Roxanne à la campagne

Isabelle and Steve run a full house: three sons, one hamster, two dogs, three cats, walls lined with shelves lined with picture books and Beatles anthologies, cabinets brimming with colorful antiques, and best of all, a tire-sized fruit bowl that never empties of nature's sweetest gift to womankind: oranges and clementines.

Isabelle and Steve are English (Isabelle is an English teacher at the high school). Chez eux (literally, "at their house," but - I love this - chez can also refer to personality or preferences, as in, "according to them"), tea means black tea with milk, cheddar cheese comes from Cheddar (not Vermont, as the Sharps had me believing), and David Bowie is no joking matter. Oops.

They live happily à la campagne - out in the country - a good forty minutes from Roanne. Fifteen minutes out and we're passing fields of happy cows and clucking chickens in front yards. Thirty minutes and the roads are dirt or gravel. By the time we reach their narrow lane, farm houses dot the rolling hills on all sides. Well-trimmed hedges form even squares that, viewed from a distance, transform the landscape into an oil painting. A quiet calm, accentuated by a soft soundtrack of lazy mooooooos, blankets the land.

Inisde next to the woodstove, it's cozy and ... less quiet. Joshua, age seven, circles like a whirling dervish - can I eat this? do that? go there? Let's play a card game, or read a book, or make Play-Doh spaghetti! And it's all in Little Boy British English, which triples the cuteness factor.

The house is a delightful mélange of French and English cultures. The language spoken at home is English, but at 8 o'clock it's off to school where the boys turn into little French school children, and off to work where Isabelle converses with her French colleagues. Steve, a stay-at-home dad, says bonjour to his French neighbors. When French company comes for dinner, French is spoken and no one blinks an eye. But when company leaves, the BBC or "Antiques Roadshow UK" resumes, and the wine is replaced by tea.

Bilingual children are a beautiful thing; bicultural children are the raspberry on the tart. I was hugely pleased (ah, British English) to walk into Josh's room one morning to find him reading Franklin - a picture book about a turtle named Benjamin - in French, while listening to The Police on his Fischer-Price cassette player! I reckon the beauty of this trio was lost on him, but I was happy watching him and he was happy with his book and his music. Win-win-win (one for Roxanne).

I mentioned a woodstove and citrus fruit - this combination may be my favorite part of weekends à la campagne: standing next to the stove, peeling orange after clementine after orange, putting the peels on the woodstove, and smelling the citrus fill the room. Yuh-MEE! in the words of Isabelle.

Whenever I spend a weekend chez Isabelle, we visit neighboring villages and I discover little regional treasures. This time we went to the tiny town of La Clayette, home of Les Chocolats de Bernard Dufoux - one of the top chocolatiers in France. And now prepare yourselves.

You've got your chocolate bars, your chocolate truffles, chocolate ganache, chocolate-covered marzipan, your pistachio, almond, and hazelnut chocolates, caramel chocolates, chocolates with ginger, jasmine, cardamom, lavender, thyme, rosemary, or red pepper, chocolate bars filled with rhum ... and that's about it (Bubba Gump style).

My favorites were the Barre anti-stress (praline, hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, raisins, orange peel) and the Buchette aphrodisiaque (marzipan, pistachio, praline, ginger). Who needs meds or cupid when you've got chocolate, eh?

You were probably wondering what's so great about expensive chocolate stores. Unlimited, guilt-free samples is what. I bought twenty-two euros worth of chocolate, and ate about five euros worth in the store. So it's like I paid seventeen euros. Cha-ching.

After an English weekend in the French countryside, here's what I can tell you: while some things are hugely English and others are très français, chocolate, my friends, is universal.

Mona Lisa Thattaway

Last weekend, two country gals took a trip to the big city.

Bonjooouur, Pah-reeee! Hellooooo, Paris.

My former Greenfire housemate and fellow Birkenstock-wearing friend Christina was visiting France during a vacation from teaching English in Giresun, Turkey. And so it was that we spent a lovely weekend in the City of Love and Public Displays of Affection.

We walked, we sight-saw, we feasted our earbuds on gypsy jazz and jazz standards, and we found Christina her Holy Grail: a steaming bowl of authentic French Onion Soup, complete with a rude French waiter who chastised us for ordering only soup and wine. Thanks for the soup, buddy.

