By Janet Duignan

I didn’t think I would miss the snow last winter. Usually a sun lover, the mild weather here in the Dordogne was particularly disappointing because I was on the lookout for the return of a very special visitor to our garden from the previous year.

Since arriving in France nine years ago, I have thoroughly enjoyed the variety of species of birds that have visited us. During the unseasonable week of snow the previous February, it was obvious that the wild birds were suffering, especially those that were not adapted to take advantage of the variety of foods we left on the feeders. As the snow melted, a patch of grass appeared in our south-facing garden. And I was astonished to find, when I looked out of my window one cold morning, a large bird with an enormous beak pecking through the thawed but still hard ground for worms. It was a woodcock.

Not only had I never seen one before but the bird itself must have been driven to desperation to come out of the woods that give it its name and forage around in broad daylight as they usually feed in the evenings or at night and are carefully camouflaged to make them very hard to see in leaf matter. I kept quite still in order to spy on this unusual visitor; they have large eyes placed high on the sides of their heads giving them 360° vision. The beak is twice as long as their head, which is why the French name for the bird is bécasse or “big beak.” They are a bit bigger than wood pigeons and sound like a frog when they call, croaking followed by a sneeze.

Unlike some of my French neighbors who like to hunt, I knew that I would rather find out more about this beautiful bird than pick up a gun and shoot it for the pot. I can’t even keep chickens because, just as the Red Queen told Alice when she went through the looking glass, “It isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to.” The hunters use dogs specially trained for this type of game, with bells on their collars; they find and point to the birds before flushing them out. The French Woodcock Society (Club National des Bécassiers) specify a bag limit of 3 birds per hunter per day to a total of 50 per year. Its motto is “Hunt as much as possible while killing as few as possible” (Chasser le plus possible en tuant le moins possible).

Woodcocks have been hunted for food for centuries, with recipes appearing in medieval times. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame recreated a Ten Bird Roast for a medieval-themed feast. He starts with turkey and stuffs it with goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and, last but not least, woodcock.

Elizabeth Raffald, when writing The Experienced English Housekeeper in 1769, included a recipe for A Yorkshire Goose Pie which also involved a turkey, two ducks and six woodcocks. No bag limit in those days, then.

At least there is no wastage when eating Woodcock as almost every part of the bird can be eaten, except for the gizzard, eyes, beak and feathers. It seems that they empty their bowels before flying, which means the bird can be roasted with the intestines still inside. When removed and added to the cooking juices with a small glass of Armagnac, a dash of lemon juice and seasoning and then flambéed, the resulting sauce was said to be so delicious that, in his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, published posthumously in 1873, Alexandre Dumas Père felt he had to write a warning. He said that, when serving a ragoût of roast woodcock, in a recipe called salmis de becassins des bernardins, it was essential to provide forks to prevent the guests devouring their sauce-covered fingers.

Another delicacy was the head split open in order to eat the brains.

Guy de Maupassant in his 1887 book of short stories Contes de la Bécasse (Woodcock Tales) tells of a dinner party game played with the head of a woodcock pinned to the cork of a good bottle of wine (once drunk). The head is spun around, a bit like Spin the Bottle, until it stops and the woodcock’s bill points to one of the diners, who is announced the winner. The prize is the privilege of eating all of the woodcock heads but at the cost of having to tell a story to the others while they sit by the fire smoking cigars and drinking brandy. The trick, as a good host, was to be careful how many good bottles of wine were served before getting to the game, to ensure the winner’s tongue was loosed enough to make him capable of telling a good story, without being too drunk.

Mordorée is another name for woodcock in French, so perhaps the ideal wine for these occasions would be the Châteauneuf-du-Pape “La Plume du Peintre,” an expensive special reserve with a 16.3% alcohol content from the Domaine de la Mordorée. Wine Advocate (N° 173, Oct. 2007) described it as a limited cuvée which “is meant to age for 40-50 years. From a specific site in one of the appellation’s most hallowed sectors (La Crau), this wine’s level of concentration, richness, extract, and harmony are almost beyond comprehension. With beautifully integrated acidity, tannin, and alcohol, it is a monster wine the likes of which are rarely seen today.”

La Plume du Peintre, the painter’s feather, is in fact the name of the little pin feathers. Only two of these are found on each Woodcock, on the leading edge of each wing. Shaped like the head of a spear, they are so fine that they are used by artists for very delicate work, for example by Renaissance painters to paint angels’ hair and Victorian artists who specialized in miniatures. Perhaps when Claude Monet painted his Partridge and Woodcock in 1872 he used the Plume du Peintre for the fiddly bits.

The impression I am left with, after researching the woodcock through history, literature, cuisine and art, is that I am just looking forward to the next snowy winter and the hope that I might once again see an unexpected visitor rummaging for worms in a small patch of thawed grass.

© 2014, Janet Duignan

Janet Duignan is a British writer and journalist living in Dordogne

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The seasons in the city. Along with the change of light and length of day comes the change in urban vegetation. For France Revisited I’ve been watching the seasons in Paris by keeping an eye on the Virginia creeper that hangs along the full side wall of a building in my neighborhood.

Les saisons en ville. Ce qui change, c’est la lumière et la durée du jour bien sûr et aussi la végétation urbaine. Pour France Revisited, j’ai guetté les saisons à Paris grâce à une vigne vierge qui s’accroche sur tout un pignon d’immeuble près de chez moi.

