hot goat with misellary

Several people would like to know what “hot goat with misellary” could possibly mean, and while I can’t promise great illumination on that score, still, here is the relevant story of Valerie’s birthday in Provence.

Valerie’s birthday was March 30, a blustery day of sudden sunshine and dark scudding clouds. During our time in France, the Euro was worth between $1.23and $1.28, so we couldn’t actually afford to eat; but for Val’s birthday, Dadand Linda offered to take us out for a real French meal. We put on our cleanest clothes and drove off to Fontaine de Vaucluse. I loved driving around in Provence. There was always a view, and always a hidden something tucked away behind the next curve—a mas (enormous old farm house), a town, a sudden sheer cliff, a field of yellow flowers. The country roads are narrow, and they curve around the humps of hills and then wriggle through the narrow valleys that divide them, up and down and over and through, so your vantage-point is constantly changing. From the crests of the hills you can see from one mountain range clear to the next. Forests of scrub oak slope away to one side of the road, and on the other, lavender shrubs bristle in silvery rows, like regiments of dormant hedgehogs (big ones) in the rocky, early-spring fields.

Fontaine de Vaucluse, a village nestled into the crevices where several hills meet, is well-known for being the site of the spring that is the source of the River Sorgue. You can follow a nice path up the ravine, the startling green water rushing alongside in a rocky river, until you come to this enormous deep green pool welling up out of a huge limestone cave curved like a clamshell. The high-water mark was waaaay up there above our heads. The pool was still, though, and the springs must have been running under our feet to feed the river a bit farther down. They said sometimes it was like that; but that other times the water would come rushing right up out of this very cave pool. (Standing with the French tourists at the lip of the pool, well below the “Danger—no trespassing” signs at the end of the path, I could only trust that they had the inside scoop on the spring’s moods and habits.) The wind picked up to a dramatic sideways drag and we took shelter in the museum built around the old paper mill. We observed how the water wheel turned a big log bristling with significant bumps like the bumps on a player piano’s inner rod; the bumps tripped three sets of wooden mallets that took it in turn to pummel cotton, linen, and something I couldn’t translate into the pulp that paper was made from.

The birthday lunch back in the village was extravagantly French. Val had: some kind of shrimps baked in a fancy cheese casserole, followed by fillets of a little red fishy, all laid out in a fan design on her plate and drizzled with sauce of a complementary yellow, garnished with a fancy molded cheesy vegetable thing, a broiled herbed tomato, and something else I can’t remember, and adorned with a small flaky pinecone of baked crust of no discernable purpose other than aesthetic balance on the plate. I had: a divine fresh green salad with toasted crumbs of hazelnuts in vinaigrette topped with a little round pastry filled with baked goat cheese, giving an overall effect of Oscar the Grouch in a small flaky beret. This was followed by slices of duck in orange sauce, again arranged in an artistic fan, garnished with a little cookie-cutter stack of superb scalloped potatoes au gratin (they looked like butter cookies in sauce), snow peas slightly caramelized in an herby/oniony sauce, and a grilled herbed tomato of my own. We were nearly dead by dessert, but managed to consume (among the four of us) pear sorbet and vanilla ice cream (I hardly need point out they were homemade); a slab of crumbly white nougat (looked like feta cheese but tasted nuttyand delicious) in warm raspberry sauce; an isle flotante (floating island) involving some kind of buoyant custard block in a wine glass filled with some sweet liquid; and a crème broulee to die for. I began to see why Peter Mayle writes entire books that consist largely of lists of things he got to eat and you didn’t.

Speaking of foods eaten and not eaten, it was in Fontaine de Vaucluse that we did not eat (here it is) “Hot goat with misellary.” We did, however, see it listed as an entrée in a neighboring restaurant. The French from which this unlikely phrase was squeezed was “Chevre chaud sur son lit de salade,” which I would perhaps translate as “Baked goat cheese (is there a word for goat meat?) on a bed of greens,” “misellary” presumably being some sort of salad green. This same restaurant offered “Pave de Saumon sauce pecheur,” rendered in English as your favorite and mine: “Salmon’s cobdestore with fisherman’s sauce.” Also “Tosted broock’s lamb,” from “Brochette d’agneau grillee,” a.k.a. grilled lamb chop. I shouldn’t laugh, however. I’m sure my own efforts to communicate provided plenty of linguistic merriment to many a tactful Provencal soul.

