Here is the most beautiful carousel I have ever seen.  All of the animals move in the most amazing ways.  For instance, that bird Magdalene is sitting on so triumphantly, knocked me in the head as it swung back and forth and I stood below it next to Mimi on a little ladybug.  Magdalene moved the wings herself.  The boys went on a flying man and got to pedal his wings up and down.  All of it is made of wood, with just the mechanisms in metal.

Aside from that, we visited the boys' school (they begin on Thursday, and then it's Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri from 9 to 4:45 (with the option of starting at 7:30 and ending at 6:00, for a moderate price determined by how much we make.  The price they pay for school lunch (all of you wish you could have their school lunch, I swear, it would be like going to a fancy restaurant every day) is also determined by how much Sean makes).  How very egalitarian of the french.  Anyway, Simeon and Matthias are going to a small neighborhood school (5 minutes walk from our house) with one class per grade.  It's an old old building.  Matthias's teacher has historical pictures of the school pinned to their classroom door, and it showed elementary school boys Simeon's age training for WWI by learning to shoot rifles in the shadow of the Franco-Prussian war, when revenge was on everyone's mind.  
Other than that, I have discovered that the grocery store delivers for free!!!  No little old lady carts for me, and no more twenty minute walks carrying 100 pounds of groceries.  Freedom to buy 5 liters of milk if I want to (but no longer the ability to browbeat my kids by pointing out how much I suffer to provide them with food).

Oh, and I want to make an inventory of what the streets smell like in my neighborhood:  first, there's the smell of diesel, all over town, wherever you go, I guess they use it a lot here.  Then, anytime you go near any of the rivers, there's the smell of mildew and rot (really fun to run with all that in your nostrils).  Then, any small alley, or even an unexpected wall smells like the strongest human pee smell you've ever had to endure.  Then there's the dog poop EVERYWHERE.  This is especially galling to me because aside from picking up my own dog's stuff (and often other dogs') fanatically (it's all I have left to allow myself to feel superior to my neighbors.  I've lost the 'I'm French and they're mere Americans' attitude, both because I don't find the French quite as admirable as I used to, and because I'm here anyway, the lowly American), there is such an abundance of public garbage cans here, I never have to carry my little brown bag more than 5 minutes, no matter where I happen to be.  So that excuse, which sometimes tempts me around Bellingham (I can't stand to carry this thing for the next hour of my run) is not available to anyone here.  

Ok, then there is the smell of the sewers, a smell which materializes randomly in different places at different times (except, it very reliably wafts from my toilets, not at all masked by all the perfumed cleaners I have used).  Then there are the huge dumpsters near the market where the fish salespeople dump their refuse (and they sell a lot of fish and shellfish at my market), that's a really powerful smell, together with the smell of raw meat and blood that also permeates the market (when I was a kid, I always thought that was the smell of horse meat, I don't know why).  Oh, and when you have to pass people, then there's sweat and (lots of) aftershave and perfume.  

Once in a while, very rarely, you happen by a bakery that is just baking its breads, and then all is forgiven: that smell is even better than the smell coming out of Haggens when they are cooking their donuts, or the smell of Target when they are popping their corn (!).  And in the woods, there is a smell I only recently remembered from my childhood, I think it's the smell of chestnut trees, or else it's the Platanes, huge majestic trees that grow everywhere here: here is a picture of us walking among them.  That is a very good smell, acrid and fresh at the same time, a little peppery, the smell of french woods.

There are three lovely rivers that run through the city of Nantes (aside from the huge one, the Loire, of course, which splits the city the way the Seine splits Paris...  well, sort of).  There is the Erdre (that one with all the rs that I run next to), the Chézine, which climbs North to a beautiful park and then continues up to a castle and another park (I run on that one too), and then the Sevre, which we walked near last Thursday.  On my severely un-detailed map from the tourist office, there was a dam built by monks in the year 1000 drawn not very far down the river, and it looked like there would be restaurants there, so we didn't bring a lunch, we didn't bring the stroller because we had to get to the trail in the tram, and the stroller seemed too big (I just keep being embarrassed by the size of that stroller, gargantuan by French sidewalks and tram standards).  We walked and walked and walked and walked.  It was lovely, but it was 1PM and the children were definitely waning.  So when we finally arrived at a little town with, you guessed it, a playground, we parked the children on the playground, and Sean went in search of food.  He returned 10 minutes later having emptied the tiny bakery in town, and we all consumed about 3 pounds of butter in about 5 minutes.  The butter definitely gave everyone energy, because the way back did not seem nearly as long.

