winter vineyard

There is a small vineyard below the building where I work. For the most part I never see people in it, but the other morning I saw a group of workers pruning the grapevines and burning the branches. You can see the figures of the workers hidden in the fog.

And then later that afternoon as I was leaving, there was a lovely light hitting the vineyard. Same place, different time of day.

As an aside, this is the kind of work that Jean-Marc has been doing for the last couple of months. He's been clearing the pruned branches from the vines, after someone else has done the pruning, and once the branches are freed he breaks them and puts them on the ground in bundles, where they are ground up for mulch.  It's hard work because the vines are attached to the guide wires and other branches, so it means a lot of muscle is needed to separate everything (while not damaging the vine!). I think Jean-Marc is appreciating wine and the work that goes into it in a whole new way!

The bonus is that he sometimes gets paid in wine.

truffles for sale

I saw this in our local café the other day. Truffles for sale for only 25€/100 gr. That's 250€/kilo! Jean-Marc has a month's work in the vineyards and he's seen people looking for truffles nearby his work. Maybe he'll get lucky one of these days and strike gold!

language musings

I have been speaking French for the last twenty years and have been living every day in French for three years, and yet I am surprised by the French language all the time. Sometimes I get muddled in the specificity of terms because in English there is one word and in French there are numerous words for the same thing, depending on its shape or material. Take the word 'box' for example. In English, we just put a modifier in front of the word and we're good to go: shoe box, cardboard box, gift box, metal box, wooden box or just a box on a page. In French, there is a different word to learn for each one of these items. Let's take them one at a time.

shoe box: une boîte à chaussures 
carboard box: un carton
gift box: un coffret cadeau
metal box: une boîte métallique
wooden box: une caisse en bois
box on a page: une case


I remember looking up box in the dictionary twenty years ago and I thought that the translation was boîte, but when I started using it to refer to a cardboard box that I had, I was corrected, making me aware of the complexity of it all!

Then there was the time that I was with my in-laws and I mentioned putting some fruit in a big bowl on the table. I just said un grand bol, thinking that they would get the picture. Their eyes became very wide and I could tell that they had no idea what I was talking about. "You know, a BIG bowl," I said, miming the shape of a big serving bowl. "Oh, you mean a saladier!" they exclaimed, finally getting it. Yes, but in this case there would not be a salad in it and actually I was talking about a bowl that would never have salad in it, but never mind, it's called a saladier whether you are using it to mix dough, display ornaments or whatever. A grand bol would be a bowl you would use for cereal, soup or maybe a large latte.

Not unrelated to the bowl incident is what to call the somewhat shallow bowls that we have. For Jean-Marc they are assiettes creuses (hollowed plates, or soup plates to be fair) whereas for me they are shallow bowls. Plate or bowl? There's no rim and the sides go up, so it's a bowl for me, but for Jean-Marc it's not what he drinks coffee out of, therefore it's a plate.

I can also recall a time when I mentioned the toilet. Now, I had always just assumed that the actual, physical fixture was called une toilette because we do ask where the toilettes are, after all. Jean-Marc did not understand what I meant; whatever I wanted to do with (or put in) the toilet just seemed impossible to him. I said "you know, the white thing you sit on in the toilettes" and that's when he informed me that this thing wasn't called a toilet. What? I've been getting this wrong for over twenty years? At the time, he couldn't even come up with the right word (it's une cuvette, in case you are wondering).

And then there's anything to do with education. I was on the phone with a training centre about a course I was interested in taking. I referred to it as a cours and the guy on the other end of the line was very quick to explain that it wasn't a course (that's only for diploma-granting institutions) but a formation or training session. I should have known this because back when I was an English teacher, I was a formatrice and not a professeur. I can see the difference between teacher and professor in English, but in French there is a whole sublist of possibilities, depending on where the teaching is happening. In elementary school, you can have a maître, maîtresse, institutrice or instituteur. In secondary and higher education you have a professeur and outside of that, there is also enseingant(e) and educateur/educatrice, as well as formateur/formatrice. The same thing goes for students, who are élèves (elementary and secondary), étudiants (post-secondary), stagiaires (continuing education or training), collégiens (junior high) or lycéens (senior high). Every time I have to talk about teachers and students I get all worried that I'll get it wrong!

Oh, and do you know the word for font or typeface? Police! Seriously, it's police.

cheese (or, 450 reasons to love France)

OK, so I've counted and we currently have nine sorts of cheese in the fridge, or ten, if you count cottage cheese as cheese. We've got our regular staples:
1. parmasan
2. feta
3. gouda - I am Dutch, after all!
4. camembert - impossible to live without, according to Jean-Marc

And then we have a selection that I picked up on the way home from our snowshoeing trip in the Jura mountains:

Clockwise from the top, we have:
5. aged bleu de Gex
6. tomme de Jura
7. aged morbier (with ash running down the middle)
8. chèvre with truffle oil
9. brebis (sheep milk) with piment d'espelette or espelette pepper, from the Basque region

Our boss had organized a cheese-tasting at a famous fromager's shop in Gex, a city at the base of the Jura mountains. A fromager is someone who not only sells cheese, but ages it himself - sometimes for years and years - before selling it in his shop. France has over 450 kinds of cheese, which means there is more than one for every day of the year! This particular store had over 300 varieties to choose from and I thought it quite impressive to find a shop with two-thirds of the country's cheese selection in stock.

