Oui, Je Parle Francais!

Earlier this week I went to a wedding. The bride was a coworker of MJ’s who spoke French. I wished her congradulations, told her she looked beautiful, then had conversations with some of her friends. When one of them turned to MJ and said “You choose beautiful women” (meaning me), I realized we'd all been speaking French the whole time.

I love the French language. A French person can read from the phone book and make it sound like the most erotic thing ever. Automatic ten sexiness points if you speak French. I figure if I learn the language, I will immediately be a total babe. It won't even matter if my hair is messy or I have an entire four-course meal stuck in my teeth. I am hot and I speak French. Bow DOWN.

Dinan

On the way back to Paris, we stayed a night in Dinan, where Mugambi’s great-grandmother came from. And the old part of Dinan probably looks just like it did when she lived there. We’re talking an entire neighborhood full plaster-and-timber buildings straight out of a Shakespearean movie set, each one at least 500 years old. Usually you’re lucky to see just one or two houses like this, even in European towns with a lot of history. Check this out:

Breton Food

I used to read this fantasy series called Redwall by an Englishman named Brian Jacques. One of the things I loved about this series—other than that all the characters were heavily-anthropomorphized woodland creatures like mice, squirrels, stoats, and weasels—was the descriptions of food. Every chapter or so there would be a feast with a groaning table full of cheeses of every description, flower-scented creams, fluffy white and wheat breads, vegetables in elaborate stews, and sixteen different kinds of beverage including golden ales, brown ales, frothy dark ales, jugs of creamy milk, icy water, and anything else you could imagine drinking. Jacques was effortless at describing the sheer richness of the food—and every feast was different.

St. Thegonnec

Afterwards, we drove to St. Thegonnec, a little town in the heart of “close country.” The distinctive feature of Bretagne’s compact little towns—other than utterly NO urban sprawl, cobblestone streets, ancient-looking houses and creperies and pubs with huge oaky-beamed ceilings and cozy nooks by the fire where you can read a book and drink your weight in cider—is the parish close. Churches (often dating from the 1200’s or 1300’s) are surrounded by a circular wall that encompasses a graveyard, an ossuary (which I think is a kind of mausoleum, but most we saw had been converted to gift shops), and an elaborate edifice called a “calvary.” The calvary is like a huge stone coffin (except twenty times larger than a coffin) carved all over, with towering representations of Christ on the cross on top. It’s really just easier to show you a picture:

Drive to the End of the World

One day that first weekend, MJ and I went jogging by the harbor. I’ve hated to jog my whole life. I’ve usually only made myself do it by convincing myself that I was really going for a walk—I like walks—and then jogging in very brief thirty-second spurts after about five or ten minutes of walking. I hurt my knee a few years ago and that’s been an excuse, too—it hurts when I jog. So I told MJ not to wait for me—I had a feeling I’d be really slow.

Turns out my body surprised me. I started running and just didn’t want to stop. I wasn’t tired. My knee didn’t hurt. And the sea just spread out in front of me and I felt my heart open up. I just wanted to run. We ran all the way around the harbor and back, barely resting, and then jogged into Old Town.

So yeah, jogging is AWESOME. Did you guys...know about this?

The Festival Interceltique Lorient

Our first weekend in Bretagne, we stayed in a town called Concarneau, by the sea, and went to the Festival Interceltique in nearby Lorient. The festival is an enormous week-long celebration of Celtic music, and this year’s theme was Diaspora—so there were Celtic music groups there from all over the world, including Africa.

The parade was a highlight, with lots of bagpipers, marching bands, dancers, and people in traditional dress:

Delft

It was a beautiful day today, so I went to Delft. It's a small town with a beautiful cathedral and picturesque canals just a few minutes from the Hague. There's a huge market there full of neat, cheap stuff. I picked up an antique key and a red satin ribbon for under two euros--plus a whole bunch of nail polish and a pair of sunglasses. Sunglasses are awful for me; they're always too big for my face, look weird, and I am terrible at judging which ones are flattering. I had a pair of awesome sexy movie star sunglasses that somehow managed to be both trendy and flattering...and I lost them this week. The new sunglasses are NOT as cute as the old ones. MJ says they make me look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar. So I will look like the Terminator all throughout Brittany, instead of looking like Mary Kate Olsen with my cute waify sunglasses. Sighh...

