In which we visit awesome castles, ruined and not

The real shocker is that all four of us were in upbeat moods throughout the morning that we explored Carcassonne. That was quite a change from the two previous days, at Pont du Gard and Peyrepertuse – both which I now know to be among the most visually awesome places for any parent to spend his time wishing that he could legally thrash the hell out of his determinedly grouchy daughter.

Yes, Jasper is precocious. She's still only 8 years old, but increasingly she acts like she's 12 or 13. And I mean that, obviously, in the least positive way possible.

Of course, if you asked her, she'd assure you that the cause of her sullen displeasure can be traced to me and my Draconian parenting practices. Regardless, it was irritating. And aesthetically frustrating: Jasper's been regularly wearing a red sweater that just happens to look dynamite in photos – a great wet splash of color to punctuate the monolithic earth-tones of all these ancient ruins – but she vigorously refused to be photographed. When she'd see me with my finger on the shutter, she'd bolt immediately from wherever she'd been so picture-perfectly posed and flee, as fast as she could, up some flight of stone steps.

But at Carcassonne, Jasper was all smiles as she cheerfully characterized the legendarily well-preserved medieval city to be "kind of boring." I didn't find it boring. With its turrets and portcullises and throngs of camera-toting tourists, Carcassonne is like some sort of derelict Disneyland. And even though the castle is a UNESCO World Heritage site, it's still part of the living urban landscape, full of retail shops and restaurants and motorcycles zooming over historic drawbridges and diesel trucks rumbling down medieval alleyways barely big enough for a bicycle. As a pedestrian and parent to two distractable children, I didn't find that boring at all.

That's something that I really get a kick out of here in France: the way that deeply historical stuff is taken for granted; the way it's just part of the ordinary landscape.

Traveling around France, or even just walking around Cotignac, I'm reminded of the phrase that V. S. Naipaul famously used to characterize the American south: "a landscape of small ruins." During the times that I've traveled around North Carolina and other southern states, I've really resonated to those regular bits of ordinary wreckage – old barns overgrown with kudzu, uneven porches being slowly shattered by wisteria, that sort of thing. But, if anything, "a landscape of small ruins" is an even more apt description of southern France. I mean, sure, there are plenty of impressive huge ruins here too – immense displays of ancient architecture like the Pont du Gard and all, blah blah blah. But it's the countless little ruins – the ones we see everywhere – that I dig so much on a daily basis: The crumbling mill at the edge of a village; the half-collapsed hilltop chapel; the cylindrical remnants of abandoned wells amidst the rocks and rangy weeds of almost every orchard. At an intellectual level, it's humbling to encounter these constant casual reminders that, no matter how sturdy we might try to make the things we make, our things are ultimately no match for the rain and the wind and the sun. And there's also something so aesthetically pleasing in these juxtapositions of engineering and entropy: I just like the way they look.

The big ruins look pretty great too, and even Jasper's headstrong grumpiness was no match for the dilapidated awesomeness of Peyrepertuse – which, with its dizzying mountaintop location and sharp geometries, has an almost Machu Picchu-like quality about it. Hours later, after we'd returned to the cramped little "camping" cabin where we spent the night, Jasper snuggled up to me as I downloaded that day's photos onto my laptop, and she giggled in amusement at the pictures that I had taken of her attempts to avoid being in the pictures I was taking. And then we looked at them again, and she laughed out loud all over again, and so did I.

But why, mama?

The circus came to town. Helen was in town and she and I took the kids. We opted to spend the few extra euros for ring-side seats. Sounded worth it just to avoid the discomfort of the bleachers. It was a very cute mom-and-pop kind of an organization. It featured a goat. Only in the south of France would a goat be considered a legitimate act for a circus. It was pretty cute and did some very goat-like balancing. In addition to the goat there were a number of other barnyard animals plus a few exotics like horses, llamas, an anaconda. You know, the usual. There were 4 human performers: a clown (who was introduced as an American. Ha ha), two women both of whom did acrobatics of sorts, and another guy who was the master of ceremonies/jugglar/animal trainer. The whole thing was surprisingly entertaining. The kids loved it, of course. But I think if you asked them they would say their favourite thing was the caramel-corn (popcorn sucre, en français).

