Bonjour, y'all!

Who would have thought a move to France would bring out my inner redneck, but I have found that many French seem to love all things country and/or western and I am beginning to discover this whole new aspect to life here. Last weekend Patrice and I attended an American Country Western Festival in Chartres (about 45 minutes from here and famous for its cathedral). I happened to stumble across this when I was looking for line dancing lessons in our area because - don't ask me why - I have had this huge desire to line dance since I've arrived here and we thought it would be a fun couples activity.

We arrived for the first day of the American festival a couple of hours after the scheduled opening (note the keyword here is "scheduled") only to find not much going on and the vendors and expositions were still setting up. As someone who is usually 10 minutes late for everything I have ever done since I was probably 12, I do love the fact that schedules here seem to rarely exist and/or be adhered to, but there are times when you wish things would generally start moving along within, oh, one to two hours of their scheduled start. (On the flip side, we had some friends over for dinner a couple of weeks ago and not only were they and hour EARLY, they brought their dog and two extra people we weren't expecting, so I guess it can go both ways!)

One of the biggest things I was looking forward to about this weekend was speaking with other Americans. When I have attended French or German events in Portland, for example, I seemed to recall actual French or Germans attending or participating. Speaking French 24/7 gets a little tiresome and I was really looking forward to parlez-vous-ing a little anglais, but in this case, I really think I was the only American there, which was disappointing. However, once things got going, we had a great time! It was really cool to see French people taking this aspect of American culture so seriously and really enjoying themselves. There was country and rockabilly music, all sung in nearly accent-free English and there were times I looked around at the crowds and thought I was back home (well, not Portland or course but at least at the Canby country fair).

There certainly was a "we're French and not American" aspect to some of the getups - e.g. Gucci sunglasses, men with baguettes under their arms and jauntily-tied scarves around their neck as well as some of the most frightening ensembles of cowhide print couture I'd ever seen. I was obsessed with this trio of women I saw both days - one of whom I dubbed 'RoboCowboy' because she had a silver cowboy hat and wraparound sunglasses and her 'mutton dressed as lamb' friend had an indescribable combination of looks going on; I was simply hypnotized. My stealth-without-being-a-stalker photo skills were definitely put to the test. The music was great (the BBQ, on the other hand, not so much), we enjoyed the dancing and the people were fun to talk to. I really liked seeing the American cars as well (including the ubiquitous Dodge Ram pickup). We did get information for country dance lessons near our home and we have our first lesson this Thursday! I am super excited but Patrice is nervous because he thinks it's going to be too hard and he'll be impatient, which it will be and he will be, but he'll get it. Most men don't have 20 years of aerobics classes under their belts to prepare them for the wonderful world of group choreography.

I had the really good luck of meeting a Dutch woman here on the "other" side of St. Jean - which I didn't know existed - who runs a B&B for mainly Dutch people and offers English and French lessons. My friend Denise and I saw her flyer offering English lessons to children, so we though we had another 'rosbif' living in the village, but despite not being English, her English was very good and now I have another opportunity to NOT speak French. She hired me for one week to give English lessons to a 17-year-old boy who was visiting with his family and it really great because I enjoy doing it and it showed me how much I miss working in a 'normal' capacity, e.g. actually leaving your house and talking with other human beings.

I am really looking forward to getting my carte de sejour so I can look for a job. As I alluded to in the title of my last email, life here is VERY, VERY expensive. Not like the "go to California and spend ten cents more for a gallon of gas" expensive, but literally $8 a gallon for gas, $70 for a gallon of paint and the aforementioned $15 volleyball-sized watermelon at our local market. I went to buy a carton of cigarettes for my neighbor to the tune of $81. Suck on that for a moment - 81 bucks! (Yes, I am vehemently opposed to smoking but I figure if you're 80 years old and are still putting down a carton of unfiltered Gitanes each week, God bless you, you deserve each and every one.) On the plus side, bottled water is cheap, cheap, cheap (fortunately since, due to our hard water, I wash my hair in it) and the bastion of my teenage leisuredom - the glossy tabloid - is only about $1.50.

