La Rentrée
La Rentrée is upon us. Officially (if there is an official date) it is next Monday, the 4th of September, since that's when school starts; but people are trickling back into the city and stores are re-opening so it's really a bit more of a gradual thing.
The term,
la rentrée, just means the re-enterance, because everyone is coming back at the same time (more or less). It's more of a production than our Labour Day since it's not just school children who are starting anew; everyone has been away from their workplace for a month. Nothing much gets done for a day or so while everyone kisses everyone else on both cheeks, catches up on their news and shares holiday snaps.
Of course, little of that applies to me; it's Janet who will have to face the cheek-kissing on Monday. I'm just happy to have my bakery back. Not a single one of the four bakeries we regularly frequent has been open since the beginning of August; but my favorite across the street re-opened this week. The familiar face across the counter was tanned and relaxed; and there was more butter than ever in the
baguette céréale.
Equally delightful was the return of our cleaning lady. She spent most of the month in
Mauritius, whence she originates. An idyllic tropical island that I'd love to visit - but not in August, I'm advised, since it's winter there now. Her holiday was spent in cold and wet. But the French take their vacations in August and our cleaning lady is French (albeit from a colony) so off she went.
Book Shopping
In Paris there are limits to expansion in a growing store, since the architecture is precious and often protected. Some merchants have solved the problem by simply moving into the shop next door, and often the shop next door to that, and the one around the corner. What was once a department gets its own store.
Au Vieux Campeur - the closest thing we have to an MEC (or an REI) - has eighteen addresses within a few blocks of each other just off Boulevard Saint-Germain. Skis are in one store; Scuba gear in another; Maps and guidebooks in another, and so on.
Gibert Jeune is the closest thing we have to a Chapters or an Indigo (or a Barnes & Noble). It has a total of eight locations clustered around the Place Saint-Michel (plus one on the right bank near the big department stores): fiction in one multi-level store, language books are across the street, next door to several addresses of scholarly non-fiction, and around the corner are the school books. There are no comfy chairs and no coffee shop inside but there are many floors of all varieties of the printed page. I can never find a chair in Indigo anyway; it's the books that make it a pleasant place to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday.
The excuse for this visit was an urgent need for a French-English dictionary. Janet will be spending next week in French classes, and the four we already have were either too large or too small; we needed to get one that was ju-u-ust right. And to aid my studies, we came away with an edition of Edgar Allen Poe's
Murders in the Rue Morgue printed in both English and French, page by page.
Construction Season
It seems that the summer construction season is not just a Canadian concept. We awoke the other morning to the sounds of heavy equipment in the street below. Oh joy, they're resurfacing our street.
Ottawa Friend
Visitors again this weekend. This time K, an old friend from Ottawa days who now lives in London, flew over for Saturday and Sunday. We have both acquired spouses since we last saw each other, so it was a chance to meet her husband, R, as well as catch up.
The four of us took a walk along the left bank on Saturday afternoon, stopping at cafés and bistros here and there. And speaking of
Paris Plage (as I was in the
last entry), we strolled by and can attest to its popularity, even on a cloudy day.
Janet under a Paris Plage palm tree.
The sun came out long enough to dazzle a scooter driver, who failed to see the left-turning motorist in front of him. They collided in front of our eyes, throwing the scooter's passenger across the roof of the car. She landed apparently unharmed on the other side. Clearly the motorist was at fault - except that Parisians do assume that if they get in your way you'll go around, and even seem to have a fair bit of patience for this. Perhaps the scooter was from out of town.
We finished the day, having walked from the 7th arrondissement to the 11th, with dinner in a restaurant on Oberkampf called
Chez Justine. The meal was excellent of course (it's Paris); less common, there was a terrific Spanish jazz singer to entertain,.
Août and About
August in Paris is a very different creature indeed. Back home the traffic is lighter at this time of year; here it's just about absent. Mid-day on a weekday and there are only a smattering of cars on the road. Granted there's been a lot of rain, but the air seems palpably clearer. With everyone and their dog away, the sidewalks are also less polluted.
Parisians clearly take their August holiday quite seriously. The
Paris Plage is set up by the city so that those who can't get away can still have a little bit of beach. Janet read recently that you can even apply for a small bursary if you couldn't otherwise afford to go on vacation.
Many of the shops we frequent are closed for all or part of the month, in particular the bakers, cheese shops and butchers. Fortunately we are near a decent supermarket (or "
hypermarché" as the Carrefour likes to call itself), but the hardship of not having warm baguette and artisanal cheese just around the corner does makes us wonder how we'll ever adjust when we go back home.
What If There Was a Fire?
I continue to find new paths to explore in the Bois de Boulogne. This morning I stumbled across a parking lot filled with fire trucks. The city’s fit young firemen were running a 5k (I know because they’d placed mile markers on the path and I overlapped their course at the finish). Janet loves firemen; she’ll be very disappointed that she missed it.
Sorbetiere Strikes Again
We had a small dinner party last night, inviting over a colleague of Janet’s. G is an expert economist and a renaissance man: art, wine, food, house restoration and decoration are his talents that I know about; with a past including an academic and a military career, I’m sure there are a great many more.
It amuses me that the products of my ice cream maker get such high praise, when they are in fact, with the possible exception of the salad, the easiest course on the menu.
