The Maginot Line and Luxembourg

It's a long and busy four hours from Amsterdam to the Ardennes hills in northern Luxembourg. Remember that none of the Low Countries is particularly large, but when you go from one end to the other, it can be quite a distance. The roads, while definitely up to world standards--if not better---are under significant reconstruction around and between most Dutch cities. So the speed limit is not 120 kmh, it's more like 90, which slows you up. Belgium, where you spend about 40 minutes, is mad, the drivers are absolutely fierce--the speed limit on the Autoroutes is 130--about 80 mph. Luxembourg on the other hand is mostly rural with small villages in the northern Ardennes region where we are staying.

For those who don't know, Luxembourg is the last independent Grand Duchy in the world, about the size of Rhode Island, with about half the population of our smallest state. It's a population that is obviously well-ordered. There is nothing out of place in this country. Even the flower boxes in Vianden are tended...and the relic buildings in ruin from the Middle Ages look good.

Vianden is in the midst of a natural (not National) park, with a cute winding main street that leads up to a gorgeous castle. That castle sits on a promontory overlooking the River Our (pronounced more like Ewer).


We're staying in an old hotel, the Heintz Hotel and Restaurant, which appears to be a favorite of German bikers, with a few Brits thrown in. The proprietors' family have owned the place for generations. It is very nicely modernized. We have a balcony that overlooks an old monastery and some of the fortifications from a thousand years ago.

Sunday morning--The few Brits thrown into the biker mix included two from Whitefield, Manchester. They are exploring the European countryside on huge Hondas and thoroughly enjoying themselves. All about our age, except one, somewhat younger---she glowed at being jokingly called 21!--Frank and Judy, Peter and Jean, heading off to the Black Forest then to Austria and northern Italy for a few days before returning to Britain. Frank and Judy live in Whitefield near Manchester and have delightfully home-town Mancunian accents (for John). Peter and Jean are more from the south, Bedfordshire if we remember righly, but now living in Southport on the Irish Sea.

We had a delightful time with them closing down the bar after we'd had a few Diekirch beers and lots of conversation. They apparently continued the party in their rooms later to the point of the proprietress asking them to cool it. Peter was in the merchant marine, helmsman for LNG carriers. Frank delivers gasses to chemical plants in Grangemouth, Scotland, from Lancashire in convoys of three trucks. All looking forward to retirement and perhaps a major trip across the US by bike, though they disdain our low speed limits. Off to Montana, John said.

Dinner at the Heintz Restaurant was good... Ben had schnitzel and John had fried trout from the Ardennes. Both were very good, though the trout was superb. Brought back memories of our first date when I made trout on Good Friday, going on 28 years ago.

Sunday, September 13

Up to breakfast at the hotel, goodbyes to the Brits and then off to France for the day—to see the Maginot Line's Le Hackenberg fortress.

We stopped a few minutes to see the city of Luxembourg, population 81,000, the center of money laundering and tax avoidance that has made the country rich. (John may be overstating this, but the Grand Duchy is not noted for its international financial regulations.) The city has some grand boulevards, but has more the air of Providence with a ravine in the middle of it instead of the headwaters of Narragansett Bay. Lots of French style medieval architecture and old fort ruins, but mostly a sleepy provincial, rather than national, capital of parks, cute buildings and ho-hum.

We got to the Maginot Line two hours before the first tour, to find there was no English language tour, so we took off to explore Lorraine. Our first stop was the ruins of a medieval chapel with a graveyard, overlooking the province's gently rolling hills with Germany in the distance and little towers of the underground Maginot defenses sticking out of the ground around it.

We went further afield looking for lunch and eventually found it at a village fête des artisanats in Monneren. We enjoyed a local baker's pizza and farmer's ice cream from a local farm as we heard a local band play 50s and 60s favorites.

Now to the Maginot Line. We had to take a French language tour, which proved to John that although he is good in French, he doesn't stand a chance if the vocabulary is military. However we enjoyed the visit to this subterranean 20th century French castle designed to stave off a German attack and provide ready-built trenches for the French army that would avoid the debilitating trench warfare of WW1.Understand that the line was built between 1930 and 1936 with the then latest technology. Just at Hackenberg alone, it housed 5000 men, had 10 km of underground tramways to move around the ordinance and people. It had hospitals, kitchens, and sleeping quarters for the troops, and it held enough fuel for its generators that would fuel thousands of hours of protection, food for several months, and necessary water supplies. There was a story, that John only got part of, that Charles de Gaulle said the money spent would have been better spent on an airforce, and that he had used some parts of the Line for the French nuclear force de frappe of the 1960s. The place is probably nuclear proof, since it has air filtration systems and food and water supplies. Outside, the massive concrete entrances look like the entrance to a science fiction movie. On surrounding hillocks, the underground tunnels protrude little turrets and larger monitor-like installations that host cannons that can be aimed at invaders in any direction.

