So, I lied, it wasn't my last blog after all. But this one is: I'm disconnecting the computer right after this so I can pack up all the hardware we rented from the phone and internet company. Just a note to say that in addition to lying about the number of blog entries, my last entry was also mistaken about Magdalene's conscious feelings about coming back (though I had thought she was indeed sad but didn't know it). She's sad actually, and she knows it. She doesn't want to come back (except to see her good friends). She loves Nantes, she loves her friends here, she loves her new French life frequenting cafés and little restaurants, going to the movies in the afternoon, and discussing deep ideas at every opportunity, even if it leads to loud barking fights. My little French heart beats joyfully when she says so, and when the other three spontaneously speak to me in French instead of English because that inferior language cannot express the complicated and subtle thing they mean. I'm going to miss a lot of things, but I think most of all the way the entire culture (the language, the way of greeting one another with kisses, the length of the meals, the way everyone loves to talk--but also listen) encourages you to become close to other people, many of them.

Ok, that's it, this speechifying is over, I say goodbye now to this blog's imagined and real audience. But that's only to see most of you in the flesh soon.

As is to be expected, now that it is a week and a half till we have to go (and I don't know, really, who's reading this, but I have a hunch some of you, my faithful readers, are smiling again at the melancholy sound of my voice as I say this, given what the first few months of this blog sounded like), there have been more signs of the end: the boys also had their school fête: there was a wonderful concert (all the kids, from first to fifth grade were completely involved in singing complicated songs, some of them with harmony, many in foreign languages--it did confirm for me what Magdalene has been denying since we got here--French education asks more of kids, and so gets more from them, than American education... or, maybe I should make only very modest claims: Jean Jaures Elementary school gives better concerts than Parkview). We also had a combined party for all the kids to say goodbye to their friends (and us to their parents)/birthday party for Matthias. I had great success by making only American treats (for some bizarre reason, american desserts are very popular in France, in case I haven't mentioned that yet), and the party degenerated into a wild water fight, with a few of the little girls Matthias had invited feeling a bit shaky. At this point, we had our first real goodbyes, although we've been saying goodbye to everyone for weeks it feels: Our friends Stephanie and Xavier, the parents of mateo (Simeon's good friend) who let us stay in their house in the north of Brittany, left for a vacation in Italy as soon as school ended, and we won't see them again until 2012, if they do come visit us. This year really is coming to an end, and look how sad the girls are! (I hope Magdalene doesn't read this, because she's really the only one unreservedly happy about coming back, and she would probably be annoyed at me for misportraying her like this).

The boys had their first and last Judo competition where (thanks be to God) they both won bronze medals and there were only a few feathers to be smoothed (because the older one didn't think he should have the same medal as the younger one).

Then, like the good french patriots we've become, as soon as school ended, the various parts of the family began to fly in all directions for various vacations (although that's not very French, what I'm describing here, that's more American. The French take their vacations as a family, and were very shocked when they heard that we never do that, and as a result of the shock, to try and fit in better, Sean and I decided that we must do it soon, all together, maybe camping, maybe with some friends...)

Vacations then: Magdalene, who had been complaining within ear-shot of her friend's mother that here, she had been in France for a year and had not seen Paris, got invited for a quick Paris tour. I never heard how that went, because she got back from Paris on Sunday at noon, and then left again for Chenonceau with Maura and Julia (yes, from Bellingham!) at 12:15. I hope I get to hear about it when she comes back on Wednesday, but since Julia will be there, as well as Magdalene's American-bashing friend Clara, I may not hear about it till another day, sparks might fly instead!