Bordeaux
Janet and her father are in this picture (in the portal) of Porte Cailhau, a 15th century gate in the old Bordeaux city walls
We read that there was a lot of roadwork going on in Bordeaux, but we understood that it was almost finished. It does, in fact, seem to be almost finished; but the purpose of it seems to have been to discourage all but the most determined to actually drive in the city. Before we were a hundred yards from the train station I was forced to drive against a no entry sign. Perhaps there was some other way out of that intersection, but every route I could see was labelled with a white bar in a red disk. And that was just a foretaste. Our hotel was right in the centre of town and every intersection seemed to direct us away from it. At one point, having been waved into the only way out of another confusing intersection by a group of police cadets we found ourselves driving down a busy pedestrian mall. That this must happen a lot was clear from the fact that none of the shoppers more than glanced at us.
Friday morning, since we were leaving town heading North to the Médoc, the anywhere-but-downtown traffic pattern worked in our favour. Right. George Bain’s excellent book for the Canadian wine-lover, Champagne is for Breakfast, should have warned me:
The Médoc chateaux, classified and unclassified alike, are located north and slightly west of the city of Bordeaux, the first of them not ten miles form the city limits. There is a broad avenue leading out of the city, on which the traveller, having failed to turn on to the poorly marked road leading to all this vinous treasure, soon finds himself hurtling across the bridge over the Garonne, hell-bent for Angoulême and Paris. Once recovered from this mistake, he can have a shot at finding the D. 2 to Pauillac from the other direction. (Somehow, ten or twelve years ago it was easier.)
Nice bridge, though. And thirty years on, it is correspondingly more difficult to correct a navigational mistake. Our first attempt led us onto another superhighway; the next got us successfully off the motorway but in a position where it was impossible to get on again in the other direction.
In the vineyard at Chateau Prieuré Lichine
Many chateaux contract their bottling; but Chateau Prieuré Lichine likes to be able to say "Mise en bouteille au chateau", so have their own equipment.
Our first appointment was at Chateau Prieuré Lichine, where we were shown every stage and detail of their wine-making, from the grapes on the vine to the labelling of the bottles. This proved to be a great tour to start with because it was incredibly thorough. It took an hour and a half, not including the tasting, and our half-French, half-German guide explained every aspect, such as why the aesthetics of the property make a difference to the wine. He had clearly grown up in the shadow of grape vines and was a good example of the kind of person we met throughout the weekend: so eager to tell you about the chateau, the wine, and the history. Everyone we met plainly had a passion for the work and a feeling of connection to their vineyard, even when they were just interns.
Chateau Prieuré Lichine's wine archives, where are stored samples of every vintage
Chateau Lynch-Bages' old control panel for the casks has been replaced by something less graphically interesting.
Old wooden casks, from the top
The following day, Saturday, we went South, to the region of Pessac-Leognan. This
appellation was created quite recently, being carved out of Graves and taking with it some of the best white wines. It is right next to the city, so we didn’t have to drive far to our first appointment, at Chateau La Louvière. There we found our guide to be another Canadian, a young woman from B.C. who was in France doing her masters in oenology.
Janet at Chateau La LouvièreThis chateau was the grandest of those we visited, looking like you expect of a French chateau, including the sculpted gardens, large pond and tree-lined drive it overlooks. Of the four chateaux we visited, it was the only one not included in the
1855 classification of Bordeaux’s great wines (much prestige – and consequent pricing – still revolves around this classification, even though, at 150 years on, it can’t be expected to tell you very much about the quality of the wine), but the one that looked most like it ought to be. In fact, its owner, André Lurton, also owns several other chateaux, a couple of which are Grand Cru Classé.
The accelerated tour at Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte
Our last visit of the day was to Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte. This takes second place for aesthetics, being a little Tudor castle amid lovely gardens (and with, a little incongruously, a helicopter on the lawn). My French must have let me down when I made this appointment, because we weren’t expected; but the gentleman showing people around that day was extremely gracious and gave us a quick tour anyway. As this was our fourth in two days, a quick tour was all we really wanted. At this point, we’d seen enough about the process such that what was interesting were the differences from other chateaux, and there were a number of interesting variations: their casks were of wood (we’d seen only stainless steel and cement so far), the white wines are barrel-fermented, and all their barrels were made by their own in-house cooper. Also, they told us they never sell their wine by primeurs, or as futures; most chateaux with prestigious names prefer to offset some of their risk this way (Janet, who never stops trying to keep companies honest, found a listing on-line to suggest that they do, or at least they did for the '05).
Wooden casks at Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte
Gare du Nord
Another lesson in French systems and manners today. I was running an errand across town, and got off at the Gare du Nord. For some reason, where I came up there was a turnstile which appeared to require a ticket to exit. Well, this is not normally a requirement of the Paris metro, but it is in other places, so I inserted my used ticket and attempted to exit. I got a tone and an 'X' lighting up, and the doors wouldn't budge. I tried this in a couple of places, with no luck. Others were leaving without difficulty, but many were also forcing their way out or coat-tailing. In frustration, I approached a security guard and asked, maybe a little angrily, how one gets out. He gave me a patient look and said: "Bonjour, Monsieur." I throttled back and greeted him properly. "Comment ça va?" he continued, and I responded. Only with these pleasantries properly exchanged did he address my question; which he couldn't answer, but he directed me to the kiosk, where rather than explain the system the official just had me exit via the wheelchair gate.