Inside it's dank and dark, like a huge home for moles. The caverns are all lighted with old fashioned railway station lights, the unlighted sub-caverns lead away into the distance. The tram we rode runs for about 1 km between two of the forts. In truth it is a 20th century castle built against invaders.

It was also totally out of touch with the reality of the 1930s. Designed for the First World War as a replacement for trench warfare, it did not stand up to the air and land blitzkriegs of the Second. Once the French gave up their hold on the Rhineland to the Nazis in 1936 and Belgian ceased to be an ally, choosing instead uesless neutrality, the Germans could execute their speedy invation and were able to run around it. The French were isolated in their Great Wall, that they thought would protect them and give them time.

This is important because the Line was built to give the French, with a dispersed population and less intensive rail network, the chance for the Army to mobilize as the Line, and before 196 the Belgians, stopped the Germans' progress into France. To a certain extent this occurred. During the year of the 1940 Phony War the French felt relatively secure behind their wall, but that came to a quick end later that year when France fell and the Vichy regime was established under Maréchal Petain. At that point, the Germans staffed the line until the Americans came. As the Americans advanced in 1944, the Germans found that French construction was pretty good. The Line is virtually indestructable. It is still owned by and on land of the French military.

Both John and Ben enjoyed the two hour tour, in the 60F temperatures, along with an entire trainload of French speakers. Now if the Amis de Maginot had lived up the promise of an English language tour, it might even have been better.

Hamburgers for dinner at the Auberge Aal Veinin, since 1683 on Vianden's main street. Could well have been one of the best burgers John has ever had. Ben had a chicken à la king on a puff pastry. You could almost imagine d'Artignan and the Three Musketeers there. Instead a family with a new baby, and a group of Polish students! Early night.

Monday, September 14

We rose late, intentionally missing the hotel's breakfast because we thought we would do cappucino at the local bakery with a couple of croissants. The cappucino was good, but the sandwich and croissant we had totaled nearly 10 euros and we had to buy orange juice later, so the savings for a much smaller breakfast, albeit with cappucino, was not more than 3. Tonight we will eat in the hotel.

We decided to do virtually nothing today. Ben is writing letters, John is reading a cheap novel. We did drive up to the Vianden Castle, a huge old pile of a building, which we did not tour. We also drove to an old shrine on a promontory overlooking the river and then drove down the river to Echternach, an old abbey town about 30 miles away. It is raining off and on. We got yoghurt at a local Q8 and returned to the hotel. The sun is trying to break through, but it is a day of gray skies and quiet. It's Monday and almost everything is closed. After the last few days, that's fine. We have a busy day tomorrow. Time to go home.

Bruges and Amsterdam

September 10 2009

We seem to have gone from small to big to small to big environments on this trip. Right now we are in a small environment in a very big city. I'm writing this aboard the Lucky Piper, a concrete-hulled houseboat permanently moored on Zeeburger Pad in Amsterdam while listening to the ducks on the canal and hearing an occasional groan as the boat moves against the dock. The boat even occasionally moves in the wake of a passing barge or pleasure boat.

We left Paris on Sunday for a quick drive up the expensive French motorway system to Bruges. The system is superb, excellent road surfaces, excellent signage, but it is about three times the price of American toll roads. But at the current rate of exchange, everything in Europe is expensive.

Bruges was everything I expected it to be. A crowded, tourist mecca of magnificent art, beautiful buildings, gorgeous medieval and baroque buildings, small canals, chocolate shops and cafes. Our BnB, the Hip BnB at 99 Werfstraat was excellent, clean, inexepensive, and only 15 minutes walk from the town Markt and Burg piazzas. Free parking helps too.

Our car, a Citroen C4 is excellent. We had the luck of getting a diesel engine, which is somewhat, though not excessively, sluggish compared to our Acura. The diesel manages to move the car quite nicely with enough pep on both country roads and highways and still giving us 60 miles per gallon, or so. With diesel at one euro a liter, compared to 1.60 for gasoline this is working out to be quite a saving. Perhaps a diesel is in our future.

We walked from one end of the town to the other. We had one interesting guide. John's grandmother Cross had left him with an art book of Belgium's glories dating from 1914 that had a substantial chapter with pictures of Bruges from almost 100 years ago. It was fun to compare the pictures then with the pictures now...the main differences being the fashions of clothes and the lack of autos.


