Hiding from a rainstorm in a nettle
Recently, I went to France again, to Brittany. It’s been a year since my grandmother’s funeral but as it was the first time I’d been back since her death it was strange. I was forced to admit that Bubry has become a place of memories for me, mostly older ones from my childhood. I didn’t want to feel separate from it, but without my grandmother I did.
In the past year, I’ve tried to make the French language more a part of my life. I started blogging and vlogging in French and I even translated my portfolio site. I didn’t want to lose my grandmother’s language even though I’d lost her.
My plan worked, but not in the way I expected. It seems that the more I try to embrace my French origins, the more I notice about French culture that I don’t understand. It’s become something of an obsessive fascination for me. I wonder if it would work itself out if I moved to France or if I would always feel like I was missing the subtleties.
For one thing, I’m certain I will never understand the word vachement. Directly translated it means “cowly.” That’s right: it’s the word “cow” turned into an adverb. It’s used in the place of the superlative form for “really,” so a phrase like “the weather is really nice” turns into “the weather is cowly nice.” Anyone with leads as to how this happened, please contact me.
That said, one of the things that I have little trouble understanding in France is food, and, while in Bubry, I was spoiled.
We went to the Crêperie De La Forge, where our neighbor just opened up a dining room in addition to the take-away crêpes business that she started last year. Here, my mother is doing what only real Bretons do: she is drinking a bowl of buttermilk.
Isabelle’s crêpes are magnifiques...
...as this detail image of yumminess attempts to capture.
Other neighbors do crêpes and galettes de pomme de terre homestyle, in their basement. The last time we ate at Jean-Yves’ and Miriam’s a few years ago, we tried our hand at it with varying degrees of success. This time, we left it to the expert. Jean-Yves is in the background slaving away over the hot skillet while the rest of us, including Flo, enjoy our meal.
Despite appearances, this visit to France wasn’t all about food. This bunny, for example, is not for eating. She belongs to friend and she’s a NAC or a nouvel animal de compagnie, as the acronym-friendly French like to call her.
Not a NAC, this snail was not for eating either, despite the fact that the French are famous for that sort of thing. I actually found it rather comforting to discover a snail on my store-bought lettuce. Nothing says produit biologique like an escargot.
This is not for eating either—at least in my opinion it isn’t. Why ruin chocolate with cornflakes?
On our way to the Côte Sauvage this year, we stopped in Erdeven where we happened upon a paradigm-shifting cemetery and, outside of town, some megaliths.
photo by Maman
Megaliths have always fascinated me. The story goes that these fields of upright boulders are an enemy army that a god turned to stone for the Celts, but no one really knows what the alignments are for.
photo by Claire
To some degree, the pyramids and other such ancient wonders are understandable. They may have been really difficult to build, but we’ve managed to unravel the purpose behind them so they seem to make sense.
photo by Maman
The megaliths have still not given up their secrets.
They stand as a monument to humanity’s ability to turn imagination into belief.
photo by Claire
On the beach, we came across an unidentified object. After some debate, we concluded that it was a rusty old bra shelf.
And it had spent quite a lot of time in the ocean…
...making for lovely colors and textures.
Dénes and Claire came to visit us in Brittany since they live not too far away in Paris.
I went to college with Claire, and I liked being able to introduce some of my Oregon home to my beloved BZH.
A dog enjoying the Côte Sauvage.
This was in nearby Quiberon, stenciled onto the sidewalk. It reads “walk way NOT poop way.”
We had dry-ish weather for most of our trip, but at one point a storm did gather.
In Brittany as in Oregon, you can’t let rain get in the way of plans.
We went for a very wet walk…
...enjoying the surprises of a spring shower while also getting completely soaked.
As wet as I got, I’m still not sure I would hide from the storm in a nettle.
Much like the detail image of the crêpe, this photo doesn’t do justice to the sensory experience I’m trying to share. The Breton countryside is famously smelly around this time of year.
We visited my grandmother’s younger sister outside of Rennes where she now lives in a retirement home.
My Mamy and my Tata always had a rivalry of sorts, but they were still sisters, and seeing my great aunt connected me again to my grandmother.