Me! I had my little vacation too. Annette (my neighbor and friend) and I have been joking over e-mail about a bike-wine tour of the Loire Valley. Well, I didn't think I had it in me, but I organized it! Me, who's always too afraid to make phone calls and would rather pay more than have to speak to someone I don't know on the phone, well, I got us train tickets, bike rentals, hotels, a route (about which, more later), and a wine guide--no, I didn't get that, I figured that would sort itself out on its own. So, if you want to pull out your map (since I haven't yet figured out how to include one here, though believe me I would): Annette and I took the train from Nantes to Tours, where we visited the cathedral and the old city center, of which the dog here is a detail. Then we picked up our bikes and rode to Amboise (in 95 degree weather, even after 7PM). After that ride, we realized that the much much longer ride I had planned for the next day was too much, but no worries, instead of biking all the way to Chinon, we just caught the local train with our bikes.

Now, on the ride to Amboise, we had both bemoaned the fact that we had not brought hats (hem, I guess that sort of outs us as not wearing helmets, doesn't it. Well, no one does it here, really, we were only obeying the fashion requirements of the locals... and the children never saw us). So upon arriving in the center of Chinon and realizing that it was market-day, we went shopping for hats, so that ever after, we rode our bikes with silly twin hats (Annette wouldn't let me take a picture). We also bought other things, it felt very lovely, somehow, to bike into an unknown town and pick up a few things for our wardrobes at the market. After that, we were feeling so very French that we had lunch for about two hours on the central ancient beautiful plaza, accompanied by accordion music (until the police came and shut the guy up because he didn't have a permit). I had seen this plaza before, the time where I had gotten lost in the countryside and arrived four hours late... well, I think that

was why Annette had to ride back to Chinon, so I could stop on that plaza with no one blaming me for being late and no one whining at me about being hungry and thirsty. Well, it's good to satisfy one of your desires in life, even if it's a small insignificant one like drinking Chinon wine on the central plaza of Chinon.

Another desire I had acquired in that long ago trip with Sean and his parents and all the kids where I had gotten lost (note: I never got lost this time, well, except for the very first day coming out of the Tours train station where I

made a wrong turn, but Annette learned quickly to second guess my retarded sense of direction, and we did quite well after that) was to sleep at the hotel inside the Abbey of Fontevraud. Well, I satisfied that one too on this trip. The really cool thing about sleeping inside the abbey is that you can wander the grounds at night when there's no one else around. It's really beautiful. There's no wine specifically named from the abbey, so we had to compromise a little and anticipate: we drank Saumur wine that night, though we were only biking to Saumur the next day: Annette and I were very proud of our adaptability and our spirit of compromise.

We rode to Saumur the next day along the Loire: the photo below pretty much sumarizes our trip: there are the vineyards to symbolize all the wine we drank (ah, but only from within a 30 km radius or where we were, we were purists), and a church steeple to symbolize poor Annette's martyrdom as I

dragged her into every church we came across (that's one per village, multiplied by about 5 villages a day. She took it stoically. It was cooler inside the churches, and some of them had gems like painted carvings from the XIIth century or gory tapestries about tortured saints). Another place we stopped to cool ourselves down (the trip really was very hot) were caves. All the villages there on the banks of the Loire are built from a cream colored stone that is fairly easy to dig out of the cliffs, and then hardens when exposed to air. So there are caves and tunnels and houses inside of caves (some of them with cave balconies), and wineries inside of caves, and restaurants inside of caves and museums (our bike path went right through a museum that had been built from a 10th century tunnel which they said had been a shopping center). The villages are beautiful, all uniform and glowing creamy in the sun (we passed through one, Candes Saint Martin, which is classified as one of the most beautiful villages in France, what an honor, I thought I should mention it here)

and the caves are very cool. Even the front porches of the caves (where we ate lunch on the last day--no, no wine that day, well, until the champagne-like Saumur Brut in Saumur) are cool, even the bathrooms built into the caves are very cool!