I still keep finding my little tastes of home that make life even nicer for me. One of the things I have missed the most is ordering a gigantic mocha at my local coffee shop and poring over the Sunday paper all morning. Despite having lots of little cafes, it is definitely not the same coffee culture as in the U.S. Paris is different - there are 25 Starbucks there - but to recreate my Sunday ritual, it would cost me close to $60: $40 for the train and métro ticket , $11 for a large frappuccino at Starbucks and $7 for the Sunday London Times. Sadly, that not being in the budget very often, I have had my local news agent order me the London Times and I go out for a thimble-sized café au lait in Vendôme or Orléans - a city conquered by Julius Caesar in the year 52 (!!) and place where Joan of Arc overthrew the English in 1429. I still continue to be in complete awe of the history that I am living smack dab in the middle of.

Orléans is also the place where I did my final rounds of appointments for my carte de sejour last week. I had health tests (TB: negative. Blood sugar: normal. Blood pressure: 120/80. Weight: down 17 pounds since my arrival, which was a pleasant surprise) as well as a stealth French proficiency exam (written and oral) which I didn't even know I was being given. All of our conversations with the staff were in French and I was asked to write personal information when filling out forms. Hilariously (and inexplicably) the information given to the group about lessons available to those who *don't* speak French was in French, so I am wondering how that worked out for everyone. At the end of the morning, I was told that these conversations were my exam as I passed, which I was not expecting. When I signed my name to the form, I saw that others in the room were having 300-500 hours of instruction recommended to them, so I felt really proud of myself that in just under a year after speaking my first word of French with Patrice and only five or six formal lessons, I was able to pass this test. However, I am going to take advantage of the free lessons that the government offers, well "free" in the sense that I paid a whopping $400 for my residency permit! I can take three or four lessons a week in nearby Blois starting in October.

Herding Cats

Well, the joy of having indoor/outdoor cats in the bucolic French countryside has come to an unfortunate end. Humphrey returned home one afternoon, after a leisurely stroll around the quartier with a note attached to his collar which translated loosely to : Your cat is very sweet but he is disturbing our dogs so could you please keep him inside". Needless to say, we were enjoying the ability to let the cats come and go as they please - probably akin to Scandinavian parents discovering it's perfectly legal to leave their baby in the stroller outside a restaurant while they enjoy their meal. We could leave the doors open for fresh air, there were no kung-fu cat-blocking leg motions required every time we left the house and they both were enjoying the outdoors - getting to be real "hunter" cats. (See photos of Humphrey with his first bird and one of Franklin's two million mice brought inside with varying degrees of life still in them)



We also had a more unsettling discovery regarding Franklin. He had been displaying some bizarre behavior in the litter box. He was appearing to have problems urinating - sitting in the box but doing nothing and/or going outside of the box in strange places - like the blanket on our couch - which is really unusual for cats. They are so persnickety about hygiene that any variation is a cause for concern. When he seemed unable to sit down, and was crying, we took him to a vet in Châteaudun and discovered he had blood in his urine and bladder stones. The vet indicated that the blood was indicative of poison and we have heard from our neighbor that they lost four cats in the last year due to poisoning - either a disgruntled feline-hating neighbors (cats are somewhat person non grata here, or perhaps eating a mouse that had been poisoned. Either way, with the combination of Humphrey's mystery note and Frankie's health problems (including, gulp, $45 a bag food!) we knew they had to stay inside.

We really had only a couple of options: keeping them completely inside or letting them go outside with something to keep them in the yard. We went to a pet store and inquired about an 'invisible fence' - I had read about these in the U.S. and was happy to see a version here. You run an underground wire around the perimeter of your yard and your pets wear collars that give them an increasing level of beeps and shocks as they get closer to the perimeter. The cost is close to $500 for the system, about $200 more than in the U.S.