Bruges at that time was a museum town (which it still is), but had little else going for it. Zeebruge, the massive port, had just opened, and there was little industry in West Flanders. Today, instead of 30,000 inhabitants (down from 250,000 in the middle ages when they were involved in the wool trade), the area is home to over 300,000 and the town expands far beyond its medieval canal boundaries. I wonder where 250,000 people slept?

Our proprietor in Bruges, Virginia, had lots of recommendations, most of which we took. Her restaurant suggestions ranged from the local, moules et frites, to the vegetarian, to the friend with the coffee shop.

Moules et frites may be local but they sure are expensive. No matter where you look the price hovers well over 23 Euros. Our choice was top of the line, Breydel de Coninc just off Burg Square where the service was excellent, the Breton oysters wonderful as always, the beer very nice, and the moules served two ways: one natural for Ben, with chopped onions and celery in a clear broth, and the other for John, provençale style with tomatoes, onions, garlic, and celery in broth. Strangely, or perhaps locally, the vegetables were boiled with the mussels and were even a bit crisp as we ate them.

Our second meal was a sandwich at Da Noi cafe owned by a friend of Virginia's. A labor of love, the owner, a fairly young man who had quit the IT ratrace to start the cafe, made Ben his extra extra dry cappucino and produced an excellent local beer from the neighboring brewery for John. The sandwiches, Ben's lox and John's sausage, were excellent.

Our evening meal on Monday was at the Kok au Vin Restaurant, an upscale French restaurant, where Ben had zeeburger sole and JohnI had a wonderful coq au vin, probably the best he has ever eaten, with chopped champignons, onions and a deep brown red wine sauce. Our entree was a Breton artichoke about six inches across. The choke had already been removed and it was served with a caper mayonnaise. An amuse bouche at the start of the meal was a puree of cooked zucchini with cream, warm, with pieces of smoked trout in it. About 20 cl.

Our third evening, at De Bottilerij at the side of a canal, was a fair meal. We picked a South African sauvignon blanc, which we didn't much like although there was nothing particularly wrong with it, followed by our appetizers of beet salad with phylo pastry stuffed with boursin, which we split, after a fairly long wait, and then after about 45 minutes the mains arrived. Since it was a vegetarian restaurant that does do meat, Ben chose a phylo lasagne of ratatouille. Well, Ratatouille, the Rat, would probably agree that a dry ratatouille in phylo, with no sauce, wasn't the best of presentations. John's veal kidneys with potato croquettes were good, but I should have taken his own advice and gone with fries rather than croquettes which were dry. We did not have dessert.

Bruges, of course, is more famous for its buildings and art than it is for its food, save its chocolate, which we did not eat. Our art lesson was a selection of paintings by Memling, a Flemish primitive that were quite exquisite at the St. John Hospital Museum. Mainly triptychs, but for the portrait of a young Bruges woman. The other paintings were on loan from the main city museum which is being remodeled for a new show to open in October: two pieces of Hieronymus Bosch, Jesus on Judgment Day and the Trials of Job. The second is more in line with the horror of most Bosch paintings.

We did not miss seeing the Shrine of St. Ursula who took 11,000 Breton virgins to Rome to become Christians in front of the Pope only to see them slain on the trip home by the Huns in Cologne.

While Bruges is a walking city, it also has a large number of horse-drawn tourist carriages and lots of bicycles. Watch out or you may be run over.

Bicycles are more a part of Amsterdam. “There must be a million in that parking lot,” one tourist remarked on our boat tour yesterday, looking up at a parking garage for bicycles. Well, maybe not a million, but certainly thousands. As in Belgium, they have their own section of the road, with specially colored brick to distinguish from the sidewalk for pedestrians and the main road for autos and trucks. Trams, too, have their own rights of way throughout the city, making it a difficult place to drive if you want to. I have parked the car at the proprietor's place for the duration.

Amsterdam is lovely. It is a very big city with a very low profile so there are few tall buildings. In many cases, the tallest man-made structures lie along the harbor—the cruise ships at the port. It's central point is Central Station, a late 19th century building where all trains start and end. It's surrounded by tram and bus termini and the docks for the boat tours.

We took one. Since it began on the harbor, John's first reaction was ho-hum, another harbor tour, but then it turned into the canals. Built over the centuries as the city expanded, they show an architectural heritage that goes from Peter Stuyvesant's time to the contemporary. However it's mostly 16th-18th century buildings. At the heart of Amsterdam's predominance in trade worldwide, they are the protected structres and obviously are maintained with generous government subsidies.

