Bon Appétit!

I think I have mentioned that the kids have both become much more adventurous in their eating during their stay in France. Some has been by design: we have forced the kids to go to la cantine 3 out of the 4 school days each week. And while at first there were some complaints and general resistance, by the end I have been scrambling to try to get recipes for Cordon Bleu etc so the kids can keep eating in the fashion to which they have grown accustomed.

Some of the kids new-found adventurousness has been not by design but by pure old-fashioned stubbornness. That is, before coming to France, Jasper would tell us (in order to get us off her back for being a picky eater), “When I am in France, I will eat all sorts of new things.” And, as is very much like her, she has stuck to her word.

And lastly, some of the adventurousness has been just plain strange. Maddox “I wish I could keep a hammer in my ear” Schaller is nothing if not the king of non-sequiturs. It turns out this ability jumps to food preferences as well. A few nights ago, apropos of nothing, Maddox asked, “Are dogs made of meat?” And after we cautiously answered that they were, he happily said “Maybe someday we can eat a dead dog for dinner.”

I explained that we probably wouldn’t. That dog is served only in parts of Asia, but not typically considered appropriate in North America and Europe. Meanwhile, Mark told Maddox the story about how, while traveling in China, his father was once famously served a dinner dish with a large cooked horse penis draped across the top. I’m glad Mark distracted him with the horse penis; I am not sure I could have possibly explained why lamb and veal and rabbits (to name a few cute animals) are OK to eat, but dogs are not.

Even though the French don’t eat dogs, they are famous for their Great Food. And while I knew this before coming here, and I knew that lots of people come to France to eat; until living here I never really appreciated how deeply rooted food is in the culture here. And I am not just talking about having food holidays (such as Le Chandeleur – the crêpe holiday, I blogged about early on in our stay), which I love. It goes deeper than that.

Maybe most emblematic of the importance and appreciation of food here is the phrase Bon appétit! If you think about it, there is no English equivalent for wishing a person an enjoyable meal. (The closest – but so much coarser – might be “dig in”.) And people say it, and mean it, ALL the time. We have regularly had strangers delightedly say “Bon appétit!” when they have seen us having a little family picnic.

My favorite example of this happened months ago. Mark and I were hanging out near a playground while the kids played. He and I were having a little fruit and nut snack at the side of the road while we waited. A pack of adolescent boys came running by (they were all on some type of team and looked to be doing a practice run of some sort). They looked over and cheerily shouted, “Bon appétit!” Seriously. Just about each and every one wasted some of their much-needed oxygen wishing us a “Bon appétit!” It was so sweet, and came as such a shock. In North America one would expect, at best, sullen silence and at worst some sort of rude comment from a pack of adolescent boys. But here, they spy our pathetic little road side snack (fruit and nuts! – a real French person would have bread and duck confit and a small pique-nique sized bottle of wine) and cheerily shout to us to enjoy ourselves.

If I were a worthy Francophile at this point I would be able to wax poetic about the cheeses and the wines available here. All I can say is, “Oh, les vaches!” (Holy cow!) Les fromages! Les vins! I know I will miss what is available here. So many varieties and so cheap. We have been pretty provençal about our approaches to wine. We have mostly enjoyed the ever-present (and so VERY cheap) local rosé wines.

Exploring cheeses here has been pretty fun, though occasionally irritating. The irritations have been quite specific to one woman (we call her the Cheese Nazi) who runs a great cheese stand at the weekly Cotignac market. Until recently, every single time we went to order cheese she gave us a long tirade (in French, of course) about how to store the cheese (never in plastic), how to eat the cheese (always take it out of the fridge 1 to 1½ hours prior to eating it), etc etc. And then at the end of the tirade (some of which I would understand, some of it went over my head, especially in the beginning) she would wish us a Good Vacation. She did this each and every week for months and months. Finally I got savvy enough, both in terms of what she was going to say, as well as in my ability to express myself in French, that I was able to cut off her tirade by ordering in a specific way. I think she finally got that she could trust me with her cheese! And, in the last couple of months, she finally FINALLY stopped wishing us a “Bonne Vacance!”

One thing the Cheese Nazi never lectured to us about was the sacred way of cutting cheese. I think this is ONLY because we never served cheese to her, or I am sure she would have had a lot to say about it. You see, it turns out there is a particular way to cut each and every type of cheese. It depends on a variety of factors including the size of the wheel (both width and height) of cheese, the firmness, the type of rind, etc. It is too difficult for me to try to describe the different shapes one makes while cutting. Lets just say it is almost always different and that the rules can be pretty baffling.

So, today is our last day as residents in Cotignac. Tomorrow we hit the road for our European tour (Switzerland for 3 days, Paris for 3 days, Bruges for 2 days, and then one last night in Amsterdam). Mark and I enjoyed one final long leisurely lunch today on the main Cours here in Cotignac. There is something really nice about sharing a pichet de rosé under a blue Provençal sky. It was a very nice finish to an amazing 6 months!

Once we get back home we may have one or two blogs in us about our European tour... Check back in if you want to!

Au revoir!

Secret waterfall redux

I won't be offended if you think that, little by little, we're going insane. I just glanced back at the stuff we've been blogging about recently, and it occurs to me that a superficial skim might suggest a family increasingly unhinged. Mark unselfconsciously flouncing around town wearing a little girl's wristwatch and a sarong; Quincy claiming to hear the serenading songs of birds all night long; Maddox speaking in surrealistic riddles; and so forth. Even the recent photos may suggest that we've succumbed to some strange madness that drives us to obsessively sculpt towering toothsome concrete rabbits and to gaze oddly at our reflections in sheared-off auto parts deep within the Provençal woods. It's like we're no longer just a family on sabbatical, but are instead minor characters in a Werner Herzog movie, or Alice in Wonderland, or Apocalypse Now. You might half expect Quincy to start blogging about the sudden appearance of a strung-out ghost of Dennis Hopper in the vine-grown ruins of an ancient olive mill; or for me to report on how, during a recent trip to the market to buy cherries and flan we encountered the lumbering form of Marlon Brando sitting in the shadows of a cheese shop reading the poetry of T.S. Eliot and telling far-out tales of gardenias and riverbanks and razorblades and snails. (The horror. The horror.)

So, yeah, I won't be offended if, while reading our blog, you're reminded of that famous remark by Francis Ford Coppola: "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."

If not for the bits about being in the jungle and having too much money, that remark might be an accurate assessment of our lives. Oh and also the bit about going insane. Because, despite appearances, I assure you: We still have all our marbles. In fact, our lives are so boringly normal here that it's hard to find anything to blog about.

But, while I cannot report on any torrential rain of madness, I can tell you about something that Jasper and I did a couple of days ago that found us dropping down through a sort of rabbit-hole and plunging into the (non-metaphorical) heart of darkness.

I wrote once before about the secret waterfall and the caves. What I didn't mention was that, in addition to the big easy entrance into the short tunnel we explored already, there's another cave entrance that I'd previously ignored because it's just a little hole in the side of the cliff and I wasn't sure I could even fit through it. On a return visit, I just had to try. And I fit. And so did Jasper and Maddox too. And, once through, we were inside a substantial tunnel just goes and goes. We explored it for a little ways – far enough for the dry tunnel to start getting damp as it bore back darkly through the limestone. Having gone that far, Jasper and I were keen to return and explore it as far as we possibly (or safely) could.

We did so as soon as Quincy's brother Kelin and his family arrived in town. It was the perfect opportunity because (as those of you who subscribe to Nature, Geology, and the Journal of Geophysical Research already know) Kelin knows a thing or two about water and rocks and geomorphology. And because one of his girls (Teagan) is 10.

"I'm not going in there!" Teagan exclaimed when, after hiking out of town and climbing up to the waterfall, she saw the narrow slot in the rock that we'd need to shimmy through.

But she did. And with Jasper leading the way with the chirpy enthusiasm of an eager mole, the four of us plunged onward and gently downward through the darkness. Despite her vocal misgivings, I think there was only one moment when Teagan had any real regrets about being there. It was the moment when, as we dropped to our knees to get through a particularly low passage, our headlamps suddenly illuminated a large dense ragged-looking spider web right in front of our faces, occupied by a burly spider the size of my hand. We quickly scuttled on, and on, pausing occasionally so that Kelin could point out interesting features created by the interaction of gravity, water, and calcium carbonate. Because, you know, when you're hunched back-breakingly over inside a damp lightless passageway deep inside the earth, and you've just been nose-to-nose with a spider that looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings, nothing beats an impromptu geology lesson. Seriously.

