We had an adventurous two days with a rented car, all of us plus my mother Christine, plus Tipomme, squeezed into a middle size station wagon with two extra seats in the back.  On Tuesday, we went to this castle: the chateau de Suscinio, which was the hunting lodge of the dukes of Brittany, the very same ones who had their main castle in Nantes.  It's surrounded by bogs and on the bog are trees full of egrets and some other quite large water bird with white and black wings, storks, maybe, but I couldn't tell for sure, not having brought binoculars.  After meandering about the castle and finding climbing equipment for the boys to fight over, we continued on to the beach where Sean and I went swimming and the kids found an endless number of other things to do (like climb onto the life-guard chair that had no ladder to prevent climbing).  It was beautiful, and as, apparently, no one here does anything before two in the afternoon, we were pretty much alone.  We also saw some 'tumulus', prehistoric burial grounds (they just look like little hills, actually), one of which had been transformed into a bunker during the second world war (and for some strange reason, the usually very self-righteous french did not write, 'by the germans', so we wondered if it was the French occupation government that was responsible for this outrage to the glorious french patrimony).

On Wednesday we went to a city to the south of Nantes (the outing on Tuesday was all to the North, in Brittany) called Clisson.  We drove through miles and miles of vineyards in what appears to be old wine country (Sean was excited to go through the birthplace of Peter Abelard, Le Pallet, and to see an abbatial church, parts of which were standing when Abelard was made abbot of the monastery of St Gildas de Ruys).  This city had (a) a castle (quite a nice one, I thought, but the boys prefer the one in Nantes, which is better preserved) and (b) a playground.  I guess that's how we seem to be balancing every outing.  First a church or a castle or a walk, and then a playground.  I don't know what I was thinking in my first days here, when I complained there were no playgrounds.  They are everywhere.

One or two observations about driving in France (all of which Sean did.  I don't think I would do it even if someone's life depended on it): driving in the city is so stressful it takes years of one's life.  The French have become completely demented about these roundabouts where the people on the roundabout have the right of way.  they've almost completely replaced traffic lights, and they make finding your way extremely stressful, because every 100 meters, you have to check again what direction you want to go (out of 4 or 5 choices), and you end up going around and around the roundabout while your wife (that's me) wrestles with the map and tries to find the various options on our route.  I don't know why they give roads numbers, because they seem to completely ignore them in the signs that line the roundabouts.  And then, they tell you a city on one roundabout, e.g., Clisson, and then 400 meters later you go round and round again (to the great nausea and displeasure of the people in the way back of the car) looking for your destination, and it is nowhere to be found. 

 Okay, and then I came up with a perfect analogy for what it's been feeling like living here so far: it's been feeling like being in a car with four children and a dog for two weeks, with all of their little displeasures magnified and amplified until they are completely intolerable.  I came up with the analogy on our way home from the first outing (on Tuesday), because we got caught in a traffic jam at dinner time, so everybody was whining and complaining in pretty intolerable ways.  And then, when we got to the house, they all went to their rooms like they normally do at home, and everything was so peaceful.  It was like the trip in the car had made them so uncomfortable that the relief of finding themselves in a house trumped the fact that it was such an unfamiliar one.  Let's hope the relief lasts, and that they don't go back to their car manners.

And so that brings us to today, their first day of school.  Here they are.  The two boys seem to have dressed like twins.  They do that when they are getting along really well, which they need to be right now, since they are orphans in a strange land.  I dropped them off at 9:00.  Simeon's class has three new kids (seems like it would be pretty nice to grow up in a school where you are with all the same children in the one class for your grade, and where the arrival of a new kid is a big event).  Matthias's class had one kid who was wailing and carrying on terribly, and trying to run away every time his mother tried to leave.  She was so angry with him for embarrassing her like that, she looked and sounded like she wanted to kill him.  Anyway, Matthias was very shy, but putting on a brave face, and Simeon was very stoical.  We'll see what they have to say when they get back (at 4:45)

Mimi already got back from her first day.  I went to get her at noon.  The teachers told me she had cried the entire time (she was indeed crying, all alone in a corner, when I got to the school).  Her main teacher was pretty pissed: "Please speak french to her, she's quite lost, she didn't even stop crying when we sang our song."  All Mimi will say is that she wanted to come home because she doesn't know the name of the school.  Let's see, she also says one kid poked her, that they gave her a cracker but called it a 'little cake' and that the teacher told her shhhh (with hand gestures) when she was crying and screaming for me.  She definitely does not want to go back.

I saw one mother who, after leaving her boy at the school (in Mimi's class, he's probably the one who poked her) was saying to the man walking with her: "That was so impeccable, he was confident, curious, just perfect."  People are extremely judgmental here, whether positively or negatively.  They don't see a kid go to school confidently and rejoice that the kid will be happy, they rejoice that they have an exemplary kid.  And they don't see their kid wailing and trying to run away from school and grieve that their kid is unhappy, and hope he will get happier and that the teacher will help him overcome it, they harangue their kid for being a bad specimen of childhood (not 'confident and curious'), and they are ashamed that they have raised such a bad kid.  For now, I'm going to conclude that this is why children don't seem to carry on and fuss nearly as much here...  because they're more repressed, because stuff that is acceptable in America is just not acceptable here, not acceptable to such an extent that it is worthy of lack of love.  A very convenient conclusion, since I have been a bit embarrassed that Mimi pitches a fit in every store that sells candy when I won't buy her one, and that my kids are so boisterous and free and loud.  It will help me to overcome that.