The quays that run along side serve as the site of bars and pedestrian benches, art students, cycles, runners and the ordinary Amsterdammer living his daily life. The gables all reflect different times and styles, but the buildings are uniformly narrow and six stories tall. The bridges are uniform and when seen in a row, are much like a never-ending view through a mirror.

Our houseboat is anchored on a newer canal facing a row of apartments in Dutch style with gardens along the canal shore. The ducks and geese cackle at night and only the slight roar of the morning rush or an occasional train rumbling 300 yards away indicates the presence of the city. Right outside the front door it's there because the houseboat is just across the street from a light-industrial section of town. The Windmill Browerij IJ at the end of the street. It makes a great beer.


Last night we went by tram to Samo Sabo, near the Rijksmuseum, for rijstaffel on the recommendation of our friend Rainer. The restaurant is older, the service impeccable. The rijstaffel is lots of fun with its 17or so different dishes, ranging from satays to coconut soup to milder-than-Thai curries, vegetables, shrimp chips, and so on. We enjoyed it immensely thought I must admit we have had better Southeast Asian banquets at Thai functions. But, for a restaurant thousands of milesfrom the former Dutch East Indies with the food europeanized somewhat, the meal was excellent. The drink: a wittje beer with a slice of lime. Ben did not enjoy it much. John did.

Thursday morning. Breakfast with the cygnets, swans and ducks...and a pigeon who had no fear whom we named Wim. They all got a few croissant crumbs.

Thence to the Anne Frank Huis museum. It's a very moving if depressing endeavor to go through the Franks' hiding place from 1942 to 1944 at the height of the German occupation of Holland and the establishment of its racist regime in conquered lands. While the house is sad, the better sight is the groups of middle and high school students from many European countries, including a large contingent from Germany, who were visibly moved and shaken by what their ancestors had done.

We followed up the visit to the Anne Frank Huis with a visit to the Homomonument just down the street. It's a grouping of three pink marble triangles, one of which dips into the nearby canal to show both the descent to which mankind can go when hatred takes over but also to the arising of the group as it struggles for relevance. It didn't hurt to listen to a small lecture from an ethics professor at the University of Edinburgh explaining the political uses of groups like Jews and Gays for the classes that keep power at any cost.

From there we walked down many a canal to the Pleinstraat, a major shopping district, found Rainer's recommendation for tonight's dinner, the Stoop en Stoop, and then had falafel and a salad at a local fast food joint.

Our next stop, the Rijksmuseum was great. Much of the museum is closed but the grand masters, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals are all in a separate gallery where we took the audio tour. A fine 90 minutes of great masters that we enjoyed immensely.

Back to the boat for coffee and a rest and then out to dinner this evening. Let us add, Amsterdam's tram network is a wonder. It goes everywhere regularly. Maps and time tables in all the kiosks.

We took a late-ish dinner at an Amsterdam Brown Bar, this one was off Leidesplein in the center of the tourist district, recommended by Rainer. Brown bars are Amsterdam restaurants that specialize in local beers and Dutch specialties to eat. Much like an English gastro pub without being too fancy.

Our choice was Stoop and Stoop on a narrow street. The ambiance was excellent. It was not totally overrun by foreigners, we heard lots of Dutch, and surprisingly Danish from the next table. The bar was lively, and the seats outside allowed us to watch the strolling students and young workers as they searched for a place for a late evening meal.

The food was adequate. No one has written books extolling most Dutch food except for the pancakes and the rijstaffel. John had a Dutch steak with a pepper cream sauce and Ben had two sole filets. Both were acceptable but by no means remarkable. Ben's spring rolls as an appetizer were fine, but John had a Dutch specialty, fried balls of goo, with bits of mystery meat in them, known as “bitterballen,” supposedly a piece of fried casserole. The waiter was a bit put out having described them as a well-liked specialty to find John didn't particularly care for them. Well, you can't have everything.

Friday morning.

We decided today to go the Haarlem. We took a morning train, all of 20 minutes, from Amsterdam Centraal to Haarlem, and then walked through the quaint town to the Frans Hals museum. It's a wonderful museum and a lovely town.

We were much taken with the Dutch modern architecture which incorporates parts of Charles Rennie Mackintosh of Glasgow, the Bauhaus, and Frank Lloyd Wright into a workable whole. Very nice and very deco.

We took the recommendations of the NY Times and had herring from the stand in the central square. It was melt-in-your mouth good.


