(no subject)

Oh for god's sake, what the hell is wrong with lj these days???

Anyway, with this brief rant out of the way, time to post something. Hooray!

I'm back home, or at least back in LA; I'm not entirely sure at the moment whether LA or Berkeley is more appropriately referred to as "home." My flight was fairly uneventful, but we got in an entire hour early, which is something that hasn't happened before. I had a stopover of a few hours in New York, during which time I discovered a book called "The Plato Papers" and read about half of it. Didn't buy it as it cost $12 or something daft like that. ( About the book )

During the first half of the trip, I sat next to a 21-year-old Dutch boy who is a catering chef. His English was not brilliant, in some ways better than my French and in some ways worse. I knew exactly how he felt every time he struggled for a word. He kept having me take pictures out the window with his camera for him, since I had the window seat. Very sweet. I also helped him with his customs and visa forms; that's where my French definitely was better than his English, because I never had a problem with forms in France. I watched three movies, namely Brown Sugar, Bringing Down the House, and The Core. I was fairly sure that I'd get to watch Chicago on the second half of the flight, and that's what I was really looking forward to.

They did, indeed, show Chicago on the flight from NY to LA, but they started it halfway through the flight (it was on a big screen up front, like they used to do airplane movies), and I was so sleepy by then that I literally couldn't watch it. So I've seen the first half hour or so, and I very much want to see the rest. On the plus side, I got to watch the finals of Jay Leno's Battle of the Jay-Walk All-Stars, or whatever it's called, and that's always hilarious. There was a lovely sunset when we were flying into LA.

(Random aside: I'm currently at a coffee-house at UCLA, and I just looked up and would have sworn I saw Tom West standing at the counter. But then common sense reasserted itself and I realized that not only could Tom not be here, but actually, the guy didn't look anything like him. Ah well, brief moments of strangeness do occur.)

My tarragon, which my parents have been looking after for me, has grown massively over the course of the summer, and I may even be able to use it to cook with when I get back. That would be an excellent thing.

Anselm is flying in tomorrow evening, and we're probably going to take him up to Cambria, where he's not yet been. I have to figure out how to work in seeing Anne, though, as it wouldn't make a lot of sense to drag him along with me, and I really do need to see her at least once.

For all of you who are anxiously awaiting my France posts, they will happen soon, really, I just need to figure out how most appropriately to fill in the blanks, and whether to post them all at once, or what. Probably not. :)

(Random squee: it's so nice to be able once again to type lots and lots into the current music bar!!)

A France Post

July 1, 2003

OK, very long day, and still no internet access. Well, there's access in town, but it's late, I'm tired, and hence the question is slightly irrelevant. So.

We left Amboise after antics with a small, sleepy child and a big friendly dog. The road we were taking out of town wove through back lanes and past Leonardo da Vinci's house (apparently), but we didn't stop. The path we're following is one given in a book of bike tours, but we're going backwards. ("Inventions marvellous Leonardo's," said my father, reading the guid book, "of models scale view.") I thought, on account of this, that it might be like trying to follow the Wychwood trail backwards, but apparently following well-paved roads in reverse is quite unlike barging blindly across open countryside. We only had one or two map-related incidents, and neither of those was entirely because of our inverted course. Maybe slightly, or at least more easily avoided.

Anyway, we aimed at first for Chenonceau, a château originally built for François I. (He must have been busy; he built Fontainebleau, too.) En route we passed Mini-Chateaux, an attraction featuring all the châteaux of the Loire region, predictably in miniature. It's labelled as a kids' thing, so of course I wanted to stop, but this didn't happen. We did, however, arrive intact and in good time at Chenonceau, and first we had fun with a hedge-maze (despite being quite easy, it was definitely a maze and hence made up for the uncertain one at Versailles). The château was very exciting, too. I only had an hour, so I didn't go see the museum-y bit, but that's OK, the château was worth it. 'Cos it had a kitchen. With lots of bright copper pots, and pumps, and fun kitcheny things like hanging spices. That was the great thing about Chenonceau; they'd decorated it with floral and planty thises and thats, perhaps as it might once have been. It also had very French-style ceilings (I can identify these, thanks to the Fontainebleau tour), and I managed to finally get my coveted picture of François I's golden salamander. I was, however, slightly disconcerted by the short-haired Sampson in several images.

We cycled off after this and took lunch at Luzillé. Brasserie sandwiches all around. While we were in lunch, the skies opened. Until then, they had been lovely; fresh and somewhat cloudy until Chenonceau, then warm and bright blue after this. But now it decided to show us what it could do if it tried. Well, by the time we headed off again, it had tempered to a very mild drizzle, but the roads were still wet. I don't know if it was due to this, or to a slanting wind, or because of the beer I had at lunch, or what, but not far from the town, my wheel skidded off the slightly mounded edge of the road, and I fell, hard. Skinned the heels of both hands and made my elbow bleed, despite being inside my jacket. A car was coming the other way just then, and it stopped, and some people got out. I tried telling them in French that my parents were here, it was OK, but they turned out to be English in any case, and quite jolly. The man suggested that it would help the pain if I swore a lot. Fortunately, I had some exceedingly large band-aids in my bag.