Anyway, enough about the bike-wine tour, Annette will be embarrassed with all my bragging. Sorry Annette! I don't know whether I'll write again, as this was my last adventure in France. The men and bigger children (Sean, Steve, Simeon and Steve and Annette's two oldest) are off in Spain walking part of the pilgrimage to Santiago, but those won't be my stories, so Sean will have to tell the tale on his new Facebook page. So, a warning to all of you who are addicted to looking at this (all three hundred of you), I will be closing it soon. It's been a nice way to force myself not to rewrite history too much once it's over--I can't at all pretend that the whole year was wonderful and that all the trips were lovely. Still, it's a weird way to write, with an unknown and extremely public audience, so you always have to be careful what you write in case the wrong person somehow finds the blog. Soon, it will be me talking instead of this page. Less neat and organized, but probably just as entertaining.

Mimi had her school fête on Friday, with singing from the little ones (that's one of Mimi's best friends Gwenaelle, whose mother is British and who speaks English) and then all manner of treats: parent-provided food (not good enough to justify my feeling inferior and self-conscious about my cooking all year; I wish I'd tasted it when we first got here and continued to feel proud of what I cook) that was sold to raise money for the school, and then fun games like lottery, fishing for prizes, and face-painting: here is Magdalene painting one of Matthias's good friends' face (she has a twin sister whose hair is just as red, and both of them REALLY like Matthias). Mimi was so serious and focused on her singing, she reminded us of Magdalene who was in French school in Toronto at that age and who, when she sang in her school choir, seemed to think the entire world's welfare depended on her performance. The other kids seemed to have fun!

On Saturday, we went to a bay full of islands in the coast of Brittany (le Golfe du Morbihan) with one of Sean's colleagues who grew up near there. She wanted to take us to this large tumulus (prehistoric building full of carvings) located on an island accessible only by boat. Of course, the boat wouldn't let on the dog, which I had brought along knowing she would cause trouble because it was her last day with us (about which more later), so I volunteered to stay on the shore while the others went to visit the tumulus (that dog is seriously interfering with my cultural improvement). As a consequence, I will not tell a story of connecting with the mind of ancient and to us forever obscure human beings, but instead, a story about my own heroism and my dog's complete lack of it. When the others were safely loaded onto their little boat, Tipomme and I went along the beach to find another island that is accessible only at low time through a causeway between two huge bays. Well, of course, when we got there, the causeway was deep under furiously rushing water (it looked like one of the bays was emptying into the other one... Sean had the camera, which explains why, though I'm not telling a story about tumuluses, I'm still illustrating it with a picture of one). So we went for a walk in the village, found one of those magic/sacred springs that are so abundant in this celtic area, an ancient cemetery, many beautiful houses... and after 20 minutes, we returned to the island to see if the causeway was passable. Well, having tried once and had to give up, I wasn't going to be put off a second time, despite the still rushing (though shallower) water. So off came my shoes and socks, and slowly, fighting the whole way against the current, walking sideways so as not to be pushed over (the water was up to my thighs at the deepest), trying hard not to slip on the algae, all the while self-conscious that at least 50 people who were waiting for the tide to be low enough were watching me intently, I made it across... only to discover that my dog had not followed me!

Not only had she not followed me, but she showed no sign of coming when I called her. She got anxious and ran along the edge of the water, but she didn't even dip her tiny paws in. I called sweetly, I called authoritatively, then bossily, then positively dictatorially, but she continued to display anxiety amounting to no action, until in the end, she ran back towards the boat landing and disappeared. I panicked right away (being anxious about her anyway for other reasons, about which more later), and off came my shoes and socks again (which I had put on after crossing and before realizing what a coward my dog was), and across I walked, much faster, getting soaked (but without falling). When I got to the other side, I though my audience should really have clapped, but the consolation prize was that I caught Tipomme, put her on a leash, and dragged her across the causeway, which, by this time (whether because the tide had gone down quite a lot, or because I was becoming such a pro) seemed nothing at all. It was all worth it. I had a whole island to circumambulate all by myself, (only when I was coming off were other people finally daring to come on) and it was beautiful. There were beautiful old rock houses on there, and an old chapel, sandy beaches, and a throne carved into the rock with a view of water rushing around the various islands (and since I was alone on there, I got the throne, ahem, especially since my children weren't there to take it from me).