Eventually, Jasper yelled out that she saw light ahead. And moments later we reemerged blinkingly, along with some gently flowing groundwater, in a familiar spot along a tiny road on the upper edge of the village.

And then we turned around and plunged into the heart of darkness again, back the way we came. Not because we were so especially keen to blunder once more into the webs of blind and bloated spiders, but because we were keen to take a bracing swim in the churning gray-green pool underneath the secret waterfall where we began.

Yeah, I know: It's not exactly a paranoid florid fantasy of razorblades and snails and Marlon Brando in his pajama pants. But it's all I got.

Whenever Maddox says something he says something hilarious, but whenever Mark says something he just reveals himself (again) to be kind of a chump

A couple of weekends ago, we went on a lovely little family hike through the forests and the hills just outside of town, during which we ate a picnic lunch under the warm midday sun and examined butterflies and bugs among the flowers and the rocks. Later that evening, as I was putting Maddox to bed, I was reflecting on the day's events. "I really enjoyed that hike with Quincy and Jasper today," I said. And Maddox replied: "I wish I could keep a hammer in my ear; or a flashlight."

Naturally, I take delight in his gift for non sequitur. It is a gift he shares generously with the rest of us at home. At school, though, he remains linguistically tightfisted: He pretty much doesn't say a word. He's got friends aplenty, it seems, but – even with those who speak some English – he appears to communicate primarily through a series of cryptic peeps and squeaks. And, although he is happy to say "Au revoir" to his teacher (Madame Blanc) at the end of the day, he refuses to say anything else to her. Not even "Bonjour." At first we attributed this to second-language shyness. But it's been going on for more than five months now and I'm pretty sure that, for Maddox, the refusal to greet Madame Blanc has simply resolved into a matter of principle.

There was a time, almost two months ago, when we tried to bribe him into saying "Bonjour" to Madame Blanc. He resisted, but did suggest a sort of compromise: "How about if I say 'Salut' instead?" We said sure; although, in hindsight, it was obviously a set-up for comical disaster. Madame Blanc is famously severe and formal in her demeanor, whereas "Salut" is about the most casual sort of greeting going. It's the kind of thing you might say to your buddies at a bar – a sort of French equivalent of "Howdy!" or "Whassup!" or "Yo! Yo! How's it hanging, bro!" It's not something that kids often say to grown-ups. And it's definitely not something Madame Blanc expects from her 4-year olds. Anyway, when Maddox got to school that day he ran up to Madame Blanc and yelled out "Salut!" and was so delighted with himself that he immediately wrapped his arms around me in a great big prideful hug. I was proud of him too. As for Mme. Blanc: Well, let's just say that she expressed unsmiling surprise. To the best of my knowledge, Maddox hasn't said "Salut" to her since. Or "Bonjour" either, of course.

But, you know, seemingly simple greetings aren't always as simple as they seem. Personally, I struggle with "Ça va." It's a phrase that literally means "That goes"; but of course it doesn't really mean that. In a cordial context it's both a question and an answer too, corresponding variously to English phrases such as "How're you doing?" and "Fine" and "Can't complain." It should be simple (it's just a mindlessly casual greeting, after all) but sometimes people attach other words to it too (like oui and bien) which makes it all more complicated, and I've never been able to quite figure out how exactly the script should go. Consequently, when people say "Ça va?" to me, my wheels fly off and I usually end up dumbly mumbling a semi-incoherent stream of random French pleasantries and then, just to keep my bases covered, I lean in close for a kiss on each cheek. It's working so far. (Well, with the women it is.) Still, I'm acutely aware of the fact that my high-school French classes never prepared me for the ordinary pleasantries of life in France. Instead, we all learned stiffly formal phrases like "Comment allez-vous?" – which, it turns out, on one actually ever says out loud.

Speaking of stiffly formal phrases that no one actually ever says out loud: "Je m'appelle Mark." Now I don't know about you, but that was one of the first things I learned in French class. I was taught that it was practically on par with "Bonjour" as a common, polite, and useful thing to say. In fact, I always considered "Je m'appelle [your name here]" to be part of the unofficial Holy Trinity of emblematic French phrases, right there with "Où est la bibliothèque?" and "Le fromage est sur la table." Well, apparently I was wrong. In real life, just as no one ever inquires as to the whereabouts of the library, or declares the whereabouts of cheese, no one ever says "Je m'appelle [your name here]." Well, no one but me that is. And after many months here, I finally realized this. I think that, unlike every other phrase in French, this one perhaps translates in a rather literal way: "I call myself Mark." Which makes it not only severely formal and old-fashioned, but also a plainly preposterous thing to say. It's as though I've been going about France shaking people's hands and saying "I wish I could keep a hammer in my ear." Or, perhaps, it's as though when I first meet people, I stare coldly into their eyes, point both of my thumbs rigidly toward my puffed-out chest and, like some tribal overlord declaiming his intentions to conquer the world, announce myself to the trembling masses: "I call myself Mark."

So, even though I still haven't exactly learned the right way to greet people, at least I've learned that everything that I always thought was right is actually wrong – and makes me come across like some sort of arrogant asshole from the 17th Century. And I've learned why whenever I bend down to chat with children, they just look at me like I'm from Mars.

Anyway, back to Maddox: A couple of weeks ago he did a series of three drawings. I asked him what he was drawing, and he told me. These are his exact words:
Drawing #1: "No stars, no sun, no moon, and no tape"
Drawing #2: "The world's largest paintbrush"
Drawing #3: "Two birds, the sky, air, and a vacuum cleaner"

These are a few of my favourite things

Wow. Time has really been flying by here in the south of France. I feel a little like I am already in mourning for Provence. I find myself noticing (and talking about, almost obsessively) all the little things about life here that I am really going to miss. Things like:

- The mournful yet peaceful sound of the bells chiming the hour and the half hour, all day long … and vespers and Sunday services, and many other things I can’t seem to fathom. What is it, for example, about Saturday morning at 8am that calls for a kajillion (sp?) bells to be rung? Whoopsie, this was supposed to be a list of the things I love. And I do love the bells. Really, I do. But this morning I was managing to sleep in until the almost unprecedented time of 8am. We were out late last night, so for once Maddox was sleeping in, allowing me to sleep in. And I was loving it. But really, I suppose of all the ways to be woken up at 8am on a Saturday morning, provençal village bells are a pretty good way to go.

Okay, back to the list.

- Eating almost all of our meals outside in the shade of our lovely garden.

- Having a post-school swim in the pool with the kids.

- The sounds of Maddox playing soccer with neighbouring kids on the 6 foot-wide “street” we live on.

- Taking a 10 minute walk in almost any direction from town and finding myself in a remote, quiet spot.

- The extraordinarily loud frog-song after the sun goes down.

- The bird song, all day and all night. I kid you not. The first few times I heard birdsong in the middle of the night I was very confused thinking it was dawn. Nope. Just French birds who seem to like to party all damn night.

- Walking the kids to school, and having that only take 2 minutes.

- Having almost every stranger you encounter saying a friendly, “Bonjour!” or the like.

- I suppose it is almost redundant to mention the weekly Cotignac market. I have already mentioned before how this is my favorite day of the week, and an activity I hate miss.

- Going out to dinner with the kids on the main cours. Mark and I get to sit under the gorgeous plane trees and drink our pichet de rosé, while the kids run around mostly unattended, running into their friends, climbing on the fountains, or finding other entertainments.

- The quiet.

- The quality of the light and the reds, golds and yellows of the buildings.

- The cheeses, the incredible produce, the bread, the pastries, the... OK, wait a minute. I can tell sitting here, that I actually have a lot to say about food. I am going to have to dedicate a blog soon to the food culture here. You’ll just have to wait for bated breath for the one.

Bonjour chaton

It's hot. I've taken to wearing my sarong around the house. Although not in public. Not yet anyway.

It's hot, and so we've been in the water a lot. This past weekend we drove up to Lac de Sainte Croix, rented a pedal-boat, and pedal-paddled our way up into the Gorge du Verdon. Spectacular. It's like being in some deep canyon in the American southwest, except that the cliffs are a surreal golden yellow and the water is a surreal milky blue and instead of being surrounded by a bunch of hooting and hollering Arizonans drinking cheap beer and throwing the empty cans in the water, you're surrounded by a bunch of hooting and hollering French folks drinking real Champagne and popping the corks in the water.

We've also been swimming a lot. Jasper swims like a trout. Maddox still uses artificial floatation. Quincy went with him to buy some water-wings a couple of weeks ago and Maddox chose the bright pink Hello Kitty ones. No surprise there. Whereas most of the world might think that Hello Kitty apparel is designed to appeal to 6-year old Japanese schoolgirls, Maddox is under the impression that it's the epitome of classy European menswear. I suppose I must take the blame for that. Because, well, because of my wristwatch.