We celebrated Easter here in our usual way. We had our annual egg-hunt. Can it still be annual if the location has changed so entirely and none of our usual neighborhood children were here? I don’t know. But, I still like to think of it as our annual event, no matter where we are. Jasper, for some reason did NOT want to invite any of her friends to it. I think she might be embarrassed at our French, but that is just my guess. It worked out okay though. We had plenty of people. Some friends from Switzerland were here for the weekend, and they have 9 year-old twins who joined in the activities. And we invited a couple of Maddox’s friends: Hannah (of course!), & Amalie and her sister Ellie. We did it in the later afternoon, which meant the adults were standing around drinking wine rather than coffee, which was a decided improvement. As usual we had lots of little chocolate eggs, plus the “grand prize” (a giant egg filled with Easter bunny snacks – carrots etc). Maddox wants me to tell you that he found the giant egg.

We just got back from a 3-day trip to Cathar country, also known as the “country of countries” because the south of France in the middle ages was a bunch of independent city-states. There are many cool castle-like sights to see, from crumbling ruins (Peyrepertuse) to still-lived-in cities (Carcasonne). Mark will be blogging about this too. I mostly want to say that I loved this trip. My favorite day was the day we drove to Peyrepertuse and back. We (accidentally) had no paper map with us at all and were relying entirely on our GPS (have I mentioned how much I loooove my GPS?). it was really kind of fun to have no idea where we were, where we were going, or how we were going to get there, but still being totally relaxed about it. I realized it was like having a local in the car telling us which way to go. We were on lots of tiny roads and the country was varied and gorgeous. For her own mysterious reasons, Madamoiselle TomTom (what we call our GPS) took us on one route on the way there and a different route on the way home. It was great. It was like we toggled a “take us on a scenic round trip” button on accident.

It was amusing to me, some of the discussion we got into with Jasper and Maddox on this trip. Some of them I could have predicted (who were the Cathar’s?, what is religious persecution? why?) others were a bit of a surprise (what is a dungeon?, what is torture? why?). It is always interesting to me how hard it is to explain some of these things to kids. Especially the why questions. As we sat at the top of Peyrepertuse, I explained to Maddox why it was a good strategic place for a castle. It was built at the top of a steep hill, to keep invading armies out, etc. But I was hard-pressed to explain they why of it. Why did armies come along and try to invade a castle? The answer to, ‘to take it over’, was of course immediately followed by another (and really unanswerable) ‘why?’. Why, indeed? Just like the why’s about religious persecution. Why did the medieval catholic church feel the need to engage in crusades against the Cathar’s? The sorts of answers I could come up with that might satisfy an adult (political power, greed etc) just don’t cut it with a kid. Being unable to answer these questions satisfactorily for the kids ended up making the experience of being in these places that much more powerful for me. It forced me to just sit with it: Why?

Poissons d'Avril

We're deep into April now and I've had a run of dreams I which I'm trying to dispose of a dead body, and only semi-successfully. One night, frustrated by my accomplices' half-assed efforts, I grabbed a shovel myself and proceeded to dig an enormous burial pit in the soft yielding dirt underneath a neighbor's vegetable garden. A few nights later, I was in a hotel room and the dead body was crammed into a backpack. I hefted the heavy pack onto my back and proceeded to walk out into the hotel hallway, down the stairs, and through a lobby full of policemen, counting on my practiced nonchalance to keep me out of custody. Weird dreams because, really, when you think about it, of all the people you know, I'm about the last person who'd ever need to surreptitiously divest himself of a freshly killed corpse.

(This raises an interesting question: Of all the of all the people you know, who's the first person who you'd think might someday need to surreptitiously divest himself of a freshly killed corpse? I don't want to know the answer. But it is a fun ice-breaker kind of question. Feel free to trot it out the next time you need to dent one of those awkward silences that crops up around the communal breakfast table at a Bed & Breakfast somewhere.)