Now a discourse on french food:  I don't know if I've mentioned this yet, but the French suffer from a massive, culture-wide, sweet tooth.  In an American supermarket, if breakfast cereal takes up one aisle, and pasta one half an aisle, cookies probably take up about one half an aisle too.  Chocolates about one quarter at the most.  In the tiny french grocery stores that we go to, there is only one thing that takes up one whole aisle, sometimes two, and that's cookies.  Cereals take up a half aisle, chocolates and candy take up one whole aisle, little desserts in the refrigerated section, like chocolate mousse, caramel custard, chocolate pudding with whipped cream, etc, take up one whole aisle (they come in tiny tiny cups, though).  In town, I can't tell you how many patisseries (that's the place that just sells cakes and chocolates, not breads) there are, and how many 'salons de the' which are restaurants that just have cakes, waffles, ice cream, etc.  So, all of you who think I have a sweet tooth and feed my kids too much sugar, should now understand that it is not a personal flaw, that my giving Mimi lollipops for breakfast is not going to spoil her, because really, it is a very French thing. 

 Oh, and the advertising on all the sweet things is unbelievable.  You buy an ice-cream bar.  Okay, you know you're not really getting any nutrition from it, you're just giving yourself a treat.  It seems like the advertising in America would have more to do with how delicious it is than with what nutrition it will bring you.  Here, your ice-cream bar is covered with slogans proclaiming how it's a good source of dairy, and the kids' cereal (they don't sell healthy cereal here, just the sugar bomb kind) proclaim all over that they are a good source of cereal-- what?  Like anyone is worried about not getting enough grain in their diet.  No mention of whole grains.  Healthy breads are just white breads with sunflower seeds added in (I'm exaggerating here, but only slightly).  I'm only going on and on about this because it's been so surprising to me, who thought this was the mecca of good healthy eating.  Probably I'll discover that I'm getting it all wrong, somehow.

All week-end, on the banks of the Erdre (that river with all the rs) they've had a 'Jazz festival'.  I put that in quotes because really it seems to be a 'food' festival with Jazz as a backdrop.  There are floating stages and stages on islands and on boats, it's very festive.  There are throngs and throngs of people milling about, standing in 2 hour lines at the hundreds of booths to get food from 2PM to 2AM.  There are bars all over that sell alcohol (funny how shocking that seems to our American eyes, to see people drinking out in the open, some with bottles of hard alcohol, some VERY young).  Anyway, it looks like Nantes likes feasts, because there are many planned for the year, and they definitely know how to beautify things for them, there are beautiful lamps hanging everywhere over the water, there are sculptures of fish in glass bubbles mounted on poles just for the occasion, and I'm sure I didn't see all the decorations.

I guess this entry should be titled 'food and rivers of Nantes'.  Next week, we'll be traveling further afield, since we are renting a car.  We are planning to go see the ocean, menhirs, dolmens, and many tiny villages with beautiful medieval churches and castle ruins.  And then, on Thursday, school! (Did that sound a little too jubilant from me?)

There hasn't been very much going on these days, just trying to create a routine, which is difficult with no constraints aside from Mimi's nap.  No one has to be anywhere at any time, so no outing feels necessary, and now we've seen all the main tourist attractions, we're struggling.

This week-end we went to spend Sunday afternoon with someone who works for the institute for advanced studies, where Sean has his fellowship for the year.  There was delicious food, very welcome friendly adult company after so much time listening to the melodramas of 4 children cooped up together in a foreign city, and, oh miracle, a girl Magdalene's age.  They hit is off right away talking about Twilight (Tentation, in French, and I thought it might not have been translated, what a fool...) then Harry Potter, then who knows what in a mixture of French and English.  The other girl, Juliette, had to teach Magdalene to 'faire la bise', the little cheek touching kiss in the air that French people do to say hello and goodbye.  Funny thing was, Juliette and her friend Ariane, who came over to our house for about 2 seconds when they walked Magdalene home, also presented their cheeks to all the adults to be kissed.  Boy you forget a lot about a culture when you're away for 25 years.  Magdalene is going to the movies with those girls (and a boy) tomorrow.  The girls go to private school, so they won't be able to show her around, but the boy will go to Magda's school, so I hope he's nice and takes a bit of care of her.

We're having a terrible time with things being closed.  Monday, we tried to go to the bank (closed on Mondays), then the running shoe store (closed on Mondays), then we looked for a photobooth to get pictures of the children for their school registrations, found none, but this merry go round was open on Mondays, fortunately, though it was really ugly and loud.  Then we planned to go check out the huge 'Mediateque' (basically a library, but since it has other media, it can't be simply called a 'bibliotheque', that would not be precise enough)--on Tuesday, mind you, having learned our lesson about Mondays, but it only opened at 2pm, so we found a photobooth instead and occupied it for an hour taking pictures of all of our kids.  They start school on Wednesday Sept 2, how scary for them (hmmm, and liberating for me, the outing is necessary and I don't have to come up with it).