I don't usually wear a watch back home in Vancouver where I'm surrounded by clocks. But here in rural France, I figured a wristwatch would come in handy. I didn't want to spend much money on it, though. So, a couple of months ago, when Quincy drove to Brignoles to do some shopping, I asked her to buy me the cheapest wristwatch she could find. Turns out the cheapest wristwatch she could find was made by Hello Kitty.

It's pink and sky-blue. Its skinny little plastic band barely fits around my skinny little wrist. Its petite little digital watch-face is embedded in a petite little plastic flower. It keeps time flawlessly. I wear it every day.

And now that it's hot outside, it's no longer lurking behind long sleeves. People are taking notice.

For instance: I was at the bakery a few days ago, buying bread, and as I was offering up my handful of coins, the bakery-woman smirked and nodded toward my wrist and said, "C'est une très jolie montre." Yes, I agreed; it is.

And it's not just grown-ups that are impressed. We attended a picnic recently, on a hippie farm of some sort near Lac de Sainte Croix, where they have chickens and swine and yurts and fanciful treehouses. It was a pot-luck affair ("auberge Espagnole," as they say in France – because, apparently, pot-luck is for Spaniards), organized by a bunch of organic food enthusiasts, and so we ate lots of rustic breads and quiches and patés made from the flesh of local pigs and cheeses squeezed from the teats of local goats. After lunch a bunch of us, accompanied by our kids, went for a walk. As we were walking, one little girl suddenly started yammering at me in very excited and slightly disconcerted French. I didn't know what she was talking about. She pointed to my wrist, and then I began to understand. Hello Kitty. Yes, I agreed (in French), it isn't often you see a Hello Kitty watch on a man. And, yes, it might seem reasonable to assume that the watch belongs to my daughter. But it's not Jasper's, I said; it's mine. What do you think of it, I asked her proudly. And she said, "Elle est très belle." Yes, I agreed (in French); she is indeed.

So, you know, maybe I should just go ahead and wear my sarong proudly everywhere I go. It's not like I have some sort of manly reputation to keep up.

In which Mark starts to think seriously about what his French stripper name might should be

It has been pointed out that maybe, for my own protection, I should be blogging under an alias.

Lots of the bloggers use wacky handles. Plus, there is a long and honorable tradition of using a pen name when contributing to a genre outside of your usual domain. If the pseudonym approach to off-brand work has been good enough for Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie and Dustin Hoffman, then, hey, maybe I oughta give it a whirl as well.

And then there's the whole self-protection thing. "Our French Files" doesn't always present me in the most flattering light. While I'd like to think that this blog portrays me as an intrepid international adventurer, it's more likely that I come across as some sort of clueless doofus with a footnote fetish. Do I really want all that embarrassing small-headed spastic woodpecker stuff attached to the name "Mark Schaller"? Shouldn't I be protecting my brand a bit better than that?

So, yeah, I'm thinking about an alias, some sort of handle that would be appropriate for a blog about a sabbatical in southern France. But how might I arrive at my French blogger name?

Is there some sort of formula to follow for a nom de blog (or nom de blague)? You know, like how there are these half-serious recipes for figuring out other hypothetical pseudonyms – your stripper name, your drag queen name, your professional wrestler name, that sort of thing – which always involve combining the name of your first pet with your favorite crayon color or your fourth-favorite 19th-century German philosopher, or something like that. The outcomes aren't always realistic. (I mean, I can't even imagine a professional wrestler named "The Raspberry Snowflake," And no self-respecting stripper would call himself "Cerulean Schopenhauer." Come on.) But still, it's something.

So anyway, Quincy and I got to talking about this yesterday, and decided to come up with an recipe that I might follow in order to cook up a nom de blague.

"How about using the street that we live on for part of your name," suggested Quincy. "That sort of thing always shows up in these sorts of things." Good idea. Here in Cotignac, we live on Rue de la Cadelle. It's not exactly a street (it's more of an invisible alley that narrows further into a foot path, but which people sometimes drive their cars on anyway because, you know, this is France). But it's good enough for half of a made-up name: Cadelle. But what about the rest of my blogging faux-nom?

Here again Quincy offered some cunning guidance: "What's something else that's emblematic of your time here in France?" she asked, leadingly. Hmmm, let's see. Intrepid international adventuring? She laughed. Pitch-perfect conversations in my flawless French? She laughed again. Nose-to-the-grindstone 16-hour days completing solemn scientific articles, one after another? She laughed long and loud, and then turned serious. "Bakeries," she said, "Boulangeries. Patisseries. You've spent weeks and weeks sampling all kinds of breads and tarts and puff pastries. What's your favorite? Because whatever it is, that oughta be part of your French blogger name."

Excellent idea. But there is so much to choose from, and it's almost impossible to identify the one bakery item here that is my absolute name-worthy favorite. There's that olive bread that they make at the bakery that's closest to Maddox's school, but which they only make on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. I do love that. (Although I'm not sure pain d'olives works wonderfully well as a personal name.) Oh, and there are those croissants aux pinons that we buy there too, stuffed with an amazing almond paste and coated with pine nuts. Yum. And then there are the sacristains – especially the ones that we buy from the bakery down by the fire station – and which Jasper in particular has repeatedly identified as the thing that she will miss most of all when we return to Vancouver. A sacristain is truly awesome. (Although I might feel a bit uncomfortable appropriating that word – which refers also to a Church caretaker – for such an unholy purpose as a prankish nom de blague.) Ah, and then there are the slices of custard pie – des flans. I'm particularly partial to a singularly fantastic coconut flan that they sometimes sell in the narrow little bakery near la mairie. Mouth-wateringly wonderful. Yes, yes, the coconut flan. (Which, happily, no one actually ever calls flan au noix de coco, because that would be just way too much of a mouthful to include in a made-up name). Mmmm... coco flan. Or, as Dustin Hoffman's pseudonym's character's student's father might say: "Mmmm... coco flan."

So: Coco Flan Cadelle. If I can figure out how to change my username on this website, that just might become my alias – my French blogger name. (Although, now that I think about it, it might actually work better as my French stripper name instead.)

The dictionary game

You know the dictionary game, right – where you choose some weird word out of the dictionary that nobody knows and everyone has to make up a definition that sounds like it might be the real definition, and the best bluffer wins. It's fun. There was a time when I played a lot of dictionary, and I loved all those ridiculous but semi-authentic-sounding definitions that emerged – like "a honey-colored ceremonial bathcap" or "any statue of a chicken." I still treasure the memory of that evening in the early spring of 1987 when (in response to the word nobble) my friend Snacker ventured the following: "To eat corn on the cob in a violent and bucktoothed manner." It's an absurd definition, of course, but because it made such visually astute reference to a treasured comic strip panel (depicting, if I recall correctly, Dennis the Menace's dad), it was very much a winner.

It's with this in mind that I thought it might be fun to use the dictionary game as a means of conveying to you one specific aspect of our life in France that, for obvious reasons, I won't exactly miss very much, but in a weird sort of way I will miss just a tiny bit.

Okay, so here's the gimmick. I'm gonna give you a phrase in French, and then I'll list some options as to what it translates to. And you gotta guess the right answer. Okay, ready? Here we go.

Here's the phrase in French: s'apporte à bonne chance.

And here are your options as to what it means:

1. A polite way of referring to a tall, thin, small-headed man from another country.

2. To insist on wearing preposterous-looking sports sandals every day, regardless of the weather.

3. To amble down the street in an eager, distracted manner.

4. The quaint custom, common throughout much of Europe, in which people blithely let their dogs crap all over the streets and sidewalks, and very deliberately choose to NOT pick it up.

5. To glance down at one's feet finally, a split second too late.

And the answer is....

None of above. Or, wait, maybe it's all of the above. In any case, it was a trick question. Translated directly, that French phrase is about bringing oneself good luck. And, apparently, people in France might say something like that to you when you step in dogshit, which you inevitably will. Kind of like how someone in Germany might say "Gesundheit" after you sneeze. Except that this isn't about sneezing, obviously; it's about stepping in dogshit, which really isn't the same thing at all.