As I write this, I'm in Carcassonne. But despite it's name, there are no dead bodies here. (Get it: Carcassonne; carcasses. Ah never mind.) It's vacation time again. Not for me, of course (I'm on sabbatical, remember, not on holiday), but for the kids. Their latest two-week holiday started just over a week ago, after April Fish day.

It turns out that April 1 is a very hilarious big deal here in France, with lots of highjinks and tomfoolery. But it's not called April Fools day here. It's April Fish day: Poissons d'Avril. When I picked up Maddox from preschool that afternoon, he was brandishing a whole fistful of paper fishes that he'd apparently spent all day cutting out and coloring in. Jasper had eaten lunch at home that day (because the cantine menu simply read "aioli" which seemed just so mysteriously weird – a lunch of upmarket mayonnaise and nothing else? – that even she didn't want to take a chance on it) and she too had her pockets stuffed with crudely-made paper fishes and bits of tape. At her school, apparently, kids spent their recess time trying to stick these fish facsimiles onto other kids' backs without them noticing. Kind of like a "Kick Me" sign, only without any apparent consequences.

As for me, Poissons d'Avril passed without finding myself the sad patsy of any piscine pranks – at least as far as I know. I did briefly toy with the idea that maybe the cryptically mononymic cantine menu ("ailoi") was some sort of unfunny joke, but then I learned that, in fact, aioli is actually a sort of culinary shorthand referring to a completely legitimate lunchtime offering (a plate consisting of fish and vegetables in an aioli sauce) and everyone knows it. Well, everyone except the small-headed rube who, until last week, didn't even know the first thing about April Fish Day.

As for Carcassonne, more about that soon.

Our guesthouse finally gets guests to house

Last week I had a lunch in a restaurant here in Cotignac and it occurred to me that it was the first time I'd eaten in a French restaurant since we arrived almost three months ago. There's something a bit funny about that. I mean, most foody folks – and I think that Quincy and I might qualify as foody folks – fetishize French cooking, and when they visit France they make a point to eat out. Somehow that just hasn't been our priority. When Quincy (who wasn't even with me at lunch) asked me about my meal afterwards, I used words like "murky" and "fishy" and "sludgy" to describe it. Her reaction suggested that she thought that I'd found the food disappointing, which isn't true at all. I meant those words in the most positive possible way. The food was fine, and it filled me up.

(Hmm, maybe that last sentence disqualifies me as foody folk after all.)

The impetus behind my restaurant meal was the fact that my parents were visiting for a week. The weekend before they arrived, our friend Carol came down from Geneva for a visit. And just before my parents left town, our friend Helen from Seattle arrived. Yep, now that spring has arrived, the onslaught of visitors has begun.

Please don't misunderstand my use of the word "onslaught" (especially if you're among the parade of people who're planning on visiting during the coming months). I assure you that I'm using the word in the most positive possible way.

Also, if you do visit us, I promise that we won't subject you to the same hardships that Carol endured. Carol's visit coincided with a brief stretch of unseasonably cold weather and we hadn't yet discovered how to successfully heat our guesthouse. We've since learned that the guesthouse "radiator" is merely decorative – kind of like having an ugly painting of a clown on your wall. (Or, more to the point: it's kind of like having an ugly sculpture of a radiator on your wall). We've also now located a portable space heater. And it's sunny and warm now too. After Carol, none of our subsequent guests have needed to sleep clothed in multiple layers of fleece jackets and woolen caps. Also, Maddox hasn't vomited on anybody since her visit either.

Of course, if you want something to read when you're here, I suggest you bring your own books. There's French literature on the bookshelves here, but we don't have much in the way of English-language books lying around. Rather than lugging tons of books over from Canada, Quincy and I opted for lighter, more electronic solutions. Quincy's got a Kindle. And I do a lot of reading on-line, a strategy that produces pleasingly haphazard entertainments. (A few days ago, for instance, and without any intention whatsoever to do so, I spent all evening reading about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.). Carol resorted to scrounging a Lemony Snicket book from Jasper's room, and my parents spent their week reading and re-reading Tintin comics.