The entire wall turns:
Le mur devient entièrement:

dazzling green in summer,
vert éclatant l’été

dark red in autumn just before the rain causes all of the leaves to fall in the space of a few days,
rouge sombre en automne juste avant la pluie qui fera tomber toutes feuilles en quelques jours,

the wall and the branches appear nude in winter,
le mur et les branches apparaissent nus l’hiver,

then little by little they get dressed in green again in spring.
puis se rhabillent progressivement de vert au printemps.

There’s nothing artificial in the four photos presented here. These are truly the four seasons of my street in Paris! And a splendid start to spring it is!
Rien d’artificiel dans les quatre photos présentées ici, ce sont bien les vraies saisons de ma rue parisienne ! Et c’est un splendide début de printemps !

Text and photos by Va-nu-pieds. Translation by GLK.

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It was a Monday, the day the palace is closed to the public, so relatively few people visit the gardens that day, even though they remain open. Even fewer visit on a cold misty Monday in February.

The alleys were empty. The fountains were silent. There trees were reflected in the still algal water in the basins.

That and more can be seen in the audio slide-show below.

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It’s been unusually cold in Paris, mostly a dry cold though. It’s the damp cold that normally marks the Paris winter so, warmly dressed, it’s nearly a pleasure to be in the cold outside. It’s inside that things get dicey. I returned to Paris a few days ago after six weeks in the U.S. and have since spent a good amount of time winterizing the apartment: hanging curtains, plugging spaces on the edges of doors and windows, buying an electric heater.

The elderly woman downstairs used to heat a lot in winter, I could tell by the warmth of my parquet, but she now goes south for much of the winter. And a guy in his 20s recently moved next door and doesn’t need to turn on his own heat very often since most nights he warms his apartment by having a dozen friends over for a rave party. I’m left to heating my own space. So much for community.

The best place to find community these days is in the cafes and bars of the residential neighborhoods. They’ve been quite crowded, I’ve noticed, these past few days and evenings, smokers swarming by the doorways. Crisis, what crisis?

I love cafes in winter, the way people come in rubbing the cold off their hands. There’s more of a community feel to a café in winter than in summer. In summer everyone wants a piece personal joy, their own proverbial spot in the sun. You tolerate your neighbors at surrounding tables in summer, but other than the usual sexual attraction you’d rather have nothing to do with them. In winter, though, there’s more of a feel that we’re all in this together. On especially cold winter days, as in rain storms in other seasons, the café becomes a kind of genteel bomb shelter. It’ll pass, we think, or we’ll soon go out and confront the elements, but in the meantime un autre, s’il vous plaît.

I just got home from having coffee with a friend and I take back what I said a paragraph ago.

There isn’t much of a sense of community in the café after all. I now think that the difference between the winter café and the summer café is that in winter Parisians have even less of a sense of personal space than they do in summer. Their sweaters, scarves, and coats not only put a damper on the aforementioned sexual attraction but also make people unaware of where their space ends and others’ begin. Add to that the shopping bags now that the annual winter sales period is underway and oh the looks you get when you ask a woman to take her ankle-length duvet coat and H&M bags from an otherwise available chair so that you can sit down! Sometimes the bomb shelter feels less genteel, but once you and your friend have got your space it’s café society as holders of McStarbucks Cards can only dream about, even at McStarbucks in Paris.

Yesterday, after insulating window cracks in the morning, I went out to take photos in my neighborhood along the canal. There were at least a dozen people taking pictures within the same 300-yard stretch of the canal during the same 30-minute grey-day photo shoot, including a couple of guys with long lenses, one with a tripod. The thought that most of those photographers were going to put their pictures on blogs accompanied or not by text about the cold in Paris and the ice on the canal was rather disheartening. It’s one thing to compete for elbow room in a café, it’s quite another to think that we’re all competing for attention on the internet.

Truth be told, the canal is not a highly photogenic place. Oh, it’s a nice place to live, to hang out, to stroll, to café-sit, and, when the weather’s right, to picnic, but its color combination of dark green, grey, beige, brown, and black, with little sky in the frame and an uninspiring mishmash of architecture alongside, make the canal an awkward place to photograph. We all pointed our cameras towards the ice in the hopes that that would be evocative enough.

I stood on a bridge by a guy with a long lens to take the shot above of gull prints in the dusting of snow on the ice. The guy tried not show that he was annoyed by my “copying” him, but when I then followed him over to shoot a view from the side he gave me the same look as the women whose space I invaded in the café today. Why should his blog have better photos than mine just because he’s got a bigger lens?

The canal may not be very photogenic but the Eiffel Tower always is. That explains why one occasionally comes across some stunning photographs of the Eiffel Tower. Problem is, it’s hard to make the Eiffel Tower look like anything but the Eiffel Tower, by which I mean that it rarely evokes any other thought than: That’s the Eiffel Tower, I’ve been there (or I want to be there).

That’s why I love the joy that comes across in Va-nu-pieds’ Eiffel Tower photo. In it he managed to capture the sense of ecstasy at coming upon a distant view of the Iron Lady. I’m honored that he gave me first dibs to use it on France Revisited’s Photography Blog.

A close look at the shot shows that he must have taken the picture in summer because you can see the sandal tan lines on his foot (unless those are shadows from the beams), but the Eiffel Tower is timeless enough that, unlike in my apartment, a difference of 50 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t matter.

– Text and photos Gary Lee Kraut, 2010.

