I think this entry should be called: when in Nantes... do as the Nantais. Here's why. On Friday (which is the day this photo was taken, after a baker came into Simeon's class and helped all the kids bake that delicious treat you see him with there, as part of the 'semaine du gout' (the week of taste)--here in France, they think you have to teach kids how to like bread, or else the entirety of French culture will collapse, God forbid, what if French kids start to eat pita instead?), I went to a new pool to swim (all on my own, without any of my friends from the boys's school). Well, in this pool, it isn't just that there's no organisation for the lanes, there are no lanes at all! So everyone swims wherever and there are constant collisions. Now, at first, I was letting my anglo-saxon orderliness rule where I swam: I was trying to swim up one side of the black line at the bottom of the pool, and down the other. But I soon realized that when you are in a messy country, being orderly actually creates more chaos, so I started swimming wherever there was room, and I didn't do too badly. I didn't increase my overall speed, but I did realize that there are skills required for water polo (swerving and turning really fast, for instance) which I could definitely acquire. Hence the conclusion, when in Nantes, in a pool, do not behave as you would in a Bellingham pool!

Here is another example of something I wouldn't be doing in Bellingham: having my 2 year old daughter shell the beans. But really, before you call child protective services (they can't get me here anyway, that's why people like Polanski hide here) she pitches a fit if I don't let her do it. These are called Coco de Paimpol, and they are so good (and only here until November, the vegetable person told me at the market) so I buy them every week despite the embarassment of saying their name. They are amazing cooked for a long time with onions and tomatoes, with a splash of vinegar at the end. A friend here told me to cook them like that.


Let's see, not much else is new. We went back to the Sevre river where we had walked once without reaching the 1000 year old dam we were aiming for. This time, we had the boys on bikes, Mimi in the backpack and a picnic, so we did make it. When we got there, we found the dam (well, it's a thousand years old, built by monks from a monastery established by St Martin, the one who cut his cloak in two when a beggar asked him for alms, he's the subject of many french paintings) not all that exciting. But there was a quite lovely playground near it, and then this old water mill here, and the castle tower you can just make out in the background. Of course, Sean and I were sort of disappointed that, given that it had taken us 3 and a half hours to get there, we had better head back . We both really wanted to go see the tower. I guess everything feels like that when you start to explore. You see some lovely things, but there's always others that you can just make out, or that you know are there from the map, and you always want to go further.

As usual, though, children and parents hold you back: the kids were completely exhausted, and Sean's father, who has been visiting on and off this week, also was pretty worn out. We'll just have to go back and leave the house earlier in the day. Here is Matthias with a water sample he took from the Sevre river below the dam. I don't know what he intended to do with it, but my only thought was, yikes, wash your hands...

There doesn't seem to be much else to report. I was shocked, last week, when Magdalene brought home a bit of homework we had done together, and several of my interpretations of a short story
by Zola were summarily called WRONG and corrected. The pile of manure did NOT represent human affairs, but power (how could I have missed that?) and the woman's fear in the cemetary did not indicate that she was afraid of where her relation with a young man, not her husband, was leading (I guess I was reading too much into it, though a few pages later the adulterous relationship is consumated). Anyway, this led Magdalene to complain once more about the central problem she sees with French education: they don't want you to do any critical thinking, they just want you to copy down what the teacher says and repeat it verbatim on tests. In this case, I'm not sure how you could get the desired intepretations without doing some critical thinking, but beware if your critical thinking leads you in the wrong direction, you can have tone of evidence for your interpretation, but it's not the process that's important (as I assume it would be in the states), it's the end result. Evidence for the wrong interpretation is not something you take into consideration, it's just something you dismiss: it supports the wrong interpretation, therefore, it is not evidence. No wonder the french are no good at science (well, yes, I know that's not right, but if there is evidence to the contrary, I think I will just have to consider it not to be evidence). (We still got an 8 out of 10 and a comment that it was very good work, so don't start worrying about how well we're doing, with our wrong-headed readings of manure piles and little cries of fright in graveyards at night).

Sean's father took us out to dinner on Sunday night to a beautiful 19th century Brasserie across from the opera called La Cigale (you can go to their website and see it, if you like, just look up La Cigale Nantes). The entire inside of the restaurant is painted with very 19th century figurative paintings of Breton scenes (girls fishing for shellfish on the beach, young fishermen in wooden clogs) and whatever is not painted is tiled and carved and mirrored. The food was good, but the service was like a parody of itself, with the supercilious waiter almost offended because only Sean's father ordered an appetizer, and then genuinely offended because though he addressed himself to Sean's father, I was the one who kept answering. Of course, I'm especially sensitive (Sean thinks paraoid) to that sort of thing, but it's really annoying to pay for a meal and then be made to feel like you are somehow trespassing because you don't quite know the important rules of how to order, what to order, who should talk, and whether you should put your elbows on the table or not. Really, after living in America where the customer is a king, it's hard to come back to France were the customer is often a supplicant instead.