I’m still having fun writing these things, so I trust you don’t mind if a few more France journal entries trail your way over the next week or so. The jet-lag is at last wearing off, although I’m still getting up abnormally early (for me). This morning before work we even had time to visit the rhody gardens,where I was chased by a big, mean, scary gander with a long snaky neck and a chip on his nonexistent shoulder. I am happy to report that I survived without nips, no thanks to Val, who was paralyzed with laughter and unable (and un-inclined, I might add) to come to my aid.

a quick bonjour from Provence

Bonjour all!

Actually, bon soir for us, so I'm off to bed soon. Just wanted to send signs of life and assure you that we are still having a fantastic time in Provence, especially now that the weather is giving the occasional nod toward spring.

Val and I have returned to Saignon after 5 days roaming south-central Provence in a tiny white globular rental car-- I called it the Ford Egg. In the last few days we have encountered Roman aqueducts, fleets of flamingoes, and French lesbians, and eaten a great deal of cheese, bread, and olive tapenade. Most days we go hiking for several hours, through increasingly flower-bedecked mountain forests, ravines full of caves, and ruins ranging from prehistoric through Roman and medieval on up to the last century.

I hope to post details soon. Tomorrow we will take in the sights in Avignon, including the popes' palace. I hope everyone is well.

having fun fun fun in provence

wow; french keyboards qre even zeirder

see zhqt i mean?

just a quick note to say we are t the market in uzes, the sun is shining, we saw flamingoes yesterday (yes!), we,ve found the b and b of our dreams

off to buy carrots``

love to all

Siena and environs

Tomorrow we take off in a rented car for 5 days to explore the regions west of Avignon, the Camargue, and then north of Arles, and then we’ll return to this beautiful village of Saignon (which, if I haven’t yet explained, is just a few kilometers—up—from Apt, in Provence).

I don’t seem to have found time to explain what we’ve been up to lately, but if you’d like to follow along on a map, here’s a not-so-brief summary of our peregrinations before arriving in Provence on the 25th.

After Venice we trained and bused our way to Siena, bypassing Florence because we were city’ed out. Someday I’ll have to come back to see Florence. Siena is a beautiful town, even on cold gray days, which these were. The grand old houses tower several stories overhead; their imposing front doors (like those in Venice, fronted by mammoth and grimacing doorknockers) open right onto the twisty, tilted old streets—there isn’t anything like a front yard or even a stoop. Thus the general feeling, at least in the heart of the old town where all the famous things are, is of being surrounded by stone. The buildings are all the same tawny gray color of the rock and stucco, and often tinged with the sooty gray that comes from car exhaust. (Only locals are allowed to drive on the inner city streets. The streets are medievally narrow and angled, basically looking to me like pedestrian passages, but local cars share the path with walkers, appearing abruptly from arched doorways and around sharp corners, and people scoot up against the walls or into shop doorways to let them pass, without breaking stride. I was surprised not to find anyone smooshed against the walls, like Flat Stanley.) It was pretty cold—I wore all my layers, including hat and scarf (same as in Venice). People had just begun putting out a few potted geraniums and cyclamen on their deep windowsills, so there were occasional spots of pink and red and green.

One day we took a bus to the nearby town of San Gimignano (‘jiminyano”), a medieval walled hilltop town famous for its towers. Everybody who was anybody in the middle ages in S. Gimignano built themselves a tower. (Or, more probably, made someone else build them a tower.) They served as defensive lookouts, of course, but could any town really need 73 towers for defense? That’s how many the guidebook claimed they had at their peak of the mine-is-bigger tower race. I don’t think they even have 73 houses in town. Now they are down to something like 14 towers, still giving the place a fetching bristly look. The main thing I will remember from San Gimignano is the look on Val’s face when we walked into the church and came face to fresco with the outstandingly kinky 14th century depiction of the Last Judgment. Each of the Seven Deadlies is portrayed on the church wall in all the forbidding perversity the artist could muster. Demons cavort with naked and miserable sinners, even seeming to feed the poor dears nothing but Italian panini (dry sandwiches) at a little round table. It was shortly after S. Gimignano that our binoculars went missing, but at least we made good use of them there.

We also had our first really notably scrumptious Italian meal in Siena. We arrived on a Sunday, when everything, but everything, is shut down, so our meal prospects were dismal that night. But on Monday we ate in a little, cave-like restaurant called Castelvechhio (old castle) and had super veggie spreads on toast, and risotto, and, um, other delightful things it turns out I can't remember.

