Bréhat with Béa

I've been away from the blogging for awhile now, but my latest trip to Brittany was too good not to share.
April vacation took me by surprise this year. I was only in the office for a week after returning from the US to get my visa paperwork taken care of, then suddenly the students were on break and so was I. After a few days holed up in my apartment doing things that seemed important (like email) a friend from Brittany contacted me and invited me over for the weekend, so I got to planning.
My weekend turned out to be 6 days in total. Train ticket prices go way up during school vacations, so I opted to carpool with a sweet gay couple to Rennes, about a 4 1/2 hour drive from Paris. From there I took a bus an hour north to my beloved town of Dinan, beautiful as usual with its medieval façades under grey skies. I spent a couple days playing music and seeing friends in the area, went to a great jam at the BeauSéjour bar in Dinard, and on Easter evening got together with my dear friend Béatrice. Once her four kids had left for their father's house we packed up the big white van and headed west.
After about a two hour drive we passed through Ploubazlanec on the Route de L'Arcouest and arrived  at the port that links the Island of Bréhat (pronounced Bray-ah) to the mainland. Although it's only April and warm weather has not yet hit Brittany, grassy parking lot was nearly filled with cars. As the evening wore on, however, more people came off the boats and the field started to clear out. Béatrice and I passed the time picnicking on the rocks and watching the sun set.

We spent a very cozy night in the van. When we got up the next morning the grass was whet with rain and the clouds were heavy in the sky. We heated up tea and chocolate bread for breakfast, packed a picnick lunch and headed to the boat.

 

 It being my first trip to the island, we opted for the 45-minute guided tour around the island, during which our captain pointed out historic buildings and the various mini islands off the coast of Bréhat. We were the only ones to brave the wind at the front of the boat, but the weather wasn't that bad, really.

 

Once the tour was finished we walked up through the main port of Bréhat without glancing at the restaurants and cafés lining the path to welcome tourists into their warm interiors. We were on a mission. Bréhat, though a very small island, is still a lot to explore in one day. Béatrice planned to avoid fellow tourists and head straight for the more wild and less-populated northern part of the island, walk the coast and get back before the last boat left for the mainland in the evening.

 The island of Bréhat was left untouched by the first and second World Wars. Medieval chapels and castle-like villas sit side by side with more modern beach houses. Stone is the principal material here. Stoney pathways weave through intricate stone buildings surrounded by low stone walls, sometimes interrupted by natural stone formations too large to be dug out of the way. Protected by the ocean's humidity, the island is a gardener's paradise, with it's own micro-climate allowing palm trees to grow next to pines and nasturtiums to grow year-round. Béatrice assured me that she had never seen rain during her previous visits.

 There are no cars on the island of Bréhat, only tractors, bicycles and pedestrians. Hundreds of paths crisscross the island, some paved and most not, and the islanders use hand carts and bicycles to run most of their errands. We decided to avoid the "big roads" and stick mainly to the most narrow foot paths, but eventually found ourselves leaving the paths altogether.
 Low tide gave us a nice view of the contours of the island.

 The island's few farmers supply meat and vegetables to the rest of the inhabitants (300 in winter months and as many as 6000 in summer). Everything else is brought over by boat and sold at the little grocery store in town.

The northern half of the island is indeed more wild-looking. The sea is choppier and even the rock formations are wilder. High winds must keep too many trees from growing. The peaty ground reminded me of Ireland. We saw rabbit droppings everywhere, but no rabbits.

The weather, which started out grey but dry, soon turned to rain. It only really began to rain hard near the end of the day. By then, we had finished hiking the northern part of the island and started to get hungry. We squeezed ourselves into the doorway of an old windmill in order to eat our picnic lunch without getting too wet. In the end, we managed to hike around most of the island and catch the boat by 5pm. Like the day before, the weather cleared up in the evening. This time, the sun came out just as we pulled away from the island.

Rain or shine, Bréhat is a beautiful place to visit and I'm sure I'll be back soon.