We followed up with excellent coffee and then returned to Amsterdam for our last dinner. We ventured to a Spanish tapas place written up in the Times in an upscale neighborhood. Very good lamb dishes, but a minimum of seafood, which one would expect in a Spanish restaurant.

More Paris and Chartres

September 6, 2009
Three days of culture, but what different culture. Tarzan and the Virgin Mary! Then the history of the Paris Commune.The Musée du Quai Branly on the Left Bank near the Eiffel Tower is a modern museum with a collection of primitive art. Its latest show, Tarzan , is a French view of the American hero Tarzan from the first throughts of Edgar Rice Burroughs to the German ad for Homme perfume. Historical analysis, books, paraphenalia, posters, products and movie clips including a wonderful 1932 rendition of Marlene Dietrick and Cary Grant in a night club where she plays a gorilla amongst a bunch of black faced female, scantily clad, jungle dancers. The show is wonderful view of Americana but not from American eyes.

We went book shopping following that for a new French novle, L'Élegance du Herrisson, which I shall enjoy, though I doubt it is about hedgehogs. A couple of Greek salads near Boul Mich completed the afternoon.




Our evening was a lovely meal at a local Lebanese restaurant where John and Eric know the owner. La Zénobie, at 234 rue Championnet near their apartment in the 18th. Very nice shish kebab, and an excellent table of mezze made for a lovely evening. We had two very good bottles of Lebanese wine to wash them down. John and Eric's dog, Abby, joined us quietly for the evening.


Friday, September 4, we headed off to Chartres Cathedral, a wonderful medieval cathedral with some of the loveliest stained glass in the world. We found the world's worst traffic on the way, taking nearly three hours to do the 100 km run.

But the cathedral is magnificent.
Sited on top of a hill, it comands the countryside for miles around. It's surrounded by a quaint medieval town, someone restored.

The cathedral itself is in process of rehabilitation. Most of the windows have been cleaned and double glazed. The baroque altar is currently hidden because of restoration. The windows, though, are brilliant in their colors as the sun shines through. Fortunately, we learned a lot about them from an English medieval architectural docent, who had been leading tours and writing about Chartres for 50 years. He also had a very wry sense of humor: "That's the sixth tour of Japanese this morning. I have this idea that Japan is so crowded they have to send some of them abroad all the time so the rest have room to move."
The hour long tour includes descriptions of the exterior as well as the windows. We learned more about the visual representations so necessary to the education of a medieval worshipper.

We enjoyed a fine lunch of salads, omelettes and sandwiches at the Serpent, a 19th century style tea shop on the cathedral close. I particularly enjoyed my bettereve salad.

We thought we had encounted horrid traffic going...returning to Paris took over three hours with traffic that rivalled Bangkok in its snail pace. John had never seen it so bad in all his years in France. Accidents and breakdowns, combined with Friday rush hour led to total gridlock.

We had a lovely dinner at home and retired.

Saturday we took a metro over to the Butte de Caille, a hill in the 13th, near place d'Italie. The hill was the last stand of the Communards who fought off the 3rd Republic after the Franco-Prussian war. We celebrate the event at home with framed newspaper cartoons of Parisians enjoying the last meat available—their zoo animals. We walked the neighborhood and then enjoyed a small lunch at the Restaurant Cailloux on the square of zucchini with grilled shrimp and carpaccio of beef.

Last we joined old friends for a lovely evening at home. Mark and Noel were completing their three week vacation which included a canal boat ride on the Canal du Midi and a few days in Aix en Provence with other friends Bernard and Edward. Since we have known Mark and Noel for many years but not seen them recently we had much to talk about. The evening lasted until 1 AM!

Today, Sunday, September 6, we finish a week here in Paris. We will miss our hosts and Abby as we drive north to Bruges.

Paris!

August 31, 2009

One thing you can say about France is that the trains run on time. But when it's time for the Rentrée, a remark John made to Ben that "the train was stuffed," brought a retort from a young woman, struggling to her seat, that “All French trains are like this!” Ten long cars, a train that then doubled in size when SNCF added another train coming from Lorient at Rennes, and you have a train so full that with baggage there was no excess space... but it does move at 300 km per hour and makes the 500 km trip from Guingamp in Brittany to Paris in less than three hours.

We've spent the last two days talking with our friends hosts about the future. With more than ten years on us, they feel they are finishing out, but I can only add that the ten years that their granddaughter has lived is a long time for her, and they have at least that long left. We hope they will come to the States again.