Half an elephant and not-so-smart mice

The kids brought home handbills; posters were pasted on walls; and on Saturday, a small car with a large loudspeaker on its roof made a tour of the village, fuzzily blaring the news: a parc de loisirs was coming to town. Quincy and I studied a flyer carefully. Among the various spectacles and amusements, we figured the kids would be especially excited about the objets gonflables – a phrase that we assumed, correctly, to be a French way of talking about "bouncy castles." As for me, I was intrigued by the promise of Sourisland – a "village miniature de souris savants!" Because, you know, if there's one thing more entertainingly surreal than a miniature village, it's a miniature village populated by preternaturally smart mice.

The parc de loisirs was set up in a dusty parking lot next to the gasoline station. There was a small circus tent and four large inflatables, each as big as a house. Despite all the pre-parc publicity, there weren't a lot of people there. Which is not surprising, given that Cotignac is a sleepy little town. Also, a lot of families probably preferred to spend their sunny Sunday afternoon on amusements that didn't cost 8 euros per child (but only 5 euros for grown-ups!). Quincy and I got our money's worth by relaxing in the weeds at the edge of the lot, leaning against a makeshift fence, and watching the action on the inflatables. Which was mostly stuff like this: Jasper slides to the bottom of a giant inflatable sinking ship. Maddox too. Jasper takes off running, in shoeless stocking feet, across the dusty gravel in the direction of a giant inflatable chicken. Maddox, also in his socks, stumbles across the gravel after her.

The gonflables scene went on until a loudspeaker called everyone into the tent, where a series of entertainments began to unfold. As they unfolded, it became abundantly clear that the whole thing was very much a mom-and-pop-and-their-collection-of-kids operation (the dad and the kids provided the entertainment, while mom sold popcorn and cotton candy from a cart outside) which made me enjoy it all the more.

It started with the trained goat. It appears that this is de rigeur among carnies in the south of France: A scrawny goat with gigantic distended teats balancing upon an increasingly tall stack of increasingly tiny stools. Then there was the teenage daughter of the troupe, dressed for burlesque, walking on a wire and twirling a dozen hula-hoops. At one point, Jasper leaned back and whispered, "She would be more beautiful if she didn't have braces." I reflected on my own metal-mouthed high-school years of braces and retainers and headgear. "Hey kid, don't be so judgmental," I wanted to warn Jasper, "That's you in about 5 years, minus (I hope) the sequined bikini."

After she was done, the patriarch (and head clown) invited the audience into the ring so that we could try our own amateurish luck at hula-hooping. We were all comically bad at it. And some of us were comically badder than others. I'm told that I attracted an especially loud set of laughs when, after failing to spin the hoop around my waist, I tried to spin it around my neck by jerkily jackhammering my head back and forth like some sort of spastic woodpecker.

There was one little boy, though, maybe about Maddox's age, who was amazingly adept, and kept his hoop spinning perfectly with a confident rapid rhythm that reminded me of a masturbating monkey I once saw at a zoo. After we all gave him a big round of applause, it was revealed that he was a ringer: He was the youngest of the circus siblings, and this was his dad's amusing way of introducing him. A few minutes later, though, the boy wasn't feeling so great. While his two older brothers – dressed like identical homeless mimes – showed off some elaborate balancing skills on piles of barrels and planks, the 4-year-old nearly collapsed in tears while trying unsuccessfully to set up his own apparatus on the uneven ground. This led to some vivid acting-out in the direction of his dad who was trying simultaneously to energetically emcee the show and to keep the whole thing from becoming a train-wreck of predictable family dynamics, and who was doing it all while wearing a ludicrous orange shag-carpet wig.

Things soon got back on track with another crowd-pleasing piece of audience participation, in which Jasper played a prominent role. This particular act involved a dancing elephant. Except that it wasn't a real dancing elephant. It was two people bending over with an elephant-shaped sheet fitted over them, blindly following a bewigged clown's Svengali-like instructions to kneel down and to stand up, to trot and to boogie and, inevitably, to fall over sideways in a hysterical heap. Jasper was half of that elephant. Specifically: the back half.

I found it all entirely cheesy and delightful and worth every centime, but I did wonder if we were ever going to see that miniature village of super-smart mice. After all that audience participation, I was starting to half-seriously think that there weren't any precocious rodents after all, that "souris savants" wasn't to be taken literally, that maybe it was just some ironic euphemism meaning, loosely, "easily-gulled country folk who pay good money to become spastic woodpeckers and elephants' asses in front of their friends and neighbors."

But I was wrong. Sourisland did indeed exist, and it was finally unveiled after a second sweaty round of bouncy castle fun. Yep, it was a miniature village all right, with a school and a church and post office and all. But the mice inside it didn't seem so savants. Aside from climbing a tiny ladder and sliding down a tiny slide, they didn't show off any special skills. They mostly just stuck their heads in and out of the tiny windows of the tiny buildings, and pooped their tiny turds all over the tiny streets. Big deal; I could do that myself.

The secret waterfall

Is there a scene in some adventure tale that depicts a secret cave hidden behind a waterfall? In a Tintin book maybe? (Or Lord of the Rings? Or Planet of the Apes?) It seems like an iconic image anyway, but I just can't place it. All I know is that when I was a kid I wanted to discover a secret cave behind a waterfall, and explore it.

There are lots of caves around here in southern France. Cotignac butts right up against a massive cliff that is full of holes. Some of these holes, high up, are home to hundreds of swifts that dart and swirl in the skies in search of insects. Lower down are bigger caves, hollowed out hundreds of years ago by local troglodytes. Some of these caves are still used today by people who own houses up against the cliff, although they use them in fairly pedestrian ways – as garages, for instance, or to store patio furniture. Not exactly Tintin-esque.

There are also waterfalls around. A nearby town – Sillans la Cascade – is named for its huge waterfall, which is a popular destination for weekend walkers. Although, before you get to the deep blue-green pool at the base of those falls, you encounter several barriers with scare signs posted on them. Danger de chute! Acces interdit! Things like that. But there are wide paths worn around those blockades. That's one thing I appreciate about France: It's a relatively less litigious environment than North America, and so people have easy access to potentially dangerous places like abandoned mills, ruined castles, and slippery cliffs. Sure, there might sometimes be signs warning you away, and sometimes even easily-breachable barriers, but they come across as little more than half-hearted municipal suggestions. Nothing to really stop you.

There are waterfalls right here in Cotignac too. There is an easy well-worn path to one of them, and we've been many times. And there's another one too, which isn't exactly unknown, but also isn't exactly easy to get to. It's hidden high up along one side of the cliff, and there's no real path, and I think it might be on private property anyway. Jasper and I finally made it to this "secret waterfall" one recent weekend while Maddox was having an all-afternoon play-date at Hannah's house, and Quincy was enjoying a rare opportunity to have the house to herself. To get to the waterfall, Jasper and I had to beat our way through tall grasses and vines and wild roses along a barbed-wire fence, and then scramble steeply up over crumbling shale alongside a sharply cascading stream. Jasper is a strong climber, and a sensible one too. More than once, as we fumbled for footholds in the slippery rock, she suggested that we stop. "It's too dangerous, Dad," she'd say, "Let's go back before one of us gets hurt." Fair enough. But if she was gonna talk precociously like a parent, I had to respond like an eight-year kid – "Oh come on, just a little bit higher? Please?" – and after three or four dodgy maneuvers, we hauled ourselves up to a large hollowed-out bowl shrouded by trees in the side of the cliff, with the waterfall suddenly thundering down above us and gathering in a wide pool at our feet.

A couple of days later, Eric and I revisited Jasper's secret waterfall while the kids were at school. It was then that we discovered the secret caves as well. There were multiple entrances, including a big one carved into the dry cliff on the far side of the pool, and even one small wet one – barely big enough for a malnourished troglodyte to slip through – partially hidden behind the roaring plume of the waterfall itself. We resolved to come back the next day again, with Jasper, and with headlamps.

And so, the next afternoon, Eric and Jasper and I set off on foot one more time toward the secret waterfall. It really is a lovely walk. Deep-throated croaks of bullfrogs lurking in shallow pools choked with mosses and algae. Black-and-white skittery flashes of magpies in the fig trees. Weedy fields dotted with red poppies and purple irises and rustling stalks of wheat. We munched on tender shoots of wild fennel. We talked about that time many years ago, when Eric and I, along with our friend Noodles, set out with flashlights to explore the abandoned tunnels of a long-defunct iron mine carved deep inside a Connecticut hillside. Some previous trespasser had done the dirty work of cutting through and bending back the steel bars that were supposed to keep foolhardy teenagers like us out of the mine. So only common sense – which we chose not to possess that day – could have prevented us from risking our lives inside the lightless subterranean obstacle course tricked out with sharp stones and broken ladders and deep vertical shafts that appeared suddenly at our feet.

