France, Day 2, 8/23/2012

At 8:30, we have breakfast: coffee with milk, bread, jam, butter, and croissants. Then we walk into town. Lindsay wishes we had a fork and a knife for lunch. I agree but have no idea where to get them. Then we realize that we're standing in front of a kitchen supply store. Armed with utensils, we go to the next store over and buy two local cheeses: a wrinkled round disc of goat cheese, and a squishy cow's milk cheese.

We have a hard time finding the GR34, the trail that will take us to all the other towns. A woman sees us looking confused and asks if we need help. She speaks impeccable English and leads us to the trail, chatting the whole way. Then we walk towards Mont-Dol, a little hill with a flat top.

Toby in front of Mont-Dol.

The view from Mont-Dol.

We eat lunch in the town of Hirel, after hiking for two hours. Both cheeses are great. The goat cheese has three layers: a dry, wrinkled exterior, a thin layer of rich goo, and a chalky center. It has a grassy flavor, and its aftertaste weirdly reminds me of peanut butter. We also eat a delicious can of sardines in tomato sauce.

The cow's milk cheese and our sardines.

The hike is exhausting but not too painful. After we collapse in our room in tiny Saint-Benoît-des-Ondes, we go out to sit outside in a bar drinking Perrier.

For dinner, we go to a restaurant we've had our eye on since passing it on our hike. It's the store/restaurant of an oyster farm. We have a dozen oysters, mussels with fries, and a bottle of Breton cider. The only thing on the menu besides seafood is the fries. They're also the only thing we have that isn't great, perhaps not by coincidence. Our mussels don't come with forks. From watching other people, we figure out that we should use a empty mussel shells as tongs to pick out mussels and carry them to our mouths.

The cider is delicious. It comes in a 750 ml bottle and is only 4.5% alcohol. It's dry, but not completely so, and it still resembles juice. It's quite fizzy with a light but interesting flavor.

France, Day 1, 8/22/2012

The first half of the day, in Paris, is organized around buying bathing suits, which we forgot to bring. At the fancy department store le Bon Marché, we see some nice women's suits, which turn out to cost 320 euros. We end up buying suits at Monoprix, which feels like a French version of Target.

For lunch, we stop at a satisfactory if forgettable brasserie next to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Lindsay gets a croque monsieur (a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, to everyone who didn't take high school French). I get a Niçoise salad, which has lettuce, string beans, roasted peppers, potatoes, rice, tuna, and anchovies and comes with little jars of olive oil and lemon juice. We trade halfway through. The croque monsieur is nothing great, even when we dose it with the excellent mustard on our table, but the salad's not bad.

We take a TGV (a train of great speed) to Rennes. The train lives up to its name (unlike last time). When the train goes next to a highway, we can see that we're moving much faster than the cars. I read and have to stop when I can't keep my eyes open anymore. I get a little cup of espresso (which comes with a tiny stick of Lindt chocolate!).

In Rennes, we transfer to a train which takes us to Dol-de-Bretagne. We walk around its huge cathedral and check out the rest of the town.

A window in the cathedral in Dol-de-Bretagne

Then, we take a long walk on farm dirt roads to avoid walking along the side of a fast road, until we come to our guesthouse, La Bégaudière.

La Bégaudière, just outside of Dol-de-Bretagne

I feel much better after a shower and a few glasses of water. It's time for our guesthouse's communal dinner, which starts with a Kir (a small glass of white wine with crème de cassis). A middle-aged French couple joins us. We move to the dinner table. Our host Catherine brings the four of us an enormous bowl of mussels, a basket of bread, and a slab of butter sprinkled with sea salt. The mussels were farmed in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, just north of us, and are delicious, briny and flavorful but not fishy. They were cooked with white wine, shallots, and parsley. The butter with the bread is the best butter I've ever had. Even though it was a huge bowl of mussels, the four of us finish it off and look forward to dessert.

