It took me a couple of weeks of naturally reaching for the “C” faucet thinking that “Cold” water would come out before I finally learned.  Nope!  “C” is for “Chaude” and “F” for “Froide.”

Shopping for your average, daily life products wasn’t always easy, but eventually I learned things like “bio” means “organic” or “après shampooing” (after shampooing) is “hair conditioner.”  Géraud has had to go into the pharmacy with me multiple times (even ibprophen and cough drops have to be bought from the pharmacy, they are not carried in grocery stores) to help me find various feminine and prenatal products that I could normally find on my own in the U.S.  He’s always a good sport about it.

Pictured above are dishwashing soap (savon de vaisselle) and toothpaste (pâte dentifrice). The reference of “pâte” for “paste” in toothpaste is interesting to me because it is also the word for dough or pasta.

You often see toilets that flush with a button.  If you look closely the button gives you the option of light or heavy flush…pretty fancy huh?  Light switches and plug-ins are different too (hence the need for an adapter when I use my computer).

For my first visit with our midwife, she asked my height and weight measurements.  I opened my mouth to answer this oh-so-standard question when I realized that I had no idea.  The midwife looked at me like I was from Mars until I got the chance to remind her that we use pounds and feet/inches in the U.S. rather than kilos and centimeters/meters.

Even google knows I’m in France!  (How do they do that?)

Being gluten-free here is a little bit of a challenge (and a bummer considering all the wooooonderful baked goods there are to be found.)  Through the years, I have basically let go of baking and replaced all of my cravings for sweets with dark chocolate.  However,  Géraud and his family and friends won’t hear of me skipping dessert.  Dinner at a friend’s house this Sunday included a wonderfully airy, gluten-free cake with chocolate chips, lemon zest and almond powder in place of flour (sorry I don’t have a picture of that one).  Géraud has been experimenting with brownies made with “farine de châtaignes” (chestnut flour) and he made the crêpes below with a mix of quinoa and rice flour.  Mmmm…

#1 Local pears from the Saturday morning market soon to become a pear-apple crisp.
#2 An upturned jar with green-lentil sprouts under way.
#3 Mushrooms we gathered during a walk (Géraud learned about hunting mushrooms from his grandfather.  It’s a big thing here.  When the season is right and it’s a day or two after a good rain you will find cars parked all along the little country roads left by folks of all ages searching for mushrooms.)

“Lait cru” written on the little signs mark the raw-milk cheeses.  The absolute majority of cheeses in France (of which there are hundreds and hundreds of different kinds) are unpasteurized.  Though I agree with eating “live” foods, I admit that when a super-duper moldy cheese appears on my plate I take a double-take.  These are moments when I remember that I am an American (though this doesn’t stop me from tasting!).

This picture is from New Year’s Eve at about 3:00 in the morning.  Our friend Pascal (a real high-energy kind of guy) is leading a group croissant making effort.  The table is outside under a tent so that when the croissant are ready, they can put them directly into the old-timey, wood-fired oven to the right.  The bottles of water are to be used as rolling-pins.  Since we were heading home at this point we didn’t get to try them, but we hear that they came out of the oven around 6:00 a.m. and tasted great!

*I am back in France living in this house…

…with my French husband…

…8 months pregnant with my first baby…

That’s that for my personal life.  Now that I am way out here, making a new home with lots of fast changes I would like to start blogging again to keep connected.  With who?  With you!

But don’t worry.  I have no intention of making this blog about how oh-so-romantic it is to be living here or how oh-so-challenging it is to be pregnant and a new mother (though, of course, our daily lives are integral in our creative lives).  I am still painting, playing music, making books and exploring in general.  I still want to participate in the creative exchanges that happen via the net while far away from home.  How does that sound?

So…to be continued.

She had had a lovely, solitary week and a half reading books, drawing, journaling, working on the computer AND making fires in the fireplace.

Here is the rest of the story about how we found the cottage.  As some of you know, Laurie Corral, of Asheville Bookworks, and I were asked to teach a 9 day workshop at Chateau du Pin in the Loire Valley.  When Clara had the idea to find a place for a month-long retreat she suggested I ask, Peg Gignoux, the woman who hired us to teach at the Chateau.  As it turned out, Peg’s cousin Marie had cottages for rent just down the road from the Chateau.  Have I lost you yet?

During our time at the cottage we made buddies with Marie (our land lady) and Louise (Peg’s sister) who is living at the Chateau for 3 months to help with the family business.  This is how it came to be that we received a personal tour of the grounds.

The story of the Chateau is an interesting one.  Louise told us various tid-bits; it was seized as living quarters for the Nazi’s during the war and at present it’s owned by almost 20 members of the French-American Gignoux family.

Pretty nice eh?