In addition to Tintin and delicious sludgy restaurant food, I kept my parents intermittently entertained with walks around Cotignac. On one walk I picked a bunch of wild asparagus growing by the roadside and, despite my mom's contention that it'd be coated in dog urine, I served it up for dinner. We also played a lot of table tennis. My dad used to be a ping-pong demon during his undergraduate days – almost 60 years ago – and he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to once again throw down some topspin-heavy forehand smashes. My mom holds her own at the table too, and the mere act of palming a paddle again brought forth a flood of proud recollections her about sporty teenage years. You probably didn't know, for instance, that she had the highest bowling score among all the girls in her gym class.

("Oh that was just on that one day," said my mom when I read that previous sentence out loud to her, "and then that man died" – referring to the fact that news of FDR's death irritatingly overshadowed her moment of gym-class glory. She also suggested that I blog a bit about her high school badminton exploits; but, alas, I've failed to record the details.)

She flew back to the States today. My dad left a couple of days earlier, to attend a meeting in Switzerland. I accompanied him via train to Geneva where, after making sure that he boarded the right train to continue his onward journey to Montreux, I spent the night at Carol's place, before returning home the next day. (It was super warm and cozy in Carol's apartment, by the way, and chockablock with English-language books; I borrowed one for the long ride home). It was a lot of train travel in a short time. But I was happy to hang out with my dad and to make sure he actually made his connections. Although he's traveled in crazy ways in crazy places all his life, this was the first time he'd actually ridden the rails in Europe in over 40 years, so he was feeling a bit clueless and uncertain about the whole thing. My favorite part of the journey occurred when a French train conductor came around to check our tickets. He was wearing a cheap gray suit over a purple turtleneck, and an old-fashioned driving cap of the sort that I associate with golfers of the Ben Hogan era. I nudged my dad to tell him to get his ticket out. "There's the ticket puncher," I said. My dad looked. "He doesn't much look like a ticket puncher," he said, "He looks like the kind of guy who wants to sell you dirty pictures." For reasons that I can't quite explain, I found that hilarious in about six different ways.

Il ne chant pas

Maddox at age 4, just received his first report card. I kid you not. I think I may have said this before, but wow, the French do seem to take their early schooling very seriously. I wouldn’t be surprised if the kids in the petit class (Maddox is in the moyenne class) get report cards too! They actually judge to what extent they colour in the lines and are able to make a squiggle design just so. Anyway, it was of no surprise to either Mark or me that on most things Maddox didn’t even rate an “in progress”. You know, in minor things such as speaking. The teacher did admit that he will now repeat some words, and communicates with friends during play.

One of the phrases that caught my eye was this: “il semble s’ennuyer pendant les histories”. In other words, he seems bored during story time. Not a surprise, but while “ennuyer” simply means bored in French; in English, at least to me, it connotes something a little more tragic and soul-weary than just bored. It cracked me up to imagine Maddox suffering from ennui during storytime. Oh, and then there was the final line on the report card, "Il ne chant pas." Coming on the heels of the whole of the ennui deal, it just killed me.

Maddox’s class went on a field trip the other day. Literally. They went for a day-long walk, pique-nique lunches in their little sac à dos. I thought it was a really great idea – getting kids walking in the great outdoors for the whole day. Any parents who could attend were invited to come. Given that I am not working, of course I went. It sounded so sweet, you know, a walk in the provençal countryside with a bunch of cute kids. Riiight. What was I thinking? Of course what this meant is I spent the day trying to do the equivilant of herd kittens. French kittens. Non-english speaking French kittens. French kittens who speak super-fast in high fluting voices. Sheesh. I felt like I was an extra on a French-dubbed version the new Chipmunk movie – "the squeaqual" (a movie I made the mistake of going to with the kids in an effort to get more practice understanding French). Not exactly relaxing. I did learn some new phrases and got very proficient at shouting out imperatives: “Avance!” “Arrête!” “Allez!” “Restez avec nous!” Every once in awhile I would get a chance to look up and enjoy the scenery and the jewel-like sky. It was a gorgeous day, but exhausting!

