France – Life In A Word

Blue-Blood Spuds

As I was digging into dinner last night, I surveyed the contents of my plate and decided the food was looking rather pedestrian. Yes, I’d topped the roast pork with a tasty sour cream and onion sauce. I added lemon zest and shredded cheese to the broccoli. But the potatoes were run-of-the-mill, simply diced and baked with nothing but salt and pepper. I could’ve done more there; a lot more. Starting with potatoes from La Bonnotte. It’s just, I don’t want to spend $300 for a pound of them.

$300 for potatoes – yikes. It sounds ridiculous unless you’re British royalty or the finest restaurants in Europe. A couple of medium-sized Russets – the ones we bake – weigh a pound, but the Bonnotte potato is more like the small red ones you cut up and season. 10-12 Bonnottes in a pound; so like, $30 each. That’s a pricey bite (and not exactly “small potatoes”). But if you’re willing, you can purchase your share of this delicacy; that is if you’re quick. They’re only on the market ten days a year.

What makes the Bonnotte the aristocrat of spuds? Here’s the meat and potatoes of it:

La Bonnotte potatoes are found on a small island off the Atlantic coast of France, and nowhere else. It’s as if they’re grown in some fortified castle, surrounded by a wide moat.
The potato field is limited to fifty square meters, so they’re not even using the entire island. You could walk the perimeter of the entire crop in about five minutes.
Even though the island soil is ideal for growing La Bonnottes, the “secret sauce” is nearby seaweed and algae, mixed into the dirt by hand. This is perhaps the first time I’ve heard of a good use for seaweed.
Every Bonnotte is harvested by hand, then treated, cleaned, and sold by a small cooperative of local farmers. Talk about an exclusive club.
As I said, the harvest is only available for purchase ten days a year. Mark your calendars for May 1-10, 2023.

The island of Noirmoutier-en-l’ile has a church, a chateau, and very expensive potatoes.

Here’s my favorite reason to buy this hot potato (and for heaven’s sake, don’t drop one): you don’t peel them. You shouldn’t peel them. Their unique flavor – tastes of lemon, earth, “the sea”, and chestnut – is most concentrated in the skin. You eat them just the way they come out of the ground.

Luxuo is an online news portal whose mission is “to uncover the values which permeate the fiber of the world’s most recognizable luxury brands” (Got all that?) The Luxuo website has a dropdown menu for timepieces, yachting, motoring, properties…. and now you’ll find potatoes, because La Bonnottes (you don’t even call them “potatoes” at this price) are the most expensive potatoes in the world. By some measures they’re one of the most expensive foods in the world. Saffron, macadamia nuts, Beluga caviar, and white truffles are the top four, followed by La Bonnottes. Blue-blood spuds indeed.

[Author’s Note: I just had to know why we refer to things as “blue blood”. The term originated in Spain. It was used to differentiate between people with light skin from those with darker complexions. The veins of southern Europeans appeared bluer due to their pale and translucent skin. Wealthy landowners or their descendents were part of an upper class in Spain, and somewhere along the line the veins were associated with wealth. Not a look I prefer, but the money is tempting.]

After the La Bonnotte harvest and sell, a small number of the potatoes are reserved for a local festival, where they’re served plain, just as you see them in the entertaining video below (because no other ingredient deserves to share the pan). Who can blame the farmers for throwing a party? They’ve convinced the world to purchase potatoes for $300/pound yet again, just as they’ve done for decades before.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Amending Fences

We’re keeping a close eye on our new neighbor these days. You see, he’s building a fence on his property. In most cases the only discussion neighbors have about fences is who pays for what, or how the fence will look on either side. But this situation’s more complicated. Our neighbor doesn’t realize the driveway separating he and me is not right on the property line. If his new fence line marches down his side of the driveway, he’s actually claiming several square yards of our property.

Here’s a story you never hear, certainly not in the United States. A Belgian farmer was working on his property and decided to move a giant rock in one of his fields. Several days later, federal authorities knocked on his front door. Turns out, moving that rock adjusted the border of Belgium. Our farmer moved one rock (as it turns out, a 300-year-old stone marker) and singlehandedly increased the size of his country by 1,000 square meters. The very sovereignty of his nation was called into question. Neighboring France was not thrilled.