They live in a lovely part of the world, with friends, farmers who deliver vegetables,oyster sellers they know well, short walks to the ocean and even a deer farm. The Pink Granite Coast is rocky and highly tidal, but it has an simple beauty about it, enhanced by the golden stone homes in Breton architecture that nestle along the coast and among the fields. The towns are universally pretty. Their intricate church spires are beautifully competitive with each other. The views of fields, hills and the shore add to the rural loveliness. While the province has a huge influx of summer people and tourists, it never seems overwhelmed. Our nightlife here is an evening of conversation around the dinner table after good meals of appetizers, main course, cheeses and then dessert. There's not much to do in the evening, and even trying to find a cup of coffee in our village, Penvenan, on Sunday afternoon was impossible. The place shuts up like a nunnery by nine in the evening.

We spent a lovely hour sitting on the edge of a rocky beach watching the sailboats tack into Port Blanc with the incoming tide, and a group of kids building a huge tower of a sandcastle.

Like much of France now, Bretons have no qualms about using their English. They are certainly pleased if you make an attempt at French, but if you slip into English, they then slip into English...many of the marketers, for instance, speak English for all the tourists who come here from the UK.

Now to Paris.

September 2, 2009

Paris is a whirl for us. We aren't tourists in the strictest sense since we are probably on our eighth visit. Now we do what we want, when we want with whom we want. Last night it was having a lovely, albeit wine-full, evening on August 31 at John and Eric's apartment, then a good night's sleep and then off to visit a museum.

Albert Kahn, an industrialist, spent a small fortune documenting with early color photography the world. About a hundred years ago he traveled to places that were not well-known to Parisians. While his photography collection wasn't on view on Tuesday morning at the Musée Albert-Kahn, even the dreary rainy weather couldn't dampen the beauty of his magnificent Japanese, French and English gardens. We agreed the gardens were worth a visit. We hope to see some of his photography next trip Unfortunately a show of autochrome color photography from the 1920s had closed last week.

We had a quick sandwich lunch, of mediocre note at a local Boulogne Billancourt sandwich shop and headed back into town to go shopping.

Ben had found several stores that offer the German Trippen shoes he loves. We found some in a store on the edge of the Marais. They now show off his tootsies to best advantage, particularly for our dinner in the 'burbs last night.

Poissy is a Paris suburb with lovely old houses along the islands in the middle of the Seine...it also has an ugly railway station and a bit Peugeot factory. Our friends, a free-lance writer and a middle school principal have one of the homes on the islands. We sat with champagne, talking about the last couple of years since we had been here, enjoying every minute, watching the river flow and the evening creep in. It didn't hurt to have pâté de fois to start and breast of duck with a 1994 St. Emilion for the main course.

Long conversations about American politics, the future of President Obama and his health care proposals, reactions from the right wingers and the state of the union, made for a long evening. We managed to get the very last train back into Paris from the railway station. We weren't even on the dernier Métro to our friends apartment.

Today was a trip by bus to the Ile Ste Louis to the 17th century upperclass housing development on the island in the middle of the river.
Our friend, from Brown and Washington days, was a great host and picked out a lovely restaurant for a formule lunch: 17 euros...Les Fous de l'Ile restaurant on Rues des deux Ponts. Lovely place. Salade des gisiers, saumon tartare, grilled chicken leg, bass, and duck breast. Good white macon, too.

The magnificence of Paris is always there. We saw the illuminated Eiffel Tower last night from the train and today was a long bus ride through the centre-ville along the Seine passing the palaces, the squares and the cathedrals. The beauty of this very human city is always evident. Thankyou Baron Haussman and Napoleon III.

Of course, the dinner party with French speakers was a good chance to prove that my French is not as good as I think it is. Discussing my daughter's wedding, I noted “Elle est marié à son garçon de treize ans,” which brought down the house. What I had said was she had married her thirteen year old boy. What I meant to say was “Elle est marié à son copain qu'elle a connu de treize ans.” She married her boyfriend she's known for 13 years.

Bretagne

Welcome to Bretagne, a special place. Brittany is as far west as you can go in France, a great nose of the country poking into the Atlantic to face storms, rains, clouds, and when the weather is good beautiful blue skies and clear air with temperatures in the low 70s even in the middle of the summer.

The countryside abounds in truck farms that serve all of France, as well as more traditional agriculture, like cows, chickens and pig farms. But the bounty of the truck farms is exquisite. Just yesterday the local fermier arrived on our doorstep to deliver to our hosts two grand cauliflower and a handful of local artichokes which we will eat this weekend. When we arrived back in the afternoon from our travels, another crate of zucchinis was awaiting us, almost bringing us to the point of groans about what would we do with a dozen foot long zukes!