Along similar lines, it had come to my attention that l’école maternelle was looking for more parent-helpers to assist with swimming outings. I was impressed that they were willing to undertake something so ambitious. I mean yikes! Taking a bunch of non-swimming kids into a pool? They do require enough parents for a 6-1 ratio in the pool, and these parent helpers need to have a basic certificate in swimming proficiency. Again, since I am not working it seems wrong not for me to help with stuff like this. So I signed up for the proficiency ‘test’ at a pool in the near-by town Sillans la Cascade. I had quizzed a couple of parents I knew who had done this test previously to make sure the test was not likely to be too complicated linguistically. They both assured me it was easy, as long as I could swim. And I figured when in doubt I could make sure I was never the first to do any particular task.

The written instructions I received ahead of time established that there were 3 basic proficiencies:
1) To be able to enter the pool (dive or jump)
2) To be able to swim (any form) 20 meters
3) To be able to retrieve an item off the bottom of the pool.

That all sounded quite easy. And for the most part it was. There were 2 aspects of it that were a wee bit more daunting than I anticipated. Firstly, the dive into the pool was to be from a racing stand. And I will tell you, for a woman who hasn’t dived(?) (dove?) (or as Mark helpfully suggested, diven?) into a pool for ages (maybe 20 years?), when I got up on that stand the water seemed a loooong way down. I was relieved to see the woman in front of me chose to jump in. I took the same chicken-way out. The only other heart stutter occurred when it was time to retrieve rings from the bottom of the pool. It turns out this task was to be done in the deep end. I had hoped they just wanted to see that one could swim under water and would do it at a reasonable depth like, I don’t know, 4 feet. Wrong. We did it in the way deep end. And for a girl with sensitive ears and a cold to boot, it seemed a long way down. But I did it. And I passed. I realize I may come to regret that.

Mark’s parents are visiting right now. The other night we watched a slideshow of lots of photos that spanned Mark’s dad’s career and travels. At some point there was a photo of two pandas humping. Mark pointed out matter-of-factly that they appeared to having sex. Maddox immediately asked what that was. Jasper (who knows exactly what having sex is because we have read a very detailed book about it to her) jumped in quickly to assure Maddox that he's really too young to know about it. (Mark’s parents, listening silently, surely agreed with her.) But, of course, Mark seized the opportunity for instruction, and gave him the very brief one- sentence version about the male penis and the female vagina and making a baby. Still, I guess it's a bit confusing for a four-year old. And so after a pause he asked, "what do they do with a penis?" (I'm sure Mark’s parents were silently appalled by Maddox’s persistence, as well as Mark’s). Mark answered, "the male puts his penis in the female's vagina." Maddox silently considered this for about 3 seconds and then said, "I want to do that."

So, while he may not graduate from French pre-school, Maddox definitely seems well on his way to growing up. After all, who cares about drawing perfect loop-de-loops when you can do that?

In which Mark uses words like muesli and Fanta and plaques d'immatriculation

It's that time of year. Branches are budding, bushes are blooming, fruit trees are flowering. And you know what that means: It means that I'm spending my days itching and sneezing and filling handkerchiefs with watery snot. That's what I do every spring back home in Vancouver too.

So, yeah, the more things change, the more ça même chose. Or at least, almost the même chose. Some things are a tiny bit different. The springtime pollen is different, for instance, emerging as it does from almond blossoms and walnut buds and whatever that great big tree in our back yard is that spills fuzzy red allergens all over the terracotta terrace where, increasingly, we're eating our mid-day meals.

Despite the airborne tides of pollen, it's probably a good thing that we've started to move our life-style out of doors, if only because it's a departure from our previous routine. Having been here already more than two months, the novelty of being in France itself has worn off, and it's easy to feel that we've settled into a comfortable sort of sabbatical rut. You know: Yet another trip to the weekly market to buy fruits and vegetables and cheeses. The specifics may change from week to week (last week we discovered a delicious gaperon, the week before it was a cantal vieux) but really, it's the same ol' same ol': Wandering from vendor to vendor in the shining morning light, uttering a few phrases in haphazard French, handing over the euros, and stocking up. (And even some details never change at all: every week I seek out a particular vendor who specializes in eggs and flan and un-aged curds, and I buy a fourpack of sheepsmilk brousse.) If not for the unnecessary French mots I'm forcing into these sentences, I might as well be writing about a trip to a Safeway supermarket. Yawn.