Before leaving Siena we made sure to admire the ins and outs of the Duomo, the cathedral, which has famously striped towers like monuments in homage to Pippi Longstocking’s socks. It also has jaw-dropping scenes in inlaid marble all over the floor, more black-and-white striped marble columns, and marble of all colors generally in liberal supply. Best of all was the library, a small room with fantastically detailed medieval frescoes still in Crayola colors, and enormous parchment choral books with illuminations replete with miniature flowering beasts and ravening trees and other whimsical whatnot. I wanted to lie on the floor the better to gape at the ceiling frescoes but would have been trampled by the fleet of German tourists briskly circling the room.

From Siena we planned to take the train to Pisa and thence to Cinque Terra on the coast. But it turns out that when the man at the ticket window crosses his arms with his hands on his shoulders and shakes vigorously, he is not telling you that you w ill be cold while waiting for the train on a stone bench in the Italian hail (although you will be). What he is telling you, in a presumably international gesture you may never have needed to know, is that the trains are on strike. But they are only on strike until 15.37 (3:37). Really? Yes, it is an itty-bitty strike, a little appetizer (as it turned out a couple days later) just making the point that they could wreak some serious havoc if they chose. It was ten minutes to one and we already had our backpacks and picnic lunches with us, so there wasn’t much for it but to sit on the cold bench by the train tracks, huddle together, listen to the occasional unintelligible Vogon announcement over the loudspeaker, nibble pannini, and wait until 3:37, when the strike ended on schedule and we were able to catch a train to Pisa.

We were only in Pisa the one evening, so although we knew the monuments were closed, we took the stinky diesel-fumey city bus to the famous Duomo and observed the leaning tower in the dark. Yep, it leans. Very peculiar. I was sorry we didn’t get to climb it. I really liked the baptistey, an enormous domey building festooned top to bottom with colonnades of columns (just like the church and tower) and looking somewhat like a very fussy, lacey tea cozy, or maybe a summer bonnet. We spent the night in a women’s (Catholic) hostel with very firm beds and lots of jams and Nutella at breakfast.

The next morning we caught a train to the southernmost town of the Cinque Terra (5 villages), Riomaggioro. I’ll have to tell you about these pretty little towns next time, and about the lemon trees and the campo santo in the castle....

Missing spring weather but otherwise having a fantastic time hiking the gorgeous countryside around Apt and Saignon...

More about Venice from us in France

Upon hearing about sagging beds and irascible Venetian chefs, some have written wanting to know if we are in fact having a good time. Mais oui, certainly we are! Everything is new and fascinating (if not always entirely comfortable or comprehensible) and we are enjoying ourselves thoroughly. Travel, you know, broadens the mind and the feet.

So here’s a little more about Venice.

Well Venice is simply amazing and strange, simultaneously ornate and crumbling. From novels and guidebooks I’d read I’d gotten the impression of a kind of fairy tale city, so I’d pictured it in clear watercolors with gilt edges. It turns out, at least in March, to have a more shadowy, almost seedy, beauty than I’d expected. The buildings were taller and more crumbly than I’d imagined, the colors more earth-toned; the alleys more shadowy; the canals abruptly edged, with water a dark mossy green. That indifferent water spends the centuries lapping the mortar off the bricks at the houses’ ankles, warping the wood on the great old noble doors, 10 feet tall with their front steps of pitted marble streaked with muddy algae and sludge, stepping down into dark water. Often the canals are so narrow that if you slipped going down your front steps (to your boat) you could crack your noggin on the house opposite. And the houses are several stories tall, so that most of the narrow streets feel like dim little twisty canyons, riddled with ancient wooden doors of surprising sizes (4 feet tall, 8 feet tall…), with brass doorknobs right in the middle; such as might be used by secretive, cave-dwelling hobbits. There are books and posters featuring the doors of Venice. Most of them have awe-inspiring doorknockers, too, elaborate metal heads and hands and grimacing lion-like beasts as big as your head. Fabulous.

Mostly in Venice we spent our days roaming through the twisty streets, getting lost and peering in windows and gawking at the apparent contradiction of front doors opening on water. I understand this is what you are supposed to do in Venice. Also you are supposed to visit Saint Mark’s, which we did most thoroughly. In case you haven’t seen it, the inside of this enormous duomo (church) is one big fantastical mosaic. All the domes and walls and the ceiling and around the windows and in all the funny medieval joints and crannies, every spot is completely covered in eighty bajillion eensy pieces of glass, stone, and gold-leaf covered squares, each about the size of a fingernail. It’s like walking around inside a really flashy sequined medieval prom dress. One that’s been turned inside-out. Only in this case the spangles are arranged in Biblical and other religious scenes. The façade of St. Mark’s is just as ornate, not only mosaic’ed but bristling with statues, cherubs, horses, and so on. You can climb up some narrow stairs that let out on part of the roof, where you can walk among the statues and peer down on the pigeons and tour groups down in the square, and also see out over rooftops and past the Doges’ palace to the Grand Canal.