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This is a small garden in the heart of the Latin Quarter, between the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages and the Sorbonne. And its Siberian elm. Snow is rare in Paris. Many years there is no snow, and when there is it generally doesn’t stick… And this year, for the third day, the snow is still there.

Today, written on the windshield of a car : “Vive la vie!” Puts a smile on the face for the rest of the day.

Aujourd’hui, tracé sur le pare brise blanc d’une voiture : “Vive la vie!” De quoi sourire pour le reste de la journée.

But the snow doesn’t last long in Paris. The memory, however, remains because Va-nu-pieds was there.

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Before I moved to Nice I had been warned by friends in nearby Provence that this was a city of little old ladies and small dogs and that I should always look down at the pavement while walking in order to avoid the ubiquitous “ca-ca.” Their comments were perhaps inspired by the Provence-Riviera rivalry, but even in Nice I’d been told that the locals easily distinguish the tourists from the true Niçois by the fact that the former look up as they walk while the latter look down.

Nice is a big city with much going on, but those little old ladies—usually widows, I imagine due to their lack of male accompaniment—are as much a part of the city as the famous Promenade des Anglais that follows the curve of the bay. It’s not unusual to see their tan, wrinkly, svelte bodies lying around the beaches below the Promenade in groups of two or three.

I arrived in Nice just after the New Year. This wasn’t my first time in the city of widows, but I had only ever spent the odd weekend here. I chose the Cote d’Azur for the mild winter weather and Nice in particular for its language schools—it was time to master the language of Molière once and for all. As a bonus, I arrived just in time to witness one of the most famous winter festivals in Europe, Nice’s celebration of Carnival.

Carnival (Carnaval in French) is the period of festivities that precedes Lent—not that many people in French now pay attention to that religiosity. Basically, Carnival is Mardi Gras. Though Mardi Gras is technically Fat Tuesday, the day that precedes Ash Wednesday, it’s non-religious connotation (i.e. party time) has now led to it referring to the full period of festivities. Call it what you like, it’s party time!

Pre-Carnival buzz

Nice’s Carnival began on Friday evening, Feb. 13, but all that week there had been a buzz in the air. Nice is one of the larger cities on the Cote d’Azur so there’s activity in the streets all year, but beginning early in the week I noticed the arrival of an increasing number of people looking up—tourists no doubt. Despite the cold weather, the widows were out in force, bronzing themselves in preparation for the upcoming festivities.

The fabulous Promenade des Anglais—think the Champs Elysées of Paris but along the sea—is never really empty unless it’s raining, but it was getting increasingly busy. Bleachers had been in place for a few weeks already, and on Monday a massive TV screen was installed in historic Place Massena on which the various parades would be shown. The Nice Tourist Office was the first to decorate, putting a giant colorful lizard head up on the roof.

Nice’s Carnival, France’s largest, has been around for 125 years. Another major Carnival takes place in Dunkerque in northern France. Nice’s Carnival lasts for two weeks. There are festivities every day, punctuated by major events described here: the opening ceremony, the Flower Parades on Saturdays and Wednesdays, the night parades on Tuesdays and Saturdays and then the grand finale on the last Sunday.

This year’s theme was “King of Masquerades” whose inauguration was staged in a parade with 20 monumental floats, accompanied by over 200 big ‘heads’ much like the above-mentioned lizard.

Arrival of the King

The King arrived on Friday evening. By then it had become apparent to me that a lot of Niçois have never actually attended the Carnival because when I asked various locals what happens on the King’s arrival I never got a clear answer. They all seem to know the history: The King’s arrival commences the Carnival, and at the end of Carnival two weeks later is taken out to the sea and burned so that he can rise from the ashes the following year. But everyone was vague on the details.

What actually happens, I discovered at the opening ceremony, is this: There is a huge party staged in Place Massena with two enormous floats—the King and the Queen—that come from the direction of the large shopping street, Avenue Jean Medécin. The square is packed with revelers; confetti and Silly String are thrown about in huge quantities. Everyone is in a festive mood and dances in the middle of the square to the pop music blaring from loudspeakers.
Quite a few of the revelers were masked.

I asked one of them why and they said that this year the theme, The King of Masquerades, was an invitation to hide your identity and become someone else. This made it impossible to resist dancing and frolicking in the streets with perfect strangers. My friends and I made the most of it. Then suddenly we all realized that the King and Queen were bearing down on us, and we were in a panic as we all tried to make way for the giant floats to pass. As they passed by, you could see that there were masked people in costume inside the floats, waving and throwing confetti and spraying the crowds with Silly String. Revelers also sprayed each other. At first I wondered where all the aerosol string was coming from but after the parade I saw a few street vendors still hawking the stuff.

Trailing after the floats were various semi-organized groups in costumes, including a gaggle of children and some acrobats who danced in the streets. The whole experience reminded me of an exotic New Years Eve in Times Square as for a few hours strangers from around the world danced, laughed, and sprayed each other with Silly String. It was fantastic.

La Bataille des Fleurs – Battle of the Flowers a.k.a the Flower Parade

Honestly, someone should have warned me that the Bataille des Fleurs, the Battle of the Flowers, was not a contest between the flower floats in a parade but rather an actual “battle” to catch the flowers being thrown at the spectators throughout the parade.

