now for the fun part. You get to rappel down.”

Everyone has seen rappelling in the movies, and it does look fun – SWAT team members aand rescue personall bounding down walls and sliding down ropes. Like at an amusement park ride. Except you forget something – it involves the biggest “D’ya trust me? of all – you have to deliberately fall backwards off a rock hard cliff into a nothingness that only ends 100 feet below with the stone hard ground. You have a rope, of course, but who the heck believes in ropes?

Nonetheless, I did it. After I finished, I was told that in fact, they had put the never-been-in-a-harness-before beginners on a run that was classified as intermediate. Thanks!
_{Amynah's turn. I won't describe how she did, because it's my blog, and I am determined to rescue a semblance of male pride here}

We all did a few lines and over the course of the day, I noticed that everyone had their own swearing style. I tend to mention Jesus a lot. Karim, meanwhile tended to yell about “professional ladies.” Greg, being trilingual, would – on the rare occasions when he had difficulty – unleash a stream of syllables that must be fairly commonly heard in EU meetings when they’re not going well.

His multilingualism wasn’t a help with his instructions however, most of which boiled down to “C’est facile! Just do it!” I was understanding the French well enough to get instructions: “Votre main gauche en haute… NON! L’autre gauche!” However, asking for directions was a little harder, since my brain absolutely refuses to think in French when it’s a life or death situation (“Now, is ‘I can’t see what to do next’ present tense, future or conditional? And how does one conjugate ‘get me down, now!’?”)

On my second run, which I did without Phillipe’s aid, I made an interesting discovery. I was on a section of cliff, my left leg extended ninety degrees to my body, the sole of my shoe barely making contact with a half-centimetre ridge, my right foot wedged in a crevasse and both hands gripping with all my might to a dead tree stump when I had an epiphany: I’m not having very much fun.

Phillippe yelled at me to move my right foot to another crevasse and then I had a second epiphany: I might be not entirely comfortable with heights. I realized this because although my brain was entirely calm, because I knew I was attached to a rope, my right foot was not moving. It was perfectly comfortable where it was and it was going to stay there – along with the rest of my body, clinging to the rock like lichen – until the fire department arrived to peel me off.

At this point, Audrey helped matters immeasurably by whipping out her cellphone/MP3 player and putting on “I will survive.” I think it was supposed to be encouraging, but off course the first lines hit a little too close to home: “At first I was afraid, I was petrified…”

That helped. I managed to loosen my grip just enough to give her the finger.

Movie review - Sunshine: not so hot

Nothing but spoilers
We saw a film called Sunshine last night, drawn in by the movie posters plastering every bus stop and tram station in Strasbourg.

Going by the posters, it looked like it was going to be a good old fashioned summer blockbuster/disaster flick – something obviously involving a space ship and getting far closer than could possibly be healthy to the sun. Neither of us had heard of it before, which is odd as we both keep up on the entertainment news from home but we went anywhere.

As loyal readers of this here blog know, I generally only review movies here that I hate and I am delighted to report that Sunshine qualifies eminently. I feel bad ripping it apart here – as far as I could tell it was actually a small budget movie, possibly British or Australian, a noble attempt to compete with Hollywood in the dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers blockbuster department. Criticizing it makes me feel slightly like I’m kicking a puppy.

On the other hand, there is a risk, however tiny, that someone reading this might be tempted to see it and feel I will have failed in my duty were I not to do my utmost to prevent that from happening.

The plot, such as it was, was established in a portentous voice over from the Captain of the Icarus II: “The sun is dying,” he says. His craft, the Icarus II has been sent to kick start our home star by dropping the mother of all atomic bombs into the centre of it before the earth turns into a giant snow cone.

You know it’s serious because he speaks really slowly. You know its dangerous because of a passing reference to Icarus I – the first mission, which went to the sun and was never heard of again. Anyone want to predict what happens next?

The movie stars the guy who played the flaming dude from the Fantastic Four movie, and the guy who played the Scarecrow from Batman Begins plus a lot of what are known in sci-fi movies as Ensign Cannon Fodders: filler characters that will need to be killed off one by one.

Movies set on long-term space missions all tend to fall into two categories: Alien, where sweaty actors do battle with each other, claustrophobic sets and a strange beastie lurking in the air ducts. Or they fall into the Solaris mode, where strange space phenomena make us realize that the Final Frontier is, in fact, our own souls.

Sunshine had no idea whatsoever which kind of movie it was and appeared to fail at both, like Event Horizon but without the budget.

After some brief (and poorly edited) establishing scenes wherein we learn which character is the wise captain, the philosopher/doctor, the arrogant cowboy, the tormented scientist, the love interest and the level-headed female character who takes down the men with her wise cracks, the cowardly yet ambitious second officer).

Suddenly, a fight on the bridge occurs between the cowboy and tormented scientist, handily establishing them as rivals and the main characters. What they were fighting about was never established but never mind! We’re picking up a distress signal!

From whom? Why, the seven-years gone Icarus I! No one could possibly be alive after all this time, could they?

Through a shoddy use of statistics that my scientist readers will appreciate, they decide that if they can pick up the bomb on the Icarus I they will have two bombs and therefore double their chances to jump-start the sun. The fact that something obviously went horribly wrong on the first ship did not enter into their calculations at all. Not surprising – this is presumably only the second best crew earth had to offer, the best one having been on the Icarus I.

So they change course, except they forget to readjust their giant sun shield (damned B-Team!), which is then damaged. Now, call me crazy, but if they have developed the technology to remind us to turn our headlights off when we park our cars, do you think they might have come up with a similar warning system for a space ship that is supposed to save all mankind? A little “beep” or a flashing light or something?

In the process of fixing the shield, wise old captain dies. One down! Why’d you get him to do the introductory voice over if we weren’t going to get to know him?

Problem solved the merry Icarus II continues on to the Icarus I. Arriving, they find that it had been deliberately sabotaged, all the crew are dead. Or are they? No one did a head count and faster than you can say “Alien” the two ships are somehow separated. Leaving the boarding crew stranded. Two more crew die! (take a bow, philosopher doctor! Aurevoir cowardly second officer! You didn’t get to be acting captain long!)