Maastricht and Aachen

We decided to go to Maastricht on Friday night and stay til Saturday. I think Maastricht is my new favorite town in the Netherlands, for the following reasons:

1. I thought Utrecht was the oldest town in the Netherlands, but Maastricht is. It's been inhabited since Roman times. There's some dispute about another city, Nijmegen, being older because it obtained Roman city rights, which Maastricht never did--but as far as uninterrupted human habitation, people have lived in Maastricht since at least 50 BC when the Romans founded the town, and possibly about 500 years earlier than that.

2. Maastricht is the place where the first Mosasaur was discovered. A mosasaur is an enormous aquatic lizard up to 56 feet long (!!) that was one of the fiercest beasts in the sea for millions of years. Mosasaurs have double-hinged jaws that let them gulp down a 20-foot fish whole, sharklike teeth that point inward and literally drag the prey down the gullet, and their fossils have been found all over the world. They're believed to have been extremely ferocious--there have been skulls found with massive tooth wounds from other mosasaurs. Think about how life would be if they were alive today. There would be no fishing industry. No scuba diving. No humans anywhere near the ocean. Mosasaurs would eat all the ships! Mwarrr.

Mosasaurs are epically cool. As can be clearly seen, here:



Anyway, the first mosasaur skull was discovered in Maastricht's famous limestone quarries in the 1700's. It was thought to be the skull of an enormous beast that lived in the River Meuse, which runs through Maastricht. All these medieval towns have rivers running through them, incidentally. Most of those rivers do not have significant mosasaur populations, as far as I know.

3. People speak lots of languages in Maastricht. It's located in a little uvula of the Netherlands dangling down between Germany and Belgium, and people speak French, Dutch, German, and English here as well as Limburgish (Maastricht has its own unique dialect of Limburghish, Maastrichtian).

So we got in kinda late and wandered through beautiful cobbly streets in the evening, periodically coming upon wide squares dominated by cathedrals or ornate town halls. Maastricht's basilica, noted for being entirely flat in front (like a halibut!), dates from around 1,000 AD:



More pics from the picturesque night walk:



Yummy:



Local color.



So in the morning, we visited the basilica, including a tour of the museum inside where lots of religious artifacts and statues were on display.

Is anyone else creeped out by reliquaries, or is it just me?



Mugambi went to great lengths to keep the next activity a surprise. He asked me not to read guidebooks about Maastricht, and kept me in the dark right up until we got on a boat that traveled up the river Meuse. I love boat trips! I thought this was it, until the boat pulled over and started letting people off...for a tour of the limestone quarries where the mosasaur was discovered. So excited!! Turns out there are over 185 kilometers of massive tunnels underneath Maastricht where people have been quarrying limestone since the 1500's. It's an enormous labyrinth that stretches all the way to Belgium underground. People came from hundreds of miles around to get limestone to build cathedrals. The tunnels are enormous--walking through, you get a sense of the vast, soaring space of hundreds of cathedrals, stretching on and on into the darkness.

Since the middle ages, people have been putting artwork into the limestone, usually with charcoal. In World War II, the tunnels were used as an air raid shelter and hiding place for Jews and downed pilots.











So we were planning to go home Saturday night, but on a whim we decided to go across the border to Germany and spend the night in Aachen. Aachen is a fairly small town whose claim to fame is that it was the capital of Charlemagne's empire in the 700's. You can still see the cathedral dome he built, complete with 32 (or so) pillars scrounged from ancient Roman sites that are a thousand years or so older than Charlemagne's original buliding. The dome and the surrounding cathedral (built in the 1200's) were quite picturesque. So was the town hall, built around 1000 AD after Charlemagne's palace had been allowed to collapse into ruin. Could you imagine living in Aachen a hundred years or so after Charlemagne's reign, with the big collapsing corpse of his palace just moldering in the center of town? Weird.

Incidentally, the whole time it was bitterly cold. Like 50 degrees F. Which explains why I'm wearing pretty much every piece of clothing I brought with me (all mismatched) in this pic (did I mention it's July here, too?):





Reputedly Charlemagne's actual throne, dating from the 700's:







There are very ornate golden reliquaries in Charlemagne's cathedral containing (ostensibly) his bones and the loin cloth and swaddling clothes of Christ, as well as the Virgin Mary's cloak. Hundreds of thousands of people have been coming to this place for over a thousand years to make a pilgrimage to see the cloth. Naturally, I was the one with the temerity to ask whether they'd ever been carbon dated to see if they really came from the time of Christ. Answer: nope.



So, that's pretty much it. This week is all catching up on work (maybe a trip to Delft, maybe some salsa dancing) and then I'm off to Bretagne for 10 days!