The Bataille took place Saturday afternoon on the Promenade des Anglais. I was seated in the bleachers thinking that I had lucked out for picture-taking because seated around me were hundreds of gentle, sedate senior citizens who would never jump up in front of my camera. They were mostly couples, arms linked rather romantically (occasionally you saw one lone man with a few ladies seated around him; I’m guessing these lucky men were favorites of the widow crowd). “Aw, how cute” I thought, wishing I had someone special with me. As it was most of my friends had refused to pay the hefty 25 euro fee to sit in the stands and had opted to stand in the crowds on the other side of the street. And my one friend who had been willing had lost her ticket. So I was friendless in the stands.

The parade started with a bang when loud Brazilian music accompanied by an even louder announcer scorched our ears. I noticed a few of the seniors dialing down their hearing aids.

The first dancers to arrive were Brazilians scantily dressed like flowers. I had to laugh at the men in the bleachers trying hard not to look too much and the women acting scandalized when they caught their men ogling the dancers. One particularly Brazilian-shaped (read: nicely formed) dancer was sans flower and very nearly naked, shaking her bootie on uber-high heels. How could you help but stare!

Then the first flower-drenched float arrived. It moved slowly. I noticed there was someone just walking alongside the float with a cartful of flowers. The walker then started throwing flowers into the stands. This caused a roar from the crowd, and suddenly everyone was lunging forward trying to catch flowers. Fights erupted between the men who, I now realized, were supposed to try to catch the flowers in order to give them to their significant others. It was utter chaos. The formerly placid old men surrounding me who didn’t look like they could move unless assisted were now jumping up like grasshoppers, sometimes knocking over their loved ones in the process. Several times a few aggressive younger men very nearly came to fisticuffs. Their women gave each other the evil eye all in order to catch a flower or two.

This process went on throughout the parade. It was evident that this was a time-worn tradition as the women knew how to duck and weave whenever the flowers were thrown. A few were unlucky and knocked off their chairs but they just got themselves back up—in a very dignified manner, I might add. I myself was nearly knocked over a few times, but I managed to catch a few flowers, although the old ladies, seeing that I was manless, just sniffed and turned their backs on me.

The parade was fantastic—it’s hard to describe all of the various floats and costumes that passed by in the two-plus hours—and it was a photographer’s delight, but I think the real event was the battle. As the parade was coming around a second time the flower-tossers were now pulling flowers from the floats themselves and throwing them into the crowds. The competition got even more fierce. Slightly shaken, I decided to scurry out of there lest some loved-up senior decide to arm wrestle me for my armful of flowers.

Corso Illuminé

The Corso Illuminé is the night parade that circles two times around Place Massena on Tuesday and Saturday nights. The two corsos, or corsi, I attended were spectacular. There were enormous harlequins and huge floating caricatures of what would have entertained royalty back in the day, a rather fierce dragon (my personal favorite), and groups from various countries who entertained us in between the grotesque processions with acrobatic dances, drum-playing, or baton-twirling. They slowly passed by as the crowd heaved to and fro, filling in the spaces between each float.

It was interesting to see the spectators get up close and personal with the floats, and armed with aerosol string cans (boums, in French) and confetti, they would spray the heck out of the floats, the groups, and each other until everybody and everything was covered in string and confetti.

Those of us who chose not to buy boums and confetti were frequently targeted with stealth attacks from behind as if the boumeurs (think bombers) were saying, “Hey, you there, blocking my view and my chance to spray a float, this one’s for you!”

I was told by my French teacher Jean-Philippe (probably referring to pre-aerosol string days) that years ago they threw little plastic balls a bit bigger than bb pellets and which weighed a bit more than bb pellets (I’m guessing) as there were always a few eyes put out and, according to my informer, a couple of near deaths. As Carnival became increasingly popular with tourists from other countries they finally banned the pellets and switched to paper confetti and the infamous boums.

After a few days of partying and picking string off my clothes I stayed home one evening to do research into the origins of Nice’s Carnival. Nice’s Carnival is mentioned various times in the journals of royal patrons during the Middle Ages. It appears to have been particularly popular with dukes from France and Italy and that in 1889 the Prince of Wales (future Edward VII) came to light the procession stake to commence Carnival.

My favorite float, the dragon, is called a “babau” and first appeared as a float in 1882 to honor the tradition of grotesque mythology that is prevalent in most Carnival histories. Here is where mythology and Catholicism meld. Winter Carnivals are now said to be a celebration of the advent of Lent, which is why Mardi Gras (literally “Fat Tuesday”) commemorates the end of the Carnival period and incorporates a huge feast so that Catholics can get ready for eating meagerly (specifically no meat) for Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter. Nowadays my Catholic friends usually resolve to give something up like sugar in their coffee or white wine. (Notice they don’t say all wines.) According to tradition, then, all manner of wild behavior and voluntary madness is allowed during this Carnival period as you would pay penance during Lent. Perhaps this explains the folly of Silly String.

Street food in Nice: the socca party

I could write at length about how, after a week of cool weather, we finally had a beautiful sunny day, and how my friends and I gathered together on the Promenade des Anglais along with a few thousand tourists to watch the parades most days. But what I really want to do is write a love letter about a Niçois street food called the socca.

Socca is a thin, moist-on-the-inside, crispy-on-the-outside pancake made of chickpea flour, olive oil and salt and baked in huge pizza pans in wood burning ovens. It is delicious, especially if, like me, you have been living it up all weekend and are moving just a bit slower than usual on a Sunday afternoon. It is served on little paper plates. You just add pepper.

I’m not the only one who loves socca. In the Albert 1er gardens next to Place Massena, the Carnival held a socca party and everyone queued for over half an hour just to get a plate of socca. The line was so long that kids waiting with their parents were bored silly and as a result used up most of their aerosol string cans on all of us waiting in line. Other targets included the wandering bands of Spanish singers, a few clowns and the occasional palm tree. On most Sundays the queues are just as long at the socca restaurants in old town Nice.