It was at this point that the movie really showed its budgetary restrictions. It was clearly shot in an abandoned factory. Surgeon’s scalpels were X-acto blades attached to electric toothbrushes. The crew zipped along in their ship with those mini-scooters that were such a hit with the kids 10 years ago.

The bad guy – basically a Jesus freak with a really bad sunburn – shows up a starts killing people for about ten minutes (Ensign Fodders – we hardly knew ye! Smarter-than-all-the-guys girl, say goodbye!).

At this point I realized that the Fantastic Four guy must have been terrified of being typecast as a “guy who burns.” I can imagine his meeting with the producers now: “Yeah, I’ll appear in your traveling to the sun movie, but I must insist that when my character bites it, I am frozen to death. In water! Yeah… that’ll teach ‘em to think I’m a one note actor!”

Anyway, lacking the funds for good prosthetics or make up the bad-guy/monster/Born Again Christian was only shown with the super cheesy “wavy screen” technology pioneered on "Dr Who" so that you could never focus on him properly.

In any case, we can all rest easy, because they do end up saving the world and we get to see the new sun being born – apparently the bending of space and time that happens in the heart of the sun makes normal flesh impervious to the force of a nuclear explosions, at least temporarily.

And I learned something. Never, ever go to a movie based on the poster alone.

Oh yeah, visitors

Rebecca and Milan were visiting over the weekend, thus the lack of posts. We took them to Mont St Odile and Kaysersberg as well as around town. WEather was nice enough that we were able to have a five-cheese picnic in Kaysersberg, followed by espressos in an outdoor cafe. Photo is of the very Euro-looking duo there. On the other side of the camera, meanwhile, I am in the process of getting a lovely sunburn, which I mention largely to be a jerk to my shivering Canadian readers.

Now I'm off to French class...

Vimy rant

edit - note added at bottom
I am going to take a break from France posting for a while to post about something that happened in France. Namely the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

I have nothing to add to the sap-clogged rivers of ink that have been spilled on this topic in Canada in terms of the battle’s importance, or its meaning, or heart-rending recollections torn from diaries that were never intended to be plastered all over the front pages of our newspapers. To the best of my knowledge, I have no direct ancestors that served in either of the World Wars, let alone at Vimy.

Nonethless, I’m going to rant. Specifically, about Rudyard Griffiths of the Dominion Institute. You might not of heard of them, but if you’re from Canada you will know their work. Every year, at least twice a year (Canada Day and November 11) they publish a poll which will get heavy, and undeserved coverage in the media, that will purport to demonstrate Canadians woeful lack of knowledge about their history in general and military history in particular.

When there’s a special anniversary, they inevitably pop up again, as they did this year on the commemorations of Vimy Ridge Whenever they do, there is much hand wringing that we are losing our heritage and therefore our sense of national identity and forgetting the sacrifices of bleah bleah bleah.

No one who knows my writing can accuse me of being indifferent to history (Canadian history in particular) but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say something radical: Vimy does not matter. Remembering Vimy does not matter. It is completely inconsequential to understanding Canada, war, or history. Even for students of military history its importance is largely one of improved tactics and the effect the win had on Allied morale– Vimy Ridge itself was strategically insignificant.

I would argue that the deep attachment neo-Tories like Griffiths have for Vimy is of much more historic interest than the battle itself. It mattered once, to a Canada that was young and finding its way in a world that still measured national worth by the length of its muskets. No more. We have new symbols, new beliefs. It is no more natural to worship the dead at Vimy – over and above those at, say, Ypres, who were equally brave and just as dead – than it is to have a once-in-a-decade conniption over the Battle of Stoney Creek (1813).

Interestingly, those countries that participated in the Great War with less of an obsessive need to have a capital “I” identity all pick losses as their “national” battle: Passchendaele for the Brits, Verdun for the French, Gallipoli for the Australians. The tremendous loss of life for little geo-political gain in a war of which the major consequence was to set up another war is not something that can be appropriately remembered by a “glorious victory.” Canada’s fetishization of Vimy is a throwback to an era we have outgrown.

I am not suggesting that we forget the Great War or the men who fought in it, but simply remembering it as “Vimy” or even remembering Vimy divorced from the context of the propaganda that has swirled around it since 1917 is serving Canada’s history and identity just as poorly as forgetting it entirely.

Edit Just to clarify, I fully intend to visit the Vimy Memorial later this year (see comments). My beef is with the idea that knowledge of a single battle should - or even could - be considered a key part of Canada's national heritage and identity after ninety years, over and above hundreds of other equally important events and developments.

For your reading appetite

By popular demand* a post on food.

First, a disclaimer. I am not what food-obsessed people would call a “foodie” (a word I find irritating all out of proportion to how often I encounter it on a daily basis. I’m not an “airy” despite my fondness for that life sustaining collection of gases) and so I might not do so well describing the gastronomic delights I have endured whilst en France. I generally prefer to apply my limited store of adjectives elsewhere. That said, I make no claims that everything described here is spelled correctly, or even described all that accurately - once an ingredient is combined with a larger dish, I cease to care about its individual identity: therefore something is "spicy" not "flavoured with scotch peppers."

My lack of food sense aside, dining at people's homes is probably one of my favourite things about living in France, not least because my being thoroughly smashed on fine wine by the end of the meal is a reliable part of the experience.

It would be hard to know where to start. One of the first meals we had here was with our friends Julie and Sebastien. We had been out exploring the Alsatian countryside, a trip that devolved into a mushroom picking expedition.

On our return, Julie and Sebastien invited in for dinner. Now, it is important to note that this was a completely spontaneous invitation, the equivalent of “Hey, it’s pretty late – you want to come in for a bite to eat?” that would be followed by pasta or pizza in North America.

Not here. First, they pulled out a bottle of wine and a “martini” (which is a type of liqueur here, rather than the mixed drink) offering us a choice of either. While I sipped my wine, Julie busied herself preparing fresh picked mushrooms and magrette de canard in the kitchen. This was followed by a cheese plate with three separate artisinal cheeses (reflecting the improvised nature of the meal – had this been planned there would have been at least four cheeses and possibly six). Needless to say, each course was accompanied by its own wine.