The other (and much more affordable) option is using a harness, leashes and a long rope to keep them tethered to the house. For the moment, this seemed like the best option because we simply didn't have an extra $500 laying around. I had the clerk help me pick out harnesses, trying to explain the ginormous dimensions of my nearest and dearest, Humphrey. To the first harness I picked out, his response was, "Oh no, that is for a dog!", to which I replied, "Trust me, Monsieur, you haven't seen this cat!" Eighty dollars in cat harnesses later, we were out the door thinking our cat worries would be over - the cats could roam but not too far and we'd saved ourselves about 400 bucks.

Needless to say, the "training" did not go as expected. (Does anything, really?) Getting them (calmly) into the harness was not easy - it took practice on our part to not freak them out so they wouldn't associate being manhandled with this new form of restraint. We had the ingenious (not) idea as well to attach them to opposite ends of the same rope so that they would be push to the other's pull and when the reached the end, they would just stop. Mind you, this is a rope that can easily reach from the back of the house to the front. Seemed foolproof enough. What I wasn't expecting was that I was dealing with two little Houdinis. Ten semi-supervised minutes into the first outing, we two discovered expensive harnesses devoid of two wily cats. They had disappeared with nary a trace or signs of struggle (or even photo of them holding up an edition of today's newspaper). Our "set it and forget it" method of cat training had not worked.

As time has gone on, we have been able to get Humphrey to hang out resistance-free on the harness, but Frankie has been a lost cause. We have slowly allowed him to reclaim his role of the petit chasseur - the little hunter - (to wit: he has brought in three mice - two dead and one squeakingly alive - in the course of writing this entry) but we keep on eye on him and go look for him after he has been out awhile. Patrice is also completely pleased with himself and his (legend in his own mind) cat training because, ala Dr. Doolittle, he tells Frankie to be back in 20 minutes and sure enough, 20 minutes later there is Franklin. "Dressage, mon coeur, dressage," he tells me, "Je suis un professionnel". "Training, my darling, training. I am a professional." Hopefully as time goes on we can find that nice inside/outside mix of safe, but happy, cats.

I'll Take the $15 Watermelon on the Right, Please

I hope everyone is doing well. It’s hard to believe that the last two months have just flown by with nary a peep, but it has definitely been a full, full couple of months – for better or worse. Planning this marriage and move overseas with my heart and not my head, I neglected several important steps in preparation. I just “assumed” (stupidly) that these things could be taken care of once I was here – after all, I’m married to a Frenchman and coming from a first-world country, I don’t need to work here, how difficult could it be? (Famous last words if I ever heard them…) A couple of forms here and there, no problem. At the beginning of May, I discovered that I did not have the correct long-stay visa that allowed me to stay in France after my initial three-month tourist visa expired.

This magical piece of paper was only, apparently, available in once place in the world: The French Consulate in San Francisco, which handles all visas for the NW region of the US. However, the biggest piece of the puzzle that I was missing was that Patrice and I did not properly register our marriage with the French government. We thought since we were married in the U.S. we would only need to be aware of U.S. procedures, but the reality was that we needed to follow the same steps in France as we would have were we married here including the publishing of the “banns” (a public declaration of your intent to marry), a French transcription of our marriage, new certified copies of our birth certificates, an Apostile copy of our marriage certificate from the State of Oregon (“Um, a requirement of the 1961 Hague Convention, obviously” – a near-actual quote of an embassy worker. Naturally! How *silly* of me not to have remembered the 1961 Hague Convention and all of its bylaws…) . With this proper registering of the marriage, we would then receive our “livret de familie” – our family book – which starts with an entry of our marriage, has room for the subsequent birth of our up to 11 children (um, ouch) and finally our deaths. And with the livret de famlie, I would receive my long-stay visa, which would allow me to remain in France while awaiting my residency permit.