We deftly navigated the Paris Metro, taking the 1 to the 9 to the 4… and I found myself humming Jay-Z’s “H to the Izzo” in between Edith Piaf melodies. [Editor’s Note: “H to the Izzo,” released in 2001, was hip hop artist Jay-Z's first Top Ten Billboard single. The song's lyrics use izzle language (H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A) to spell out H.O.V.A., which refers to one of Jay-Z's nicknames, Jayhova, and his self-proclaimed status as the god of MC.]

That’s neither here nor there, but surely more there than here.

We spent a sunny Friday afternoon atop Montmartre, the picturesque hill that affords a panoramic view of Paris, nibbling on chocolate-pear and rhubarb macarons (egg white and almond powder pastries that look like brightly-colored mini hamburgers and fit neatly into your palm).

Saturday was a typical Parisian day, cloudy and gray, so we followed the famous Rue du Rivoli to I.M. Pei’s glass pyramids, marking the magnificent Musée du Louvre. In front of the larger pyramid, a girl in furry boots approached me with her camera, pointing to herself saying, “Photo? Moi?” with a thick Texas accent. “Sure,” I replied, “And I speak English.” She laughed. “Oh, great! Would you take a picture of us in front of this pyramid thing?”

The Louvre is one heckuva museum. Its enormity is unfathomable for someone like me with the estimation skills of a mosquito. You can walk for hours at a pace conducive to a couple comments per painting and only see a tiny fraction of the collection. Christina and I wandered through rooms filled with ancient bowls and masks looking for the reputed Turkish room, and got sidetracked by ancient perfume bottles and statues of naked gods. You’d think they were trying to out-naked each other, those Greeks.

We wandered right into the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an armless, headless statue of the winged Greek goddess Nike (Victory). Her magnificent wings recall a certain trademarked swoosh, and her right hand, found in 1950, is displayed in a glass case off to the side. The palm faces up and only the middle finger remains, the rest broken off and lost. The wrist is also bent upwards.

A little girl with her hands pressed against the display case was motioning to her mother.

Maman, regarde, Speeder mahn! Look ma, Spider Man!

Bah dis donc. What do you know, Nike’s finger and wrist were perfectly positioned for first-class web-shooting à la Speeder Mahn. Time and time again, American culture makes a dramatic entrance into deep-rooted French institutions.

Scattered throughout this particular wing of the Louvre are laminated signs depicting Her Majesty Mona Lisa, with arrows pointing you toward what is arguably the most recognizable face in art history. The signs seemed as normal as those pointing you toward the W.C., and I’d bet my Louvre ticket that more people visit Mona than les toilettes.

So we followed the signs to Mona’s wall (she gets her own wall) and took pictures of the hoards of people taking pictures. Christina noticed a painting of a seated man with his arm halfway down the front of a seated lady’s dress, hanging on a side wall. She looks less than thrilled, and he is suspiciously expressionless. We joked that they know no one is looking at their wall, anyway.

Zooming past the Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, and Notre Dame… Paris is an ideal city for doing the Tourist Thing. Big and exciting, it’s rich with history, culture, music, and endless winding, walkable streets to discover and consecrate.  

We country gals are getting different but equal experiences. Living in smaller cities, we’ve both repeatedly experienced the kindness of strangers-turned-friends – people who’ve opened their homes and introduced us to regional specialties, and quirks of language and culture that we wouldn’t discover on our own.

And I always know where to find Mona. After all, I saw the signs.

Mooncakes à la Mode

A funny thing happened on the way to my favorite salon de thé.

It actually happened inside the tea parlor, but catchy openers trump truth in my book.

I had just poured a steaming cup of honey-chestnut-flavored oolong tea (a mystical-sounding variety called Shadow of the Wind) into a small, handle-less tea cup, and was daintily lifting it to my lips, when the server approached our table carrying a small tray. On the tray were two little plastic packages.

Eh ben, qu’est ce que c’est? Oh my, what’s this? I asked the server.

Yeah! Free treats! is what I was thinking.

She pointed to the plastic packages. These are gâteaux (can mean cake or cookies) for the Chinese New Year, she told us. I noticed the shiny red and gold wrappers covered in Chinese lettering. C’est pour ça. Ok, that explains that.

The explanation continued.

Each gâteau has some paper inside, she said, and you must be VERY careful not to eat this paper. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to open the plastic wrapper, carefully extract the paper from the gâteau, and then eat the gâteau. Repeat: the paper is NOT edible.