The socca in Vieux (Old) Nice is served alongside other local specialties such as pissaladière (caramelized onion pizza sometimes with bits of anchovy and black olives), pan bagnat (little buns brushed with olive oil, then filled with green pepper slices, black olives, onion slices, anchovies, tomato slices and hard-boiled egg slices — all drizzled with vinaigrette), niçois farcis (vegetables like zucchini, peppers and onions cut into bite size pieces and topped or stuffed with delicious fillings made of meat or fish or other vegetables), and beignets (shrimp or meat fillings dunked in a thick batter and deep fried).

All of these are finger foods—although your fingers tend to get very greasy—and families, couples, and friends gather together at brunch time to sit at the picnic tables outside, eat some Nice street food, and wash it all down with a glass of rosé. Yum!

While Nice parties through Carnival, Menton hosts its Lemon Festival

While Nice was holding its Carnival the pretty Riviera town of Menton, sitting between the Italian border and Monaco, holds its Lemon Festival, la Fête du Citron.

I’d visited the Riviera a number of times before moving here but for some reason I’d never thought to go east of Monaco. Now I think it’s a shame that it took me so long since Menton is indeed worthy of at least a daytrip.

The Lemon Festival is also basically Carnival/Mardi Gras/party time while being directly linked to that fact that the climate in Menton is ideal for growing lemon trees and other citrus. Known as the City of Lemons, Menton distinguishes itself from the rest of the French Riviera by having a subtropical climate that, in addition to its attractiveness to lemon trees, has earned it a special place in the heart botanists and garden-lovers.

The town has won many awards for being the top “floral” town in France. Botanists have been coming here since the 1800s to plant rare species of flowers and plants because they can thrive in this climate. About 115 acres (46 hectares) of park space surround the town, with contemporary gardens created in the very heart of the city. During the Lemon Festival the garden at the center of the town becomes the setting for the jardins illuminés or illuminated gardens/gardens of light.

During an afternoon reconnaissance mission from Nice I was struck by the fact that although this is on the coast and therefore should be loaded with tourists and little old ladies with tiny dogs, it isn’t, so you can walk through the pedestrian area without having to watch your step. Menton (pop. 29,000) has its charms but isn’t quaint per se, though it has an elegant feel that is sometimes lacking in Nice. It is one of the few towns in France where the population is actually getting younger, and the downtown area appears to be particularly clean.

In preparing this article I didn’t actively set out to test restaurants but I can nevertheless report that of I’ve enjoyed the several meals I’ve had here. In Nice, on the other hand, which has some great food possibilities, haphazard selection can lead to some bad and overpriced meals and hit-or-miss service.

The Lemon Festival, first held in 1934, runs about three weeks. The theme for 2009 was “Menton celebrates the Music of the World.” And indeed the night we went everything from African tribal to American country music was being played in different venues in the gardens. My friends and I were delighted; a town that actually encourages music and dancing is a town that we can love.

Since my army of friends marches on its stomach, no sooner had we arrived then someone suggested we find a restaurant. We stopped at La Tagliatelle, an Italian restaurant across the street from the beach and promenade. It was absolutely fantastic and came complete with two huge Italian waiters. They’re brothers and they look like Mama breast-fed them pasta from the day they were born. Jolly as they were, it was the clientele who spoke volumes: La Tagliatelle must be a badly kept secret amongst the Italians as I heard no French in the restaurant, only Italian. (Remember, Italy is only a few miles away.) We each had a different pasta and left nothing behind. The lemon tart, tarte au citron, was fabulous, with no complaints about Le Colonel, a lemon sorbet topped with lemon vodka topped with a tiny bit of whipped cream.

After the meal we attacked the night garden event, and within five minutes a big stuffed clown thing was flirting and dancing with me… and trying to touch my bum while we were dancing.

Swiftly moving on, we came upon a quite good mariachi band which had us shaking our booties once more. Through the evening we frolicked amongst several other musical venues: country, disco, tango, rock-‘n-roll, etc. The venues themselves were each shaped a bit differently—there was a house, a chateau, a boat, a car, even a ‘moulin rouge’—all composed of thousands of lemons and oranges! Officially, the Lemon Festival uses about 145 tons of citrus fruit.

Open for dégustation throughout were small stands selling some of the best limoncello (sweet digestive liqueur made of lemons) I have ever tasted.

At the far end of the gardens Grand Marnier, makers of the famous orange liqueur, had set up a creperie that was serving warm Grand Marnier and coffee. By this time it was late and we were tired, so we all had a glass of Grand Marnier, tipped it in admiration to the magical music village, and caught the last train back to Nice.

We returned to Menton for a second evening of lemon festivities for the parade and fireworks. The parade itself was a little disappointing since it contained few surprises as it mainly consisted of the various village settings made of oranges and lemons that we had already seen. Or maybe the parade was a bit disappointing because we had been going to the far more spectacular night parades in Nice where the crowds were enormous and more international and showed more enthusiasm in the streets. Nice’s Carnival attracted more than a million visitors in 2009 whereas Menton’s Lemon Festival drew about 230,000. The crowds in Menton seemed mainly to be French, and the French, in my experience, don’t publicly dance or express themselves at such events like the English, Americans, Germans, Swiss, Dutch, etc.