Brittany abounds in treasures. In two days we have visited a neolithic cairn reputed to be up to 5000 years old, a town that was rich in the Renaissance from its linen trade and thehome to the last reigning duchess of Brittany, who married a French Parisian king and sealed the fate of her Breton-speaking subjects to become part of a larger nation-state. It offers, too, huge bays, which at low tide are sandflats extending over a mile into the Manche, otherwise known as the English Channel.

That said, getting here takes time. From Washington DC, our home, the time to our friends' maison secondaire is a long 18 hours...seven on a plane from Dulles to Charles de Gaulle and three and ahalf on a Train à Grand Vitesse from Paris' Gare Montparnasse, and then a 45 minute ride by car from Guingamp to the village of Penvenan. This time all was accomplished without hitches, though there are possibilities for delay if weather is bad leaving Washington or traffic is bad for the Air France bus between Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and the rail station.

But it is a special place. Our friends' home has a 14^th century well. It's a house built about 110 years ago in Breton golden stone. Our room overlooks the Atlantic when the clouds lift. Occasionally we see wildlife in the adjacent rolling fields. Of course, our hostess has a love of the local shrub, the hortensia, know to English speakers as hydrangeas, which abound around the house, barns and farm buildings. Huge pompoms of pinks, purples, blues and whites.

Previous visits have taken us to Mont St. Michel on the borders with Normandy; Treguier, the epsicopal seat for the region where the cathedral is dedicated to the patron saint of lawyers, St. Yves; and the Isle of Bréhat where the tides run to 30 feet.

Tides in Brittany are huge. When the tide is out, marée basse, the sands run for miles toward to the sea with small pools of water, but when the tide is in, marée haute, the waves crash against the seawalls and sometimes overrun the seaside roads. At low tide boats are stranded on their sides in the harbors, while at high tide, they swing on their buoys. All in 24 hours.

Yesterday, after the morning run to the Carre-four, the local supermarket, and a full lunch of local pâtés, andouillette, and a roast of beef with green beans and spices, we headed off to the Cairn of Barnenez, which overlooks the Baie of Morlaix.

The cairn was discovered in mode

rn times in 1954 when a contractor bought what he thought was pile of rocks covered with dirt. As his trucks and backhoes excavated, the drivers found tombs in the pile and realized they had an archeological site under their bulldozers. The archeologial dig began, eventually to find 11 tombs, all but three of which are sealed. The cairn, built about 5000 years ago, the same time as the Egyptian pyramids, is believed to be a burial site, but we have so little information about neolithic times that we are unsure. The view over the bay is incredible, but at the time of construction, the sea was about 25 feet lower than today at high tide, so much of what is now seabed would

have been agricultural lands. What it does show is that Brittany, and its original population had a civilization well before the age of Vercingetorix and the Gauls of Caesar's time.

Every place you go is a site of history in this old province. From the neolithic times to the Renaissance is less than 20 miles to the old town of Morlaix. Here the linen trade made the city rich. It became the home of prosperous nobles who, unable to earn money through commerce, gave up their titles, provisionally, to move into town, work as businessmen to earn the money they needed to keep up their estates, which were not profitable, and then resume their titles and their country estates.

The homes in Morlaix are half timbered, but have a

multistoried centralhall that helped heat the upper rooms. Generally the first floor was used for business. The home we saw must have been very advanced for the time with indoor toilets on each floor. Of course, there was no evidence of running water to flush them!

In the main square of Morlaix, nestled in its valley below the 19^th century rail viaduct that soars in the air above the harbor, is the home of Duchess Anne, the last reigning
duchess of independent Brittany. She marrie

d a French king and at that point Brittany became French, eventually losing its status as a duchy, and facing the 18^th and 19^th century regulation that French be the language of the land. Today Breton has a slight resurgence—the street signs are written in two languages—but we have never heard anyone speak it in a store or restaurant. It is distantly related to other Celtic tongues, like Welsh and Gaelic, though the languages are not mutually comprehensible.

One of the French customs to which we needed to adjust is having the main meal in the middle of the day and a smaller repast in the evening. Our Thursday meal was various cold cuts—country pâté and andouille sausages with baguette to commence and then a small roast of beef with spiced green beans as the vegetable. In the evening, a shrimp risotto. Always the tradition, at least for our hosts' generation, is cheese before dessert laid out on a platter for eveyone to choose small pieces as each wishes. Our hostess is a dessert fanatic, so we always have dessert, including a home-made compôte of apples from the garden, unspiced and unsugared, but mild and very pleasant.