And then it was summer

On April 6th, the Sarah Lawrence College Paris program took the students to Dijon for a gastronomic and historic visit of the city. Here are all our students beneath the city's arc de triomphe: 

Despite being at the center of the Bourgogne wine region, Dijon is known first and foremost for its mustard. As early as the 13th century the city was recognized for its mustard sauce made using either white wine or the sour green grape juice, or "verjus" pressed from grapes not yet ripe enough for wine-making rather than using vinegar, as was common in other regions.
Although Dijon is still recognized by most people as the mustard capital of the world, Dijon mustard is not a product covered by a Protected Designation Origin (PDO) by the European Union. The word "Dijon" therefore refers to the style of mustard sauce, though today verjus has been largely replaced with white wine. As a result, while there are major mustard plants surrounding Dijon most "Dijon" mustard is manufactured elsewhere, most prominently in the United States under the Grey Poupon brand. Furthermore, the mustard sold in Dijon itself is made not from French mustard seeds as one might guess, but from seeds imported from Canada. Over the past 40 years, mustard cultivation has slowly replaced with colza, or rapeseed, grown for vegetable oil. This is largely due to the fact that mustard is no longer subsidized by the French government, while colza still is. The two plants come from the same family and their yellow flowers look very similar. The bright yellow colza fields surrounding Dijon are often mistaken for mustard.
Ask any French person about Grey Poupon and they will give you a puzzled look. This is because it is not a brand that is now sold in France. The company Grey Poupon started in Dijon in 1777 when Maurice Grey met his associate, Auguste Poupon, a partner in what had theretofore been the Maison de Grey. In 1946 the Heublein Company bought the American rights from the original company. In 1970, the directors of Grey Poupon and of another Dijon mustard firm, André Ricard, having earlier bought the popular Maille-label, formed a conglomerate called S.E.G.M.A. Maille. Soon afterwards, the new company decided to phase out the Grey Poupon label in France and today Maïlle is the only well-known brand of dijon mustard.

Enough about mustard. Dijon has much more to offer. It's a beautiful city, having always been well-to-do thanks to a rich trade business and the Dukes of Bourgogne. We took our students to the Brasserie de l'Hôtel de Ville where they got to participate in a cooking demonstration of the making of gougères, puffy cheese balls made using the same "pâte à choux" pastry as for éclairs, profitéroles, réligieuses, and other cream-filled pastries. Gougères are a specialty of Dijon, which is also a region of numerous cheeses, so this was appropriate.
While tasting the gougères they helped make, our students were served kir, or white wine with black-current liqueur, another specialty of the region.

One lovely Sunday a few weeks ago the sun came out and all of Paris rejoiced. We knew it was coming; after weeks of rain and cold, television and newspapers happily informed everyone that Sunday would be warm. Since I rarely pay attention to the "metéo", I usually get my weather updates from the cleaning ladies at work, who helpfully warn me when to bring my umbrella or an extra sweater. I therefore knew that Sunday would be nice, but I don't think anyone was quite prepared for how nice it would turn out to be.

 

My friend Béatrice happened to be visiting from Brittany that weekend, and as you can see from her photos of our walk in the Sacré Coeur area Saturday was cool and overcast. By the next morning, however, the air was so warm that I donned my summer sleeveless dress and we walked, squinting and sweating, to a park in a southern Paris suburb to picnic and play music with friends. The park was so full that it took some time to find an empty plot of grass but once settled in we ate and played for hours while Béatrice convinced innocent bystanders to dance with her. Parents brought their little kids to listen. They were so interested that we let them try our instruments. Pretty soon, Guillaume had given out his four penny whistles and Leo and I each had future violinists scratching away in our laps. At one point, the 4-year-old boy I was working with  suddenly took the bow from me and told me to go dance!

In the evening we took a break to take Béatrice to the train station. I then noticed that I my head hurt and realized that I'd been playing in the same position for so long that I had a sunburn all down one side. Not bad for mid-April!

Since then, the trees have bloomed and leafed-out and although the rain has returned, average temperatures are over-all much higher. Every now and then the sun comes out again and we get another hint at summer. Here is a picture from last Sunday, spent playing by the Seine in central Paris. We met and played with some interesting people, including an student studying to become an Opera singer, a Belgian fiddler, and a musical saw-player (who also plays the violin).

The Coming of Spring

Springtime is finally showing itself in Paris. And it's official, too; my calendar says the 20th is the first day of spring.