Anyway, the poor dog is a coward, but I miss her dearly, and the whole family has had to make many sacrifices for her. She couldn't fly back with us (problems with the airline companies and the planes that were too small), so we had to send her by freight on her own from Paris. Only she had to be in Paris 5 hours before her flight (the direct Paris to Seattle flight which leaves at 10:30 every morning). Sean rented a car and left Nantes at midnight so as to make it to Paris at 5:30 in the morning. He sent Tipomme on her way (which costs such an obscene amount of money I cannot write how much here) and then faced another 5 hour drive after a whole night of driving. In order to make his trip worth something, he drove through Chartres (another illustration that requires an explanation) and, though he did not find the Cathedral quite as impressive as he had when he last saw it when he was 14, he still said it was the most luminous of them all (I myself have never seen it I think, unless I did when I was a child and can't remember, perhaps it was Rheims). In any case, he made it home in one piece, stopping several times to sleep in rest stop areas, and drinking a lot of tea and coke for the caffeine. Tipomme made it safely to Seattle to my mother's house, we already have pictures of her in my mother's yard looking quite herself and happy... Still, now we have sent one of us home, it really feels like the end, even more than last week.

Everything has the smell of the end now, and after so much complaining on this very blog, it's a little embarrassing to say that everyone is sad about it, even Magdalene (but don't tell her I said that, she'd definitely deny it).

The boys had their last Judo class where they got examined to see what belt they can take back to America (we don't know the results yet, I think they actually get the non-white belts next Wednesday in some kind of ceremony).

Simeon had his last sailing class on Tuesday. Mimi and I ran to the sailing school (about 3 miles up the river from where we live) and were caught in several downpours on the way (I hope the last ones of our stay in Nantes, I'm really sick of walking around in sopping wet clothes) and watched Simeon sail back and forth on the Erdre river in his little sail boat with a very concentrated and serious look on his face while most of the other students in the class were falling and leaping in the water in droves (they've had a substitute teacher for the last 3 weeks who is

completely lacking in authority, and boy did it show there on the river!). Next Tuesday they don't have sailing class, instead, they have an

all-day treasure hunt on the river and in the various parks that border it there, where they have to sail their little boats to various places, land find stuff, and then take off again. Pretty cool.

The event that's been the strongest memento abitus (remembrance of departure, as in, memento mori--note, I had to ask Sean to look this up in his Latin dictionary for me so I could look educated) for us, though, has been our joint goodbye party with our friends Muriel and Emmanuel (who are going to Boston for a year). We had it at their house in La Turballe on the coast, with about 25 adults and 28 children there for the weekend (most of them camping in the back yard, but using the one bathroom!).

Here to the left you see Magda in the play she organized with the children. Ok, now, after being pedantic with my bit of Latin, I will add insult to injury by bragging (this is in addition to all the bragging I'm doing about what a wonderful life we're having here, you really shouldn't believe a word, it rains all the time, really): Magdalene actually wrote a play in French and directed about ten 10 year old kids in it (all in French). And it was really good! And everyone had a lot of fun, she did, the other kids did, all the parents who watched it (and also who were freed of their kids for the time it took to put the play together) did.

The men who were there were all completely foot crazy. They were either sneaking away to cafés to watch various matches, or they were playing it with the kids, or, when they had finally succeeded (through I don't know what devious stratagems and sneaky machiavellian machinations) in getting rid of all the kids, playing it with each other (though they got a bit too rough there, and it didn't actually last that long before someone was injured. It was better when they were holding back for the children).