Neither of us speaks Italian but Val has some Spanish and mine is pretty good, and combined with the remnants of my college French, English cognates, signs involving pictures and what we hoped were international gestures, we managed to keep ourselves housed and fed. We had a little Italian phrase book with us. I had balked at adding this minute bit of weight to our backpacks but Val was for it, and as it turned out I was really glad, especially the evening I planned adventurously to order something I’d never heard of for dinner, but then in a moment of prudence I looked it up and discovered I had been about to order (ugh) liver.

Did I mention the shoes already? The streets of Venice, the ones that aren’t water, are cobbled, but that doesn’t stop an enormous number of women from wearing really deadly stiletto heels everywhere. Some are shoes and some are boots, but they all have heels you could use for shish kebab and whimsically long pointy toes that extend several inches beyond your average homo sapiens toe length. It is possible that Venetian women have long prehensile toes and require these shoes to accommodate them. It’s true that I never saw a Venetian trip.

The church of San Geremia, on the same square as our hotel, was dedicated to Saint Jeremy but also housed the relic (ie., dead body) of Santa Lucia, Saint Lucy, who as you may know was martyred by having her eyes put out. In paintings she is shown smiling sweetly and holding up a tray with what appear to be fried eggs but are meant to be her eyes. Her saintly body is displayed, as is customary, in a sort of small sarcophagus (a reliquary) in turn enclosed in a glass case. Most of her is hidden but a pair of shriveled feet protrude from the bottom of the sarcophagus, much like those of the Wicked Witch of the East, but without stripey socks. (Stripey socks are, however, quite popular in Venice.)

That’s everything I can think of about Venice at the moment.

After Venice we headed to Siena, so more on that to come. And meanwhile, in real time, we are still in Saignon, outside Apt, in Provence, France, and having a marvelous time with Dad and Linda going hiking and eating olives and cheese every day. More on that later too.

Frankfurt & Venice (from the comfort of Saignon)

If you have been following the international news, you might have heard that today in Italy there was a general strike in protest of the current retirement/pension system. One of the many areas of civil life affected was national transportation, especially trains. Thus I am excessively happy to report that while Val and I spent 14 hours yesterday navigating the Italian/French Mediterranean train network, by this morning when the strike began we were safely ensconced in the tiny town of Saignon, in Provence, France, and could observe the whole mess on CNN from the comfort of Dad and Linda’s living room.

Now that we aren’t paying by the minute at an Internet station (where are the public libraries in Italy?), I can start filling you in on where we’ve been in the last 10 days or so.

As you may know, we started out in mid-March in Frankfurt, because tickets on Lufthansa from Portland were so cheap. We spent one jet-lagged evening in Frankfurt, strolling the promenade along the River Main (watching out for bicyclists and roller-bladers) and had dinner in a nice café in Old Town, where it turned out that the reason our server spoke such great (if German-accented) English was because she was from Michigan. Our cheapish hotel near the train station had firm and comfortable beds but was impregnated with a cheap-perfume scent (we think it was a “cleaning” product meant to mask the smell of cigarettes) so chokingly potent that we had to throw open the windows and stagger blearily around the streets for two more hours before it became marginally habitable.

The next day, still thoroughly jet-lagged and smelling of tawdry perfume, we took a bus two hours to the other Frankfurt airport, caught a flight to Venice, took a bus another hour to the edge of the water, and followed the pointing arm of our bus driver to the vaporetto station, where we caught the first of a long series of these water taxis. I love vaporettos. They are like small ferries for people, and they serve the function of public buses for the citizens as well as the tourists of Venice. There is a cabin that seats about 30, an open deck in the middle where 20 more can crowd in, a few seats in the prow (you can’t stand in the prow or you will block the view of the pilot), and a little open spot in the back, behind the cabin, kind of like the little platform at the back of a train caboose, where 5 people (or 8 very friendly people) can hang out in the fresh air and diesel fumes and watch the huge old palazzos go by on either side of the canal. This back caboose/patio is my favorite spot, being more in the lee than the seats in the prow, although I liked sitting in front too when it wasn’t too cold. All the Italians talk on their cell phones on the vaporetto, and the younger ones make out, and the tourists swap stories about where not to eat and how many bell towers they’ve climbed, and all in all, the eavesdropping is terrific (and multilingual). Val and I gawked at the faded elegance of the palazzos, peered into the narrow canal alleys (canalleys?), and practiced Italian sentences from our handy phrasebook.