So it is with my neighbor. Unless he has a plot plan on hand he’ll unknowingly increase the size of his property while decreasing mine. But that’s why we put up fences, right? A fence specifies property; a literal landmark to indicate, “this is mine”. That’s just for starters because we use fences for a lot of other reasons.

If I’m guessing right, my neighbor needs a fence to keep horses (or other livestock) between his house and the edges of his property. His animals will be shut in from adjacent roads and lands. Good luck with that, friend. Most people around here seem to have breaks in their fences (if they have fences at all). Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t post a notice on our neighborhood’s electronic newsletter about animals on the loose. This morning’s alert concerned a bunch of cows grazing peacefully… on the wrong property. You can’t blame ’em if “the grass is greener on the other side”, right?

Last week on our vacation to Charleston, South Carolina, we drove down streets full of the town’s characteristic row houses, with tasteful pastel colors and two-story side “piazza” porches. We also walked by stately antebellum mansions in the waterfront “south of Broad” neighborhood. Each of these estates was surrounded by high gates and brick walls, an obvious nod to security. Yes, these palaces were beautiful, but their surrounding “fences” seemed to declare, “keep out”. So we did.

Here’s another need for fences. At last Saturday’s Triple Crown Belmont Stakes in New York, the eight thoroughbreds were guided – and in one case pushed – into the starting gate before the race began. In the split second where the horses were all in a row, each standing in a sort of starting cage, there was structure. Once they burst out of the gate, all horses and riders shifted to the left, jockeying chaotically for prime position on the rail. Imagine the start of that race without that starting “fence”. Disorder with a capital “D”.

Some fences don’t even need a physical definition. Picture your city streets without lane markings (as if you lived in India). All cars would tend to compete for the best position, just like those Belmont Stakes horses. Horns would honk and road rage would rise to new levels. Roll down your window and throw out any sense of safety.

I leave you with one final fence. The shuttered Cal Neva Lodge and Casino overlooking Lake Tahoe straddles the border between California and Nevada. A solid line on the floor splits the dining room and then the swimming pool, to indicate which state you’re dining or soaking in. Drink on one side of the line; drink and gamble on the other. I just hope the hotel’s current remodel doesn’t include relocating the pool. California might become even bigger!

Some content sourced from the CNN Travel article, “Belgian farmer moves border with France by mistake”.

Vicious Circles

When I was ten years old, the progressive rock band “Yes” released an unforgettable song called “Roundabout”. The lyrics included trippy phrases like, “… mountains come out of the sky and they stand there…”, and, “… go closer hold the land feel partly no more than grains of sand…” The words made no sense but the melody hooked me with its driving beat and wandering synthesizer. “Roundabout” and “Stairway to Heaven” – both released in 1971 – are perfect examples of my rock music baptism.

Turns out, “Roundabout” was not a metaphor for the song’s underlying message nor even a made-up word. The lyrics really were spawned from an overdose of traffic circles. Yes was on tour and traveling from Aberdeen to Glasgow when its lead singer Jon Anderson says their van passed through “maybe 40 or so” roundabouts. Anderson promptly teamed up with guitarist Steve Howe to produce one of Yes’s biggest hits. Wikipedia dedicates an entire article to “Roundabout” here.

Fifty years forward, roundabouts are more prevalent than ever on our city streets – and in some setups, as mind-boggling to navigate as a Yessong lyric. In a neighborhood near my house, I pass through three consecutive roundabouts to get to a friend’s house. Each has two lanes entering and exiting the circle from four directions. If I’m not conscious of the lane I’m in when I enter a circle, I’ll find myself going round and round before I remember it’s safe to exit from both lanes. If I lose track of which circle I’m in (all three look entirely alike), I’ll exit onto a street nowhere near my friend’s house.

You’d think we’d have them figured out by now since roundabouts first appeared in 1966 and have proliferated ever since. (By definition, we’re talking about circles tight enough to induce centrifugal force, not the more leisurely curves of an urban “rotary”.) The Wall Street Journal reports traffic authorities still toy with public awareness campaigns, signage, and modified roadway designs in an almost desperate effort to reduce roundabout fender-benders.

Here are two lingering oversights with the rules of roundabouts. First, drivers entering the circle sometimes assume they have the right-of-way over drivers already in the circle. Second, drivers approaching a two-lane roundabout don’t check signage to see whether one or both lanes also exit the roundabout. On the latter problem, I admit to several instances where I had to quickly change lanes while circling, just to exit where I needed to. Changing lanes in a roundabout ranks among the scariest driving maneuvers of them all.