Planned meals are yet more elaborate still. Soon after our arrival here, Amynah’s boss invited all the newbies and their spouses to her place for a traditional Alsatian dinner. Her home at the time was a converted farmhouse about twenty kilometers from town.

On entering, we were confronted with a table full of “bretzels” – giant pretzels, which locals claim are an Alsatian invention. Once everyone was gathered they pulled out the cremant - Alsace’s answer to champagne. Another common apertif is a mix of Reisling and Kir, a cherry black currant liqueur.

Traditional Alsatian cuisine, such as it is, consists of pig in all its multifarious forms. In this case, the main course was a “choucroutte.” This is basically an enormous pile shredded cabbage cooked in wine, atop which are piled a joint of ham, cooked to be so juicy that it dissolved on contact with a fork, sausages, pork ribs and some other swine part I can never identify. All of the local restaurants serve this – though none has measured up to the homemade version we had, largely because restaurant “chou” is generally way too acidic.

This, in turn was followed by a cheese plate which featured (among many other cheeses) munster. Munster is not unlike brie in texture and originates from a town in Alsace not far from Switzerland. Munster is what aficionados would term a “stinky” cheese. I made the mistake of buying some during the heat wave when we moved here and then not eating it immediately. Our fridge inadequate to the 35-degree heat, soon smelled like a locker room. A locker room filled with stinky cheese. It is tasty though – more tart than brie.

Cheeses, like wines and most other foodstuffs, be eaten in a certain order. Just as one does not have a Pinot gris before a reisling, one would not eat brie after munster, nor munster after emmental. I've learned that the convention in restaurants seems to be to present the cheeses clockwise - you start at 12 and make your way around the plate. Remarkably, people will cut off giant pie-sized hunks of cheese at this stage of the meal, as if they hadn't just downed three courses, four glasses of wine and were preparing for a giant dessert.

Dessert was a tarte aux quetches (a quetch is a type of plum) served with Gewurztraminer wine, a very sweet dessert wine which is the pride of the Alsatian vineyards. It’s too sweet for my tastes, but as I am rapidly discovering, the right wine served with the right dish really does improve both considerably. Sadly, I can never remember which wine is supposed to go with which dish, so my nascent wine snobbery is unlikely to develop into an insufferable pretension.

Afterwards, we had the digestif which in this case was schnapps. I had never had schnapps before, associating it with old men and Nazis for some reason, but they too are supposed to be a local specialty (I would not be in the least bit surprised if some Alsatian were to one day serve me pancakes and claim that maple syrup was an Alsatian invention). Shnapps come in many varieties – peach, quetches, myrtle (a local berry), cherry, blackberry and Gewurztraminer, made from grape skins left over from winemaking. Learning that I had not had schnapps before, a fellow guest insisted at a subsequent dinner, on plying me with shots drawn from his considerable collection (this on a day that had started with a wine tasting and moved on to pre-apertif aperitifs before the various wines served with dinner. That I was still upright by the end of the evening was a miracle).

Dining culture is considerably different from North America. If you are invited as early as 7:30, chances are you won’t sit down before nine and will be likely finishing dessert at around 11 PM. On Saturday, when we were invited to a fondue (turkey and veal cooked in wine and boulliaise) we finished at about 1 AM.

Potlucks are almost unheard of, and it is considered by some to be offensive to send people home with leftovers. Amynah is still trying to adapt her tradition of putting all the food on the table at once, buffet-style, with the more rigid local protocols for serving food one course at a time.

Alsatian restaurants are another mystery. One local delicacy that I am rather fond of is the flammekuechen which is a flat bread with sour cream and “lardons” – what we in Canada might call back bacon.** It's light, yet filling and would appear to be an ideal lunch food. So one would think, except most restaurants, especially those in the smaller villages, never serve it for lunch. Lunch is for the huge pile of pork meals. Dinner is for the light meals. Of course, schnapps was traditionally for breakfast as well.

Local restaurants are extremely local. When Zack came to visit a while ago we took him to our favourite Alsatian place, called the Mairie for it’s proximity to city hall. It’s a comfortable place, cozy inside with very friendly servers. The owner, we soon realized, was on a first name basis with every customer who came in. No exceptions (well, us, of course). Everyone who walked in was greeted with a two-cheek kiss, small talk, and seated immediately. Some were never shown a menu – their order was brought to them in minutes, obviously prepared beforehand for their arrival. It felt vaguely like we were intruding on a giant family reunion.

There’s no shortage of other oddities on the local menus – I’ve had both roe deer and wild boar. I’ve developed a real fondness for “spaetzel” which is a kind of spongy, cheese-like pasta. When the Christmas market was on I was feeling munchy so I picked up a piece of garlic bread covered with an escargot butter from a market stall, like one might get a hot dog from a street vendor in Toronto. On the other hand, it's fairly difficult to find chicken. Go figure.

The local produce is excellent as well. There are farmer’s markets almost every day in various parts of the city. Our favourite is the organic farmer’s market, where we get our apples and potatoes and whatever other necessities are in season. One week they had live geese in a pen – for what purpose I’m afraid to ask.


Amynah gets her honey there, which she usually uses for her tea. The honey guy has a vast selection of honeys on display, varying in hue from translucent amber to mud-brown. Last time we went, Amynah asked him his recommendations as to what sort of honey is best with tea. His reply? “Well, there are two schools on this question…” Only in France would there be schools of thought on the niceties of honey-tea combinations.

Food is remarkably fresh here – our green beans are always incredibly firm and Amynah’s raspberries actually look like raspberries, rather than those watery red balloons that come from California. I buy fresh baked bread nearly every day, simply because I have no choice: the big, preservative laden loaves I grew up on don’t exist here, and so I make do with fresh, tiny little things that looked like they were made for Barbie Dolls. I am also pleased to announce that after five straight months of partronizing the same bread shop every morning, they’ve finally deigned to acknowledge that they might have seen me before. This was a big step for me. I feel like a local.

Allright, I’m done. I’m sure no one made it this far, since I was unable to break it up with many photos, as I am generally to busy eating to take pictures of my food, unlike several other bloggers I could name.


---
*That would be one person, Tara, who made a request on Facebook, of which I am now a member. See what powers you readers wield over me!

