From: Rainer Subject: Rainer's Europe Tour 1998 -- part 2 Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 16:47:36 EDT Hello Family and Friends, Sorry to take so long to send the subsequent installment. There will be a flurry of email tonight to bring you all up-to-date. Things are going well overall. The humor that you may (or may not detect) covers up some of the stuff that is not going as well as expected. We are all still getting along together but you can tell that cabin fever may have set in this week. Feel free to send email back. One of things I really do miss is contact with the people that I care about and that I''ve had, in some cases, regular contact with. So, say I if you want to. Cheers, Rainer If you remember I ended last time at Thursday night in Paris. We were going to leave the next day. This is where we resume..... Friday, 9/25/98 Thursday really blended into Friday because Monika and I didn't turn in until around 00:45. I just couldn't get to sleep, so much was running through my head. And, the Esmeralda mosquito was buzzing around my ear whenever my thoughts had reached a lull. Vera stirred around 0200. She'd been sleeping about 4 hours and was now wide awake. So we turned on the light and we both spent over an hour writing. I still didn't fall asleep after that. Maybe an hour or so. I got up at 0700 and started fiddling with the pictures on the laptop. Originally the plan was to pick up the rental car at 0800 and leave Paris. We postponed that until noon. We had a nice petit dejuner at the Cafe Notre Dame. Vera went to finish packing and Monika and I hiked to the Internet store once more. We got there and sent our respective emails and returned to the hotel for a last go around to see what we had forgotten. Somehow the stuff grew. I don't see how the extra camera and hair dryer can account for the all of the extra space. It was very warm today, and lugging all of the stuff to the rental car, which is barely large enought to hold the three of us and the baggage, got one to work up a good sweat. The Hertz lady had trouble explaining how we should best leave Paris to La Bouille. She just said it would be very difficult. With Vera as navigator and me as driver we did pretty well. Paris traffic in a small car is actually easy to drive in. There's just a lot of Paris to drive through. When we thought that we should be in the French countryside, it still seemed like we were in Paris. The side roads we had marked out for our trip were clogged with traffic, and it wasn't until after 16:30 that we reached Monet's house. We weren't going to stay there -- we just wanted to see it along the way. We're on the way to see Monet. Can you hear the tune? No one else thought it was funny either, even though it is an old piano roll song. Getting to Monet's house was quite an accomplishment. A couple of guys and a lady gave us separate directions after we'd made a wrong turn. Anyway, we've explained a lot about the miscommunication tonight when I realized (from the 10F dictionary I bought from Walt Whitman's brother) that "straight" is "droit" and "right" is "droite". Not only do they look the same, they sound pretty similar -- especially when you're French is lousy. The house was large. The flower gardens were much nicer. You weren't allowed to take pictures inside the house. Don't know why you would -- perhaps to get a photograph of a Monet reproduction. We saw the European Robin in le jardin, also lots of magpies. On the way to the Monet place Monika saw her first Mute Swans in the river. The rest of the drive we took off the country roads and on the freeway. We got to La Bouille around 18:00. Clouds had started to form, and it was quite humid. Hotel le St. Pierre has 7 rooms, is about 20 feet from La Seine, and is too dressy of a place for use to eat (also too expensive). La Bouille is very small and very picturesque. Black Headed Gulls flitted about the banks. We're probably going to be taking a lot of pictures tomorrow before we leave for Mont St. Michel. Dinner was at the Art Dat Cafe and Crepery. Sounds funny, but was fun. There was quite a lot of activity for such a small town. Some of the tables were even reserved. One of the two women working there had to clear one of the desert tables off and reset it with table cloth (everywhere we go in France the table settings have a table cloth -- even if it's a paper one) and stuff. Interestingly enough, the creperies don't seem to be open for breakfast as you might expect. Crepes are considered more of a dinner fare. Monika had an apple one (calava?), Vera a ham and egg one, and me a hot dog and mustard (but of course it was grey poupon) one. The Art Dat was also advertised as a pub, a tea house, and a sandwich shop. You've got to know that La Bouille is not a very big town. It's more of a village. If you look up "bouille" in the dictionary you won't find it. It's a derivative of "bouillie" (remember the "right" and "straight" anecdote?) which means "baby food" or "mush". It turns out that a long time ago before this place had a name and before they had asphalt or gravel roads, all the paths to go were very muddy (La Buouille is about 2 meters above the flood plain of La Seine). So, they named the place, "La Bouille", which should have been "La Bouillie", meaning place of the mushy streets. It is a very interesting but mostly picturesque place. The ferry boat is the main attraction. It is even represented on most of the post cards that are sold in La Bouille. There's also a church, a school, a post office, a bunch of small shops (for the locals), a couple of hotels, and more restaurants than you would expect. There are very nice homes along the only main road through town -- some are even for sale (a vendre). Monika saw several new European birds here -- the black headed gull, the robin (actuall in Monet's garden), the shag, and the pied wagtail (also new for me). The staff at the hotel were extremely pleasant. When we arrived, a garcon showed us to our room. When we carried in our stuff "le guy du head" asked us if we were going to have dinner at the hotel. We told him we didn't know yet. The nice thing about restaurants in France is that they post their menus on the outside of the building. This gives you a chance to see what they have to offer and what the "plat du jour"s are. It also gives you a chance to see the prices they charge, do the conversion from francs to dollars, and walk away without feeling embarassed. We told "le guy du head" no thank you. He understood and recommended the Art Dat Cafe, which was cool, as I said. When we wanted to have a bottle of wine, he right away pointed to the cheapest one on the wine list. It was quite good, too. Much better than the French beer. When we discovered that the French modular phone connections were unlike anything else (recall that this is the first time we've seen phones that plug into the wall -- all the rest so far have been hard-wired) and that they laptop wouldn't connect and when we asked about an adapter to hook the telephone to the computer, le guy du head thought a moment, went upstairs with me to another guy poring over receipts and using and adding machine. Le guy d'accountant looked at the telephone cable that I brought along and thought for a while. He said that "this is not French", which I knew. He thought a while longer and took all of us guys downstairs to the front desk and pointed at a cordless phone and said, "This is not French either." He then proc to unplug the cordless phone base station from the wall (that's the end that matched the wall outlet in our room) and the other end of the cord from the base station (that's the part that matched the modem plug). He told me that we could use it for the evening. What a nice guy! Unfortunately, the setup didn't work. But this place gets way high marks for effort and attentiveness without being so "french", if you know what I mean. If you don't know what I mean, read up on stereotypes.