In early March I went running for the first time since the rain and cold weather began in November. I had the first two weeks of March off, a school break that French refer to as the "February holidays," when most people take off to the Alps to ski, only this year the Paris region's break happened to be in March, not February. It felt good to stretch my legs and run freely at a time when when other runners were still at work.  The flowering plum trees and forsythias had just begun to bloom as well as the daphne bushes, whose sweet perfume I breathed in ecstatically while  circling the lake. It took me several days of jogging afterwards to stop feeling sore; I'm apparently very out of shape. Ever since moving to the 16th arrondissement, running up stairs and between metros is about all the exercise I get on a daily basis. The rest of the time is spent sitting in front of a computer in the office or on a bar stool somewhere playing fiddle.

It's been a long time since I've written. Work, in particular, has been keeping me very busy. In January we welcomed in a new batch of students for the spring semester and took them on a three-day trip too the south of France as a part of orientation. Many of our second-semester students often come from Scripps, and I suspect that the trip is Monique's way of lightening the shock of the Parisian winter. Though  it was nearly as cold in the south as in Paris, the sky there is not covered with persistent grey clouds the way it is here and the sunlight did everyone a great deal of good. We traveled Aix-en-Provence with our history professor, Mme Moll, and from there visited the cities of Nîmes and Avignon.

Spring 2013 students in Nîmes during the 2nd semester orientation trip to the south of France in January

I'm offically a part of the SLC Paris team now that the website is getting updated. Monique's daughter did a quick photo shoot of the three of us one afternoon during everyone's lunch break. We look relaxed, but it was really quite cold outside.

 The Sarah Lawrence College in Paris team: Natalie, Monique, and myself posing for an updated website photo at Reid Hall

March 8th I returned to Brittany for an Irish music festival in the little town of Le Bono, in the Morbihan (southern Brittany). The festival itself consisted of 4 days of workshops and non-stop jamming in the various restaurants and bars and even the post office. The town is so small that everything was within a 2-minutes walking distance, practically. When the bars closed around 2am, the remaining musicians moved to the post office and continued playing until around 5am each day, when the festival volunteers kicked everyone out so as to catch a few hours of sleep. I stayed in a rented apartment with Guillaume (the penny-whistler pictured below) and 2 of his friends and we skipped out on the workshops to play in jam sessions, relax, and enjoy the warmish weather all weekend. The sun came out and I even gained a few freckles playing outdoors for awhile!

It's a good thing we did, too. As soon as we reached Paris Sunday night the temperature dropped and it began to snow. We had a good 6 inches, I'd say, before the sun came out again 2 days later and it all melted away. Hopefully, we've seen the last of ice and snow until next year...

Happy Spring!

Jamming at Le Bono Winter School Irish festival in Brittany, March 8-10th

A very nice session

The lovely port at the town of Le Bono

Boats in Le Bono's port

Fêtes en Picardie, Strasbourg, Bretagne

Happy New Year! Joyeux 2013!
Saturday evening I turned the key to my Paris apartment, empty and abandoned for nearly two weeks of holiday travels. The familiar musty smell of stale smoke mixed with cooked peas, a smell I've tried in vain to remove ever since I arrived, wafted out to greet me. I had hoped it would go away while I was gone, like an unwanted neighbor. My clothes are now permeated with it and when opening my backpack away from home I'm forced to air my clothes out a little before putting them on so as not to feel like I'm wearing eau de cologne de Paris apartment.
My little studio was cold, quiet and clean, just the way I'd left it. I immediately set about cooking dinner as I always do after returning from a trip, as though by cooking I am somehow reclaiming the place as my own.
I left Paris on December 23rd to spend Christmas with a dear friend in Picardie. The train ride was short, and in a little under an hour I had quit the sprawling enormity of the Paris banlieu to find large open farm fields and pastures. Eugénie met me at the train station in Villers-Cotterets and we drove half an hour further into the countryside to her parents cattle farm. Eugénie came to Oregon two years ago as an agricultural intern for a family raising alpacas outside of Scio. Her Ag school requires a 5-month internship in another country. Knowing I speak French, mutual friends put us in contact, right before I left to teach in Brittany. We spent a good month doing farm tours together, but I hadn't seen her since I left.
Eugénie's family live in the village of Priez (pray), made up of 50 inhabitants, where they raise charolais cattle and farm basic crops like corn and sugar beets. Picardie is extremely agricultural, and reminded me a little of the Willamette Valley, with fewer trees. It had been raining hard the past few days, and Eugénie pointed out with some concern the puddles of standing water in fields along the way. It looked to me like a regular Oregon winter.