We tasted a number of regional cheeses and in the end we all bought some to take home as a souvenir. When we got back in the car after stopping at a rest stop for a coffee on the way home, the smell was something else (!), but we soon got used to it. Sometimes you have to suffer in order to enjoy the finer things in life!

a surprise trip

A week ago, everybody at work was asked to reserve the following Monday - Wednesday, nights included, without being told why. Then at the end of the week, we received an email asking us to be prepared with a packed lunch for Monday, three days' worth of clothing, a swimsuit and clothes suitable for snow. The plan was to leave Monday morning at around 10 or 11am and come back Wednesday night around 10pm.

So Monday came around and the six of us got into two cars and we started heading south. After eating our packed lunch at a rest stop, we started driving east towards Switzerland. We drove past Geneva (or at least 14 km away from Geneva) and started going up some mountains in the Jura region. We ended up checking into a hotel in the town of Lamoura, which is a small winter sport centre with access to downhill and cross country skiing, as well as snowshoeing, and discovered that we each had rooms overlooking the snowy countryside (and not the road out front!). After dropping our things off in our rooms, we set off to rent our snowshoes for our stay and we then took advantage of the remaining daylight hours to get a bit of snowshoeing in.

The hotel had a wooden chalet feel and it was demi-pension, so breakfast and supper were included. The first evening before supper, we gathered for aperitifs in one of the hotel rooms and enjoyed 2 bottles of champagne that my boss had brought along. The second evening we had 2 bottles of red wine and we played Time's Up in teams of two (it's a game where you have to try and get your partner to guess a word, either using long explanations, just one word or mimes).

During our stay, we had two full days of snowshoeing and we explored a lot of the trails that are scattered around the ski hills, snowshoeing about 10 - 12 km per day. From time to time we would come across chalets where it was possible to have a mulled wine or cup of cocoa, and on both days, we packed a picnic and enjoyed our lunch in the snow. We lucked out with the weather because it was nothing but blue sky and sunshine. Just have a look!

Did I mention that our office dog, Eclipse, came along too? She *loved* the snow and spent her time fetching snowballs, some of which were much larger than her head!

On the way home we stopped at another mountain peak and went to a restaurant for some tea. The sky was clear and there was a panoramic view of the Alps across the valley. We could even see Mont Blanc. It's the biggest one there in the middle.

Further down the hill we stopped at a fromagerie to buy some local cheese before going home (I'll write more about that in a future post).

We arrived home in one piece on Wednesday night. It was nice to have time to bond with my work mates and just have fun together without thinking about work. I think that was the point!

paperasse part two

(another catchup session)

This is an ongoing theme here! Paperasse, or paperwork, is really stress-inducing in France and every time there is reason to change or update papers, just the thought is enough to create a knot in my stomach. SO! Second move in a year? No problem. I told myself I could do this.

carte grise

The carte grise is the car ownership paper that needs to be kept up-to-date in terms of current address. If you don’t do it after a month of moving and are caught, you can get fined and lose points off your licence (but for some reason, the licence doesn’t need to be updated!). Changing your address on your carte grise means a trip to the préfecture or sous-préfectures and proving your new address with a utility bill.

So we drove 15km into Avallon with our rental agreement in hand and went to the sous-préfecture to change our carte grise. Of course once we got there, we learned that a rental agreement is not proof enough of an address (ANYBODY could make up any old rental agreement) and since I had taken time off work to do this transaction, I drove back home to get the paperwork needed. They wanted an electricity bill (and those couldn’t be made up in photoshop?) but I was hesitant to use our electricity bill because we have three (yes, that’s 3) street names on our bill. Why? Good question! It has to do with the street changing names over the years and nobody being willing to accept the correct address. So I brought the bill, along with a stack of other papers showing the correct street name, back to the sous-préfecture and they were able to process the address change for both of us, although we did have to prove we were married – because the bill was in Jean-Marc’s name – and I needed to insist on keeping my own name for the new sticker. Sixty kilometres later, we were both done.

Back in Canada we don’t have anything like a carte grise, but it seems to me that when I moved I was able to change my driver’s licence online in a matter of minutes and that was that.

banks

Changing your address with a bank also requires sending by mail (not fax, not email) proof of address, along with an accompanying letter requesting the change. I sent off the request along with the rental agreement, but – you guessed it! – that was not the right thing to send off. The letter was returned and I was asked to send the valid proof and so I sent off the electricity bill with the three street names, explained the situation, and I threw in a few other bills, just for good measure.

The change was made, but just for one of the two accounts I had requested, so I had to call the bank and request the change for the second account. They gave me the song and dance about sending proof and I said that it had already been sent in. The decidedly unhelpful and unfriendly person at the other end of the line finally understood the situation and begrudgingly agreed to change the second account’s address. Just today I received the bank statement from this account through redirected mail, so the change didn’t actually get done. Somehow I'm not surprised. I’ve written yet another letter requesting the change again, and I’m sending it with a stack of justificatifs de domicile. Third time lucky?