There wasn't quite so much danger lurking behind the secret waterfall here in Cotignac. The caves didn't go very deep. Most of them were pretty well waterlogged, and the one dry tunnel ended in a cave-in after about 15 meters. So, while it was definitely fun and exciting, it's wasn't exactly like my iconic comic book imaginings. No Tintin in pleated pants disappearing through a waterfall with an old-fashioned flashlight in his hands and an exclamation mark above his head. No Snowy with a worried look. No Captain Haddock making a blustering hash of things. And as we explored, we had to be wary of broken glass. Because, of course, Jasper's secret waterfall isn't exactly a secret to people who've grown up in Cotignac. Evidence suggests that local teenagers have been climbing up here for years, to explore, to carve the cliff face with their names and initials and earnest declarations of unrequited love, and to party.

A car is not a truck, in ANY language.

It looks like it is going to be up to me to actually share some reality with you, our gentle readers. Those Schaller brothers have a way of encouraging each other to stray farther and farther from actual events! Sheesh.

I know it has been ages and ages since I have blogged. I thought Erica was doing an excellent job replacing me for a time. But it is becoming very clear (as noted above), that it is time for me to dust off my laptop and get to it.

So, our friends Bob, Erica & West & Donald, Jane, Cara & Caity Rose have all headed off. Not quite home, but to other, greener pastures. And then within less than 48 hours Mark’s brother and belle-soeur, Eric and Paulette, replaced them. So, thankfully, we will not have to face being in Provence alone for some months.

I think the rash of good-byes disturbed Maddox a little bit. A day or two after the great exodus, while I was tucking Maddox in bed for a nap, I had an amusing conversation with him. Why is it all the best conversations happen at tuck-in time? Anyway, it started with him wondering if he will still have to take naps when he is a teenager. I assured him that while he wouldn’t have to, he would probably want to. He looked at me like I was insane. Then he went on to point out that Jasper would be a teenager before him, and then stated that Jasper would die first. At this “realization” he looked crushed and said, “But I always want to have Jasper! I don’t want her to die first!” And of course, as a loving, empathic parent I wanted to take that pain away. I managed to catch myself before I said, “Well, maybe it will be OK and you will die first.” Geez! What was I thinking!? But what are you supposed to say? I ended up saying something pretty lame like, “It’s just best not to think about it.” So lame.

Speaking of lame, I have been continuing to be involved with outings with l’ecole maternelle. Last week I went on another hike with his class. Overall it seemed to go much better than my first. For one thing, I already had all those helpful imperative commands under my belt (“Arrete!” “Avance” etc). It was a lovely hike up over a near-by hill with really breathtaking views across a valley. At the end of the day, a number of the kids, from the petit class especially, several of whom have not yet seen their third birthday, were so tired as to be stumbling more than walking. Like some sort of mini Bataan Death March.

Towards the end of the hike, we were walking along a road that carried some traffic. So, every once in a while a car would come by. I saw a vehicle coming so I yelled out, “Attention! Une voiture!” After I yelled it, I looked up to see two absolutely indignant 3-year olds with thunderclouds hovering over their wee heads. They looked at me, aghast and said, “THAT is NOT a car! That is a truck!!” (translated here for your ease of reading). I was pretty tired myself, which may be why I barely stifled my eye-roll and “puh-lease” and found myself saying, “C’est la même chose!” (It’s the same thing). It turns out, thems fighting words in the 3-year-old set in any country. I didn’t catch all of what they said in response, but it is probably just as well. Let’s just say their already low opinion of me, dropped even farther. You see, my lameness continues.

Last Tuesday I had my first swimming lesson with Maddox’s class. You may recall that I got myself “certified” to be an official parent helper on the insane trips to the pool with l’ecole maternelle. Yes, these crazy people actually knowingly get into a pool with 40 some children, none of whom actually know how to swim. For me, my first day was a real trial-by-fire sort of experience. For the first time on one of these excursions I was paired with someone who didn’t speak a lick of English. I thought to myself, (with some effort), “OK, this is good. This will be good practice for my French.” And to just ratchet up the challenge of it; the powers that be chose to give me and my partner more kids than anyone else had.

All the kids were wearing waterwings, which helped a lot. Most of the kids were very comfortable flopping around in the water with the wings as support. Not Maddox. He has always viewed water wings with a jaundiced, distrustful eye. As a result he clung to me like a barnacle during much of the open water activities.

Some of the activities were pretty bizarre and chaotic. The first of which was “Pirate Boat” which involved two thin rubber boats (really, more like mats), a bunch of water noodles as swords, and then total chaos while all 9 kids writhed and smacked each other in the head with noodles and knocked each other off the boats. Maddox was absolutely terrified. And really, I couldn’t blame him. But it did make it harder for me to be of reasonable help with the other 8 kids I needed to keep from drowning.

Well, in the end, no kid died on my watch. And the only tears were the ones I caused in my own kid (so that hardly counts, right? I mean, that happens almost every day around here.). And it was good for my French. I even learned a new phrase – “Attachez-vous!” (put on your seat belt). So, I guess it was a good day.

In which Mark has the pleasure of introducing another guest blogger: His brother Eric (!)

Introductory note from Mark: After 30 long hours of vacancy, our guest house is occupied again. This week, it's Eric and Paulette. Eric is famous for endlessly imagining that he suffers from dry flaky skin on the soles of his feet, and for being a ridiculously talented renaissance man. Viz: He's not only a professor of biology at an esteemed Ivy League institution, he's also an accomplished artist (with a peculiar affection for sizeable cephalopods). And now, as further evidence of his all-around multi-media virtuosity, Eric has the honor of being only the third person in human history to be a guest blogger for "Our French Files." His narrative – which will begin in mere seconds – offers a lightly fictionalized account of exactly how he and Paulette have been spending their time with us here in the south of France. Here's Eric:


It is Friday, the week of the Cannes Film Festival, and we spent today the same way as we have the last three days. We left our home base in Cotignac driving first along the tight two-lane asphalt roads that wind through the tiny hilltop villages of northern Provence, then finally turning onto a narrow dirt track that ends at a wrought iron gate with massive stone posts: the entrance to Chateau Miraval, sometime home of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Here we dropped off Maddox, purple pillow in hand, and instructing him to toss this into the air. Leaving him behind, we then backed down the track until we found a convenient spot to park off the shoulder and out of sight. We then hiked the quarter mile back to where we had dropped off Maddox and hid ourselves behind some low-lying fig trees and watched what transpired.

Most days this has been nothing. No cars entering or exiting the gate; only the occasional sound of a helicopter, taking off first thing in the morning and then returning late at night, our only affirmation that Brangelina are indeed currently in residence.

Maddox to his credit has been a real trooper, tossing the pillow repeatedly into the air and counting off each catch in binary ("1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, ...") as if he were a human computer. We had considered placing this rather arduous task upon the slightly more doughty shoulders of young Jasper, but precociousness seems more precocious in a four-year-old than an eight-year-old.

As I said, most days nothing has transpired, and we have driven back home with our tired little nephew curled in Quincy’s lap, already asleep and his stiff arms protruding rather pathetically outward like two of the local thick-crusted baguettes. But as I say Maddox has been a real trooper and, like us, returns inspired each morning to take up his post. Ah, the bright hope that springs eternal in a young man’s breast! And today it finally paid off. The pillow tossing, please understand, is nothing but an attention-grabber, just the sort of thing to induce a chauffeur-driven Lamborghini to slow down, and an all-too-well-known passenger to roll down her tinted window and inquire as to the boy’s provenance. At first Maddox does not pause in his well-rehearsed task, continuing to robotically count ever upwards ("... 1111101, 1111110, 1111111, 10000000, 10000001, ...") just long enough to bring a ample-lipped A-list celebrity to full attention. This boy knows binary! He will be a good influence on my brood!

Celebrities know how to seize the moment, as well as a young boy it turns out. Maddox was swept up into the sports car, the day's trip to Cannes forgotten or postponed, and the car with scarcely a sound retreated back up the hillside, past fields of low-lying grape vines, terraced olive groves, until it disappeared behind the gate of the courtyard of the elegantly elephantine Chateau Miraval.

Then there was nothing for us to do but to wait. Which we did in the nearby town of Correns, drinking at a café that serves only organic wine, in our case a most pleasing and delicate Rose, crisp as an apple and light as spring sunshine. Jasper, not to be outdone in seizing the joy of the day, drank a delicious organic chocolate milk shake and ate some of the sweetest pastries ever concocted by a French patisserie. Mark paid for it all with some antique and now highly sought-after French francs. At about eight in the evening, just as the daylight began to fade, we returned to where we last saw Maddox. He was there already, awaiting us, chewing on a stalk of wild fennel and seated on the same pillow we left with him.