The story continues…Clara has a rule for herself when it comes to France: Never go to France without going to Paris for a few days.  So, staying true to her rule, she had planned 5 days in Paris at the end of her month-long stay.  Being the lovely person she is, she invited me to come along.  Who passes up being in Paris? Not me!

It being a surprising and wonderful thing to find such a weekend way over here in France I really, really wanted to go.  Once Clara assured me that she wouldn’t feel deserted, I bought a train ticket and embarked on yet another mini-journey within my grand journey.

However, it wasn’t as easy as that.  Clara and I didn’t have a car and the cottage where we were staying was a 45 minute walk from the nearest town.  The town had, not a train station, but a train stop.  So, I woke at 6 a.m. and walked with a day bag, a water bottle and my banjo, down the road (I wish someone had been there to take a picture).

I caught the little train that ran through Champtocé to Angers where I caught another train to Orléans.  Nadine had arranged for me to catch a ride there with people I had never met; Yves and Réjane.  I recognized Yves immediately because he was the only one waiting for the train with a banjo on his back.

We drove for hours, talking all the way.  We arrived to meet a whole gang of folks with instruments, sleeping bags for the dorm beds and lots of food and wine to share.

Everyone was curious about the American girl who really, truly came from North Carolina.  Then, amazingly enough, another American girl and great fiddler, named Anne, arrived.  I taught some clogging steps and she called a few square dances.

(Anne and I also discovered that, not only are we teaching during the same week at Augusta Heritage Center in August, but she is also the musician for my clogging workshop at Pinewoods in Massachusetts.  How crazy is that!)

Everyone put their food in a large utility kitchen and shared the duties of cooking and cleaning.  Polo got the big idea to make 40 wood-fired pizzas from scratch.  It was alot of work, but they tasted soooo good.

Bécours is also the location for a boyscout/girl scout camp.  A few of us went down and played them some tunes.  I’m sure none of them had heard Appalachian Old-Time before.

Here is a short video of a brother and sister duo playing and singing the Lonesome Pine Special from the Carter Family.  They are accompanying themselves with a piano accordion.

Here is the link to the video if you are unable to view it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwAtu27ZDaY

I tell you this because what I’m about to write about is my mid-trip rest break, though in reality I am now nearing the end of my trip.  By the time I left Cathi’s house in Sisteron I had been visiting people via planes-trains-and-automobiles for 3 months.  While still in the U.S. my friend-marketing mentor-fellow bookmaker, Clara, suggested renting a place for a month-long artist’s retreat.  We found a little cottage near Angers (more on that later) and promised to meet there in the beginning of May.  So, here it is:

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  I had 3 months worth of great people and experiences to reflect on.  I had a chance to catch up on emails and began to prepare my fall/winter schedule (searching for teaching and music gigs).  We enjoyed long walks, interesting talks (it was fun to see someone from home way over here), cooking our own meals, watching French T.V., reading books, making cozy fires and sleeping alot.

I even got to paint a little…

]]> http://afainbooks.com/blog/2010/07/07/champtoce-sur-loire-travel-break/feed/ 5 http://afainbooks.com/blog/2010/06/24/sisteron-the-gateway-to-provence/ http://afainbooks.com/blog/2010/06/24/sisteron-the-gateway-to-provence/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 05:47:38 +0000 Annie Fain http://afainbooks.com/?p=1659 Continue reading →]]> Do you remember the woman, Cathi, who I met at the festival La Motte en Provence?  The one who called American contra and square dances (in French of course)?  She is a dear friend of, not only Polo and Nadine, but of Philippe who I visited in Grenoble.  After she and I hit it off so well at La Motte she called and invited me to visit her at her home near a pre-Roman town called Sisteron.

In the picture above you can see how the rock formations create a sort of gateway.  A 13th-17th citadel is on the hill to the left and a rare rock formation, where people come from far and wide to rock climb, is to the right.   It’s also on the route for Le Tour de France (kind of a pain-in-the-butt for locals).  Cathi says it marks the passage from the Alpes and to Provence, hence being a perfect stop after my visit with Aime.

I was enamored with this walk-through from old town to new town.  The little sign hanging to the right is for a bakery of artisan bread.  They don’t even have a store front, you just peek your head through the front door and they come to sell you bread fresh out of the wood-fired oven.

Below is Valerna, the little village near Sisterone where Cathi and her daughter Julie live.

Cathi is a fiddle player.  She started with Irish and traditional French music and then fell in love with Appalachian Old-Time after meeting Polo and Nadine.  So, of course, we played some tunes together….

Went on some beautiful walks…

And went to the market…Mmm…Strawberries…

From Grenoble I took a bus to St. Bonnet where I was met by my next host, Aime (sitting to the right in the picture below), who lives in a small village near a ski station called Chaillol.  I had met Aimie once before because he is a good friend of Joelle and Daniel’s.  I had also received his email almost a year ago from a Frenchman named Christian (who I met at the John C. Campbell Folkschool) who was kind enough to put me in touch with many of his musician friends.  Christian’s generosity is one of the biggest reasons I have been able to make such wonderful connections here.  Thank you Christian!