Venice is expensive, so we spent our first two nights in Venice in a youth hostel on the Isola, a less fashionable island across from the fancy-pants parts of town. Here we befriended a young woman from New Zealand and spent an interesting day wandering Venice with her and learning about innovations in the New Zealand electoral system. We also had a run-in with the hostel chef. The hostel has its own kitchen, so we bought dinner there our first night and were startled to find the food (in contrast with the beds) to be of such high quality. It was also expensive, so the second night, after having had a restaurant lunch in Venice proper, we picked up some slices of pizza for dinner and brought them into the hostel common room to dine. The chef, who had not yet begun serving dinner to anyone, came storming out of the kitchen to tell us, in Italian and French, how deeply affronted he was that we would bring pizza into his fine dining establishment. He informed us coldly that he hated people who ate pizza. As it was the only common room in the hostel, we were surprised to find him so territorial, and cringed in sympathy when, only five minutes later, another unwary and cash-strapped traveler sat down at a nearby table with her own pizza. He must have been just warming up with us, because he stomped back out and reprimanded her not once but three separate times. She protested weakly that she had asked at the office and at the pizza establishment next door, and both had assured her there would be no problem with bringing outside food to the hostel. But the chef begged to differ, and spent the evening glaring in our mutual direction. When a third pizza eater wandered in the chef chased him back outside before he could even sit down. He was barely mollified when vaporettos bearing the entire student population of northern France arrived around then to eat every last green bean in his kitchen.

Anyway, after ruining our backs on the swaybacked hostel bunk beds for a couple of nights, we decided we were too decrepit to hack it any longer and we transferred our Venice base to a cute little hotel on the Piazza San Geremia, where we could wash our socks in the sink and watch late-night CNN and a weird Italian gong show on the tiny television.

There’s lots more to tell about the wonderful weirdness of Venice, and our peregrinations since then, but it’s getting late and we hiked high and low today around Saignon, so I’m turning in. We’ll be here for several days so I should be able to write more soon. I hope you are all well and having fun.

Siena ciao

internet prices are way cheaper in siena than they were in venice.

we got kind of city'ed out so we passed right through Florence and came to Siena instead. We are ready to get out of tourist-overrun towns in hopes that we could find some decent food.

I am grumpy this morning because I've put my neck out. Seems a waste to be grumpy on vacation. In search of ice we bought something the farmacia lady said (as close as we could tell) would help sore muscles -- a tube of gel so innocuous that it can't be smelled or felt on my skin. Perhaps it is imbued with Italian magic that will help.

Today we will either tour Siena or catch a bus to a smaller town with a Roman ampitheater <(Venterra). Tomorrow probably off to Pisa and then CinqueTerra.

In Venice we saw many wondrous things including some shriveled up feet the sign claimed belonged to Santa Lucia, she of the eyeballs on a platter. Who has her eyeballs, I wonder?

If you would like to be fashion forward you will need to adopt the European fad for absurdly pointed high-heeled shoes. Itàs like footwear as an extreme sport. I am talking about points that extend 4 or 5 inches past the human toe and sometimes curve upward. And the stilettos are 5 inches high and needle sharp, and are used for navigating cobbled streets. I did not see one woman fall down. They hardly even teeter. Myself, I walked into a couple of walls just gawking at other women's incredible footwear.

As we took the train out of Venice (who knew trains could get to Venice? Turns out thereàs a spit of land that connects train tracks to the island) I peered down between tall buildings in the mainland town of Mestre and found myself startled to see pavement, not water, between the narrow sidewalks.

My minutes are winding down-- more later--

Sealegs in Venice

We canàt afford this particular internet station so we are just sending signs of life'

Weàve spent the day roaming venice, gazing at the bazillion gold tesserae of San Marco until our necks cricked and hysteria set in and we could no longer obey the stern Silenzio! signs, socializing with a young woman from New Zealand whom we adopted for the afternoon, and looking on with horror as other tourists used cracked corn to lure nasty, pink'toed pigeons -- intentionally!-- to sit on their heads. yuck!

weàve noticed that the canals seem steady while the buildings seem to wash up and down'' -- sealegs or dehydration? we arenàt sure.

more soon islands tomorrow, adn the ghetto