Les hommes en noir -OR- A bon pun

Fashion is important in France. But color, at least in Angers in winter, is not. Everyone is black. Black coats, black scarves, black shoes, black pants (or dark blue jeans). Our family, sauf moi, got the memo. I  am walking around Angers in a red shell like Rudolph the Goretex reindeer. Over the last three days I've taken some comfort in finding red to be the second most popular coat color. On our first trip to le supermarchet, Ivy and I noticed that the guy restocking the duck sausage was also wearing a veste rouge.


Wednesday we all attended our first galette. La galette des Rois (as it's referred to in this part of France) is the local variant of the Epiphany king-cake tradition. Site-director Sue invited us to join current and soon-to-leave AHA students for a gallette they were having at her office. The rules were explained to us newbies: Baked into the almond cream somewhere is a proxy-Jesus/king trinket--in our case a tiny Snoopy. The galette is divided and served. Careful eating ensues. Whoever finds Jesus is king for the day.

Mariessa prepares to leave the Angers AHA program a three-time winner of la fève. Her victory Wednesday, confirmed by Snoopy, comes with a paper crown and a week of even more good luck. WTG, M!

With no theological consensus on when Epiphany celebrations should end, it seems the private sector has intervened with clarity. For the entire post-Epiphany remainder of January, regional boulangaries fold iconic choking hazards into the mix, bake the galette, and attach a paper crown. Wearing the crown around town is totally acceptable. Asserting that the king rides the bus for free is not.

We got to share a second galette (it's the end of the month so people are packing them in) on the way back from our Friday morning meeting at Ella, Ivy, and Jack's prospective school, College La Madeleine. Madame Thomas, head of 6th and 7th grade, walked us through the options and then walked us around the campus, stopping for brief visits with teachers, administrators, librarians, and very watchful students. The school has fully embraced an EU-community perspective and  established itself as a European institution but Americans and other foreign students are welcome. It is Catholic but religion class is elective. And the building used to be a convent but now there seem to be happy people there. One of the happiest was the chef. We passed through the cafeteria as he was putting the finishing touches on the day's lunch line. After watching the likes of Super Size Me and Food, Inc., it almost seemed like a passive aggressive display of dietary superiority. If you were pushing a tray you'd have your green leaf salad, half grapefruits, slab 'o brie, sweet bread...Then the main course: fish, couscous with vegetables, and (to ensure there's no trouble with the authorities) a baguette basket. The wine was out of a box but whudduya want for €3.50?


I should also put in a plug for the school librarian. She was in Alaska last summer and has a book on grizzly bears coming out in September. It's probably in French so be sure to look for it on Ámázön.fr.


As is still often the case, I'm writing this in the middle of the night. The streets below our apartment are pretty much party-central and apparently the folks around here like to chant and sing after a few drinks-- even more when the bars close at 2 AM and they slowly parade... OMG, that's what Jim Morrison was talking about:

Not sure what's up with the cobra and leopard but I'm sure Jim was working through some stuff -- or maybe just pandering, yeah.



Another reason it's hard to sleep is that just below our bedroom window is one of the best boulangaries in town. At 0-dark-thirty I can look down and see the shelves start to fill with Able Baker Pierre's array of confections. This is where I go to get some comfort with my rudimentary French--which is easier because, at the end of it, for having endured such stress, Madame gives me a treat. The exercise goes like this:
"Bonjour."
"Bone jur. Uh (feigning brief, contemplative hesitation) Do pan o' shock-a-lot see vu play (with pathetic pointing)."
"Deux pan au, oui."
(But then I see that there is pan au chocalat maxi. The French, evidently, super size, too!)
"Eh, do maxi" (again with the pointing).
"Deux maxi, oui. Souhaitez-vous un sac?" (holding and pointing to a bag -- she's onto me.)
"No, mare see." (Does my red Goretex coat not signal disdain for plastic except when it's my clothes?)
"Cinq quatre vingt cinq, s'il vous plaît."
Now it's just the Euros talkin' -- almost home.
"Merci. Bon jour. Au revoir." (This is French for, "Next.")
"Mare see." (Minimal but I'm a busy guy).