The problem was, it could take six to nine months to put together this “livret de familie” and my visa was expiring in a month. The consulate official that we initially dealt with was *very* unsympathetic of our ineptitude in understanding of international marriage laws and *especially* very unsympathetic of Patrice. “He’s French, he should know these things!” However, we truly, utterly and completely were blessed with some of the nicest and most helpful government officials I have ever dealt with (unfortunately not my friend, Rick’s, experiences with the State of Oregon officials…). The aforementioned consulate worker, Stephane, bent over backward to get this done for us – very, very unusual and we are very grateful. I arrived at her office in San Francisco on a Friday and left with my visa and family book the next Monday. Our bump in the process was an (unexpected) immigration interview outlining our relationship and marriage. Because we had a rather whirlwind courtship and wedding, the felt they needed more proof of our established life in France. We are very, very lucky to know the assistant mayor of St. Jean and she was able to personally vouch for us – to know that we were part of the community and that our marriage was valid and not for a green card (me being Andie MacDowell, Patrice being Gérard Depardieu, naturally). After receiving that information, everything was good. I have to say, being handed that book at the consulate’s office was a very emotional experience.

I have to say it was really hard to be back in Portland and San Francisco visiting my friends. I want to thank Rick, Mike and Rob for being such amazing friends and helping me with this unexpected visit – Rick for “loaning” me the money for the plane ticket, even though he knew it would be a long time before I could pay him back and all three for picking me up, shuttling me around and making it possible that I didn’t have to spend a penny. This whole relocation has been a huge financial kick in the pants to say the least, and I just simply couldn’t have taken care of this trip without the help of my three wonderful friends!!  It was very bittersweet to say goodbye. I missed Patrice, of course, but being back in Portland especially felt like I’d been gone forever and at the same time, gone for not even a day. I think it was almost too soon to be back because I was still in the adjustment mode in France.

As time goes on, I am still finding my little routines (like "Hetty Wainthrop Investigates" on BBC at 2:30 pm, which has been been thwarted for the time being by having Patrice and the kids here on three week's vacation). Even with a city like Paris so close, it is very easy to feel like I am in the middle of nowhere which, in the fact, I am. One thing about the smaller cities and villages that is such a strange adjustment is how DARK they are night! Not a streetlight or porch light anywhere. It is very Bram Stoker’s Dracula at times… (thankfully without the torch-wielding villagers). Most every house has these large shutters that they close at night so there literally is not a ray of light. Bad for people like me who like to take walks at night and do a little ‘surveiling’… The shutters are awesome, though, for sleeping until noon on your day off and thinking it is only 6 a.m. when you wake up. Sometimes, though, it feels almost too quiet. We were in Paris for Bastille Day and we lay down on our blanket along the Seine near the Eiffel Tower and the traffic noise just lulled me to sleep – something I miss out in out little town.



One thing I love about the country, though, is the fresh everything. Fresh flowers, fresh eggs from my neighbor’s farm, fresh plums, green beans, lettuce and other seasonal things from Patrice’s parents’ garden, fresh flour from the mill down the road. It is just so easy to eat a more pure diet – we never eat processed foods - even though we certainly don’t eat low-fat - and I make most everything from scratch, so we are not eating artificial preservatives (on a side note: “preservatif” is French for prophylactic , not for the agent that preserves our food. It took me a little while to catch onto the blank stares when I said I preferred my food “without condoms”…). The beauty is with the cooking is that Patrice has gained about 8 pounds (he was 6’ and 137) and I have lost weight – so go figure. I really have loved cooking and trying out new things, but I am also understanding the need for books like “501 Chicken Recipes”. It is *hard* to come up with new meals while not buying a million different ingredients. We laugh now that the choice tends to be “poulet et pomme de terre or pomme de terre et poulet”…. And I have upped his tolerance to spicy foods although I still feel mortally wounded when he whips out the salt at the table.