** Montreal readers: Both the Trois Brassuers locations serve this, along with many of the innovations that have been inflicted upon it over the years to make it more pizza-like. Resist! Get the “traditional” if you can.

Plantagenets, plants, castles and caves

_{The cloister, Abbey of Fontevraud}

All righty – last post on this...

Technically, this is end of day one, for one we realized we couldn’t get into the castle of Saumur, we hopped in the car and made our way to “Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud” (translation: Royal Abbey of Fontevraud).

Sadly, it was closed when we arrived, so we booked a hotel in the village and stayed there for the night (La Croix Blanche, which I highly recommend to anyone who finds themselves in Fontevraud l’Abbaye in need of a bed. Hey, it could happen). The place has been around since 1696 according to their card.

I won’t go into to much detail about the hotel, but they were extremely courteous, sitting Amynah and I in a separate dining area because they were afraid that the large group of people celebrating a family reunion would disturb us. They also had parking, which as a relief, as it meant I didn’t have to leave the car in the weird little Potempkin suburb that lay on the village outskirts.

All of the villages and towns we saw on our journey were of the same kind of beige limestone with black slate roofs (the slate roof is supposed to be a local trademark. Black slate roofs – you sure you want to go with that as your distinctive local selling point? Okay…). In the rain, the unrelenting limestone looks soul-suckingly drab. In the sun, it looks warm and inviting.

Fortunately, we got a bit of sun for our visit to the Abbey. The place has a fascinating history. It was founded by a hermit who, apparently not understanding what “hermit” means, decided to found a large religious community on a large hill not far from the Vienne river, a tributary of the Loire.

The huge complex ended up hosting a community of nuns, another of monks, lay brothers, lepers and repentant sinners. All of it – even the men folk – was under the authority of an Abbess. The holder of that office was usually related to royalty in one fashion or another, and so the Abbey was pretty good at attracting some fairly influential patrons.
_{Richard, Couer de lion}

These include a couple of historical Mega-Celebs: Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart. Ricky spent very little time in England – most of realm was in fact in France and he was much more interested in looting his way around the Holy Land. In any case he is buried here, along with his Plantagenet parents, all of whose effigies are in the Abbey Minster.
_{Eleanor of Aquitaine, catching up on her reading}

After the Revolution, the Nuns were dispersed and the place became a prison, holding some 1800 prisoners in some pretty horrible conditions (though, presumably not much more horrible than what the nuns endured, given that only one room in the whole complex was ever heated). In the 1960s it became a meeting facility and historic site.
_{The Judas Kiss - note the Nuns on either side. It was customary to depict the donors in religious art, sort of like "American Idol is brought to you by Chevrolet."}

Abbey done, and faced with a debilitating long list of potential chateaux to visit, we asked our innkeeper for a recommendation. Without hesitating, he recommended Vilandry – “It has the most beautiful gardens – even this time of year, they are amazing.”
_{Vilandry Chateau}

Ok then, Vilandry it is. Driving there was an adventure – Amynah foolishly recommended we take the highway route that was direct and recommended by our hotelier. I, using navigational skills honed in my numerous backwoods adventures, was confident that if we just followed the river we’d be fine. As if we were in the Rockies and I was Simon Fraser in an Opel or something.

When we arrived at Vilandry in the mid-afternoon; me, tense and communicating in monosyllables, Amynah grinding her teeth with the effort of not saying, “I told you so.” It was a pretty drive though – French highways are amazing.


The sky looked particularly changeable when we arrived, so we decided to hit Vilandry’s garden’s first. They were amazing, to say the least. I’d just finished reading a book in which Frederick Olmstead’s (he of New York’s Central Park and Montreal’s Mont Royal) landscaping theories were featured prominently. He would have hated this thing.

Everywhere, nature was controlled, boxed, categorized and slammed into little green cupboards. The hedges were perfectly shaped – I saw exactly one twig that was out of line.
_{Note the Maltese Cross in the centre}

The gardens had various parts to them – some were purely decorative, though the flowers hadn’t grown in yet, the postcard we bought makes me want to return in two months time. Others were for herbs and medicines. There was even a hedge maze. Amynah, remembering the lessons from Carol Shields’ “Larry’s Party” better than I, turned left at the entrance. I turned right. She thus made it to the central viewing platform to mock me from on high as I floundered about, reduced to looking for trails of crumbs to find my way out.

The most interesting patch was the “garden of love” which consisted of four large squares, each designed to represent a different kind of love: passionate love (with a pattern of wounded hearts), while adulterous loves features horns and fans and is dominated by yellow flowers in season. Tender love has flames and ballroom masks while tragic love gets swords and blood red flowers, representing duels.
_{Garden of Love}

All of this was due to Joachim Carvallo, a Spainard who purchased the place in the 1900s. He brought his considerable art collection and poured much of his American heiress wife’s money into the gardens. The family still owns the place, though they no longer live there. They did leave the art though, and much of it was spectacular, including an Islamic (or Islamic inspired) ceiling imported from Spain and painstakingly reconstructed.
_{Fancy ceiling}

Next on the list (he said, breezily skipping the driving to Tours debacle) was the troglodyte village of Rochemenier. Turns out these are quite common here in France – we picked up a freebie magazine where one of the stories was a Better Homes and Gardens-style “I love my trogdo!” complete with all the glossy photos and Bauhaus type furniture that implies, only in a cave. Hole-based living is quite common – we saw a row of quite modern-looking dwellings whose facades were right in the middle of a cliff face.


Rochemenier, strangely enough, is nowhere near a cliff. Rather, one drives though the kind of rolling French countryside one sees in the movies before seeing a few scattered homes in the distance.

This is Rochemenier – or rather, the above ground portions of it. Two thirds of the town is below ground, even today. Probably this is a good idea – during the Thirty Years War this place was spared the incendiary fate of its neighbours because, after all, you cannot raze that which is not raised.
_{Trogdo village}

The museum itself was not all that different than the “Here’s how the old timers did it” farm museums you might find in North America: a lot of old photos, farm implements, old cloths and the like. In addition, there was a small section debunking the negative connotation the word “troglodyte” has acquired, which they depicted with a couple of panels of a sputtering Captain Haddock from the Tintin books. Charmingly unpretentious.
<sub>Chapel nave

Chapel stairs</sub>

The most interesting spot was the underground chapel, converted in the 1600s into a chapel. It came complete with a staircase to the surface, a bell “tower” and a floor plan in the rough shape of a cross. There was no word as to whether it, like its above ground cousin, was dedicated to St Emerance, patron saint of the village and reputed to be able to forestall thunder and hail.