When Catherine returns, she looks taken aback. Then she brings us our next course: thick, small meaty rounds of monkfish in sauce Armoricaine, a thick pureed sauce made from shallots, tomatoes, and cognac. The fish is smoky, flavored with lardons. It's served with rice with short pieces of vermicelli pasta in it (weird but perfectly good), and a zucchini gratin. Since zucchini doesn't have much taste and falls apart when cooked, this is like cream and butter given body, with a delicious browned crust. We manage to convey to the French couple that we thought the mussels were the whole meal, and they laugh and say they did too. We all manage to eat a little bit more, and we take more from the pitcher of pleasant red wine served with the meal. The four of us even eat little bowls of chocolate mousse, and Lindsay and I have cups of verveine tea.

As the meal goes on, we talk more and more to the other couple in our broken French, aided by a dictionary that Catherine brought us. They're on vacation before their son's wedding. They ask us what we do for a living, and then the man tells us proudly that he's a patissier. We tell him about the wedding cakes we had made the week before. Finally, we go off to sleep for a long time.

France, Day 0, 8/21/2012

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 Trailhead ISA

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.

L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour III

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.

Monday:

Lunchham and egg in aspic; braised beef, mashed potatoes; crème caramel
Dinnermelon; stewed Romano beans and other vegetables; breaded chicken cutlets; packaged coffee ice cream sundae

Tuesday

Lunchquiche with Cantal cheese; stewed chicken with mushrooms, onions, and cauliflower; cooked peaches
Dinnerbeets and tomatoes in vinaigrette; salad, cod cakes (from yesterday's mashed potatoes); chocolate mousse

Wednesday

Lunchprosciutto with bread and butter; pork chops with buttered pasta, roasted tomatoes; plum, apricot, and raspberry tart
Dinnersalad; chicken kebabs, string beans; fruit

Thursday

Lunchtuna with mayonnaise; veal stew, scalloped potatoes; ice cream
Dinnergrapefruit; baked crepes with ham and béchamel sauce, endives, hash browns; baked apple with caramel

Friday

Lunchsalad; a white fish called colin, which might be hake, in a very buttery sauce, rice with vegetables; meringue in vanilla sauce with caramel
Dinnercelery root remoulade; tomatoes stuffed with sausage; chopped vegetables; fruit

Saturday

Lunchham/corned beef in aspic; steak, aligot (cheesy mashed potatoes); pastry with pears
Dinnersurimi (i.e., fake crab--seriously!); salad, lasagna; flan

Sunday

Lunchassorted seafood (fish, mussels) baked in scallop shells with cheese on top; brussels sprouts with fried potato balls, chicken legs; tiramisu cake
Dinnermelon; croque monsieurs, salad; cooked peaches, lady fingers

Monday

Lunchcarrots with vinaigrette; roast pork with prunes, french fries; packaged sundae with weird pear flavor
Dinnercured sausage with bread and butter; buckwheat crepes with cheese and mushrooms, stewed zucchini; banana, nuts, and chocolate with vanilla sauce

Tuesday

Lunchmushrooms in sweet tomato sauce; rabbit stew with a cream sauce, egg noodles; tarte tatin
Dinnertomatoes with corn, crumbled boiled egg, and vinaigrette; spinach, potato croquettes, omelets with herbs; fruit

Wednesday

Lunchbaloney-like meat; sausages, lentils; creme caramel
Dinnerbeans and vegetables in mayonnaise; quiche, salad; cake

Thursday

Lunchbeets and cucumbers in vinaigrette; paella; strawberry cake
Dinnermelon; cold chicken, herbed potatoes; apricot Chantilly

Friday

Lunchmixed vegetables; cheese and ham in pastry
Dinnerpaté de campagne; peas and carrots, breaded balls of ham and veal; chocolate pots de creme with ladyfingers

Me in front of the Viaduc de Garabit, bilt by Gustave Eiffel

L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour II

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).

L'École d'été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour I

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.