The boy was tired, sweaty, and dirty, and dearly in need of a bath. But first he must tell us all of his miraculous day inside the gates of celebrity. And indeed he had much to tell. There was a never-ending film reel titled “Notice to the Academy” that showed scenes of Angelina Jolie from her star turns in Tomb Raider and Beowolf, and which elegantly made the point that some stars have had their performances digitally enhanced to good effect well before Avatar took the world by storm. Then there was the actual suit of armor that Brad Pitt wore in Troy. Our little nephew even got to try it on! A little known Hollywood secret: the armor for all its realism is made of plastic and is surprisingly light; all credit to the acting acumen of the estimable Mr. Pitt for giving it the appearance of weighty metal. Then, finally, Maddox informed us, there were the hours of backbreaking labor down in the vineyards, working shoulder to shoulder with the other juvenile members of the expatriate Hollywood horde. The gnarled vines are trained low to the ground and children, it turns out, are of just the right height to assist in the pruning. Hard work no doubt, but the children do it with nary a peep of protest, inspired by the promise that they will all, one day, appear in an upcoming advertisement for the United Colors of Benetton!

Yes, our nephew Maddox is now immortalized on the internet! And we as well just for knowing him. Some vacation! Check it out at http//www.maddox.r.traveler.joie.com/home.


Afterword from Mark: Hmmm. You'll recall that when I was introducing Eric earlier, I characterized his narrative as "lightly fictionalized." Upon further reflection, I realize that I used the word "lightly" loosely, and more-or-less as a synonym for "almost entirely." There are two things, though, that are kind of true: (1) Eric did have the bizarre idea that it might be fun to teach Maddox how to count in binary code, and (2) Maddox was scarily quick to pick up this almost entirely useless and socially debilitating skill. Thanks Eric.

When I paint my masterpiece

We took a picnic lunch up to the hilltop ruins of Castellas à Forcalqueiret a few days ago, and it was pretty darn awesome. That night, as Quincy and I were putting the kids to bed, I was reflecting enthusiastically on the day. "I love ruined castles," I said. The kids had their own opinions. Said Maddox: "I love castles what aren't ruined and have bakeries inside them."

Meanwhile, we're hoping that our house here in Cotignac doesn't become a ruin itself before we're done with it. It's a rental, after all. It's not like we're bad renters, but things do break down. (We bought a brand new coffee maker to replace the one that succumbed, on our watch, to years of calcium deposits from the famously hard French tap-water). And things just break, period – especially on these stone-hard floors. Cups, saucers, plates, bowls. Hell, last week we broke 3 wine glasses in just one single evening. (I realize that makes us suddenly sound like we're Def Leppard trashing a hotel room here, but I assure you, there is a legitimate and non-drunken-debauchery explanation for each and every bit of breakage.)

We're especially attentive to breakage because of all the kids passing through our house. Our friends Donald and Jane arrived in Cotignac a few days ago, with their daughters Cara and Caity Rose, both of whom are at the ages (like our own kids) where hands and feet seem especially likely to seek out and slash themselves on any stray shard of broken crockery. Plus, Bob and Erica are here as well, with baby West; and West is at the age where he explores his expanding world by putting everything possible in his mouth. Anyway, keeping things pristine is a bit of a chore, what with our doors open to the terrace all to the time, and the breezes blowing, and kids tromping in and out. Luckily, the mottled terracotta floor-tiles disguise most of the dirt, so it doesn't look quite as filthy as it always is. The flip side, though, is that we're sometimes reminded of that hidden filth in ways that are, well, just a bit horrifying. Like the other day when Erica heard West half-gagging on something and, upon extricating that something from his mouth, discovered it to be an old Bandaid.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Maddox yesterday decided to re-decorate his bedroom with a crayon, and he spent the better part of the morning doing so. His bedroom is a sizeable estate, including (and I'm only exaggerating the slightest bit) his own antechamber, bathroom, and office, as well as the bedroom itself. That's a lot of walls to cover with crayon. And he covered them all with a series of designs that, while not exactly sophisticated, were impressively coherent in style and motif. Mostly they were cycles of loops and swoops and rounded humps – like an endless series of hills seen from afar, or the world's largest herd of purple elephants – plus a few generous X's and hearts for visual punctuation.

And of course, because this house isn't actually ours, it's all illicit graffiti. It's not allowed. We punished him by sending him down the street, with Jasper and Cara and Caity Rose, to spend several hours playing with clay in the studio of a local potter. He loved it (that'll teach him). They all loved it. Meanwhile, I spent a good chunk of my afternoon with a sponge and bucket of soapy water.

Carnaval

On the weekend before we went to beach, there was Carnaval. It's a very big deal in Cotignac. It started Saturday morning with a parade, and lasted through nightfall when, down in the dirt field where the old men play at boules, there was a burning-in-effigy of a gigantic tissue-paper gingerbread man – a spectacle that maybe symbolized something but, if so, I don't know what. In any case, the burning of this faux-confectionary effigy started and ended so quickly that Quincy and Maddox and I (arriving late to the boulodrome) missed it entirely. Jasper was there though, and she said it was awesome.

We'd been anticipating Carnaval for weeks and weeks. The kids had been advised, through endless flyers sent home from school, to dress in déguisements. In the days leading up to the big day, we could watch a massive truck-sized dragon – a parade float – being built in the garage across the street from our house. Maddox loved peeking in on the emerging monster as it got a freshly painted coat of bright green scales and a bright red mouth. Eventually, the dragon even breathed fire (well, okay, just smoke).

On the morning of Carnaval itself, Jasper and Maddox mustered at their respective schools along with every kid in Cotignac. They were all in costume. The theme this year had something to do with myths and legends and fables and fairytales, and I suspect that this theme was made explicit in order to cut back on the number of kids dressed up as Spiderman and Iron Man. There were still a few, of course. But mostly there were lots of princesses and pirates, and lots of medieval knights waving cardboard swords. Jasper was the Mad Hatter – although, with her oversized flamboyant floppy hat, she might easily have passed for a pimp informant instead, or Bootsy Collins.

Maddox was a pirate and, as is his fashion, he wore his eyepatch well up on the top of his head, where it looked less like a pirate's eyepatch and more like a lopsided homemade yarmulke, or maybe some sort of embarrassingly weird unnecessary toupee.

Quincy borrowed one of my many bandanas to make herself a last-minute pirate costume as well, and she marched in the parade along with Maddox and his classmates from l'école maternelle. In fact, Quincy found herself suddenly appointed a parade marshal of some sort, which was a little scary because it suggested that she would be burdened with lots of opaque responsibilities. But, ultimately, her primary responsibility seemed simply to wear an orange armband.

The parade was led by a car full of blood-donation enthusiasts dressed up as corpuscles. (They looked a lot like Woody Allen as a giant sperm in that famous movie scene from 1972, except bright red instead). The red corpuscles were followed by a rag-tag massive mob of schoolchildren, all in costume, and some of them riding elaborately decorated bicycles and scooters as well. There were also various grown-up groups too, including an enthusiastic troupe of French cowboy dancers (who later would please the crowds in semi-synchrony to the tune of "Achy Breaky Heart") dressed up in the kind of ornate West Coast western wear once favored by Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Bringing up the rear were a few whimsical floats, including one with a human-sized deck-of-cards, and another that appeared to be celebrating some sort of vaguely sexual union between Pocahontas and The Big Bad Wolf (and maybe the three little pigs too; it was pretty high-concept). Finally, tugged by a tractor, came the smoke-belching dragon itself, accompanied by confetti-tossing wig-wearing dragon-wranglers and a set of massive speakers blaring out songs by the Rolling Stones. After a few slow boisterous processions around town, the parade petered out, the dragon and wolf and Queen of Hearts parked themselves on the sidewalks, and tout le monde spent the rest of the day milling festively around the central square, eating crêpes, drinking drinks, and bouncing on the bouncy castle.

Later, when I asked the kids what their favorite parts of Carnaval had been, Maddox singled out the bouncy castle. Jasper especially liked the burning gingerbread man. She also really liked it when the costume contest awards were announced: She and her MadHatterBootsyPimp outfit won second prize.

The prize itself turned out to be a flimsy pen and spiral notebook, and she loves them both. She has begun to fill the notebook with the first lines of a book that she says she's writing. It's got illustrations too.