Bastille Day (or Quatorze Julliet – the 14th of July – as it’s known here) in Paris was amazing! It is something I probably wouldn’t have the desire to do every year, but it was a great experience. We arrived on the Champs-Élysées at 6:30 in the morning to stake out our place – managing after a little bull-headedness between the two of us – to get a great spot in the front row for the 10:00 a.m. parade. We had to clear our spot momentarily before the parade so they could put a security point in place for each section. Then we were scanned and everyone went back to their original spot. When I turned around to look for Johnathan, the police were pulling weapons out of him left and right like and episode of Captain Caveman! He had brought fireworks, numchuks, toy guns, good lord – it was hilarious! And he lost all of them, which was unfortunate, but geez! The program for the parade said it would start at 10:00 and was listing certain events as starting at 10:17, 10:32, etc. I thought “My, that’s pretty ambitious” and true to French form, it certainly did NOT start on time. It was, however, a wonderful parade. We were right near where the people sang for Sarkozy and got a great view and listen. Not even being French, it was great to see the troops so proud of what they were doing – and to see the other 26 countries of the European Union represented – check out the Spanish soldiers in my photos: Skin-tight, v-neck uniforms with chest hair a’ flyin’, tilted hats and sexy little sideburns.





After the parade, we wandered up the Champs-Élysées, looked in shops, marveled at the $11 price tag for a 4-ounce glass of Coke, had lunch and headed towards the Eiffel Tower. We napped for a bit along the river, and then found a great spot at the foot of the tower to relax and people-watch until the fireworks started. The fireworks were absolutely amazing – wonderful music as well – the best display I have ever seen! The crush AFTER the fireworks, though, was a nightmare. We were right at the base of the tower and there were probably close to a million people there (600,000 people stayed for the concert afterwards which featured Michel Polnareff - Google it and try not to laugh - , Nelly Furtado and Tokio Hotel) and all those million people seemed to be wanting to go different directions at exactly the same time. It was a little frightening, especially with Johnathan. I was pushed into some guy in the crush of people and he just flipped OUT on me, so much so that he and Patrice got into a ‘don’t touch my wife’ chest-butting incident. That was one time when it was nice to have a macho, headstrong husband…. ha ha. We made our way through the crowds, past the closed metro stops and finally to the jam-packed stop that would take us home. It was a LONG, but wonderful day. Beautiful weather and great people.

It’s funny, the French have such a reputation for being rude, stuck-up a**h*les (how’s that for a bunch of asterisk?), but I have found it to be absolutely 100% the opposite. (Of course, all countries have their stereotype, the loud, pushy American, the cold, uptight German, etc). But whether I am in Paris or out in the sticks, I seriously have found the nicest people who have bent over backwards to help me or answer a question when I needed it. When I returned back from the States on this last trip, I had two really heavy bags and didn’t want to take the Metro because it meant lugged 120 pounds of luggage up and down tons of stairs. So I stood outside near the taxis and shuttles to see what I could find to Austerliz (my station in Paris). This shuttle driver of a reserved shuttle called his boss to see if he knew (he didn’t) and asked several other bus drivers. He ended up giving me a ride to downtown Paris for free (normally 30 Euros), getting me a taxi and lugging my luggage to the taxi. I had a nice conversation with the taxi driver (who LOVES America) and when I got the train station, after asking an employee if there was place I could plug in my cel phone to get a charge, he not only took me to his office to let me use the outlet, but gave me a bottled water for the rest of my journey. I found this kind of niceness everywhere, consistently. I don’t think I have run into a rude person since I have been here – although I am sure speaking French helps.

Finally, I had a wonderful opportunity the other weekend to have dinner with a friend of mine from Portland who was visiting Paris - Lisa, my friend and former boss when I was a work-study student 15 years ago at PSU. Patrice and I met her around 6pm at the Pantheon in the Latin Quarter and had dinner at a beautiful French restaurant about a 10 minute cab ride away; a restaurant once visited by the likes of François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac and even Madonna, I later discovered. Lisa speaks fluent French, which was great for Patrice, and we had simply the most lovely dinner I have had in Paris. It was a great evening and it was fun to see someone out of the usual context. She and her traveling companions were headed to Turkey the following week and I have to say, it was really hard to say goodbye to her that night! I'm a little sniffly right now... sometimes those little glimpses of your former life are hard to let go.




Anyway, that is “all” for now – I feel like I could write a million more pages especially since I have not written anyone for months – time simply slips by before you know it. I would love to hear from you all and what you are up to! I miss Portland a lot and it is great to get any update, etc.