 

Eugénie and her brother on the farm

When I arrived, her brother, only 24, was on the brink of taking over a farm of his own from an old couple, but paperwork complications were making things difficult. Eugénie took me on a visit of the region, showing me castle ruins in Chateau Thierry, the home town of Jean de La Fontaine, and the American cemetery at Aisne-Marne. With her boyfriends family we even went to the Christmas market in Reims, which is in Champagne and not Picardie, but was only an hour's drive away. Eugénie's family was kind and welcoming and Christmas with them was a delight, though a bit painful, as they stuffed me like a goose with foie gras, turkey, boudin blanc, cheese, christmas cakes and chocolate.

 

Eugénie and her family at Chrismas, right before cutting the cake

I returned to Paris on the 26th, only to head out the next morning for Strasbourg to see another friend, Magali, who had taught English classes at a middle school in Dinan last year. Strasbourg is a visual pleasure. Even before arriving at the station I noticed the transformation of the villages from dull grey buildings to brightly painted houses and Germanic architecture. It was a nice change from Paris, which despite it's lovely palaces and haussmannian-style apartment buildings tends to turn a sober grey in winter. And Christmas is no joke in Strasbourg. All the main streets, shops and houses were decorated to the max, with Christmas markets huddled in every available plaza. In front of the main cathedral, the sweet smell of mulled wine was nearly enough to intoxicate the passer-by and the piles of dried sausages, pretzels, candies, and  Alsatian Christmas cookies or bredele, would make any gourmand drool. Magali took me to a couple of excellent restaurants, where I had the best flamekuche and some darn good munster cheese.

 

The Christmas market in Strasbourg

The traditional dress worn by Alsation women 

 

Magali and I in a town near Strasbourg 

I returned to Paris again on the 30th, this time for an even shorter stay because my train the next morning left at 7am (the ticket was cheaper) for Brittany. My friend Béatrice had picked out a New Year's fest-noz put on by Amnesty International in the town of Saint Thégonnec, Finistère. The dance started at 10 and ended at 7:30am the next morning. At midnight we toasted with cider, and at 3:30am onion soup was served to keep everyone going. When all the groups had finished playing at around 6:15, a jam session made up of bombardes, bagpipes and accordions took over, and began playing a gavotte. The musicians weren't young, but boy were they enthusiastic! Tune followed tune, each musician standing up in turn to alert the change in melody. The call-and-response format of Bretonne music meant that the musicians could slip imperceptibly from one tune to another, even if the melody was new. I witnessed a tradition I'd never seen before, where two dancers break out of the ring to dance together in the center of the circle bit, then the man bends down on one knee, the couple kisses on both cheeks, and one of the dancers returns to the ring while the other brings a new partner into the center. It was cute, and apparently common at weddings. This lasted a good long time. Pretty soon, my knees started to ache and my feet began to drag. My ears were ringing from the noisy high-pitched bombardes, and I wondered how much longer it would last. No one else seemed willing to leave, so I kept dancing, the sweat dripping down my forearms clasped tightly by my partners on either side. When the dance was finally over, I looked at my watch: 7:30! The gavotte had lasted an hour.
Béatrice had arranged for us to stay with her aunt about a half and hour's drive away in Plougastel. On the way we found an open bakery and picked up a few pain au chocolat to keep us going. The sun was up by the time we crawled into bed at around 9am on January 1st. Now that's a way to bring in the new year!
The rest of the week was a wonderful series of adventures in Finistère, most notably the Chaos de Rochers, or "Chaotic Rocks" at Huelgoat (photos below), followed by visits with friends in Dinan and Dinard. It was a good vacation. I hope to go back soon.