Friday, August 28.

Time for old churches and the End of the World. There's never a visit to France without at least one old church. The best for the tourist are listed with “trois étoiles”, three stars., in the Guide Michelin. On our tour we found one, and it is glorious. Ste. Thégonnec is a small town off one of the main freeways heading West from our Penvenan hosts' home. Situated

on the top of a hill is an religious enclosure, one of the best kept in all France, with church, ossuary, porch, calvaire and entry, surrounded by a wall. The calvaire, in the center of the yard in front of the church is a fairytale of horror and beauty, with sculptures of Christ being taken from the cross, but also of ordinary women and men, with full codpieces, in the act of being part of the Passion. In the nearby ossuary, where the bones of saints are kept, is a wooden representation of Jesus being taken from the cross, carved about three hundred years ago.

The church itself has spires and cornices in a Breton style of whimsy, which is mimicked across the old province in the village parish churches everywhere.

Our goal was not Ste. Thégonnec but the points and cliffs
at Finisterre, Land's End, which drop into the sea. The points, the waves and the rocks are magnificent, fortunately in both a bit of drizzle and chill and in gorgeous sunshine as the

weather changes quickly and often. You realize that many a medieval man or woman could stand here, see just a couple of distant islands and fear that the end of the world happened after that. We didn't fall off.

But modern times intrudes on these cliffs, at least modern times of 70 years ago. There are the blockhouses and gun emplacements built by France's German conquerors during World War II designed to keep unwanted invaders, like Brits, Americans, and Charles de Gaulle, from appearing over the horizon and landing without impediment. While most are sealed up now, the concrete remains and the metal bolts that held the cannons needed to maintain Nazi control of the continent stand as a memory to the madness of the world.

After the beauty of Finisterre, finding lunch became a major occupation. We decide to stop at Douanannez, a fishing town, the center of French sardine production, to overlook the harbor and enjoy a selection of Breton oysters, fish pâtés and soup. Gorgeous small oysters with shallot and vinegar sauce, fresh bread, a pâté of sardine and white fish, and a fish soup with gruyère, made a wonderful meal, interrupted by the arrival of a playful dolphin in the harbor we overlooked.

While most of the crowd felt a cormorant was attacking the dolphin, we agreed that both the dolphin and cormorant were playing a game since each kept coming at the other when the bird could easily have flown away and the dolphin could have searched out other entertainment. The show continued for at least 15 minutes as the dolphin surfaced with a hoot and the bird fluttered overhead only to return for more.

That made an appetite for dessert! Black coffee, caramel ice cream, and two pastries, one a far breton, a flan with fresh plums and the other a buttery pastry, now made sometimes with a fruit or chocolate center, similar to a tarte made with a croissant pastry. The far breton is made by filling a cake tin with a light pancake batter used for making crêpes bretonnes, adding fresh pitted plums, and then baking till it sets. The second is known as kouign-amann, originally was full of butter. Now a good kouign-amann is light and airy and not, as the French say “trop gras” or fatty.

Part of the problem with a voyage from Penvenan to the sea is distance. We were now more than 200 kilometers from the sea, about 130 miles. We had spent the afternoon at the end of the world and enjoying a lunch that fit the time and the space, but we now had a long two hour trip home ahead of us. Fortunately French roads, particularly the Routes Nationaux freeways are just fine.

Arriving home at 10 pm, with our tummies growling, we had a lovely evening meal of leftover cold roast beef, vegetables and cold cuts, green salad, and a grand basket of breads. And then to bed. A fresh reisling from Alsace didn't hurt.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Late to rise, but good coffee, fruit and a croissant, then off to market. The day before yesterday Ben and our hostess had visited a neighboring farm where the owner raises “cerfs,” deer. He sells deer meat, or venison, at the market and we expected to take some back to our Parisian hosts on Monday. We telephoned Paris to make sure there was interest—as if we didn't know.

But our trip to the local Saturday morning market didn't produce a venison roast. The deer-owner didn't have any today. What to take in place? We already planned grand artichokes and cauliflower, but what to replace the venison? No problem: The charcuterie vendor had just the thing. A marvelous pâté de campagne, which we call head cheese, and another reddish pâté--of tripe. We expect our hosts to help us devour them we arrive on Monday on Montmartre. We are also taking a jar of venison pâté as well.

Along the way our host and hostess went for shellfish. We came home with pounds and pounds of mussels, now consumed from their white wine sauce with the necessary frites. We are now ready to bask in the sun, read our books and nap. Dinner is to be fresh oysters, cold artichokes and salad.