In addition, if you had diarrhea, she was supposedly the one to run to.

The Apocalypse of Angers, as told by John Spencer

First stop of the Loire extravaganza was Angers, a town about 80 km north of Nantes, where we spent the night after our arrival in Paris (we spent the night in a cruise-boat themed hotel, incidently, complete with ropes on the wall and an awkward portal to the bathroom. I’m still not sure if Amynah’s repeated cries of “Yaaargh” were an attempt to get into the nautical feel of things or because she whacked her head on the faux water resevoir in the bathroom).

In any case, the less said about it the better. After finding our way out of Nantes in our rental non-diesel vehicle, the drive to Angers was fairly quick, especially as I inadvertently took the toll highway.

We had selected Angers on the off chance that a monastery there still had a relic of St John the Baptist, mentioned in a Medieval source I found on the Internet. I got quite the reaction in the Angers Tourism Office when I asked about that in crappy French.

“Has Angers a head of Jean Baptist?”

“Jean Baptist who?” she said, eyes widening.

“Oh, right… Saint Jean Baptist.”

Turns out the answer was no. We wandered over to the Angers Cathedral which, as with every Cathedral I’ve seen since arriving in Strasbourg, was a bit of a disappointment. To satisfy my history geekery, it did have a two-fer memorial to a sainted religious martyr (Martin, I believe) and victims of the Terror. That the deaths memorialized occurred ten centuries apart didn’t seem to discomfit anyone and was probably intentional to make a political point that now eludes me.
_{Wood carving in Cathedral. I don't who she's supposed to be.}

More delightful religon/politics analogies were in store for us (and therefore you, dear reader) in the Angers Chateau. This is a big ass castle right in the middle of downtown Angers (such as it is) overlooking the Maine river.


The castle was originally built by a nasty SOB by the name of Fulk Nerra (972-1040), also known as the Black Count who, among many other charming exploits left his first wife by the clever means of incinerating her. He was also responsible for a number of the other castles that litter the Loire Valley, I suspect possibly because his charming temperament earned him a mortal enemy or two in his lifetime. One contemporary eulogized him thusly: “Fulk of Anjou, plunderer, murderer, robber, and swearer of false oaths, a truly terrifying character of fiendish cruelty, founded not one but two large abbeys. This Fulk was filled with unbridled passion, a temper directed to extremes. Whenever he had the slightest difference with a neighbor he rushed upon his lands, ravaging, pillaging, raping, and killing; nothing could stop him, least of all the commandments of God.”

In any case, the big attraction at Angers is the Apocalypse Tapestry, which my guidebook describes as being based on “cartoons” by the painter Jean de Bandol. It dates from the 1300s, and is a stunning 140 metres long, detailing with horrific gusto the delights described in Revelations.

_{Note the sceptre}

The 100 years war was in full swing during the making of the tapestry and it was inevitable, perhaps, that some current events would creep into the weaving. As the narrator on my audioguide (who sounded remarkably like the actor who played Leo from the West Wing, which now that I've followed that link is a even more unsettling than I initially thought) explained, one panel depicts two beasts battling over a scepter with which they will rule over all mankind. The scepter is crowned with a fleur de lys and one of the beasts – the particularly nasty one representing the Devil, is depicted as having come from the sea – any parallels to the English being purely accidental, of course.

_{This one was Amynah's favourite, called the overflowing well. There was nothing to explain why they focus on that and not that the Angel is clearly flouting zoo regulations by feeding the ogre grapes.}

After Angers we didn’t have any specific plans, per se, so we made our way south east, more or less towards a place called Saumur, which has a particularly fairy-tale like castle sitting on a cliff overlooking the Loire. Reputedly Réné of Anjou (“The Poet King”) called it “the castle of love,” which, if I’m not mistaken, is also the name of a seedy looking bar on the highway just past Rimouski.
_{Saumur castle}

The one in Saumur attracted a similar crowd. Though it was briefly used by King Réné and St Louis, it later fell on hard times, hosting a number of aristocratic prisoners like the Marquis de Sade and then, in a further slide, English sailors.

Today it holds two museums, neither of which was open when we arrived. Amynah and I had to content ourselves with a quick jaunt around those parts of the ramparts we could get to (renovation work blocked us from the river side).

Ok, that’s it for now. Tomorrow: Abbey Road!

Lord Louvre a duck

We were in Paris so that Amynah could attend her religious New Year’s festival (Navroz). As we’ve managed to see an embarrassingly small amount of France in the time we’ve been living here (though, to be fair, it took me until I was almost thirty to make it out to BC) we decided to use the trip as an excuse to visit the Loire Valley.

We had high hopes – the weather here had been topping 17 degrees almost every day for a week prior to departure with sun nearly all day. Needless to say, the day we boarded the train for Paris the temperature plunged to just above zero.

We’d been to Paris a few times before. Amynah has a theory on the city: namely it is great on odd numbered visits, horrible on even numbered ones. Last time we went was an even numbered visit in the summer. I was tired, homesick and cranky and managed to ruin it for both of us. This time, by Amynah’s reckoning, we should have had an excellent visit.

The stars for a good visit were not auspicious – in fact, they were not visible, what with the clouds and the rains and the hail. Amynah pointed out that my perception of Paris while I’m there is mercurial at best: one moment, I want to live there forever and even the subway maps strike me as resembling nothing more than colourful spider’s webs covered with a scattered dew of stations. Then one gets on the subway and can’t breath for the overpowering odour of urine.

_{Hotel Invalides}

This time was no different. Most of the rest of our time there was spent picking up necessities – clothes for Amynah (and a new coat for me), eating what may well be the World’s Best Falafel in the Marais (where I also picked up something bagel like that was no substitute for Fairmount’s Sesame Covered Rings of Joy) and books. So, so many books. On the advice of Zack we went to The Abbey Bookstore, in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne. It’s a Canadian Bookstore, with new and second hand books piled up to the ceiling. The organizational system would send any self respecting librarian into paroxysms of rage – I saw copies Romeo Dallaire’s “Shake Hands With the Devil” filed in four different sections.