 The town of Huelgoat

 The Chaos de Rochers

Béatrice contemplating the Chaotic Rocks

One more tune

It's been a little over three months since my arrival in France. I don't know where November went, it flew by so fast. Yet like many of our study-abroad students I experienced a difficult period during my second month. Once I finally stopped running around Brittany with Béatrice I had to find other things to do on the weekends, and not knowing anyone in Paris my age I found myself suddenly very alone.
It's passed now, once again thanks to the fiddle. I tried different things: swing-dancing on weekends, long walks around Paris, dances at the Mission Bretonne. And then someone turned me onto an Irish jam at a bar called the Quiet Man, in the part of Paris called the "Marais." There in the cramped basement, slow and fast Irish jams take place several times a week. I never thought I would end up doing the Irish thing again, but here I am. As in the US, the musicians are very serious, playing Irish and only Irish, tune after similar tune. But one night at around 2am the jam thinned out and I finally got the names of some of the musicians I was playing with. The other fiddler, Aléxis, admitted to being a fan of American old-time. We played a waltz. Then, a young trumpeter who'd been sitting in the back all evening broke out into blues.

 It just so happens that Béatrice had been visiting that weekend. When I finally looked at my watch it was nearly 3am and the metro had long stopped running. We followed some of our new friends to a bus stop, but while we were waiting Béatrice turned to me. "I don't want to get on a bus. Why don't we walk?" she said, turning to me. I had walked from the Hôtel de Ville to the 16th arrondissement once before and knew it would take us a good 2 hours, but I was feeling good, too, so off we went.

 We made good time following the northern side of the Seine, empty of it's usual tourists, cars, and bicycles. There was a bracing wind which from time to time whipped up fine spits of rain, but overall the weather held. As we reached my apartment around 4:45, the birds were singing and the buttery smell of freshly-baked croissants was wafting out of the corner bakery.

 Eiffel Tower at 4:30am from the Palais Trocadero

 Béatrice on a bridge over the Seine

 Views from the boat ride on the Seine with Béatrice

La Bogue d'Or

Last Saturday I again took the train west to Brittany, this time not to Dinan but to Redon a town of similar size located in southern Brittany. Each year, Redon holds a month-long celebration called the Mois du Marron (Month of the Chestnut) during which all sorts of concerts and festivities are held. Chestnut month ends with La Bogue d'Or (the Golden Husk), which is a music and dance festival held along the port. I had seen the posters advertising the festival last year while teaching in Dinan, but never had the opportunity to go. It was Béatrice who reminded me about the festival this year, so we agreed to go together.

Béatrice arrived Friday evening for the big Fest-Noz being held that weekend. Unfortunately, I couldn't leave until Saturday because of work but as it turned out there was no lack of dancing the rest of the weekend. Béatrice met me at the train station at 2pm and we walked to the center of town where a huge outdoor market was taking place. There were stands selling clothes, crafts, and regional products galore but the best part was the covered market, where food stands gave out samples of their products, many featuring chestnuts as a main ingredient. There were little chestnut pancakes, chestnut bread, boudin noir with chestnuts, pâtés, even chestnut beer. Béatrice and I bought a couple of galette-saucisse (a buckwheat crêpe wrapped around a grilled sausage) and then proceeded to the port.

 

A view of the crowds of people heading towards the end of the port, where tents and music were located.

Redon is located between the rivers Oust to the west and Vilaine to the east, which come together at Redon's southern point. The town's small port is located on the Vilaine, and for the occasion was filled with old-fashioned sailboats with the traditional salmon-colored sails. Sailors traditionally wore similarly-colored vareuses, or stiff cotton work-shirts free of buttons or clasps that could get caught on nets, ropes or lines while fishing. Below you can see some people wearing vareuses in the boat on the left. On the right, a group of Galician women sing traditional songs in high-pitched voices while playing the tambourine. Each year the Festival invites bands from other parts of the world to mix in with the Breton music. This year there was also a Bulgarian band.

Gotta have a figurehead!

 

There were music contests for all ages. Here, a group of 3 little girls, aged maybe 4-9 skillfully leads a dance Sunday evening. They didn't miss a beat. 

Béatrice and I danced all weekend. We had a blast. The tents were so full of people that it was hard to move around. Dancing the polka was the equivalent of a Breton mosh-pit, what with all the couples twirling and hurling into each other. It was heartwarming to be surrounded by so many happy people, though. As much as I hate squishing into a metro at 9am rush-hour in Paris, it was a pleasure to danced, locked arm-in-arm, with so many enthusiastic dancers.

Photo taken by the newspaper "Ouest France".