1. When French people show numbers on their fingers, for "3" they hold up their thumb and first 2 fingers. We save the thumb until "5".
2. When someone speaks to us in FAST French, Ray & I just stare at each other as if to say, "I hope YOU got that." The person speaking the fast French is usually very kind and thinks it is great when we make our best effort to speak French to them. On a few occasions, I have been able to rattle off what I needed without a hitch, and the person understood, and I actually got a proud feeling inside. I passed for French!!! I am really good at writing French and fairly good at speaking it. Ray can understand spoken French better than I can, though--I think this is because his parents spoke a lot of French when he was young.
3. Lardon is Bacon!! Isn't that just appropriate. Lard On. : )
4. Some French words are just not intuitive. We see street signs all the time that say: Sauf Livraison or Sauf Riverains. I thought maybe the riverains meant people who live there--and I was correct. It means Residents Only may go down that road. The Livraison was one I had no idea about. It means Deliveries Only. You have to be quick to decipher the street signs to be sure you can go down a certain road or to see if you are allowed to park in a certain place. And I am NOT telling about the times that Ray got it wrong and broke the law anyway. Makes for very interesting driving sometimes.
5. Watching "The Simpsons" in French--each one has his own different French voice--is 10X as funny as usual--and I don't even know what they are saying!!
Monday, November 15, 2010
Pictures I Didn't Get
View of the Chapelle des Templiers near Avallon, France, from the website www.chateaux-france.com; 2 views of Flavigny-sur-Ozerain from the Visit France website. I tried my best to find the girl in the window, but to no avail.
Strange Light in the Sky
Sun--is that you??? It has rained steadily for a week now. We are SO hoping for sunshine tomorrow.
Roundabout Way Home thru the Vineyards
On the Chablis Road--3 views of the vineyards in burning time; old church; vineyards by the lake.
Carvings in the Cathedrale de Saint-Etienne
Oh Dear!!! More lost heads!!!; creepy guy inside church on a column; woman with a book--Mary Magdalene?; intricate carvings over the doors.
The Life of Mary Magdalene Chapel in the Semur-en-Auxois Notre Dame Church
from top: Notre Dame church in Semur-en-Auxois and its Life of Mary Magdalene Chapel. Last stained glass is in another chapel and is of a marriage.
Cow Barn!!! November 15
Still raining this morning, but we decided to go for an adventure anyway. Yesterday on the way to Vezelay, I had seen a sign for Chapelle des Templiers, (very near Avallon, amazingly) so I looked it up on the internet and found a picture of the chapel and a bit of history. This was a Templar Commandery of Saulce d’Island. It had been being used as a cattle shed until it was repurchased by its original owners in 1940. I think they are restoring it. Anyway, when I told Ray the part about the “cattle shed,” you can just imagine the eye-rolling I received. He put the coordinates in the GPS and named it “Cow Barn”!!! So we decided to try to find the “Cow Barn” today. We drove back to the road and found the sign—which also said the chapel was from the 13th century—and we drove down the road a bit until it said Private—or rather Prive—this is France after all. Anyway, once we backed all the way back out of the narrow road, we read the tiny print under the sign which said “Acces sur Rendez-vous”—which, guess what, means you have to make an appointment to see it—but no information as to how to do so, so we went on to our next thing on the list for today.
Semur-en-Auxois is a walled city surrounded by a hairpin curve in the River Armancon. It is guarded by four massive 13th and 14th century pink-granite bastions. One of these, the 110 foot high Tour de la Orle d’Or has this HUGE crack all the way down its side. The literature says that it is not likely to collapse, however, since these cracks have been there since 1589.
The literature also said not to even try to go into the walled city with a car—that it isn’t allowed and there is no parking. So what did Ray do? Drove right in and found a parking space right at the cathedral!!! This is one time I was glad he didn’t follow the rules. Evidently it is fine to park inside the city. Perhaps the literature was written by a local who was tired of the tourists. The city is surrounded by medieval battlements and has two concentric medieval gates.
Inside the twin-towered, Gothic Collegiate Notre Dame, a collegiate church restored in the mid-19th century, are some beautiful stained glass windows. The church itself is beautiful—one of the prettiest I have seen. The whole town was incredible, sitting atop its hill behind the walls. Very nice city but the streets were very narrow in some places.
When we were returning to our car, there was a little girl of about age 2 who saw us and came walking towards us with a smile. I started talking to her and she was headed over like she wanted to play until her mom scooped her up to put her in her stroller. At that point, she howled. She wanted to play!
Then we decided to head into Auxerre with its pretty canal to find the E. Leclerc store to get supplies. I had seen a tiny custard pot at another store that I wanted to buy but was talked out of it. Then, of course, I had to have it, so I went to this one and found it again. Yay!
We parked in Auxerre on a side street and walked to the Cathedral de Saint-Etienne, an incredible hulk of a building with amazing carvings outside. The relics of St. Germain from 448 are held in a reliquary here. Inside, it was architecturally different than any other church in the way the ambulatory was laid out. The stained glass here was not plentiful but was very nice. Evidently, Joan of Arc prayed here once as there is a statue of her that says so.
After the cathedral we were starving so we headed off in search of lunch—no creperies to be found, so we settled for a Quick. Ray had a burger and the chicken dips, the dip, he said, reminding him of Spaghetti-Os sauce. That got us think about the navelttes again and all the things we have tried that didn’t turn out as we expected. AND STILL NO SCRAMBLED EGGS, might I say. Anyway, those navettes not only tasted like soap, they even smeled like it AND had the texture of it.
Then off we went into a Geant Casino store for some groceries for this evening. Picnic in the room! On the way back to the hotel we decided to try some of the back roads and ended up getting lost, but I was glad that we did as we ended up on the road to Chablis, which is absolutely gorgeous with its hundreds of vineyards. The vintners are in the process of burning the branches right now, and it was interesting to watch. Finally got back to the hotel—which our GPS doesn’t seem to know where it is and continually tells us it is 60km from where it is—and Ray has gone for his first run of this whole trip. He hurt his back just twisting wrong 2 days before the trip and has been oh so gradually getting better, then hurt it again doing exercises, then is finally now on the road to recovery, I hope.
Pictures from top: 3 views of Semur-en-Auxois and its tower with the crack; 2 views of the Collegiate Church of Notre Dame in Semur-en-auxois.
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