We came away with a pile of reading material, from which I am currently reading “Napoleon” by Paul Johnson. Unfortunately that was less the biography for which I was hoping (I understand had an impressive career at some point a few centuries ago)
and more an argument with all the people who had written biographies of the man. So, if anyone wants an argument on why Napoleon’s legacy was the totalitarianism of the twentieth century, I’m you’re man. If anyone wants to ask me about Austerlitz or Waterloo, hey isn’t that Tom Cruise?

_{The Pantheon Dome, me trying for artsy}

Shopping aside, we had decided that this was going to be the visit where we finally visited the Louvre. Amynah had been before, but I had not. I’m not a huge fan of mega-museums: I like them small and specialized, like the Medieval art museum here.

The Louvre (or at least what I’d heard of it) is sort of a three-ring circus of a museum, attracting all sorts of the kinds of superlatives that normally get attached to Las Vegas Hotels: “Miles of galleries! It would take three whole days to see everything! We have the actual freakin’ Mona Lisa! Juggling monkeys!”

Not to mention, I’m more than a little bit crowd averse and the lines to the Louvre are, I have heard, not unlike those at Disneyland (I’ve never been to Disneyland either, or a Las Vegas Hotel. Can you people just give me a bye on all these metaphors and analogies I’m tossing around?) The fact that many of these crowds would contain people who were affected enough by The Da Vinci Code to make the journey to see the actual final resting place of Mary Magdalene didn’t help my enthusiasm at all.

Nonethless, we showed up at 9 in the morning. The weather was awful – we had been caught in a hailstorm coming from our train the evening before, and the wind was cutting rather efficiently through my spring-weight jacket.

_{Lord Louvre a duck}

I was surprised that our crazy strategy of showing up early during crappy weather meant that the place was relatively empty. I won’t go into a detailed description of what we saw. The Louvre used to be the downtown pad for the French Royals until the Bourbons hightailed it out to Versailles, which though considerably less centrally located, benefited from being a much greater distance from the open sewer that was the Seine.

We made a beeline for the floor with the Mona Lisa. Everyone I know who has seen this painting has always said two tings: there’s always a huge crowd there, and it is much smaller than they thought.

Thus armed with low expectations, I am pleased to report that the painting is in fact bigger than I expected and the crowds were surprisingly thin. Nonetheless, I felt a little sympathy for the older American lady I overheard asking her husband “So, why is this so famous?”

She’s right: everyone knows what the Mona Lisa looks like: she is the Coke logo of Art. Yet somehow, seeing the actual painting is still supposed to be an authentic experience, even when guards and velvet ropes are keeping you a safe five metres away. With all the buildup, one almost expects a transformative experience, or at least a wink from the lady. In reality, the Mona Lisa’s importance is less on its aesthetic value (it’s pretty drab, after all) and more on the legends that have built up around it.

After seeing her, Amynah and I poked around the rest of that floor, seeing a whole lot of equally interesting art, including this one which I quite liked (note the menacing shadow of the horseman in the background).

All right, I’m done now. Tomorrow, the Loire! (or the day after, maybe).

Upside down, wrong way round

It's a little backwards to start a travel log with the equivalent of a post-script, but here goes: I just got a phone call from the lovely people in Hertz's Nantes office, who politely asked me if I had filled up our rental Opel with diesel fuel. I had, I replied. It was not a diesel vehicle they informed me. I replied with an expletive or two. I owed them 75€ they said.

Merde.

Anyway, I'll do a proper write up later, but in the interim, I leave you with the fruits of my ongoing efforts to get artsy with my camera. It ain't always pretty.

I don't know why I feel compelled to do this

No one has yet, in my long months of writing this thing, ever said "Geez Mark, you haven't updated for an entire week. What happened? It hurts us so when we are left without the benefit of your wise and witty words. Hours of our day are spent hitting our browser's refresh button, like a rat hitting it's feeder bar in one of Amynah's morphine experiments."

Despite never receiving such emails (would it kill even one of you to fake it, maybe?) I feel compelled to let you know that I won't be updating here until next week, as Amynah and I are off to Paris, followed by a tour of the chateaux of the Loire and their famed gardens which should be beginning to bloom nicely right about now.*

In the interim, I leave you this photo of the stained glass of the Cathedral.


_{*right, that's why I do it. For the chance to write intolerably smug sentences like that.}

Raining on the parade

The main benefit to living on the fifth floor of an apartment that overlooks the main street of a town like Strasbourg, in addition to our amazing and frequently bragged about view of the Cathedral, is the theoretically excellent vantage it affords for viewing parades.

Strasbourg has been remarkably stingy on the parades so far. In fact, we have heard tell of only one: Carnavale. Supposedly it is not unlike Mardi Gras. They hold it late here as many of the floats and marching bands go from town to town on both sides of the border. We inadvertantly saw one a couple of months ago, across the border in Kehl. You will note by the giant nosed Rasta men depicted below, that they are not exactly politcally correct.



Amynah and I were delighted to discover a notice posted on our apartment door this week, warning us that our street was going to be closed down to allow for a projected invasion of roughly 2,000 witches, fantastical creatures and musicians traveling through town at the traditional 5 km/h on their customary floats (I will admit I was hoping the "Army of blond Frauleins with legs that go all the way to the ground" would make an appearance too).


Today we invited over our friends Cela and Leslie and their two kids, (Candadians who live in an impeneratrable fortress a suburb of Strasbourg) all of whom were looking forward to a bird’s eye vew of their first European Carnavale. We knew that the show started at 2:11 precisely (why, I don’t know) and should therefore reach our place at about three.

Three rolled by. Then three thirty. We heard nothing, and there were no crowds on the sidewalks outside. The kids started to get antsy. The adults started to get antsy. I started to pick fights with the kids and Amynah sent me to my room. Finally, Leslie ventured back downstairs and asked a passerby what the heck was going on.