Anyway, in order to be a semi-responsible blogger, I'm trying to attend more vigilantly to those things – the little things – that actually are different or unexpected or somehow peculiarly Provençal. (Because the alternative, as you may have discovered, is that I don't write anything at all. Or worse: I fill up the blog with tedious faux-erudite ephemera.) And I'll try to notice things that are at least a tiny bit more interesting than the mundane fact that instead of eating a bowl of yogurt and granola for breakfast every day, as I do in Vancouver, I'm instead eating a bowl of fromage blanc and muesli (or, as they call it here in France: muesli). Still, I apologize in advance to those of you who are hoping for tales of embarrassment and humiliation. What's been happening these days is all pretty modest stuff.

Like the other day when, after putting it off and putting it off some more, I finally went to get new license plates for the car. Not for the new car. Nope. The new plates were actually for the other car: the 1980s-vintage beater that, despite performing without incident on fully 3/4 (exactly 3/4) of its outings with us, now just sits rusting in our damp and dusty garage. You see, France has adopted a new car registration system of some sort and all cars, even old and unreliable ones, are supposed to be getting new plaques d'immatriculation. Well, you can see why I kept putting this off. Even under familiar circumstances, this sort of task is typically just time-wasting and tedious – the boring journey to some wearying government office, the endless waiting in line, the hesitant inquiries about opaque procedures, the forms to fill out, the forgotten document that requires you to return home, find the damn document, and then start all over again with another boring journey and more waiting in line and more forms to fill out...yes, it's the sort of errand I'd put off even if the interaction was to be entirely in English. Add in the fact that I'd be navigating this tricky bit of bureaucracy in my awful French and, well, frankly I'm shocked that I didn't somehow finagle a way to get Quincy to do it instead.

But – and here's the vaguely anthropological twist – it turned out that it wasn't like that at all. No Byzantine bureaucratic maze; no tedium. A quick walk to the local gas station; a single piece of paper, 30 euros, and no more words of French than I'm using in this very sentence, and voilà: des nouveaux plaques d'immatriculation. You've probably had sneezing sessions that took longer. I know I have.

Our little musical-theatre outing last weekend was also just a bit different in the details than it would have been if we'd been doing it back home. In Vancouver, the performance (comically embellished re-imaginings of Aesops fables, which were actually much less awful and lot more fun than I just made them sound) would have taken place at some community centre or somewhere secular like that. Here, it was at a famous hilltop church. In Vancouver, the curtain call would probably have been followed immediately by kids' wheedling pleas for a post-performance trip to Dairy Queen. Here, we instead hung around outside under the pine trees, helping ourselves to Fanta and slices of cake and cashews that someone had put out on the picnic tables where the actors and the audience mingled with nuns and a bearded bishop. And, on our walk home through the woods, we stopped to explore a crumbling roofless building being reclaimed by trees.

And then there're my bicycle outings. Every time I go riding with Ollie, I'm reminded that we're living a different lifestyle here in France. Now, partially that's because when I'm home in Vancouver my time in the saddle is mostly limited to slow-motion cautious commutes with one or more children in tow, whereas here I'm regularly risking a bent rim or a broken chain and a shattered clavicle while following fearless Ollie down treacherous trails. But it's also because these rides inevitably take me into scenes that seem just amazingly, iconically, clicheédly, even embarrassingly Provençal. A monestary on the side of a mountain. A small stone chapel appearing suddenly in the middle of an oak-filled forest. A tiny red-roofed hilltop village where the wind blows hard and we ride under the narrow arches of ancient alleyways. Yet another dusty hillside track alongside yet another olive orchard. Last weekend Ollie led me along some centuries-old trail that wound it's way through the middle of a wine chateau, through the vineyards, up over a rocky hill, and then, like many of the trails here, suddenly crossed a stretch of private property, where there suddenly appeared a burly dog that lunged loudly at our furiously pedaling feet. Of course, as I know from sad experience, that last part isn't peculiarly Provençal at all.