Maybe it was because she was speaking quickly, or because I was distracted by the red-orange-tinted lights, or because I couldn’t conceive of a pastry that required such a thorough explanation, but her words didn’t resonate with any gâteau experience in my memory. I shrugged and accepted the plastic package that apparently contained a potentially toxic paper-filled cake, straight from China.

I inspected the specimen before me. The wrapper said biscuit de porte-bonheur, which at the time I thought meant “cookie that brings happiness.” How cute. (I later learned that a porte-bonheur is a lucky charm.) On the back, the ingredients were listed in French and English: wheat flour, egg white, sugar, water, colza (rapeseed) oil, palm oil, butter, flavoring (what does it mean?), and no preservatives. Nothing struck me as out of the ordinary.

I think I was expecting to find either a gelatinous blob or a copiously gooey pastry – something requiring nimble fingers, an alert mind, and great patience, to extract the paper inside. I braced myself for the ticking cookie-bomb.

Ladies and gentlemen, I opened the wrapper and found … a fortune cookie.

Nothing more, nothing less – exactly what you’d find in the sack with your Chinese take-out, or on a silver platter with the check at a Chinese restaurant.

I threw my head back and let out a resounding HA!

Arianna, the Italian, was looking quizically back and forth between me and the cookie. Haven’t you had one of these before? I asked her. No, she replied. I explained that in the U.S., fortune cookies are a dime a dozen and don’t come with instructions. The paper fortune is an indispensible yet unmistakably inedible part of the fortune cookie experience.

She smiled but didn’t seem half as amused as I was.

I broke the cookie in two and extracted my paper fortune. Tell me my destiny, le cookie!

En humour, mieux vaut jamais que trop tard. In humor, better never than late.

It’s better not to tell a joke at all than to deliver a badly-timed punch line? Disappointing. This was no fortune, nor did it bring me happiness. But then do they ever?

Back at the ranch, I did some quick research into the fortune cookie’s origins. Its exact provenance is not known, but modern-day fortune cookies started appearing in California in the early 1900’s. As for the inspiration, there are a number of charming legends (I love legends) such as how, in the fourteenth century, the Chinese threw off their Mongol oppressors by hiding messages in rice mooncakes, which the Mongols did not like. And how during the American railway boom of the 1850’s, Chinese railway workers came up with a substitute for the mooncakes they couldn’t buy in the US: homemade biscuits with good luck messages inside.

But long story short, there is ample evidence that it was actually Japanese immigrants in California who invented today’s crescent-shaped fortune cookies, Chinese immigrants who marketed them in their restaurants, and Americans (in its broadest definition) who tasted them, loved them, and would be utterly lost without them.

Our humble crescent cookie got me thinking about identity (it’s all I ever do these days). First, I associate fortune cookies with Chinese food, but they’re actually a Japanese-American creation. Second, I was surprised to learn that the French give dissertation-length explanations (sorry, the cookies make me exaggerate) prior to fortune cookie consumption. Third, conversations with my friends and resident French Culture and Identity Experts (FCIE) – Myriam, Vincent, Anais, and Benjamin – have alerted me to the fact that American multi-culturalism is something I take for granted. Immigrants have trouble integrating – melting, if you will – into French society because France is an old man compared to the infant United States; French identity is less flexible, less fluid, less flou (blurry, fuzzy). In the U.S., a fortune cookie is an essential Chinese-Japanese-American treat. In France, it comes stamped with an OTHER label.

I’m not saying we’re all holding hands and singing Kumbaya in the Promised Land, U.S.A. Amy Chua had Americans up in arms over her depiction of Chinese child rearing traditions and her rejection of what she sees as American parents’ unnecessary coddling and self-esteem boosting. To me, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and its rocky reception suggest cultural tension and US and THEM labeling on both sides. And terrorist racial profiling - ! And it's not as though we're welcoming our southern neighbors with open arms. But on the whole, it's easier to melt into the American pot.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, as the saying goes. (Or the French equivalent: Ce n’est pas à un vieux singe qu’on apprend à faire des grimaces. You don't teach an old mokney to frown...because he already knows how). Just as I'd like to think you can teach an old dog new tricks, I’d like to say that France is sloooowly turning that frown upside down concerning immigrant integration. But my wise French friends seem to think otherwise.

Maybe a fortune cookie is what the old monkey needs! Just make sure he doesn’t eat the paper.