Sunday was a slow kind of day. We got up around 9:00 and just hung around the house for most of the day. We went down the street briefly to get a baguette for what is becoming our main daily meal: Bread, cheese and sausage (we usually throw in some mayo, avocado and tomato too). This time we were fortunate enough to have fried sardines as well, a little treat that Cha brought back from southern France. They were delicious.
After lunch we lounged around a bit more and then decided to go check out Park Monceau, just northeast of our neighborhood in the 8th Arrondissement. This park is reportedly one of the places that Marcel Proust enjoyed spending time. It's kind of a funny park. There are several small-scale yet not-exactly-identical replicas of other famous monuments from around the world, such as Corinthian pillars and an Egyptian pyramid. This park was also the site of the first silk parachute jump (out of a hot air balloon), a massacre in 1871, and the setting for three of Claude Monet's paintings.
It was a hot day and everyone had the same idea as us. The park was filled with joggers, families strolling, couples lying about in the grass, and about a million kids. It was a little too crowded for us and wasn't very large so we just took a quick stroll around and took a few pictures.
As we neared the Pont de la Concorde (one of the bridges that cross the Seine), Charlie asked, "Did you see that?" I though he was referring to the huge lion statue (below, right). I said, "Yes," took a few more steps and then realized what he was actually talking about... The Eiffel Tower.
This was the first time I had seen it since we arrived. I gasped loudly, got a lump in my throat and my eyes immediately welled up with tears. I'm not sure what the emotional response was all about. Maybe it was the first time that I actually believed that I was in Paris. At any rate, it was an impressive sight.
We decided to stroll the southeast direction so that the sun wouldn't be blaring into our faces the whole time. We happened upon a flea market of sorts, very obviously priced for the wide-eyed tourists abounding in the area. Although it was way beyond our budget to buy anything, we stopped in at an interesting stall that contained a variety of old cameras and accessories along with some medical artifacts and oddities. Charlie and I love this kind of stuff.
Medicine bottles and preserved amphibians
Yes, the skull is wearing glasses
One of these things is not like the others
Flu shot anyone?
Kid in a candy store
Corporal odds and ends
We left the store and continued on down the bank until my feet couldn't take it anymore. Along the way I admired this boat.
Who says you have to have a house to have a garden?
On Friday I went to French class and it went much better. I am finally catching on and understood most of what was going on, although I didn't demonstrate it very well. At one point the teacher came over to make sure my partner and I were doing okay with the exercise. We understood what we were doing, but didn't understand the question he asked. So he asked whether we understood and we said "no", at which point he painstakingly explained the entire grammatical concept again. Neither of us knew how to say, "It's not that we don't understand the concept, we just didn't understand what you said." Oh well.
After class I headed to Montparnasse to hang out with my old college roommate, Sabrina, and her friend, Hannah, who were in town for a few days. They were staying in a couple of beautiful loft apartments overlooking a great courtyard. Hannah's dad owns the properties and was renovating them for rent. I thought for a brief moment about trying to snatch one up, the quality of the apartments being superior to that of ours. The price was about the same, but a lot less was included in the price of the rent compared to what we have here. Also, our neighborhood really can't be beat. So here we are, still in our same little flat for the time being.
Sabrina, Hannah and I decided to have dinner at home rather than go out to eat. We headed to Monoprix, a supermarket chain and really the only decent shopping on that particular street, and bought a couple of baguettes, several hunks of cheese, some dried sausages and several bottles of wine. I even found some non-alcoholic champagne that actually tasted like champagne rather than sparkling grape juice. It was so believable that after I left, the people who do drink alcohol accidentally finished the bottle without realizing it (well, I suppose that could have had something to do with the amount of wine they had already drunk).
Our bounty in hand, we moved our operation out to the courtyard to enjoy the warm summer evening with some typical French fare.
Le cour
Le petit restaurant
Tall windows reaching up to the second floor illuminate each of the flats.
The garden dinosaur
Nice art in someone's window
Hannah uses her fancy camera and awesome photography skills to capture the beauty of this place.
Sabrina shows off her salad-making skills:
Le table
Saucisse seche
Les fromages!
Clockwise from top: Aged mimolette, Brie, Camembert, Chevre, and Bleu Danois
As I neared the metro station next to the church I noticed that the sun was hitting the top of it in a rather impressive manner. I stopped to take a couple of pictures while the few locals that were awake watched, probably wondering what the hell I was doing being a tourist so early in the morning.
When I got to the apartment at Montparnasee, we sat around drinking coffee for a short while and then ventured out in search of breakfast. We stopped into a small patisserie where I had my first Pain au Chocolat.
If you've never had one of these, it is just a croissant, wet with butter on the outside and filled with a smooth chocolate paste. In short, heaven.
Then we descended into the metro and made our way to our destination. We got there just in time. It was late enough that the stalls were all set up and open but early enough that there wasn't much of a crowd to deal with.