"I want to live here forever!"

Well, it feels like it has been quite awhile since I have blogged. And we have been relatively busy, so I better GET busy!

This morning at breakfast Maddox said, apropos of nothing, “I want to live here forever” (of course, he pronounced it “forrreeever”). He wasn’t really able to articulate why. But, it sure beats “I don’t want to go to school,” and “How many more sleeps until we go back to Vancouver?” Ah, the capriciousness of a 4 year old!

A week ago our friend, Carol, who currently is living in Geneva, came for a weekend visit. She was our first guest here. Those of you who will be coming for a visit later should be glad to hear that we have worked out a number of the guest ‘glitches’ since she came. You know, minor details, like how to get heat into the guest house. While this probably won’t be a big deal when most of our visitors come, it was damn cold when Carol was here. I’m not going to go into the details of her visit because I believe she is working on her own blog entry to describe her visit to you. So, I will just leave you on tenterhooks for that one.

Le carnival was celebrated at l’ecole maternelle. The kids were to dress up as a character from a fable or fairy tale. I hadn’t realized there was a Spiderman fairytale. Actually, to be fair, there was only one spiderman in the crowd, which in this age set is pretty impressive. There were several Little Red Riding Hoods, a couple of Robin Hoods, some Spanish senoritas and quite a few princesses & animals. Maddox was a pirate. His costume was pretty lame (especially since he refused to put on his pirate shirt in favor of his fleece, and he tended to wear his eye patch pushed up on his head), but given that we only had one week to pull it together, I thought we did pretty well. We had been loaned a wonderful Robin Hood costume but for whatever reason he absolutely refused it. So then we agreed on the Pirate idea. We also started playing Pirate in the back yard to try to get him “into” it. So for several weekends he and Jasper ran around with handkerchiefs tied on their heads and cardboard swords and played in the backyard. It is a great garden for this sort of imaginative play – lots of nooks and crannies and hidey-holes.

We had the joy of experiencing some small town theatre, or ‘le Spectacle’. A local group put together an original show that involved interpretations of fables. They had a matinee for kids (free / by donation). It was held in a meeting room at la Notre Dame de Grace. It was pretty great. Though I didn’t ‘get’ a lot of it, I sure was charmed by the fact of it. I love theatre and there is something very sweet about small time theatre like this. I was thrown by the fact that one of the characters spoke in Italian (Come on, give me a break! I’m having enough trouble in French, here!). And also, while I was familiar with some of the fables, some of them were new to me (The Bat & the Two Weasels?) and some of the references to particular songs etc went right over my head. It made for a nice day though (we walked up the hill to the church, on the route of the penitents), and the kids loved it. We did get into quite a conversation with Jasper explaining penitents and the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

We have done quite a bit of socializing over the past week. We were invited to dinner at Maddox’s girlfriend’s house. That was fun. Mark and I got a lot of French practice. Even though Sofie’s (Hannah’s mother) English is far better than Mark's and my French put together, she was kind enough to keep the conversation in French. She knows we want / need practice. As usual though, we would morph out of French when we really couldn’t communicate something and then morph back in. I like Sofie quite a lot. And since Maddox and Hannah are still in love, I think we will be seeing more of them.

This last Sunday was a glorious and sunny day and we filled it with lots of socializing with the Brenkman’s (Nathatlie & Ollie & kids). Mark started the day by going on a bike ride with Ollie. And then the family came over for a long and luxurious Sunday lunch. It was warm and sunny so we spent the day outside drinking and eating and chatting and laughing. It went on for hours. It felt very European. I loved it. When we were fully sated, and then somewhat digested, we all piled into our cars and drove up a nearby “mountain” – Mt Bession and explored around on top. We stopped at a memorial for some Resistance fighters who were killed on Mt. Bession (which was apparently a popular spot for Resistance meetings etc – lots of places to hide).

While I don’t fully agree with Maddox on the notion of living here forever, I will say that I am very much enjoying our life here.