While the men were injuring each other and themselves playing foot, the children and the mothers were swimming and surfing in the waves, finding enormous jellyfish washed up on the

beach, and, for the more unfortunate mothers with very demanding little girls, walking up and down the beach searching for beach-glass and shells. All that took place Saturday afternoon and was followed by a very long evening and night of feeding kids, feeding parents while completely ignoring kids (not brushing their teeth, not putting them to bed, not worrying that they were climbing trees and leaping all over the place and watching too many videos). While we were eating lunch on Sunday (after drinking and dancing all night on Saturday night, yes, I keep telling you France has totally changed us and you don't believe me, but it's really true, we've turned from total sticks in the mud into party animals), Sean commented that you often see in French movies people having these long meals outside in the country with lots of friends all of them discussing interesting things. Sometimes one of the friends will take out a guitar and play French songs that everyone knows, and some of the children will join in while the others keep playing foot in the background. Well, said Sean, I guess they put scenes like that in their movies because life really is like that in France. I guess that's why we're sad to leave. I suppose I hope all these lessons in good living that we've received here can be translated into Bellinghamese. Still, even if they can, it will be hard to leave all these good friends with not much hope of seeing them again (unless they visit us).

Much to write about again this month. Influenced by all our friends here who don't think it's such a big deal to leave their children with friends or grandparents for shortish stretches of time, we accepted my aunt's offer to come stay with the four while Sean and I went away to the

other side of the country, to stay in a friend's house near Annecy. So my aunt arrived from Spain on a Sunday, and on Monday at 6AM, we kissed the children and walked to the train station carrying our backpacks like college students (that's when I realized that being a college professor is really not very different from being a college student: you carry a backpack and depend on the kindness of family and friends for all fun activities). We travelled all day, first on a two decker TGV, then on a really old little mountain train with compartments and curtains on all the windows. Oh, the children would have loved it. But we also loved it without them: we had a compartment just for us, and we stopped at every tiny village along various lakes, and though we arived in the city of Aix les Bains going forward, we left going backwards.

We got to the beautiful city of Annecy at 2pm with lots of time to explore. It's built on a series of canals and along the bottom edge of a lake, with mountains surrounding the lake (Sean thought it looked just like Bellingham!). Unfortunately, we never saw those mountains because thick clouds basically sat on the lake the entire time we were there. We climbed up to more than 2000 meters the first day, and all we saw for our troubles (the French don't seem to believe in switchbacks, they send the trail absolutely straight up the mountain, so that ill-equipped people like me, who go hiking in running shoes, have to hang on to tufts of grass

on either side of the trail to avoid sliding back down to the edge of the lake), were fields of crocuses, fields of snow, and white mist. No Mt Blanc or any other lesser known peaks. 4 hours of straight climbing and no views! No complainers either, though (except for me)!

One of the especially nice things about the French Alps is that even after you've been hiking alone in the mountains for 6 hours, you still find ample signs of civilization: there are the summer pastures (chalets high up in the mountains where the shepherds come to graze the sheep and the cows in the Spring), monuments to WW2 dead resistants, cow patties and cow paths that utterly confuse you when you're trying very hard not to get lost in the fog and the snow. It was the first time in my hiking life that I'd had to reason hard about details of the map and how they corresponded to details of reality so as to find the path on the other side of a field of snow, or from among 10 cow tracks. We must have taken that map out a thousand times in our 8 hours in the mountain, but we did not get lost. When we got back to our village around 8pm, we realized it was movie night there, and we even made it to a 9 o'clock showing of a stupid French movie, which, exhausted as we were, we found pretty funny.

Anyway, with all the cloudiness and the rain, we didn't hike like that every day, but we still had a lovely time. We travelled back on the Friday and found everyone in a pretty good state. My aunt was a bit tired, but cheerful. Simeon had spent a large chunk of the time with his friend Mateo (so as to spare my aunt the dismaying spectacle of the violence of the two boys' fighting), Magdalene had had to do a fair bit of managing Mimi's temper tantrums, and Matthias seemed suddenly to have reconciled with doing his homework. I still don't know what my aunt did, but the good will is lasting.

