The day begins with a disorganized flight to Washington, D.C., and it ends with a more pleasant flight to Paris. But the more interesting thing is Lindsay's new haircut, which she got the day before:
Lindsay's new haircut, front view
Lindsay's new haircut, side view
Two Beers Brewing Co., Trailhead ISA
India Style Session Ale
Seattle, WA
4.8% Alcohol
Rating: 4/5
This beer is exactly what you'd expect based on the name. It's hoppy like an IPA, but it's an easy-drinking beer.
Every lunch and dinner in Saint-Flour lasted about an hour and a half. Every single one included a first course, main course, vegetable dish, cheese course, dessert, and wine. The cheeses were always the same four. Nobody was ever completely sure what they were, but the most knowledgeable people told me they were Cantal, Saint-Nectaire, Fourme d'Ambert, and tomme de montagne. All of them were excellent. The soft cheeses had an amazing, gooey texture that I've never seen in American cheese. I attribute it to raw milk aged fewer than 60 days, or to non-refrigeration. We always had the same pretty good red table wine, even when we had white fish.
I tried to keep track of all of our meals and will record them for posterity here. I probably made a mistake or two, especially at the end.
Me in front of the Viaduc de Garabit, bilt by Gustave Eiffel
The next day in Saint-Flour, the summer school started. The routine for the next two weeks was to get up, eat breakfast, go to a one and a half hour lecture, take a break, go to another lecture, and then eat lunch. After lunch, there were usually two shorter talks by students about their research. Nothing was scheduled until dinner, after which was another student talk. This was usually the worst-attended talk.
After the lectures were over on my first day, I took a walk to look around and buy some postcards.
The upper town, from outside the train station.
Saint-Flour has an upper and a lower town. The upper town is the older part, and it's where I was walking. It has narrow streets that cars drive through at ridiculous speeds.
A street in the upper town.
Walking around that first day, I managed to get lost. The upper town is so small that this is a real feat. I blame it on the jetlag--I woke up at 5am that morning and was really confused about what time it was. I ended up wandering through the main square:
The main square.
Eventually, I found my way back to the abbey, establishing that a random walk in Saint-Flour is recurrent (parents and grandparents: this is an extremely bad math joke).
I spent the last two weeks in Saint-Flour, France. We're not talking about Paris: I was in the Massif Central of France, the massive middle.
Sunflowers from a train window.
I left my apartment at 6am for a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. From there I flew to Paris. I arrived at 9am and took the commuter rail to the Gare de Lyon, where I got on a train to Clermont-Ferrand. Four hours later, I discovered that my next train was actually a bus, and after a lot of miming and attempts at communication (my one year of high school French was not that helpful), I got on one of the six buses that was waiting. When the bus sat around and didn't leave when it was scheduled, I started to worry. When about twenty young children got on the bus, I really didn't know what was going on. We left, and we did seem to be going towards Saint-Flour, according to the highway signs. The person sitting behind me spoke some English to me, and then two people sitting nearby told me that I must be a probabilist, and that I was going in the right direction. This was not to last: our bus kept going down the highway right past the exit for Saint-Flour, and we all watched the town at the top of a hill, receding into the distance. This was because the bus route involved going 40 kilometers south of Saint-Flour, stopping for fifteen minutes, and then turning around and going back to Saint-Flour. And so I arrived around 7pm, after 26 hours of constant travel. The director of the summer school, Jean Picard, picked up the three of us who were on the bus and drove us to the hotel where the summer school is held. It's an old abbey. The doors are all shorter than I am.
Then was dinner: potato salad with olives, pickles, ham, and lots of mayonnaise, cucumber and tomato salad, couscous, cold meat with pickles and mustard, baguettes and four kinds of cheese with which I would soon become very familiar, and pastries with layers of cake and cream. This was all washed down with carafes of very drinkable red wine. I ate, climbed up to my room, and fell asleep.
My room.
Lindsay and I have been trying to grow things. Let's start with the tomatoes:
Tomatoes on our Peacevine plant.
Green grape tomatoes: how do we know when they're ripe?
We have really pampered these tomatoes. The first month we had them, we took them inside every night. When Seattle was more reliably warm, we put them in bigger containers, along with some compost from our friend Stephen. For a while, we covered them at night to keep them warm. Now we're forcing them to fend for themselves, but on nice days I do move them to a new spot in the late afternoon to catch some evening sun.
Here are the rest of our plants:
We bought a mystery bulb last fall, and it grew into this gigantic lily.
Arugula and thyme, with a few nasturtiums amongst them.
Our tarragon has been less prolific than our thyme, but it's doing okay.
Nasturtiums.
We also have some more nasturtiums and some sorrel growing in the same pots as the tomatoes, but they've only just started to sprout. There are some older pictures from our garden on Lindsay's blog, so you can see how much everything has grown.
I saw this when I was walking the other day. It was one block away from my apartment, sitting in somebody's front yard:
A rabbit.