Roundabouts really do make a lot of sense, even if drivers never, ever figure them out. They eliminate electronic signal systems or stop signs. They create a safer environment for pedestrians (who only have to look one direction for oncoming traffic instead of three). They force vehicles to slow down, and statistics show a dramatic reduction in the number of T-bone and head-on collisions. Finally, roundabouts require less asphalt to create a new intersection, and are sometimes enhanced with an eye-pleasing landscaped island in the center.

Look closely and you’ll see (all four) Bristol Circles

The first time I ever drove in circles was in West Los Angeles. A street known as “Bristol Avenue” earned the nickname “Bristol Circles” by teenage drivers in the neighborhood. That’s because Bristol’s four rotaries allowed for a lively game of “car tag”, where my friends and I would zoom around trying to “tag” each other with the headlights of our cars. If we were really daring (i.e stupid), we included the topmost of Bristol’s four circles, which is bisected by busy, unpredictable Sunset Blvd.

Cities in the northeastern states of the U.S. have some pretty good-sized rotaries these days but for the really daring, it’s hard to beat the giant urban circles in France or the tighter many-tentacled roundabouts in the UK. Paris’s Arc de Triomphe rotary may deserve the title “most vicious circle”. Watch the following video and see if you don’t agree. This rotary may be the genesis of the term “distracted driving”. Note to viewer: no lanes. Note to self: no thanks.

Some content sourced from the 3/14/2020 Wall Street Journal article, “Car Crash Mystery: Why Can’t Drivers Figure Out Roundabouts?” and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Iced Coffee

In the airy but over-aired romantic comedy Me Before You (2016), the dashing but damaged Will Traynor (Sam Claflin) laments bygone times when he refers to, “Paris. Place Dauphine, right by the Pont Neuf. Sitting outside the cafe with a strong coffee, a warm croissant with unsalted butter and strawberry jam.” Place Dauphine is not just a scene in Me Before You; it’s a real square in the heart of Paris. And it probably has Will’s cafe, thanks to the nearby river and central views of the city. Yet French cafes are growing scarcer every year. In fact, these quaint little gathering places are disappearing in droves.

If someone asked me to paint a scene from a French country village, I’d surely highlight a charming cafe on a cobbled central space, bursting with patrons. In the cafe, the proprietor would serve incomparable pastries alongside fine, pressed coffee. The room would swell with music and chatter; the locals swapping their work-day adventures before heading home to supper. The evening stopover in the cafe seems to me a staple of French culture.

So it pains me to read about closed doors on France’s rural cafes, according to a recent report of the Wall Street Journal. Sixty years ago, you would find over 200,000 of them liberally dotting the country. Today, there are less than 40,000. “Progress” – in its various forms – has forced the rural worker out of traditional French industries and into the big cities. Time once spent in the cafe is now given over to the workday commute. Adds a village mayor, “Without a cafe, a village is pretty much dead”.

Even though I’ve been to Paris, I can’t claim to have spent time in any of its cafes, not even the famed Les Deux Magots, where writers like Hemingway and Joyce were said to have gathered. And yet, I’ve still experienced authentic “cafe culture” (and I don’t mean Starbucks). On a trip to Ireland several years ago, my wife and I concluded our first day of sightseeing by ducking into what we thought was a small pub in downtown Dublin. Turns out the place was more “French cafe”, complete with black-and-white prints on the walls, candle-lights on the tables, and coffee, tea, and pastries to beat the band. We were so taken by the place we stopped in every afternoon for the better part of a week. Perhaps the most showstopping memory of all: we never saw a phone, tablet, or laptop. Patrons were there to gather and chat, or at least – in the case of a few loners – to lose themselves in a good book.

The French cafe is made all the more romantic thanks to the artist Vincent van Gogh. In 1888 in the southern town of Arles, van Gogh observed the play of a cafe’s lights against the nighttime sky, which inspired his painting Cafe Terrace at Night, the precursor to his unequaled The Starry Night.