Nevertheless, Menton is quite elegant and easily manageable for the tourist who wants a French seaside town flavor without all of the excessive tourist trappings, and that extends to its Lemon Festival as well. The benefit of attending Menton’s parade compared with Nice’s is that when Menton’s slows down you can walk right in between the various acts to take pictures. Another advantage is that there is far less Silly String in Menton.

The fireworks were rather special, particularly as they illuminated the sea—and who doesn’t love fireworks?! The whole event, while sedate compared to the Nice Carnival, was nicely presented.

Afterwards we all headed for the train station, satisfied with the food and festivities… but soon to be unsatisfied with the return home to Nice. As befitting a typically subdued town, there are no buses leaving Menton after 8 pm, so everyone without a car must take a train to get home if they don’t live there. The majority of people seemed to be headed east, as we were, in the direction of Nice and Cannes. Add the fact that the SNCF, the French rail service, had cancelled the two trains before the last one heading east, which was also delayed for over an hour, and you have a recipe for chaos.

The fireworks had ended around 10 pm but at nearly midnight there were still hundreds of people waiting for a train. The police were already there in advance, waiting to quell any possible riots and to keep people from being pushed off the platforms, but it would have seemed more reasonable to send in train reinforcements rather than police reinforcements.

The train finally arrived, and for about 10 minutes we couldn’t breathe, let alone move as the crowds—a not very young crowd at that—pushed forward to the doors. It was a nightmare that really only ended when we arrived in Nice. In short, check the bus and train schedules if you aren’t staying at a hotel in Menton.

The burning of the King and the end of Carnival

Back safely in Nice, I again turned my attention to the Carnival, which came to an end on a Sunday night. The burning of the king in the sea marks the end of the festivities and the start of Lent. Legend has it that by burning the King he will then rise again next year from the ashes to reign once again during the Carnival.

It was one of the more frenzied nights of the Carnival period. By 9 pm tens of thousands of revelers were gathered in Place Massena to escort the King to the sea. With music blasting over loudspeakers everyone danced in the streets, working themselves up for the ritual burning. The Silly String and confetti were flying everywhere; I had hoped that maybe they would have sold out of the stuff by now but it was actually even worse. I saw one little girl of maybe 5 or 6 being completely covered by Silly String by her parents and elder siblings, after which they threw confetti on her. My friends and I wondered whether that might constitute child abuse, but the child seemed to be enjoying it.

When the King started to move, the crowd roared bloodthirstily and followed the King down to the sea. My friends and I raced ahead to the Promenade des Anglais to take pictures of the procession. Then, as the King rounded the corner, we realized that the crowds at the beach were so immense we would never be able to see the King out at sea.

This is where I admit to having a slight advantage over typical visitors since I found the most official-looking person in the crowds, flashed my press badge, and asked where the press area was. We soon found ourselves in a private viewing area on the Promenade des Anglais, directly in front of the boats out at sea that were set up for the burning and the fireworks afterwards.

But the King was already out there! How was that possible when we had just left him at the corner? I soon discovered that they don’t actually burn the massive grotesque King we had all seen in the parades; instead an effigy made of paper maché is burned. Considering that the real King is made mostly of hard plastic this actually makes sense.

As we waited, the crowds behind us grew more bloodthirsty. Their chant of “Brule!” (Burn!) got more and more intense. Suddenly the announcement came that it was about to happen, and there was a brief pause in the yelling and screaming as they lit the King on fire.

As the fire took, the revelers found their voices again and they roared through the 5-6 minutes it took to burn the effigy. As the fire died down, so did the voices, save for one child’s voice who yelled out one last comment: “Au revoir, Sarkozy!” We all laughed.

Immediately after the burning of the King the fireworks began, and it was evident where a good portion of the city’s 6-million-euro Carnival budget went. They were spectacular. Four boats out at sea shot off fireworks in tune to approximately ten different songs as we watched from our advantageous press-passed position. The fireworks seemed endless.

Then it was over.

As my friends and I waded our way through the Silly String-and-confetti-filled streets we noticed that the formerly frenzied crowd had lost its energy and vitality. Everyone shuffled back to their home or hotel. The party was over, and we all knew it was time to take off our Carnival masks and return to our real lives.
Tourist Offices and Festival Information

Nice: Nice’s official Carnival website.

Menton: Menton’s official Lemon Festival website.

The post Catching the Spirit of Nice’s Winter Carnival and Menton’s Lemon Festival appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

***

The following morning is sunny and cool. I have breakfast in a café facing the port. I visit the Saturday morning market in and around Les Halles, the covered food market on Place du Marché.

I meet with the president of the La Rochelle Tourist Office. He tells me much I didn’t know about local history, local politics, local characters and town planning, while we drink bad coffee.

I return to the Old Town. A haze of clouds is moving in.

I enter the massive, graceless cathedral looking for a chapel of ship-theme ex-votos. Every port town has one. A sign tells me that 2008 is the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec.

There’s a little crafts market on the vast square in front of the cathedral. One man sells fruit-scented fruit-shaped candles. He invites me to smell them, which I do, but the granny smith candle doesn’t smell like a granny smith apple, the tangerine candle doesn’t smell like a tangerine, and so on. I tell him so. He answers that the problem is my nose not his candles, but that they do smell stronger when they’re lit, only 2 euros. I tell him they’re pretty anyway.

I admire the proud 19th-century décor of Café de la Paix. I love those historical grand cafés even when they no longer exude much in the way of class. A waiter asks if I want lunch. I say no, just looking, and leave.