Turns out that the whole thing had been cancelled due to high winds. They are scared of that sort of thing here, as the city is still fighting off a lawsuit arising from an incident five years ago where several people died at a city concert when a large tree fell on them.

Disappointed as I am by this (not nearly as disappointed as the kids or the 2,000 people that have been workin on their elaborate costumes and dances for this thing) I am still amused. The Montreal St Patrick’s Day Parade will be going on as I write this, despite snowstorms.

On the other hand, at least I am spared from reading the Montreal’s Gazette (I will be damned if I link to them here) desperately dull coverage of said event, which is identical every year: send out a pair of their most antediluvian columnists to hit an Irish pub: “First we went to O’Dipso’s, where I talked to Paddy O’McPaddigan. He told me the Irish are gods among us, then he served me a Guiness or six. Then I went to another pub, where I drooled over a couple of college chicks one quarter my age while drinking more Guiness. Then I went somewhere else, but I don’t remember much about that. Now my hurts heads. I mean, head hurts. Har har! Ain’t drunk funny!”

Interesting Montreal St Patrick’s facts: Montreal holds the record for the longest contiously running St Patrick’s Parade, at 183 years. The Montreal Gazette has the longest streak for reporting the longest running parade stat, at 182 years.

The Ides! Beware the Ides!

Ok, the photo is embarrasingly blurry but I'm rather fond of it nonetheless. Besides, it's rather reflective of my mod at the moment. I have a phone meeting scheduled this afternoon to discuss a story I really want to do, suspect I won't be able to do, and am frankly terrified I might end up getting. I will not explain anything beyond that as I believe this isn't going to go anywhere, but at the moment it is dominating my mind. If I get it, I'll update, if not I'll probably just delete this.

As a distraction for me and for you, more on the movies. We went to see The Painted Veil last night. I vaguely recall it was not terribly well reviewed, but I can't quite recall why. Sadly, I cannot say anything entertainly negative about it - I found the story to be compelling, Naomi Watts was incredible and Edward Norton was decent.* The scenery - inland China - was astounding though everything was a little too pretty and honey-drenched for a story that was occuring in the middle of a cholera epidemic. Overall, worth a rental, but I'm not sure I'll remember it in a month.

One thing Amynah and I have noticed that makes the cinema-going experience unique here (beyond the subtitles and lack of nacho chips), is the trailers for French movies. All of them, for reasons Amynah and I cannot fathom, appear to work as a precis of rather than an advertisement for a movie: in other words, they're trying to tell you what the movie is about rather than just throwing the best lines and fanciest special effects at you. Therefore they'll take you through the whole thing, plot point by plot point.

Based on our sampling of the dozen or so trailers we've seen so far, it would appear that all French movies are about attractive people meeting each other, having complicated affairs, then a crisis. At least one of the characters will be very old and several fetchingly young. Frequently the old person wil be Gerard Depradieu. There are always at least five people, all of whom are in love with each other in various permutations. Their feelings will be expressed in witty, yet philosophically grounded conversations about the nature of love and destiny. These conversations must, and I mean must take place in a sun dappled field with some sort of symbolic vegetation, like a decidiuous tree that will lose its leaves or flowers that may be plucked. But botanical degradation is for later, because for now all is sweetness and light, as portrayed by lively conversations over dinners on balconies and laughter over wine.

At this point in the trailer, the serious music starts. There is much rapid talk, which fails to fill the silences that fill the gaps between the characters. There will be much ennui. The old character, whoever they are, will endure many close-ups of the cavernous wrinkles. Some or all characters will run places (it's never clear where), sometimes mancially, oft-times despondently. The field will be returned to, the tree bare, the flowers crushed. Audrey Tatou or someone who looks remarkably like her will appear, stare out a window on which raindrops are falling, cast her eyes fetchingly downward and turn away.

Amynah will testify to this: every trailer for a French movie we have seen looks like this, even the ones set in Paris where one wouldn't expect to find fields so conveniently isolated and sylvan to serve as appropriate backdops for the love and disillusionment of so many French peple. Some of them are comedies, some of them dramas but NOT ONE lacks these essential elements.

Someone has to introduce these guys to the exploding car.

_{* Given that of the last three films I've seen Norton in the only one where he even merited "decent" was this one, I'm seriously re-evaluating his place on my very short list of actors I like. It's been a long time since "Fight Club" or "American History X." Hell, even "Death to Smoochy."}

Movie Madness

In response to Travis's comment below, I will try to achieve some semblance of balance in my visitor reports by saying some really nice things about Zack (who I already referred to as reasonably attractive, which is a pretty nice thing for one straight dude to call another).

In addition to being reasonably attractive, Zack is also very talented at graphic design and its related arts. Combine that with a shiny red rally car discovered in one of Kaysersberg's back alleys and Zack's offbeat sense of humour and you get this poster.

An unrelated side note, but Zack's visit also threw the deficiencies of my tour into sharp relief, further accentuated by Daniel and co. Namely, everyone that comes here has an annoying habit of having their own interests and fields of expertise, which do not necessarily coincide with my knowledge base.

For instance, when Anna's friend Daniel insisted on asking about the local trees I wrote it off as a odd little quirk I needn't be concerned with in the long term. Zack, on the other hand, seemed only mildly interested in my Cathedral tour and the living postcard that is Petit France but was thrilled at some 1980s-era apartment blocks and office towers, as they feed into his theories of urban development. When my latest guests left me blank faced and grasping with even more botanical questions I realized I either need to develop a green thumb, stat, or insist future visitors sign a waiver that would protect my ego by obliging them to refrain from asking me questions to which I don't know the answers.

In any case, to shamelessly abuse Travis' gift to my vocabulary, (while subtley praising his awesome word-power) here is another motivation for potential visitors: sincere enconiums to your many graces posted online for the world to see!

Suddenly, silence

It's rather unnerving to suddenly have one's house and day to oneself after a week of entertaining guests. Oddly enough, I can't say I particularly like it.

Daniel and his family are a wonderful bunch, and I say that not because they brought me peanut butter, bagels, books and DVDs (though I won't pretend that doesn't have something to do with it).