I also needed to change my address with my Canadian banks. I called and spoke to cheery, helpful people who were willing to change my address and take my word for it (after I correctly answered the security questions, of course!). I did both Canadian banks in under 5 minutes.

carte de séjour

After being the proud owner of my carte de séjour for six months, it was time to put in a request for a new card. I went to the town hall and made my request and the secretary thought that the card should come sooner than last year’s, which took almost seven months to arrive. To my surprise, after only two months, I was summoned with Jean-Marc to the préfecture in the big city of Auxerre, which is 50 km away. I thought maybe we would have an interview to make sure that we are really married and together, but we just needed to sign a declaration together, stating that we are living together. We drove 100 km to do that? Couldn't we have done that in front of the mayor at the town hall? They said that the card should arrive in a month. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my card had arrived at the town hall just before Christmas! I was told to buy fiscal stamps to the tune of 104€ (their way of collecting the payment) in Avallon and present them at the mairie to get my card.

We went to the place where you buy fiscal stamps and when I told them the amounts (one for 85€ and one for 19€) they were confused. There are various sorts of stamps for various sorts of transactions (passport, citizenship cards, driving fines etc.) and they are all at specific prices. They didn’t want to sell me the wrong kind of stamps because getting a refund is a chore (oh really?) and the stamps were changing at the end of the year. I thought that it was a prudent suggestion and I decided to check in with the village secretary first thing Monday morning.

First thing Monday morning I called only to find that the town hall was closed between the 19^th and the 29^th! So this little new card had to wait until 2012 to be paid for and picked up. I went in yesterday with my stamps, but the person at the desk wasn't the regular secretary and she had no idea where my card might be. Call me crazy, but I think that a filing cabinet would be a handy thing to have in an office, as opposed to binders and files stacked in boxes! That way the cards could be found under 'C' for cartes. Filing cabinets are so not French.

Why do taxes, fees and fines need to be paid for with fiscal stamps in this day and age? Why couldn’t I just write a cheque, pay in cash or – and I know I’m going out on a limb here – pay by debit card? 

Sometimes I really miss simplicity.

our house

Ok, so after all this talk about the new house, I bet you would like to see and hear more about it! I was actually wanting to get the house in better shape (painted and more furnished) before taking photos, but that’s what I thought about the last place we lived and, well, that day never came. So here we go, here’s our house! I’ll take more photos when the weather is a bit better, so you can see it with the sun shining out front or in our courtyard.

This is our entrance. There are actually two front doors: a mostly glass one (that was perhaps a store-front door?) and a newly-installed wooden one that was a result of the village's architectural demands. In the summer, we keep the glass door open, so that the wooden one is visible to the public. The bonus of having two front doors is the sound and heat insulation that it provides. The things on the walls are various cards, photos and posters that we have displayed on fishing line that is tightly attached to two hooks.

Beside the entrance is our living room, whose windows look right on the sidewalk outside. The the floor on this level is cement tiling that was typical in the 50s in France. See those two chairs? 5€ at a charity shop!

This is a close up of our front window, which is not at all typically French and more like something you might find in Holland or England!

After the living room, you pass through a hallway that has stairs going up to the other floors as well as the first separate toilet. There is a French door (with glass panes) and then you are in the dining room.

The dining room has three windowed doors that open to outside and it also has a fireplace. The curtains belong to the landlord, just in case you were wondering what was going on there.

This room is actually big enough to be a sort of family room, with dining and living areas, but we don't have the furniture for that quite yet. So in the meantime it's just our little table in this big room, along with a bookshelf.

After the dining room, off to the right, there is a door that leads to the kitchen, which is divided into two parts: upper and lower.

This is the upper part (looking dark, but it's actually quite bright), with a sink and counter with cupboards on one side, 

and a fridge and more cupboards and countertop on the other side. I should mention that this is virtually unheard of in France, especially in rentals. As I mentioned before, normally all you get in a kitchen is a sink and one cupboard underneath. The rest is up to you!

And then there is the lower bit with a second sink.

They left us the stove and everything!

I found this old mailbox at a charity shop and decided that it would be a good bread box. What's funny is that it has the number nine on it and I bought back when were were living in Savennières. Our current house number? Nine!

Going upstairs, there are two rooms: the office and our bedroom, with an adjoining bathroom. Oh, and a walk-in closet!

This is the office, which is a huge room with two windows and enough space to have another guest room. I'll post pictures once it's more put together.

This is our bedroom, with windows looking east, over our backyard. We even have a nice view of the countryside and a neighbouring hilltop village. The bathroom is accessible from the bedroom and the hallway.

Up one more flight of stairs and you have a furnished bedroom (no pictures for the moment, I'm afraid - it's been too dark) and a swank guest bathroom that has a skylight and a sitting tub with shower.

As I mentioned, once the weather is a bit brighter, I will take more photos of the inside and add some exterior photos, so you can see what it's like.