Later on the boys and I took Tipomme for a long walk up the Chezine river (easier to say than the Erdre) where she got mollested by a dog (male dogs don't seem to be neutered here, I'm sure that's an interesting cultural phenomenon), and to a large beautiful park where the boys found a (paying) playground thing called a babybob--a little cart that goes down a little hill.  They were both too old for it, but they had walked so long without complaining I paid for them to get on.  Now, in Bellingham, and probably anywhere else in the states, there would be an orderly line of kids waiting for carts, and everything would be easy.  But here, no, there is a mob of kids with their parents pushing other kids out of the way to grab the cart for their own kid, it's horrible.  And my two savage boys were completely undone.  They stood there looking embarrassed until their somewhat french mother got into the fray and got them each a cart.  They were so tentative and polite, really, these two little anglo-saxon boys in the middle of the french throng, it made me proud to be an american (can anybody believe I'm saying this?).  Even at church, for communion, there is no order, and everybody almost fights to go in front of you.  Anyway, I was also proud of my Simeon who bravely took my money and went to pay for the babybob, though he and Matthias have been very shy of speaking to anyone.  They were so shy and well-behaved at our Sunday lunch, it didn't seem like the same kids.

Well, that's all for now, I must free the computer for Sean who wants to check out when Inglourious Basterds is playing, despite reading a French review saying it was film-making for backwards adolescents.

Here we are, Tipomme has joined us and the family is complete.  Although at first, we thought people were looking askance at us because of our noisy children, the dog, it turns out, is a real object of fear and loathing.  In Bellingham, three people out of four I meet want to tell me what a wonderful dog I have, so well behaved, so beautiful.  I thought I'd be the toast of France with my dog.  But it turns out they don't have border collies here, and they must think they're dangerous because on my run yesterday, at least 8 people picked up their own dog or their children upon seeing us coming.  I know I have paranoid tendencies, and I know I don't understand french body and facial language anymore, but boy, they seemed to be giving me really dirty looks as I passed.  I think they gave me the evil eye, because I fell and injured my leg, and who knows when I can run on that beautiful river again.

Here is the Northern border of that 'square' I was describing yesterday.  These buildings were part of the medieval gate buildings a few of which still survive, but most of which were razed during the expansion of the city in the 18th century (remember, during the enriching of the city in the slave trade...  We went to the big castle today and I repent my comments about the slave trade from yesterday.  At the castle gift store, there is a huge abundance of books about the slave trade and about how slaves who somehow ended up in Nantes enriched the city.  So the French are not so backwards on these topics as I thought.)  

The gate, just to the north of this square, allowed one of my childhood heroes--Henry IV--to come into the city to sign the edict of Nantes that ended the wars of religion in France (sorry, my erudition ends here and I do not know the date).  

Here are the two pieces of playground equipment that Matthias mocked yesterday.  Those children played on those with more excitement and exuberance than they showed at the castle, whose early medieval ramparts, by the way, you can circumambulate completely, and part of whose living quarters you can visit.  But I guess children, like their parents, and even their dogs, really need the comfort of well known things to make sense of their world.  I promised myself that I would only be pedantic once in a while in this blog, and I think it's coming upon me right now.  I haven't thought much about philosophy in a long time, but making friends slowly with this beautiful city, I think back to Heidegger who thought the important way to think about knowledge was as a kind of apprenticeship, a making familiar of a certain area of the world or of thought, rather than a set of propositions, the way philosophers before and since have thought of it.  Certainly when confronted with this new environment, the knowledge that seems important to enjoying life again is that kind of 'taming' knowledge, of making familiar, so that I don't have to be glued to my map but can just be oriented naturally in the city, in the culture.

All this to say that yesterday, I was very proud of myself because I had to walk my mother to the train station, and I did it with great confidence, without having to look at a map even once.  AND I took her the scenic way through the arboretum.  Oh, and Mimi is making her own sense of the culture by figuring out what stores they sell lollipops in: some boulangeries, but not all, and all Tabacs (which are primarily cigarette stores).  I hope this orienting will make her less unhappy soon.

I've recently remembered that I've always hated the smell of a French kitchen.  All it took was one trip to the market and the purchase of three small pieces of cheese, and that smell came back powerfully into my memory.  There's nothing you can do.  You can try ziplock bags and plastic containers, whatever.  Whenever you open the fridge, the smell is overpowering.  And even with it closed, it permeates everything, even the laundry that's drying in the kitchen (they don't have dryers here.)

It doesn't help that I'm caught in a catch 22 about the garbage, so that I can't put my garbage out for collection (the cheese does smell even stronger when left out of the fridge).  In order to recycle, you have to acquire special yellow and blue bags, but those are only available at certain times of the year (i.e., not now, of course) and though I have scoured the neighborhood with Mimi and Matthias in tow (the only two little enough to be bullied into accompanying me on such fools' errands) to find the places where you are supposed to be able to pick up those famous but elusive bags at off times, there is always a problem.  Oh, no, you cannot have the bags unless you have the brochure, and you cannot have the brochure unless you can prove that you live there, and on and on.