I find it inordinately cool that they would travel a quarter of the way around the world to see us (Paris might have exerted a certain pull, I understand, but we'll not dwell on that). All four of them are so fun to be around and such through-and-through good people it's impossible, on their departure, to be grateful that I have my livingroom back. That of course holds true for Zack, Jon and all our other recent guests as well, but none of them have quite the same impact as a full-on family of four. I can't imagine any combination of me and my sisters Daniel's daughters' age that wouldn't have been unbearably obnoxious after a week of travel and its numberous discomforts - heck, even Amynah and I get a little tetchy after too long on the road. These guys remained unfailingly pleasant, humouring my numerous "you just gotta see this" moments even when lunch-time was long past and we'd driven two hours to see the World's Biggest Cuckoo Clock in Germany and then failed to actually see said clock (that said, we saw some pretty freakin' big cuckoo clocks).

Anyway, I'm sad to see them go, even if I'm going to have to spend the next week washing invisible Guacamole out of my clothes (Guacamole Girl was in full flight yesterday. Adopting the identity of Super Villain "Wet Blanket Man" had no efffect).

In any case, I hope they had as good a time as we did. Better yet if the tales of wonder they share inspire other people to come here as well.

Now I must get to work on the reading material Daniel brought me for the article I'm doing for the News. Now that is a dedicated editor.

Family Fridays

Greetings all. A little bird (McGillus McCabbeous) tells me that this little ole blog is widely read in some specific, Montreal-area locales. With that in mind, I want to assure everyone that the McCabes are all safe and sound. At the moment, they are/should be in Basel, Switzerland, which is not too far from here. So far they've endured the tour well, and even feigned a gratifying enthusiasm for some of my more involved Medieval anecdotes. It goes without saying that it has been awesome hanging out with all of them again, despite the youngest's disquieting habit of throwing invisible guacamole in my eyes.*

I don't want to go into too much detail of their visit so far, both because I don't want to steal the joy of telling their own travel stories on their return, and becase I'm hoping that people will be curious enough to come visit themselves.

But why be curious? Here's a couple of teasers: The Mark Reynolds Babble-Tour Galacticca of Strasbourg and Surrounding Environs (TM) has reached a level of such professionalism and glory that I am now receiving tips from strangers that I keep meeting at the local sights. The wine cellar lady (this particular gem of a Medieval wine cellar is off the beaten track, rarely visited by the tour buses and little-known even by native Strasbourgers. It's a definite highlight of the tour) gives me tips about un-advertised degustations. Even cooler, in the Cathedral, an 88-year-old gentleman saw me pointing out an obscure decoration on the Cathedral organ to my visitors and, impressed by my enthusiam, spontaneously told me about how he had been the Master Glass worker who had recovered the stained glass in Notre Dame from the salt mine that the Nazi's had stored it. Very cool.

I'll leave it to Daniel and co. to describe their time in their own way (and who knows - maybe they're hating it) but I've been having a great time showing everyone around, and hope that they will inspire others to pack their bags.

_{* I'm afraid I might have created a nascent Papist out of the youngest girl - she insisted that Daniel buy her a book about the life of St Odile, whose shrine we visited on Tuesday. In the convent there she turned to me at one point and said "I feel sad and I don't know why." Give that girl a rosary! On the other hand, she did turn down the water from the miraculous spring, probably suspecting it to be the Catholic version of the proverbial Kool-Aid.}

Dream Girls

A thought: when Eddie Murphy took the role of a performer who sells his talent to promote dreck, and Beyonce took the role of the over-managed, sanitized “White person’s Black person” didn’t either think that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to invite those comparisons to their actual careers?

I mean, how much of Beyonce’s performance was pretending to be someone who hides her lack of singing chops under sexy costumes and heavy marketing and how much was from the heart?

P.S. At some point I might post on something smart like, but I fear my brain is shrinking, along with the available word count on my latest writing assignment from which I am currently fleeing. Because the world needs another Beyonce blog, damnit!

Catching my breath

We had a great time with Zack, pictured here with Flat Laura in Schramberg's giant castle. It was an interesting town - it shut down entirely at two, meaning the only place we could get a bite to eat in the afternoon was in the local fancy hotel. The owner, entranced by Zack's Roots-like quest, talked to us for a good fifteen minutes, using up all of Zack's miniscule German vocabulary several times over in the process. That's what I like about small-town Germans - they don't really care if you can't understand them, they're just happy you're visiting them. Anyway, this guy gave Zack two books - free! - and Schramberg's history to give to his grandfather.

Now Zack has departed, and now we are preparing for our friends Daniel, and his family. In fact, they’re already in Paris, scheduled to arrive here Sunday.

Daniel recently became the interim editor of the McGill News* and is also the guy who signally failed to hire me for the associate editor position at the McGill Reporter, a decision for which I may eventually become grateful.

In any case, they’re here for a week and are a more generationally diverse group that any of my previous visitors (the younger daughter is seven, the older almost 15) so I’m wracking my brains for appropriate things for them to see. My own tastes lean to Medieval castles and churches but that is not, I am given to understand, for everyone. Fortunately, a mini-fairground complete with carousels and cotton candy has manifested itself next door to our apartment so Daniel should be entertained.

My problem with entertaining guests is –as Anna and Zack will both attest – I am a bit of a martinet. Anna’s friend Babet and Zack both developed serious blisters after enduring my forced march around Strasbourg. I’m not much better in a car, stopping at every postcard-esque village and romantic castle ruin in sight: “Do not ask questions! I will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it! NOT before!"

I’ve also been a bit spoiled by recent company. After all, Flat Laura appeared to be fascinated by our visit to Kaysersberg, home of doctor, theologian, organist and 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer.


<sub>* Interestingly, Daniel's visit here means I will be procrastinating from an assignment he gave me for the News.** Wonder how that will play as an excuse?

**Also interestingly,*** between the News and the Headway-like CRNS International for which I am also writing, it’s like I never left McGill, minus the fun colleagues, Friday beers and lunatic office politics. Let me tell you, it’s no fun gossiping about your co-workers when you’re talking to a mirror while the other mirror is out of the room.

***Does anyone know the style-guide on foot-noting footnotes?**** As this is a bad habit I’ve picked up from reading Julie’s blog, I look to her for an answer.

**** I'm done now.</sub>