On the next thursday after that, we had yet another vacation (for the ascension, all you ignoramuses who don't know your Catholic feasts) and we went to visit my uncle in Normandy. For those of you who met my cousin Eve when she spent the month at our house two summers ago, that's her family. My uncle has a big house in the country, where Miriam and Matthias blossomed at the contact of nature. We'd almost forgotten how lovely it is to be far from the city, since we're always stuck here in Nantes, but both Sean and I in the Alps, and then all of us in the country near Caen rediscovered that essential part of human happiness: fields, cows, rivers, grass, the smell of Spring... Actually, Mimi's new passion is picking flowers (even the forbidden orchids that grow plentiful on the sides of paths around my uncle's house, but that are endangered elsewhere. She was careful to hide them behind her back when she went close to him, the naughty one), so she was willing to hike quite a long way in her search for ever new varieties of yellow, white, and purple flowers.

Of course, we also did a fair bit of sightseeing, not at all far from the city and the cosmopolitan crowd. Normandy is completely overrun by tourists, and although it is full of extremely beautiful things, it is also difficult to get anywhere near those beautiful things, so thick is the mass of people between you and the treasures. In our case, the sight-seeing was made all the more difficult by having the dog along, which meant that we had to split up into two groups for every cathedral, church, museum: one group that went to dog friendly places like playgrounds and cafés, and the other that went to sweaty crowded places full of vulgar british and

german tourists (oh, and yes, Magdalene, sophisticated Japanese ones, she's fallen in love with Japan, and so loved following the Japanese tourists around the Mont St. Michel and understanding one or two words of what they said). Above is Matthias waiting outside one of the many beautiful churches in Caen (the abbaye aux messieurs, pictured below), and to the left are Sean and Mimi waiting outside the Bayeux cathedral (in front of a tourist shop that sold thoroughly inappropriate postcards that made me unhappy that these vulgar things were now in my children's imagination).

In Mont St Michel, it was Simeon, Mimi, and me who waited outside the abby and almost got swallowed up by the quicksand of the famous bay while exploring in and out of the city.

At the D-day beaches is was all the children and I who went to play on the beach while Sean and Magdalene visited the cemetery and the memorial. We managed to see a lot, with the impediment of the dog and the various caprices and fits of miss Mimi. The splitting into groups also caused quite a bit of fighting and confusion: we lost each other a few times, and there were a few sore feelings on all sides when one group got stuck in a huge line and didn't see the Bayeux tapestry for long enough, while the other group sauntered through and had time to read the funny latin captions, or when one group got to see the WWII memorial museum in Caen while the other had to stay at my uncle's house and hang out while Mimi had her nap (no, actually, I was happy to do that, I didn't want to go to the museum anyway, but since it was me who got more time with the tapestry, I figured I'd throw a tantrum too to muddy the waters and not let anyone see who was getting the better deal).

It's a hard life we lead here. We're just coming to the end of two weeks of vacation, in two parts. The first part we spent in a small village called Plouguerneau, in Finistere, in the North of Brittany. Our friends Stéphanie and Xavier, the parents of Simeon's best friend Mateo have a house there. We followed them there for the week-end (a 3h drive), they showed us around for two days, and then left to go back to work on Monday, leaving us behind with the house (complete with kayaks, bikes, soccer field, and anything you can dream of to amuse yourself out there) and Mateo.

We were pretty busy there. We hiked out to islands at low tide and then kayaked back, dogs and babies and all (I told Stephanie I was going to write about it on this blog and she told me that would be bragging... which it is). We hiked out to chapels and menhirs and sacred springs and dunes and more low tide islands, and at high tide we kayaked. All this, mind you, not just with our kids, but my brother and his family met us there (they rented a house at the end of a beautiful rocky point right where the wind starts howling and turns freezing when you're walking

or running up the coast). All the cousins got along beautifully, though as you can see on this picture there was some friction between the dogs (we're having a three legged race here). Simeon and Mateo got along quite well too. Mateo never rests, whereas Simeon pretty much can tolerate no more than one activity a day, so there was a lot of Mateo trying to drag Simeon out for another soccer game, or another card game, or to collect tadpoles, or to build a dam on a little creek, or a bike ride, and then falling back on Matthias when he couldn't get his first choice

(that was good for Matthias, getting some positive (if second rate) attention from an older boy). But Simeon and Mateo were inseparable and unbeatable when it came to soccer teams and card games. We had a few memorable card games involving everyone except Mimi (don't tell her, she was already asleep), where Simeon and Mateo behaved like rascals and beat all of us older folk silly.