I'm reminded of when I was a kid, living in Pakistan in the early 1970s, when my brother Eric and I were both deeply under the influence of Spiderman and Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer, and one day we decided to draw our own superhero comic books. We were on a 3-week road trip with my dad, from Lahore up the Karakoram Highway into the Hindu Kush. (It's here, by the way, that Quincy and Erica and Doug Kenrick all start rolling their eyes skyward as I dip knowing into my deep reservoir of self-parody.) With the snowy peaks of Rakaposhi and Nanga Parbat towering over us, Eric and I hunched for hours over our notebooks, drawing muscular panels modeled after the familiar formulas of Marvel Comics: the predictable super-powers that arise from random accidents, the sudden super-villains with their ludicrous names, the dumb dialogue.

Jasper, happily, has chosen to go in a rather different direction in her first book. Her book reads like this: Once upon a time, there was a bunny who lived in the blakberry bushs at Jericho beach. On the other side of the beach, there was a house and in that house, lived a cat. Now it just hapyned that one day they met. The bunny said "who are you?" Then the cat said "I'm Srauberry. Who are you?" "I'm Buttercup" said the Bunny. "do you whant to play eneathing Buttercup" asked Srauberry. "No" replied Buttercup.

So far, that's it; but it's only been a week, and Jasper's been pretty busy with school and other entertainments. She hasn't really had the time to work out exactly how to move her narrative forward in the face of Buttercup's curt indifference. My Pakistani superhero comic never made it past its second page. Jasper's book may, or may not, run longer than that.

More guest bloggin' from Erica Ellis! (accompanied by unnecessary interjections from Mark)

Introductory note from Mark: Yep, Bob and Erica and West are still here, drinking wine and eating cheeses (or, in West's case, drinking breastmilk and eating mashed prunes) with us here in France; and Erica is proving to be an indefatigable guest-blogger. But this time I'm not just sitting back and let her spin her fanciful factual tales. I'll be interjecting occasionally, in outraged blue. But first, here's Erica...

The Island of Pork Roll

We have just returned today from a brief vacation – a break from both the gruelling sabbatical that Mark and Quincy are enduring and our little sojourn abroad. We all felt the need to escape the hustle and bustle of Cotignac and retreat to the peaceful environs of St. Tropez and surrounds. OK I’ll stop with the tongue in cheek (who am I? Mark???).

Whaddayamean "tongue in cheek"? This is a blog, dammit, a blog, and I take it dead seriously. Jeezum peezum, we provide Erica with space on our blog (precious precious space; the internet doesn't grow on trees, you know) and she uses this hallowed forum to fling insults at me and my blogging style? I'm outraged! And she does it without even once mentioning footnotes or J.D. Salinger or my parody-able penchant for reflecting back on my childhood experiences overseas? I'm speechless.

But seriously, we decided that we would all head to the beach while Bob and I were here. Quincy located a lovely little seaside "campground," about 1-hour’s drive away. Not only did this place promise easy beach access but also the famed island of Porquerolles (promptly dubbed profiterole, or pork roll for short) was just a short ferry ride away.

The only twist in our plan was that our friend Carol was also coming on this trip, which put us one person over what the excellent Renault Scenic wagon could carry. So we embarked on an ambitious plan involving a one-way car rental and return train ride back to Geneva for Carol, leaving us with the requisite 7 people for the return trip to Cotignac, and the need to pack really, really light (turns out by the time you pack the Scenic full with 7 people you’ve pretty much used up most of the room for baggage).

Okay, that's better. No more flinging of insults at poor ol' Mark. Good too that Erica is back on firmer footing here: Expressing her love for our car. Which, by the way, really did a splendid job of handling all seven of us and all our stuff. And, despite the need to pack light, it actually wasn't a small amount of stuff at all. We had to provide our own bedding at the beachside camping cabins we rented. That's a lot of pillows and blankets we had to jam into the car, including a bizarrely oversized thick duvet for Bob and Erica that ended up being about sixteen times bigger than their bed itself. Plus an entire crib for baby West. And my computer too, so that Erica could compose this litany of insults and grievances that we have so generously allowed her to post on our blog.

On the whole, I would say that this restricted luggage idea paid off for us since our "cabins" [tiny mobile homes: the “RapidHome”] at the "campground" were enchantingly small. Like living on a boat I imagine: 2-ft wide doorways, bedrooms hardly larger than the beds, etc. I particularly liked the arrangement of the two bedroom doorways at 90 degrees to each other so that no sooner had you crashed through one doorway (say at 2 AM to get a crying baby) then you had to crash right into the next one more or less within the same step. I say crash because I’m not entirely convinced that we could walk through the doorway face on, and particularly not while carrying West, so there was a fair number of impacts with the door frame. It didn’t help too much that our whole mobile home was listing slightly so that one of the doors always wanted to shut and the other always wanted to swing open.

Meanwhile, over in the Schaller/Young unit, Jasper and Maddox were sharing a room roughly the size of a coffee table. Now, when I was a kid (living in the Serengeti, traveling the Karakoram Highway, reading and re-reading "The Catcher in the Rye" that one summer in Brazil, et cetera, et cetera, et parody-able cetera), my brother Eric and I always shared a room and I was used to it. But not Jasper and Maddox. They live like royalty. In Vancouver they have their own rooms. Here in Cotignac, they not only have their own rooms, they have their own bathrooms. Maddox even has his own office! So it was a bit of an adjustment for them to sleep in such tight quarters, on beds so slim that, one night at 3 a.m., Maddox actually fell right out of bed and cut his face on the floor. Luckily, it didn't really bleed much, because we needed to save our bandages for his various cuts and scrapes on his hands and feet and knees. Happily, injuries heal. Insults, however – especially parenthetical remarks about someone else's blogging style – well, they just hurt and hurt and hurt.

However, much as we may have felt that the quarters were perhaps on the tight side, West was a big, big fan of the "RapidHome": lots of smooth faux-bamboo flooring to worm around on, built-in doorstops to chew on, and easy access to the outdoor deck with its rubber doormat (yum). And the campground was delightfully quiet. Or at least it was until they started into three solid days of continuous chain-sawing of the trees at the front.

There was also that pesky seagull that kept hanging around, hoping to steal some of the food we were eating at our outdoor tables. Carol especially seemed leery of the lingering bird. At one point I jokingly threatened to toss some cheese rinds on the roof of Carol's cabin, and she in return happily threatened to sneak out at midnight and slather peanut butter all over the roof of ours. "How would you like that?" she warned. I told her that I'd like it very much – that, in fact, I'd actually pay money to have her spend her night smearing peanut butter all over our roof, because it would be one helluva funny thing to blog about. Although, of course, Erica would probably just make fun of it later, leaving me deeply, deeply hurt.

Bob and I had scoped out the beach on Google Earth and were pretty excited about our second trip to the Mediterranean. We had previously hiked the Cinque Terra in 2004 and had really loved that deep blue colour, so different from our local ocean in Vancouver. As we walked down to the beach on the first day, we exited the seaside forest and took in the vista and were taken aback by what looked like endless drifts of brown garbage. Blech! The stuff formed spongy piles as much as 3 ft high all up and down the beach, and getting into the ocean required a trip both on top of the dried portion and then through the sludgy mass at the water’s edge. The source of the drifts was a bit of a mystery until we read an informative sign: meet Posidonia oceanica, a sea grass. It probably goes without saying that the kids looooved it – kind of like playing in piles of dead leaves in the fall. The weirdest thing about this stuff is that in addition to drifts of dead biomass, it forms these little balls of fibre, some as big as baseballs, that also line the beaches. If the berms of dead and rotting seaweed hadn’t put us off the local beach, the realization that West + sandy beach = non-stop parental management kind of extinguished our remaining desire/ability to hang out peacefully a la plage. Luckily, the peninsula was encircled almost entirely by a hiking path (le Sentier Littoral), which we availed ourselves of and much fun was had by all…

It was fun. I think Erica was finding it especially delightful because, while hiking the trail, she was also thinking about how she would blog enthusiastically about it later and how she would use that blog to make parenthetical remarks strategically designed to insult – indeed to wound – one famously small-headed and thin-skinned friend.