It was a flea market a lot like any you might see in the U.S., catering mainly to antiques, except that in many cases the antiques you would see were far older than anything you might find back home. Most of what we saw certainly originated in France or at least Europe, but there were plenty of vendors with a wide variety of African artifacts as well. Here is just a small sample of what we saw. It took us a full two hours to walk the entire market.
Assorted glass, metal and wooden trinkets
Umbrellas and hats shield you from the rain while the vases catch it as it falls.
Old knowledge
Keys and a saucy bottle cork in the form of a lady in the upper right corner. If you put this in a bottle and pour it, the liquid comes out of her nipples.
The darndest things
A nice painting (yes, French women really do look like that)
Coins, magnifiers, letter openers, spectacles, tobacco pipes, scissors and bottle openers
The cutest chair in the world. Unfortunately, it was made for a kid so my butt would not fit in it.
Commemorative plates
Framed
Charlie's birthday present: An antique painted coffee grinder.
After our flea market outing, I headed home to prepare for Charlie's return after he had been gone for five days to southern France. I picked up a small candied fruit tart at the patisserie on the way home to celebrate his birthday. Later Sabrina and Hannah came over and had the same idea about picking up some sweets on the way over. When they arrived we made some of the good Guatemalan coffee we bought last week and essentially just had butter and sugar for dinner. It was great.
Hannah, Sabrina and Charlie get high on sugar and coffee.
Charlie demonstrates his new birthday present. It's not as convenient as the electric kind, but it'll do.
So, I hinted at how La Gouzine has remained unchanged since...whenever it was founded. Certainly, there are modern buildings interspersed with the stables of the 1700's, and there are modern amenities like indoor plumbing, but the place just feels old. The fact is that Nick's two aunts and their husbands have lived there their whole lives, had children who now live within 50 meters from them, and can remember the exact homes their grandparents were born in. They keep their caves (larders) for the winter, to stretch pensions from the only businesses the town offers- a now-closed coal and zinc mine and an automobile filter factory. The larders are well stocked with home grown green beans, onions, garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, zuchini, cucumbers, peaches, pears, plums, and apples. Chicken and pigeon coops and rabbit hutches provided protein, aided by one pig purchased in autumnal preparation. Swine were slaughtered in the back yard and preserved through charcuterie or freezing. In the last few years, the aging couples have been unable to keep up with the care of the animals, so they have gotten rid of them.
Speaking of, introductions:
Jacqueline, Nick's aunt.
Tony, Nick's uncle (and, as you will see, an inveterate prankster with a streak of mischief 1.6 kilometers long).
Everyone in their family worked in either the mine or the factory, or was a farmer, save for Nick's father, who left his home with an outhouse and a well down the road at age 16 to join the Army.This is where he left:
While the view is majestic, and (lacking a better word) soul of the residents is open and fraternal from living hard lives and needing to value relationships and the pleasurable things in life (like food, wine, and Ricard Pastis, an anise liqueur), there is not a whole lot going on down there. My guide claimed that I was probably the first American Firmi had seen since Liberation.
Given that, I'm assuming that when the Australians came, they were the first ever to step foot in Firmi.
Three of Nicks friends from Australia were doing a tour of Europe and came to Firmi for two days. They arrived just before dinner time, and rolled up a few hours late as Firmi and Gouzine somehow were missed on their GPS program. How about that?
Thus began a bacchanalian evening that began innocently enough with that indulgent mistress soupe au fromage. A variation of the famous French onion soup, where a base of caramelized onions is suspended in a broth with a bit of cognac, with crusty bread and cheese, Cheese soup uses only the crusts of the local bread, unavailable anywhere else (Nick, a chef and restaurateur himself, confirms this), layer upon layer of shredded cheese curd, and just enough condensed onion stock to make a stringy porridge. This stuff is so heavy, it would put an insomniac in a coma.
The Aussies, left to right: Scott, Miranda, Shane.
I suppose that one side effect of a town with nothing happening is that the conversations are rich with local histories and customs. Nick mentioned that he had re-sprained his ankle a few days before heading down to Firmi, and all his relatives insisted that he go see the local healer. Yes, the French countryside apparently has healers: gifted natural talents who, without any sort of training, official or folk, are inexplicably able to feel the nerves, tendons, muscles, and pulses of any given area and realign them as a palliative for the associated pain. The locals swear by it, so Nick and I went to see the guy. After being welcomed in to a basement office in the healer's home, he asked what the problem was then proceeded to feel Nick's ankle. He found something and started digging and rubbing the ankle, methodically working higher on Nick's leg. It was obviously painful, but Nick said that it felt like there was a stone that was causing him pain, and the healer was just working the stone up where it diminished to a bearable degree. As Carl Sagan says "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Just because something isn't proven to work doesn't mean it doesn't, even when in all probability a placebo effect is occurring.