This here is one of the sacred springs. They are quite abundant in that country. They were worshiped by the celts, and then christianized

with dedications to saints and chapels and the like, but apparently there were still devotions performed at them until the 50s. A while back, when I wrote a novel about ancient Ireland, I had included one of those sacred springs, and so I really wanted to see one. I spent a few hours unsuccessfully looking for one that was supposed to be near the chapel where we were playing three-legged races, then I brought out the big guns (Sean and Mimi, the great geographers of our family) but even they couldn't find it. So when my brother found this one after we'd already left, he was kind enough to take a whole bunch of pictures for me (unbeknownst to him, we had stopped there on our way out, but with no batteries left in our cameras).

For part II of the vacation, we came back to Nantes and got rid of a few children: Mateo went back to his family to go skiing in the Alps, and Magdalene went to spend a week with her best friend on Ile d'Yeu, an Island off the coast of Vendée to the south of us. She's not home yet, but she seems to be happy when we talk on the phone. On the other hand, Sean would never have agreed to take a week of vacation at home if there had not been special circumstances to warrant it (and if he hadn't, it wouldn't have counted as vacation for me!). His mother and stepfather met us in Finistere on the next to last day of our stay, and then met us in Nantes.

Wisdom (one of the cardinal virtues surrounding

the gisants of François II, duc of Brittany, and his

second wife-- as well as a lion and a grey hound)

So we've been tourists again here, both in the city (we've been back with newly appreciative eyes to the castle and the cathedral--as you can see from a new crop of pictures, in fact, I started to follow a tour of the cathedral, hoping I could find out what story was carved on the pillars at the entrance--a story about a woman and some camels, but when I asked the guy he said "well madame, I can't tell you all the details of everything in this cathedral, it would take much too much time" in typical french fashion: when

you don't know the answer, try to shame the asker. In fact, I was the one being stupid, because all I had to do was ask my own resident expert, the famous professor Sean, and he told me it was the story of Rebecca and the stolen house idols)

and in the surrounding areas: these three pictures are from the monastery of Fontevraud, where are buried Richard the Lionheart, as well as his parents Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (that's who the two gisants represent). Many years ago, long before sabbaticals seemed something possible in Sean's future, Sean designed a course for an application to teach in the semester abroad program Western participates in in Angers. The course was about Medieval celebrities, of which Robert D'Arbrissel (founder of the monastery) and Elianor d'Aquitaine were both examples. He had included in the course a description of a planned field trip to Fontevraud. So he got his field trip, only with his own children and parents as charges rather than a bunch of American college students.

Now, here's a typical Claudia story. On the large, not very detailed map of the area, it looked like there was a hiking trail between Fontevraud and our next destination: Chinon (Sean wanted to see that city in particular since he's done a lot of work on Joan of Arc, and that's where she found the Dauphin (heir to the king) and convinced him to let her lead an army against the English). So I begged and cajoled until Sean agreed to take care of everyone while I walked between the two towns. I had meant to stop at the tourist office to get a more detailed map, but of course, that was closed for lunch until 2:30, and I didn't want

to wait, and I had seen the signs for one hiking trail while visiting the monastery, so off I went, with no maps, hardly any water, and more to the point, the opposite of a sense of direction as part of my biological-psychological make-up. I didn't remember any names of any of the villages I should see along the way, nothing. So, of course, I got lost. I did reason my way through several meetings of trails, reasoning that included looking at where the sun was and spying a valley ahead that I concluded must be a river... In fact, I did find the Loire river (after about an hour walking due North instead of East), and then the split between the Loire and the Vienne (about 15

Km away from Chinon). So, a hike that was supposed to take two hours actually took 4, and everyone was a little annoyed with me when I got to the castle (there's only so much you can do in the ruin of a castle with three little kids and your parents, even if it is the castle where Joan recognized the Dauphin from his men after he had put his crown on someone else's head--in that high tower you can see here). And this below is the view they had as they waited for me. "Do you see her coming on that bridge? Look for the black and white contrast of Tipomme, no? No one that could even conceivably be

them?" In any case, because I'd gotten lost, I was coming on the other side of the river, so they couldn't have seen me coming... Even if I had been.