Perhaps you recall France’s “yellow vest movement” a year or so ago, when protestors took to the streets to battle aggressive economic policies. Turns out the French cafes played a part in the melee. The government sought to impose an increased fuel tax to reduce the number of cars on the road. The protesters interpreted the tax as an impolite shove, to get more people to move to the big cities. In other words, less people in French country villages. And no people in French country cafes. Remarkably, one of the government’s concessions following the yellow-vest protests was subsidies towards small businesses. Perhaps the French country cafe is not dead after all.

Had I written this post two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have come up with much positive spin on this topic. But let’s face it, those of us “sheltered in place” right now yearn for social interaction (not social distancing). We want face-to-face again, not Facetime. We want the congregation, not just the church service. So perhaps there’s a silver lining to the current pandemic after all. When we return to “new normal”, my hope is we’ll have a newfound appreciation for gathering, instead of hiding behind our electronic devices. As well, my hope is my next visit to France will find the doors of French country cafes wide open again, just beckoning me inside for “strong coffee and warm croissant”.

Bon Voyage!

Every now and then I come up with a topic for my blog, and then the topic somehow surfaces in the natural course of conversation later the same week. It’s a little unnerving – perhaps divine intervention – to watch someone bring up something you hadn’t thought about in years, or at least until a few days earlier.

Such was the case this week when I opted for a (virtual) visit to Mont Saint-Michel, the majestic island commune and fortified abbey just off the coast of Normandy, France. Mont Saint-Michel came to mind because I received a mailer from my alma mater advertising a ten-day trip to the region next summer. The itinerary includes a stopover in Paris, a base hotel in the historic seaport village of Honfleur, extensive tours of Normandy focusing on the events of World War II, and finally, a full day exploring the island of “St. Michael’s Mount.” Mon dieu, what an adventure!

Mont Saint-Michel has a remarkable history on top of its dramatic architectural elements (which you can read about here). Its buildings date to the 8th century, with the Romanesque abbey and monastery at the very top (“closest to God”), literally supported by a vast network of halls for stores and housing, and finished elegantly at the bottom – outside the walls – with individual houses for the handful of fishermen and farmers who live there. The church inside the abbey is partnered with an open-air cloister (a square covered walkway for reflection). A statue of the archangel Michael watches over the land from the very top of the church spire. Magnifique, no?

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia about Mont Saint-Michel. You may think the following photo is a distant view of the island. Au contraire. The Mont has a “sister” across the channel near Cornwall. England’s island of “St. Michael’s Mount” is much smaller, but it still shares the characteristics of Mont Saint-Michel, including the significant rise/fall of the surrounding tides, the conical shape of the island, and a chapel at the top.

In today’s world Mont Saint-Michel is a little touristy for my tastes, so perhaps it’s just as well I’ve never made the pilgrimage. 2.5 million visitors descend upon the island every year, hosted by only 25 full-time inhabitants (monks, nuns, and shopkeepers). Tourism is literally the only source of income. Besides a walk through the abbey and the spiraling streets, you’re channeled into the requisite shopping area, for food (including the famous to-go omelettes), and for purchases that can only be labelled as “tacky”. I actually have one of these souvenirs (below photo). Sacre’ bleu! Maybe if they’d left off the sailboat…

To further detract from the mystique of the Mont Saint-Michel, a permanent walking bridge was built three years ago, allowing round-the-clock access from the mainland car-park. Once upon a time you had to wait until low tide and then quickly walk across the natural spit of land before the water returned. Now you just cross whenever you want. Too bad, but apparently the channel was filling in with silt and a bridge was the only way to keep the island an island. C’est la vie.

My first introduction to Mont Saint-Michel was forty-odd years ago on the shores of California, not France. San Diego County hosts elaborate sand-castle building competitions on its beaches, and one year I snapped the following photo of the winner.

To visit Mont Saint-Michel, you’ll need to drive four hours to the west of Paris, all the way to the coast of the English Channel. Unless you have a hankering for WWII history, there isn’t much else to draw you to the region. Which brings me back to the start, and my comment about topics resurfacing later in the week. Three days after I wrote this post, I was having a beer with some older friends and we got talking about the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. One of the guys said his dad served in WWII and he’d taken him back to the beaches of Normandy, where he’d spent part of his time as a medic. “Normandy?”, I said. “Yes”, he said. “You know, in the northwest of France near Mont Saint-Michel?” To which I almost said, “excusez-moi?”

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.