After recovering sufficiently from this little incident, I gingerly proceeded. We passed lots of fields of corn and wheat, and also some other sorts of grain. Probably barley or oats. Ther were also fields of sunflowers, so that occasionally the grain fields, instead of having poppies here and there, had stray sunflowers. The ditches were full of wildflowers: poppies, thistles, sea holly, spikenard (not sure about this one, it was definitely a spikey purple flower), and numerous others. ( small sea holly digression )

At one point, the skies broke open again, and we took shelter under some trees that just happened to be nearby. This is, you understand, not a common occurrence, so we were lucky. On the other hand, not so luckily, the road was changing here, and we weren't sure which way to go. Well, the signposting was clear, but my mother had written something else on her map. We went that direction, along a very busy highway, and didn't come to the road we were supposed to. Her map was, of course, wrong, but I saw what we could do to rectify the problem. I don't know what the "real" route would hav been like, but our eventual path led us through very agricultural country and eventually to Chédigny (where we would have ended up anyway), which was a gorgeous little town.

Between Chédigny and Loches, our eventual destination, nothing exciting happneed, but there was gorgeous countryside, with horses and wildflowers and rivers and old houses. Just at the edge of Beaulieu sur Loches, we stopped to figure out the route. It was bucketing down rain, again — the weather was being fairly schizophrenic. Hot blue skies or torrential rain. Anyway, I heard a cat, hissing, and assumed it was coming from the other side of the wall. But it soudned too close for this, and it coccasionally turned into a yowling screech, and I eventually went to investigate. Under the leaves of a blackberry bush was a very young orange kitten, undoubtedly feral. I didn't touch it; I figured it woul bite me. But I felt sorry for it, all alone in the rain. Anyway, we arrived in Loches, and our hotel was very nice. (I love having parents who will pay for things!) After baths for sore muscles (all of us) and bleeding hands (me), we wandered out to look for dinner.

This proved a bit of a task, as places were either boring or too expensive. Our own hotel had a nice menu, but it wasn't precisely on the cheap side, and there's something a bit passé about eating at one's hotel, I think. Anyway, we eventually decided that we would eat there regardless, but we'd check out one final place first, the restaurant at Hotel George Sand. This was very highly recommended by our biking book, but was also supposed to be quite expensive. It was a bit difficult to find the restaurant, but eventually we succeeded, after a bit of misdirection and the "I know how to get there!"s of my mother. It was situated right on the river and had a lovely view. The menus were expensive, it was true, but there was a €16 menu called "L'humeur du chef." Outside, it didn't detail of what this consisted. Anyway, we were tired and hungry and this looked like good fun regardless, so we went inside.

We sat right by the window, looking at the river and the willows and the steel girder spanning the water. ( For those who are interested, a food digression )

After this we went back to the hotel and went to sleep, me sadly nursing my hands.

Still not nearly catching up, but... another.

July 2, 2003

The morning was uneventful, except it rained. And rained and rained. Lots and wetly. My shoes flooded to the extent that I thought my feet must have committed some grievous sin. Maybe they were just dirty.

In any case, after an hour or possibly two, we stopped in Cormery. There were two things of interest here, and the rain was finally lightening. I wanted to see the old abbey, and we all wanted to get some macaroons, for which Cormery is (justly) famous. The abbey was down a rock-strewn path, and we couldn't quite figure out if there was a real entrance. At once point I got back on my bike, having previously dismounted for one reason or another, and suddenly heard a loud hissing, which I fairly quickly determined was coming from my front wheel. We all had spare tires, but bike tires are, as it turns out, a hell of a pain to change. I don't see how anybody could ever do it alone, or quickly, let alone both together, which apparently seems to be perfectly possible. But we did eventually get the tire changed, and the sun came out, and we got macaroons and sablés.

The remainder of the ride to Azay-le-Rideau was again reasonably uneventful; we managed to avoid a steep hill by accidentally taking a slightly different route — the benefit of tracing a guidebook map backwards. In town, once safely ensconced in our hotel room, I fell soundly asleep for a good hour or more (that would be instead of usefully keeping my journal); then we set out to find dinner. We ended up at a restaurant called Ridelloise, recommended by our guide book (which seems to have fairly unerring good taste) as reasonably cheap and very tasty. I had started to write what we had, but I realized that I was going to quickly get sick of writing down exactly what we had at every meal, since we always got full menus. So from now on, only food of great note will be mentioned.

---

Here ended my journal entry, and the next one didn't get written until July 7. There are definitely things from the intervening days that I want to write about, but I obviously don't have nearly so clear a memory of the events any more as I once did. This is highly frustrating. I will probably write some sort of conglomerate entry, but now I need to decide whether to post it or the entry from the 7th first. Any ideas from anyone?

Exciting photos!

I obviously haven't scanned in any photos yet, and my dad still has the digital camera (plus the various cards for it and the CDs he copied some pics onto), but Sam's pictures from Paris are up, so you can all go here and enjoy them! They're from the 26th - 28th of June, I think.

Because they're all so very similar...

"Initial guesses of its function range from cosmetic face cream and toothpaste to something that was smeared on goats before they were killed"

Right. It's white and slimy and we haven't actually got the faintest clue of what it is. (This refers, if you're curious, to this discovery.)

[Oh look, I must be back home, I've posted how many times on lj today?]

(no subject)

Musing on a sign I saw in Boots while still in Oxford: "Lash extentions. 7x the impact!" I really don't want to know.

While leaving Vicente Foods today, I saw a sign that said "Armed Response." But I read it as "One-Armed Response." Once again, I don't want to know. ;)

And, umm, go read my first sunday100 drabble in a good few weeks! There are some I'm very cross I missed, and this one I practically missed. I'll try to get back into the swing of things.