Our daytrip to the island of Porquerolles was also hectically fun – nothing like carting around a nap-deprived baby to put some extra "verve" into your sightseeing! However, West was generally quite a good sport and survived his first bike trip (sans helmet bien sur). There are very few cars on the island so the only way to get to the various gorgeous beaches is to hoof it or rent bikes. I didn’t expect that the roads would be quite as rustic as they were, but then without cars I’m guessing there’s not much impetus to do a whole lot of paving and upkeep. West’s bike seat had springs underneath it, and he spent much of his time in the seat chewing on the safety bar. We spent the afternoon at the Plage de Notre Dame, which was beautiful, although the name struck me as somewhat sacrilegious. And it turns out that a rocky beach is a much better bet with a baby – then all you have to do is to monitor the rock intake, direct him to relatively large stones, ply him with palm fronds and sticks, etc. Sand sucks. Carol and I were both struck with the feeling that we had been dropped into a James Bond movie: hot sun and sailboats anchored in turquoise water with good-looking tanned women sunning themselves on the decks (the Bond girls). We all agreed that we would be happy to come back and stay a lot longer – but never, ever any later in the summer than June. The Island of Pork Roll was already plenty hot in April, and it apparently gets a staggering 6,000 visitors A DAY in July and August. Gah.

Okay, I'm over it. Yes, of course, my mock-outrage was all tongue in cheek. Besides, from my perspective, there is no higher compliment than to be made fun of.

Anyway, I’ve barely scraped the surface of our escapades but I’m tired of typing. Got to save my reserves for another exhausting day in Provence tomorrow – wine-tasting, market, etc. You know how it is…

Oh yes, I know how it is. I know all too well. Meanwhile, let's all give a big hearty "thank you" to Erica, for keeping our blog lively and up to date, and for keeping it (mostly) clean.

Guest blogger! (Erica Ellis)

Introductory note from Mark: Quincy and I are delighted, once again, to avail ourselves of the lazy way of maintaining a blog. We convinced Erica to spend a precious chunk of her holiday time sitting in front of a computer, in order to write something for our blog. Quincy expressed the opinion that Erica's observations are far more factually accurate and informative than anything that I've posted in the last three months, and she's probably right. Nevertheless, I'm allowing it to appear here (mostly) unedited, and without footnotes. Now, here's Erica...

Have Baby, Will Travel

I must confess that the title of this blog is slightly misleading, as though we were jet-setting parents of a 9-month old baby. In fact, this is West’s second time ever leaving the Metro Vancouver area: go big or go home we figured… You know that old saying about how you either have money or time but not both? Right now we have time (or at least West and I do), so here we are.

I promised Mark that we would do some guest-blogging and I thought I would write a post about my first impressions of Cotignac and surrounds, before I’m so used to being here that it’s all old hat and I feel like a local (I wish).

We arrived here after what felt like about 24 hours of continuous travel and Mark did indeed greet us in the airport with the offer of delightful local cheeses and bread, and was wonderfully chipper considering that we had kept him waiting for about an extra 5 hours due to our flight being delayed (see Icelandic volcano…). We rounded out our arrival by changing West’s diaper on the front lawn of the Nice airport, attempting some breastfeeding on the side of what turned out to be the main exit from the airport parking lot (not very successful – very distractable baby), and then peeled out of the parking lot with me frantically pumping milk in the back seat – vive la France! I’m sure they were glad to see the last of us…

It’s about 1 ½ hours from Nice to Cotignac by car. And what a car! I was struck again how compact and efficient European cars are – M&Q’s is smaller than a Mazda 5 but can carry 7 people, is a (quiet and speedy) diesel and has all sorts of nifty built-ins from double sunroofs to window shades. We’re in love… ;-) But I digress. We arrived in Cotignac just as it was getting very dark, driving through the main square where the bars and restaurants were still lit up and then pulling into this little tiny alley in front of their house to unload our gear (we are travelling with a baby after all, so not the definition of travelling light).

As we entered the house to go say hello to Quincy, I had the impression of endless stairs, landings and dark doorways – somehow it seemed ridiculous to have the main living area three floors up! (I have since gotten fairly used to this idea). I have to say that despite following their blog, I was unprepared for the ‘house’. It’s really more of a compound, which is also not the right word I think since that has a negative connotation, but I can’t think of how else to describe it. It’s a combination of one 3 ½-floor townhouse bounding a large, multi-tiered and tiled/gravelled exterior garden area, with a 2-floor townhouse on the other side. The garden is a combination of exterior patios (many), planted areas, and pool. And it’s big! And the ‘plants’ in the garden are big! Like 50-60 foot trees big… It’s really, really lovely. There are birds tweeting and cooing pretty much always during the day, and at night there are frogs (we presume in the nearby river canyon and not, say, in the pool). The weather has been pretty warm lately so we spend a lot of time outside reading, eating, playing ping pong (Bob and Mark mostly, multiple times a day), and watching West play with gravel and drag himself around on the ground. Not quite warm enough for the unheated pool but we’re getting there.

The other main surprise for me is how bucolic and rural it is. I’m not sure exactly why this is a surprise to me, but it is. The town of Cotignac is nearly continuous stone, tile and bits of asphalt but it takes about 10 minutes (walking, with a baby) to get out of the town and into the surrounding countryside which is very, very green right now. I guess that’s the real surprise – I pictured this hot, arid landscape with nary a spare drop of water and bits of vegetation clinging to life, but instead it’s grassy and treed and there are little streams and waterfalls all over the place. Which probably explains why this region is called La Provence Verte. There are wildflowers aplenty and gardens in bloom, and even some of the vineyards are starting to sprout. It’s beautiful (and pollen-y).

Anyway, West is napping and I am going to take advantage of the remaining nap for some breakfast and downtime.

Ash cloud

I drove to Nice last Thursday, to pick up our friends Erica and Bob (and their baby) at the airport. I figured they'd be tired after their long flight from Vancouver, via Frankfurt; and, as I know from sad experience, traveling with an infant is rarely conducive to fine dining in transit; so when they emerged from customs, I planned to welcome them to the south of France with some of my favorite fresh olive bread and an assortment of cheeses – including an amazing Comté that I'd discovered the week before. But – spoiler alert! – they didn't arrive on schedule. They were late!

You maybe haven't heard because it's probably been buried in the back pages of your local paper that you don't even read anymore and is going out of business anyway, but apparently there was some volcano in Iceland that erupted last week, spilling ash into the sky, and causing problems for flights in and out of European airports. Yeah, it was news to me too. So, anyway, they missed their connection in Frankfurt. What a pain. Sure, Luftansa found room for them on the very next flight to Nice that afternoon, but that was, like, three hours later. Three hours! That's three hours I was forced to spend hanging out on the Côte d'Azur, munching on olive bread and aged cheeses under the palm trees and Mediterranean sunshine. That's three hours of my life I'm never gonna get back. Freakin' volcano. Talk about inconvenience!

Wait. What? You'd already heard about the volcano? And what's that? You don't think that my faux-outraged tale of minor delays and fine cheeses registers – not even a tiny bit – on the ash-related tale-o'-woe-o-meter? Oh. Okay, fine. I'll stop fishing fruitlessly for sympathy. I'll go back to tolerating your envy instead.

Given that almost all European airspace has been off-limits to airplanes for the past week, and that a hundred thousand people have been spending days and days becoming all the more depressing familiar with the bright un-cozy corridors of FRA or LHR or CDG, with no exit in sight, it's really quite amazing that Erica and Bob and their baby made it here at all. When you're traveling overseas with a squalling infant, it's hard to remain chipper in the face of airline inconvenience; but it maybe helps just a bit when, for days on end, the news stories remind you that, in fact, you are about the least inconvenienced air travelers in all of Europe.

So, anyway, instead of spending their week surreally trapped in transit, Erica and Bob have been doing exactly the kinds of things that you'd envision our visitors doing – and which you'd be doing yourselves if you were hanging out with us: Drinking rosé and eating leisurely lunches on our terrace, going for sunny walks where the rosemary grows wild and abundant on the hillsides, spending ever more money on ever more vast quantities of olives and cheeses at the Tuesday morning market. Playing a lot of ping-pong. Oh, also, Erica and Bob have been wiping copious amounts of baby slobber off of their baby's chin, their own clothes, and pretty much every surface of our house. You know, it's not been so very long since Jasper and Maddox were that age, but I'd totally forgotten how much drool an infant can produce. Like a spaniel or something. Anyway, wine and cheese and drool. That's life here in France these days. That and an eager interest in the volcano and its consequences.

Speaking of which: Quincy's brother Galen has been staying here with us as well. He arrived way back when the airplanes were still flying regular schedules, but his stay here has gone on longer than originally planned. He was ticketed to leave last Sunday, from Marseilles to Frankfurt and then onward. So, obviously, that didn't happen. He's been on his laptop a lot, monitoring the ash cloud chaos with some amusement, and working out a plausible exit strategy. His latest plan involves taking advantage of our relative proximity to the open-airspace promised-land that is Spain: A series of trains from Aix to Marseilles to Montpelier to Barcelona, and then to Madrid, and then an alleged flight out of Madrid. We'll see.