But, I had actually promised myself not to complain today, so here goes for the positive spin:

The bread and cheese are so so good here, it's hard to remember that the only reason the French can eat these things and not get enormous is that they eat tiny portions.  I want large portions.  

Matthias and Mimi convinced me to take them on a little touristy train ride around the city.  It turned out surprisingly interesting: most of the city's wealth was acquired in the slave trade, so most of its magnificent buildings date from the 18th century when they basically destroyed the medieval city.  The commentary on the city's enrichment through the slave trade was surprisingly (to my American ears) matter-of-fact, no angst, no guilt, no nod in the direction of the lasting African heritage in the city, just requests for admiration for the beauty of the classical lines of the architecture, the whiteness of the stone, and the elegance of the promenades.  

On the way back from our little train adventure, we discovered a little park (square, they call them) right behind the cathedral that still has part of the original 13th century fortifications as part of its walls.  It even has two flowering trees, two rocking playground equipment pieces (Matthias laughed at that "why do they just have those two things?" he mocked), and an ancient gorgeous tree.  I will try to go back this afternoon to get a picture.

We are eagerly awaiting the arrival of my mother with our dog.  Sean left at 5 this morning to go pick them up at the Paris airport.  At least the dog never complains when I try to take it for a walk.  And I feel less guilty leaving the kids at home to walk or run with the dog, because she provides me with a competing duty to fulfill (I'm not just going for a walk or a run because I want to, but because the dog needs it).

Here is our house for the next year.  It's a beautiful apartment (although with all the work we did--ahem, if you're reading this, Steve, you'll be charitable and assume that the 'we' includes you--before we left, it's hard not to notice all the imperfections in the baseboards, the way the light fixtures hang, the tiles and grout, and all the holes in the walls that were not filled and painted over) that surrounds this little courtyard on three sides.  On my left is the kitchen, and on my right is Mimi's room, with many bathrooms and other rooms in between (we have 5 bathrooms, 3 showers, one fancy bathtub...  quite a change from the one bathroom we lived with most of the summer).

Okay, that's the roof over our heads.  The first few days here were occupied primarily with a search for food that the children would eat.  We got here on a holiday (the sacrosanct middle of the August vacation holiday, when half the country returns from vacation and the other half leaves), so all the stores were closed, the next day was a Sunday, so all the stores were closed.  We ate lots of bread.  Later we discovered that there are 'depaneurs,' little stores that stay open when the rest of France is enjoying its leisure (they're usually held by foreigners like us).

Anyway, after many trips to many stores (in basements, so the stroller couldn't get there, or with cranky cashiers who wouldn't work to make our card work, and so made the line huge behind us) and many hand breaking miles carrying lots of groceries, we seem to have a fairly full pantry.  Although I have to say that there is always the threat of running out of bread, a threat that in the US, I deal with by freezing, but here, it's just not done!  I guess my anxieties about running out of food will just have to be tamed, somehow, in this country where paradoxically, it is so possible to run out of food.  We do eat smaller portions.  And when the children ask for more I bark at them: "don't you know how far I have to walk to get milk, and how heavy it is to carry?  How can you ask for more, the very blood and sweat of your mother!"

So, with food and shelter accounted for, what else?  Entertainment, I guess.  We went to see these interesting and fun carved machines (they are powered by human legs on bicycle pedals and steam engines), but the fun was a bit spoiled by the typically French attitude of the woman showing us the exhibit--yelling at us to get with the program (i.e., remain in a herd to witness the intensely interesting and staged demonstration of the lurefish machine, when Mimi wanted to go see the tree of herons, another interesting machine).  This is art, madame, not fun, a word that, for good reason, does not exist in the French language.

Then we rented a boat and puttered up the Erdre river (not an easy word to say with all french r's) where I finally found a running route, that will go over this bridge (tomorrow, if I'm lucky).  There's a path that goes up both sides of the river, and a guy at the running store told me you can do a 10 km loop up on and down the other side.  Exciting.

Also, we have found 2 playgrounds, where finally our children have seemed happy.  Until we found the playgrounds, all I heard was 'what can we do here?  Can we watch a movie?  There's nothing to do.'  What's true is that there aren't parks like there are in Bellingham.  We've only found two very small parks, and you cannot walk on the grass (a reason for which Matthias and Simeon asked me for about 25 times, clearly american children).  Still, we're planning to do more exploring up the river; and then, there's still the castle to discover.  We've circumnavigated it, but not crossed the drawbridge yet (though we did go in a tourist shop right near it and look at swords and such).