Back to school special

The children of the Loire are back in school this week. This reminds us, of course, that in France, we do not  have to make three lunches before everyone heads out the door. Apparently France's carefully proscribed and well subsidized school lunch programs are more untouchable than retirement-age laws. I can appreciate that. Work another two years or start making lunches every morning... I'd have to think about that one. And, as noted before, the lunches are really good.

At least we think it's like chicken.

One follow-up item, though: the "some kind of delicious meat," that Ella, Ivy, and Jack reported on after their first French school lunch, was rabbit. This got me thinking. Back home in Bellingham, one of the many cities where urban chicken farming has had a 21st century resurgence, could rediscovery of the "urban rabbit coop" be far behind? We'll take advantage of our current access to supermarket-rabbit, try out a few dishes, and give fair warning to our B'ham neighbors if we start drawing up plans.

Wondering how this could be

rendered in driftwood. (see the owl?)

The last round of châteaux visits Saturday inspired plans for some other home improvements. Gargoyles, or at least some decorative downspouts, are just starting to seem like the perfect summer project. Of the sites we visited (Amboise, Leonardo da Vinci's house, Blois, and Cheverny), the Saint Hubert Chapel at Amboise scored highest on the gargometer. What these particular specimens lacked in winged-monkey scariness they made up for with spring-loaded musculature, penetrating flesh-crazy faces, and wicked claws. FYI, for the house, I'm thinking driftwood pandas.

Busing from town to town it (finally) struck us how all the houses are the same basic color -- beige. On a previous bus tour, our guide (who's real job is director of the foreign student program at the university) pointed out that, because we'd traveled into a different geology, the color of local stone and thus the color of buildings had changed. But I guess we hadn't appreciated how these stone-color rules have continued no mater the building materials. In the same way that everyone wears a black coat but finds flair with scarves and glasses (if you're lucky enough to have poor vision), homes are set apart with the color of shutters and doors and the occasional gargoyle.

Amboise. Stone beige.

Rue d'Angers. Paint beige.

The I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-jail

apartment next to Jack's

soccer field. House-arrest beige.

Because it's hard

to eat a crêpe
with 筷子.

Kristin's classes are going well. While here with the AHA program she's teaching History of English and Second Language Acquisition (with a bent towards the students' current experience as French learners). The History of English class is also taking advantage of location, making use of geographic and linguistic proximity to evidence and remnants of the Anglo Saxon-French mashup of the 10th-15th centuries. We're not sure we'll be able get to one of the most obvious artifacts--the Bayeux Tapestry, a woven story board of William the Conquerer's kickoff of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. But language change is constant and living evidence omnipresent. Just a few blocks away from our apartment, you can see the beginnings of shift in French-dialectal Chinese with the infusion of western characters.

Another linguistic discovery has been the sighting of a some potential cover art for the second edition of Kristin and Anne's textbook. Some may remember an unenthusiastic response to the publisher's choices for the first edition cover. Abandonment of the first "final choice" was granted but the replacement, by the same artist, while avoiding the folk genitalia church banner motif, wasn't exactly a fresh take.

Take one:

What's coming out of what?

Take two:

Behold the tongues.

You say tomate, I say tomâté...

So just down the street (where, you may have noticed, everything is), past the cafe, left of the boulangerie, and a few steps on from the tabac, is La Fontaine du Dialogue: a bronze sculpture of two in conversation atop a pedestal adorned with lizards and faces whose open mouths gurgle out the eternal flow d'eau. Could this be the stuff of the next book cover? While taking the picture of la fontaine (down on a knee, right eye on the viewfinder and left eye closed) a german shepherd stealthily maneuvered nose to nose with me and, at the click of the shutter, let loose with rapid fire power barking that made me an instant believer in animal language. Cujo's owner sounded apologetic but we had no dialogue.

I've never had a photograph with

brass eyelets before. The closest I've
come to piercing.

In bureaucratic news, Kristin and I are officially legal aliens. I suppose we were partially legal with our visas but we needed to get resident cards, too. This eventually ended up requiring four trips to the prefecture. The clerk on the first visit said that I didn't need any additional documentation but that Kristin did and sent us away with a new form (they don't let you fill out stuff in front of them and they DON'T make photocopies). The second clerk said we both would need forms so we only left with Kristin's temporary card and more forms for me. On our third attempt, the lobby, the entry hall, and much of the steps leading into the prefecture office were filled with North Africans at various stages of naturalization I suppose. Even though the crowd was simply large, not unruly, the prefecture apparently called the police who came speeding up in several cars, sirens blaring. About ten officers seemed unsure what to do. They announced to the crowd that would have to form a line to the left. That got no response. They then tried to physically create a line with their own bodies. As they tried to nudge the throng into some kind of linear arrangement they'd simply be re-enveloped, left standing in the thicket with pathetic looks on their faces. Since we'd at least got to witness a good comedy, we decided to leave and come back the next day. Luckily, we got the same clerk as on our second visit. She noted that we'd dutifully recopied all the same information that we'd had with us all along and issued my temporary resident card. She even noticed that she'd messed up Kristin's and had to re-issue it. To cover her error, she had to extend the timeframe on our cards from June 9 (one day before our departure) to June 14. (While the consulate claimed that the visa's term started upon our arrival in France, the prefecture clerk claimed the clock started ticking on the visa issue date.) It made no difference to us but she had given Kristin grief about "overlooking this" on visit #2. So, it was almost amusing to be reminded of how arbitrary and mood-based these potentially important judgments are.

Rowing in Angers has been a special treat I must say. The club coaches have been very willing to muddle through our mutual language barriers and get me dialed into the routine. The bateau I typically take out is listed on the equipment roster as the Languin. It's not named per se. That's the brand name and it's the only boat from that company in the boathouse. So that's what goes down on the log sheet before heading out on the river: "Conroy, Hugh, Languin, 1x, 16h15." It sounds like a cross between "languid" and "sanguine" which I suppose could result in an even keel. My standard route is north up the Maine river (pronounced, men) a little over six kilometers to the town of Ecouflant.

Eau d'row -- View off the bow having turned around at Ecouflant.

It's tempting here to conjure an embellishment about how I park the Languin for a bit and saunter up to the boulangerie behind the church for Perrier, croissants, and a quick game of boules but, the whole thing seems fictional enough as it is.

Art brew d'Anjou. Phew.

We had a quirky local rainy Sunday excursion to the adjacent town of Trélazé where the community center was the site of a regional artistry-in-food exhibition. Of course all food here strives to assert artisan qualities. It was as good a cross-section as any that featured an organic bread bakery, a Buddhism-inspired insect-diet guy (mostly about chocolate covered crickets), the all-things-saffron table, chocolate face masks, mushrooms-on-toast guy, purveyor of miniature macaroons,  food-inspired femo-dough earrings, many others that escape memory, and Mademoiselle Micro-brew. The beer we've found here has been, pardon the irony, nothing to write home about. Mostly, it's just too sweet/malty/mediciney.  On Sunday though, Biere d'Anjou was on the scene with some micro brews that were a welcome find. They've definitely given the regional varieties a shove in a great tasting direction (from our pale-ale point of view). We gave a four-pack a shove in my backpack. They are gone now. I'll have to track down some more because I imagine d'Anjou brew would be some kind of delicious complement to rabbit.