In the email I received from Christian about Aime he described a very cozy weekly gathering: “l’hiver nous joueons une fois par semaine dans un gite avec vin chaud et bonne soupe, tu vois ta copine serait aux anges.” (“in the winter we play one time a week in a bead-and-breakfast with hot wine and good soup, you see your friend would be with the angels”)  Sounds like heaven eh?

Aime and his very friendly/lively/fun friends only spoke a little English, which was perfect for me.  We understood each other just fine (expect when Aime started talking about philosophy and other such abstract topics…he would completely loose me, he’d realize and then we’d have a good laugh).

Aimie showed me all kinds of things during my visit: his favorite movies, his collection of books on philosophy, his packed away letterpress equipment from they days he was a printer, his favorite view of the mountains, and the community bal folk dance and potluck they have every Tuesday night.

One day, he took me to this very old, teeny-tiny church covered with stone “dolls.” The story goes that once upon a time there was a man who was deeply in love with a woman and for some reason he was not able to tell her.  Rather than kill himself, he used his frustrated energies to create the odd facade of this rural place of worship.

One of the wonderful things about France is that you don’t have to go very far before you are in a completely different landscape or even climate.  The area surrounding Aime’s small village was sooooo different from any place I had been yet.  It’s even more interesting that different landscapes naturally inform different ways of life for the people who live there.  There are difference cheeses, different wines or liquors, different ways of farming, different ways to build houses, different expressions, accents and jokes.

“How did you take a bath?” you ask.  Though they have an outdoor shower house with a nice view of the mountains it was still a little too cold to be wet and outside at the same time.  So, a large kettle of water heated on the stove, a water basin, soap and a wash cloth were the answer.  One night, I got to take a bath downstairs right next to the stove.  It was wonderful!

This is where I slept.

Coming Next: MUSIC FESTIVALS!

]]> http://afainbooks.com/blog/2010/05/10/chez-polo-et-nadine/feed/ 0 http://afainbooks.com/blog/2010/05/07/the-land-of-ardeche/ http://afainbooks.com/blog/2010/05/07/the-land-of-ardeche/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 19:00:33 +0000 Annie Fain http://afainbooks.com/?p=962 Continue reading →]]> I’m back!  It has been quite a while since I last wrote and I promise to make up for it (though I admit that I really enjoyed having a break from the computer).  Aloooot has happened so let me start from the beginning.

I took a train from Vichy to St. Entiennes and then an afternoon bus to a very small town called Saint Agreve.  The bus ride took me higher and higher into the mountains leaving behind the beautiful, central France springtime and replacing it with a climate almost a month delayed.  I had entered the land of Ardeche, an area I feel in love with during the three weeks that followed.  I’m sure you’ll see why.

If you look at the map below, near the bottom right corner, you can see Ardeche within in the Rhone-Alps region which is colored green.  It’s only a few hours drive from the Hautes-Alps (High Alps) which you can see to the right.

The bus dropped me off near a fountain in the center of town.  It was drizzling, there wasn’t a soul in sight (even all the shops looked closed) and I had to pee reeeeal bad .  Within 15 minutes Polo and Nadine, my new hosts, pulled up in their white van with all four of their very sweet dogs in the back seat.

We greeted with cheek kisses which is, of course, the normal way in France.  After 2 months of meeting new people I was getting more used too this very different way (for an American) of making acquaintance with someone I have never met.  In Joelle and Daniel’s town everyone gave two kisses for greeting so after a kiss on each cheek with Nadine I stepped away and she smiled and said, “It’s three kisses here.”  I had no idea that some places are two, three or even four kisses.  How do know how many and at what time is what I wanna know!

There is so much I could say about my time with Polo and Nadine so if you want all the goods we’ll have to talk in person.  But to start, they have a very special way of living, a way that would be very good for the planet if more people followed their example.  I was completely inspired.

They heat only with a woodstove and choose not to have hotwater, an inside bathroom or a refrigerator.  All of the woodworking, from the woodshed (which Polo built alone in one day while I was there) to the chairs in the house to instrument pegs are made by hand by Polo.  Nadine makes wonderful bread, soups, sprouted grains and soy-yogurt.  And they both play LOTS of music!

Away from the constant humming of electronic devices, cars driving past, street lamps and cell phones I immediately relaxed in a deep way.  I slept really well, pulled weeds in the garden, red books by the woodstove and some nights we played tunes together.  I admit that I often thought to myself, “I want to live like this all the time!”

Once again I started to get settled in a new place.  Then the good times began…(as if I hadn’t been having a blast already…tee hee).

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