à Angers

Bellingham to Angers: 4,630 miles (Thanks, Google Earth) door to porte (Thanks, Google Translate). And, it only took .00001545 second. (Thanks Google Teleport). Iceland Air from Seattle via Reykjavik is about as close to a straight line as we could have gone. In case you're wondering what town is closest to the exact half-way point, it is Pangnirtung on the west side of Baffin Island in Canada's nu-est territory, Nunavut (Thanks Wikipedia). Like most travel in the modern world, the exciting parts of the journey are reserved for the the first and final fractions.

It's too bad that we don't have pictures of our Friday night bon voyage party that our B'ham neighbors put on - complete with French flag toothpicks, fondu, and beautifully un-French Boundary Bay IPA (We're gonna miss that beer... I mean those fine friends). But we do have photos of our ride to the Bellingham Airporter shuttle stop. Shellane our house-sitter dropped us off at the Airporter Shuttle. As journey-legs go, this was similar to Steve Martin's hitch-hiked ride to the end of the fence in The Jerk.  But it gave us our first shocking glimpse of all of our luggage in one place.  (Shellane's friend and master photographer Erin drove a second car). It was a pile to be reckoned with.  And then, possibly inspired by the obscene mound of cordura, I thought It'd be fun to get a picture of someone associated with each leg of our journey.

Next, Jim from BelAir Airporter Shuttle was our driver. Maybe it's because I'm a quasi transportation professional that I thought parsing the modes of our journey would be interesting.  Or maybe it's the precarious imperative of blogging to split up everyday categories (like a trip) into smaller and likely less interesting parts.  In that case, thanks for reading this far.


At SeaTac, Iceland Air weighed none of our bags. This was no doubt karma gained by several scale-checks the night before and a last minute redistribution from the heaviest bag (won't name names) to the kids' and my bags.


Brynhildur and Svana got us set up with pillows, blankets, and fizzy glacier water. Apparently, the word for lime-wedge in Iceland is "bæti mi" (and they don't even have them). At  Reykjavik we did NOT have time to go buy Icelandic yogurt (sorry Erica). This was partly because I had to drink the entire contents of Ella and Ivy's water bottles to get through security (still not sure why we had to do security there) and so used my extra time finding a snyrting.


We had checked the train schedules before getting into Paris and were sure we'd never make the 1:16 to Angers. We were set to wait around for one that left at 3:30 or so. But, when Kristin finished up at the ticket counter, the agent noted that we had two minutes to get to the train (yep, it was 1:14). This is where our extreme sherpa skills almost broke down. It was kind of like an episode of 24 except Jack Bauer was a family with three kids hauling 170 pounds of luggage each. Where the script called for three-steps-at-a-time leaps down the long skinny escalator, we had violins too wide for the turnstiles and tipped-over roll-aboards caught up on twisted nylon straps. But under the threatening screech of the conductors' whistles, we managed to heroically shove our selves and suitcases into the steep narrow opening of the wrong train.


This was not as uninformed an error as it sounds but it was indeed a rookie move. Our train was attached to the train we boarded. We're not sure we would have made it on at all if we'd run the extra 80 yards or so. But on board, a very nice conductor (who Kristin was surprised to find understood her French) told us (Kristin) how we would get off in Le Mans and run back to the Angers/Nantes train which, after that point, would split off from the train set we were part of. He was older and slightly less fashionable than his colleagues at right. [There's actually more to this chapter mostly to do with multiple movements of the luggage itself which I've chosen to leave out of my memory as well as this blog.]

So, we arrived at the Angers train station. The site director Sue got Kristin's voicemail and found us zoning out sitting at some tables near the lobby. We got two cabs and made it safely to our apartment. All we had to do was carry the bags up six flights of stairs.