Yesterday, the last day of the vacation, I took Mimi to Paris to visit the surgeon that our surgeon in Seattle recommended for her foot-surveillance while we were in France (she's supposed to get checked every 6 months). Here she is, on the TGV, ready for her big trip. Boy, I had promised her any number of outings: the Jardin du Luxembourg (which has, of course, merry-go-rounds, pony rides, paying playgrounds, stands that sell crepes, sail boats for pushing around the little basin...) AND the Jardin des Plantes (which has all of the above as well as a small zoo). Well, we made it to the Luxembourg for a rushed 30 minutes where she tried mightily to have fun so she could satisfy my anxieties about the trip (although she refused the pony ride despite my desire to see her enjoy one). But then it was time to rush to the hospital so as not to be late for her appointment... What a joke. We got there about 15 minutes early and the receiving nurse, who was having a personal conversation full of, "yes, I kiss you too, and kiss the children for me, yes, mine are fine, in camp for the week, etc.," made us wait 20 minutes before she'd even look up at us to see what we wanted. After that, we waited for an hour and 15 minutes with no sign that anyone was being seen. I figured this must be the french lunch: our appointment was scheduled for 2, and the great doctor professor (did you know professor trumps doctor, and that I got nastily corrected for saying doctor as if it was a slight!) was having his second cup of coffee with dear friends and not worrying that it was now 3:15. And I was right, I think, since he rolled in around 3:30 looking quite self-satisfied. It's a funny dilemma, actually, because when I'm with my friends the doctors and they set everything aside so we can have tea together or dinner or the whole week-end, I think it's just the best, that people who are so busy can manage to really make time for friends. But when I'm waiting for the great doctor, oh, I'm sorry, professor, I do not regret for one second that Mimi's foot was fixed in the US and not here. Anyway, the great doctor professor barely looked at her, the exam was conducted entirely by the physical therapist who (as is usual with the para-medical professions) gave her a much more thorough exam than the great professor doctor she sees in Seattle, and said her treatment was very much misguided and told us to change everything (while the great professor vaguely nodded, as if bored). Anyway, and then we had to have x-rays (for a disorder that has nothing to do with bones, but of course I was too chicken to point that out), and then we had to wait in line again to see the great man who sent us on our way like a great lord benevolently sends away his subjects. Ok, but the best is still to come: the woman who first checked us into the hospital, not the one with her personal conversation, the one who was going to make sure we paid, had ordered me to come back to pay after the visit. Well, we get to the place with less than an hour before we have to catch our train back to Nantes (sorry Mimi, no zoo), and there is no one there. We wait, we clear our throats and cough, we call out "anyone there?", and then we hear faint voices in the distance, so we move that way. Here is our cashier lady chatting away with her buddy about who's in love with whom, Gray's Anatomy and ER style, and when she sees us she makes her severest face and says, in an icy tone, 'what are you doing here?' "Well, we're just trying to pay. We know you're not used to it, but we don't have insurance, you told us specifically that you don't bill and that we needed to pay before leaving" "Oh, well, we have your address, I'm busy now, so we'll bill you." Between her work ethic and her changing the law as her moods change and the nurse's phone conversation, it's a wonder anything gets done there. There you go, you can tell there's another republican speech about people not paying for their own health care (that's to cover the completely unnecessary x-ray) and people having too much job security (that's to punish those two irresponsible and gossipy women) coming. It must be my father-in-law's influence!