I walk down a street paved with stones brought from the banks of the Saint Lawrence River that were used to weigh down ships carrying beaver furs from Canada. The full story of that trade is told in the Musée du Nouveau Monde (Museum of the New World), where tapestries, painting, and sculptures show how Europeans perceived the New World as an innocent and exotic child, like the Indian at City Hall, and maps in the museum show the Americas as unformed continents, the definition of their eastern seaboards giving way to vague interiors, which is pretty much as I imagine them even today. I consider going into the museum now that I know that 2008 is the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec, but I visited the museum 10 years ago and don’t feel like going back.

So I go to the Natural History Museum, expecting the worst.

The Natural History Museum

The man at the front desk clearly is not the usual ticket seller; he’s much too happy to assist me to actually have the job. I ask if I’m the museum’s only visitor and he says cheerfully, “No, a family of four came in just two minutes ago and others are sure to follow after lunch, it’s barely 2.” After he gives me my ticket he comes around the counter to show me the map of the museum and then spontaneously summarizes the floor plan as follows: “Right behind you in that first room you’ll see exhibits about the coast and the marshes, then you go downstairs to see fossils and, you know, other fossils. Then you go upstairs where you’ll see stuffed animals, bears and everything, and birds. Then on the last two floors you’ll see a lot of things brought back by, you know, people who go places and, you know, bring things back.”

It’s the best introduction to a museum I’ve ever heard.

I can’t resist asking him if he actually works here. He says no, he’s just filling in for “one of the girls” for a few minutes.

The Natural History Museum does indeed have a wonderful collection of things and stuff. In the section of primed, stuffed, and mounted animals, insects, and fish from the high times of naturalism of the late 18th to early 20th centuries, I feel thankful that there are people in this world curious enough to go places and bring back things that don’t bear trademarks.

In the sections on anthropology and shamanism I understand that the progress of civilization is food, shelter, and freedom from man-to-man violence and from religious terror and that whatever steps back from that can still be called civilization but not progress.

The highlight of the museum for me is the giraffe. It’s found on the landing between two floors. This is the stuffed remnant of what had been the first live giraffe brought to France, a gift from the viceroy of Egypt Mehemet Ali to France’s King Charles X in 1825. The giraffe debarked at Marseille then walked in a grand parade all the way to Paris, where it then lived for 17 ½ years in the Jardin des Plantes (Botanical Garden).

I’d previously thought that Mehemet’s greatest gift to Charles was the Obelisk, originally from the Temple of Luxor, that he gave in 1829 and that now stands gold-tipped at the center of Paris’s Place de la Concorde. Yet the giraffe and the affection it spawned seem far more meaningful. In themelves, the sight of the giraffe and the way those bare facts play on the imagination make standing in this stairwell worth the trip to La Rochelle.

The Aquarium

Travel snobs believe that knowledge is primary when visiting museums but it is at best fourth after marvel, the restrooms, and other visitors’ expressions, all at which are found at La Rochelle’s biggest draw of a museum, the Aquarium, one of Europe’s largest.

Using the audio-guide I explore the underwater world for nearly two hours and hear a host of fascinating tidbits about creatures living in all kinds and depths of sea. I quite enjoy discovering the diversity of those worlds you’d got to be crazy to want to put tanks on your back to see in situ. But the best part about this museum experience is listening to English children asking their parents “why” questions about bizarre fish and hearing the parents answer “That’s just the way they are.”

Between “things brought back by people who go places and bring things back” and “that’s just the way they are” the Natural History Museum and the Aquarium at La Rochelle sum up all that I ever hope to encounter in a museum.

The church bells are ringing when Didier meets me by the port at 6, exactly 24 hours after my arrival. I tell him I’ve missed him. He says he doesn’t believe me because if it were true I wouldn’t have waited so long to come back.

© 2008 by Gary Lee Kraut

Go to La Rochelle: A Winter Wanderbout in an Old Port Town, Part I: Night.

Or to La Rochelle: Part III, History and Practical Information.

The post La Rochelle: A Winter Wanderbout in an Old Port Town, Part II: Day appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

I am not a seafaring man. My ancestors took several billions of years to evolve from the deep; I see no reason to go back. But give me a safe old port town on a misty evening, even on a cold winter’s night like this, and I’ll wander about for hours as if looking for chance.

It’s Friday evening, late December. Church bells have just rung 6 o’clock. The streets are full of townies, visitors from the countryside, and Brits on holiday.

This is my fourth or fifth visit to La Rochelle in the past 15 years. I’ve visited in different seasons; I’ve stayed in several of its better hotels and now one of its lesser; I’ve come on a romantic getaway, on a weekend writing retreat with a friend, and on a press trip. The love lapsed, the writer friendship cooled, and the book long out of print, the only trace I have of those visits is my fondness for wandering this town.

This time I’ve come for a 24-hour portside pause before my good friend Didier comes to pick me up to spend a few days with him, his wife, and their three little girls in the flat, soggy landscape of Vendée to the north of La Rochelle.

Despite the cold, or perhaps because of it, I’m looking forward to those countless steps that are necessary to find the perfect place to come in from the cold—steps of indecision that no lover, or friend, or press attaché would endure. Having company requires making decisions, otherwise someone is sure to get edgy. Solitary wandering thrives on indecision, edgy comfort being one of the rewards of such travels.

The shops are busy and brightly lit, the weekenders have arrived, teens are texting where and when to meet, little kids are getting cranky, lines form in the bakeries, and no one stops at a stand of local writers selling their wares at the little square in the pedestrian zone.

I speak with one of the writers long enough to feel guilty that I’m not going to buy his murder mystery that takes place on Ile de Ré, an island two off the coast, and so promise him that, not wanting to carry a book around with me all evening, I’ll be back tomorrow. “I’ll be here,” he says, well aware that I won’t.

La Rochelle City Hall

I enter the courtyard of City Hall, the centerpiece of the Old Town. A dozen others mill about examining the details between the showy crenelation of the outer wall and the decorative stonework of the arcades. I find the details that I remember from previous visits: there’s Prudence, there’s Justice, there’s Force, there’s Temperance adding water to her wine; there, decorating a keystone in the corner, is the sculpted head, circa 1600, of an American Indian child with headdress. There’s the ceramic statue of Henri IV, France’s Protestant-cum-Catholic king, overlooking the courtyard.

There on the square outside City Hall, stands a statue of the mayor during the latter half of the great siege of 1627-1628, Jean Guiton, chin forward, right fist clenched, left hand on his sword.

I walk on through the Clock Tower to the Old Port and leave the crowds for a nighttime view from the other side of the port, where I see La Rochelle’s three main medieval towers and the lights strung along the waterfront. There’s the Chain Tower and the Saint Nicolas Tower at the entrance of the port. There, further back, is the Lantern Tower, one of France’s oldest surviving lighthouses.

Le Mail – The Mall

I’m cold. I should go inside somewhere. I head back to the active side the port then walk up rue Saint-Jean-du-Pérot, La Rochelle’s main restaurant row, where tables are beginning to fill. The end of the street is like a barrier beyond which no pedestrians venture on this cold night.

I continue on though, past Richard Coutenance, the town’s premier restaurant, past the small zoo I know to be back in the dark in the park, and over to Le Mail (The Mall), the long stretch of lawn bordered one side by a row of elegant homes and apartments and on the other by a hedge of bushes and trees. Behind the bushes there’s a beach. I stand there for a minute in the bone-chilling damp looking out to the estuary at night. No, I am not a seafaring man. I return to Le Mail.

I look into the restaurant also called Le Mail. The restaurant is stunningly Hopperesque at night, full of light and grief and solitude and warmth. A wonderful sight, as well as a nice place for ice cream, I remember, on a sunny day.

Oysters at the Casino

Beer, then dinner

I have a pint in a bar on the port where the bartender and I watch without commentary the World’s Strongest Man competition on TV.

I have a second pint in a bar on the far end of the port where everyone is half my age and seems to be anticipating the smoking ban set to go into effect in three days by smoking incessantly. I didn’t want the second pint, I just wanted to go into that bar because it might be the last smoky bar I enter before the ban goes into effect; I would remember it that way, as former smokers will remember where they were when they had their last cigarette. The people are quite friendly in here, as am I, so that I’m almost tempted to order another beer, until I remember three things: I’m looking forward to the smoking ban, two beers is enough for me, food is important in France.

I examine every menu along the port and on rue Saint-Jean-du-Pérot, the town’s premier menu trolling street. I examine them again. And finally enter a restaurant because I like the placement of an empty table.

There are three couples nearby: two late teens on a first date that appears to be going exceedingly well; an English couple in their mid-30s examining the menu and looking about the room as though surprised to find that they’d been teleported here from their local pub; a French couple in their mid-50s who may have been the model for The Eagles’ “Life in the Fast Lane.”

I take notes. I eat well.

Roulette at the Casino

Then I return to Le Mail, past the Hopperesque restaurant of the same name, and back into the casino.

There are lots of people there now. The two roulette tables and two blackjack tables are fully occupied and surrounded by dozens of onlookers. I hear five languages: French, English, Dutch, Arabic, and something being muttered by a woman to a man whom I replace when he gets up empty-handed from the roulette table.

I don’t really want to play, just to sit there, but as I did with the second pint I get some chips. They’re green.

Soon enough I find myself thinking numbers, as one inevitably does, twos and threes in this case. For over an hour my stacks of chips rise and dwindle like better judgment, and just before they’re extinguished I share my last 15 chips between the numbers 2, 3, and 27.

The winning number is 23.

If I’d followed my instincts a little more I’d now have a basket of oysters, a lot of green chips, and possibly a murder mystery signed by a local author. Instead I have a long, cold walk back to the hotel.

© 2008 by Gary Lee Kraut

Go to La Rochelle: A Winter Wander in an Old Port Town, Part II: Day.

Or to La Rochelle: Part III, History and Practical Information.

The post La Rochelle: A Winter Wanderbout in an Old Port Town, Part I: Night appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

I usually count on the neighbors to help with the heating just as they count on me. But the apartment is colder this winter because the apartment below is empty.

I’ve just caulked the windows in my living room/office so that I don’t have to type with gloves on.

With gloves that sentence reads as follows:

IO ujuts cqgulKEFD TQEHW qioasdddnows ioh ny sdl;aingvv toomoffaciw asto thath ia asdotnta; ahvae to aryttg wqthh fpobes pon,.

Actually, I sort of like the like the “fpobes pon” at the end, got nice rhythm to it.

Meanwhile, the ice thickens on Canal Saint-Martin,

and city works don their gloves to put up a sign warning us from trying to walk on it.

(c) 2009, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Writing without gloves appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Winter sky over gray rooftop.

The post It may be January but it’s still Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.