Since we were in the neighborhood (sort of), we went to the magical Mont Saint Michel on the north coast of Brittany.
photo by Papa in 1975
It has special memories for my mother who visited it with my father in 1975, and we’ve come again and again as a family over the years. It’s my favorite historical place in the region besides this one which is more intimate and less well known but just as lovely.
The Mont Saint Michel is a town and an abbey on an island in the middle of a bay.
The police station.
Seriously.
One of the natives of the island.
I’m guessing the ladybug isn’t getting the best part of this relationship.
Entering the abbey.
Decorative lichen.
The church.
photo by Maman
Best chair.
photo by Maman
Note my sunburnt face: only an Oregonian could go to Brittany and get a tan!
The view from the garden.
photo by Maman
Standing in a fireplace.
Neon moss.
photo by Maman
A photo with David—well, as close as I could get to it!
Despite the fact that in most of the photos from the visit it’s just us, the Mont is impossibly popular. Even in early spring it was packed.
One of the best parts of visiting the Mont is being able to walk around the island at low tide. The muddy sand of the bay bakes and sizzles in the sun in between the tides.
On this particular trip to France, we didn’t stay exclusively in Brittany and Paris…
photo by Maman
...we also visited cousins in Burgundy.
René is my grandfather’s nephew, and, though their faces don’t actually look much alike, René still resembles his uncle so much that it’s unnerving at times. I think it has to do with the way he carries himself—that is, after all, the thing I focus on when capturing a likeness.
René’s wife is lovely too. When Michèle found out I am a vegetarian, she was more than a little concerned. On the way home from the train station she quizzed me about what I eat. Butter? Yes. Eggs? Yes. Ham? Um…what?
I was a little worried about having to offend her come lunchtime by refusing to eat what she’d made me, but I was pleasantly surprised. Michèle’s ratatouille is amazing. It’s divine. It may even be better than my mom’s. (I know, I know, it’s just wrong to say that, but it might be a little bit true.)
In Burgundy, they apparently have regular versions of my favorite flower…
...and freaky mutant ones too!
photo by Maman
And speaking of the unusual, I’m fully aware that by eating snail as I am doing in this photo I became a very unusual kind of vegetarian, but there is a logic to my choice.
I eat the way I do primarily for health reasons and I do still sometimes miss meat. In fact, if I don’t eat meat when I feel like it, it’s because I know that it’s a slippery slope for me—it starts with a bite of my mom’s famous roast chicken and suddenly I’m downing multiple hotdogs at the next barbecue.
When Michèle proposed escargot for a dinner course, I decided I would indulge for two reasons: 1) even if I wanted to eat more snail I wouldn’t have a lot of opportunities to do so, meaning that a gastropod or two couldn’t actually make me fall off the wagon, and 2) I’m supposed to be half French and I’d never eaten snail before. I’m surprised I even qualified for citizenship until now.
My very favorite color, brought to you by the Burgundy countryside.
Prettiest.
Still, the trip wasn’t all about life à la campagne.
We spent a week in the capital, going to museums and seeing sights, but also just hanging out in the various parks of the city.
We watched chess games at the Luxembourg Gardens…
photo by Maman
...and posed with sculptures. I guess I asked for this one!
Giuseppe Penone’s L’Arbre des voyelles 1999
When we came across this metal representation of a fallen tree in the Tuileries, I had to laugh. It brought me back to the Art Institute of Chicago last summer.
And this brings me back to somewhere else entirely. I’m not a fan of the show by any means, but what little I’ve seen of it seems like it would be hard to translate. Then again, twice during my trip I was asked if Americans really eat whole tubs of ice cream while watching television. TWICE. Who needs an embassy when our popular culture is so widely consumed?
I adore this place. It’s the Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterrand, and it has a vast deck of wood anchored by four towering buildings of glass. The deck in itself is a rarity in a country that tends more towards stone terraces, but it’s special too because it’s so big. I mean COWLY big. Also, there’s a heart of wilderness in the center of this below-surface library: the greenery in the middle of the photo is the tops of trees.
For all my love for the Bibliothèque, I never did much serious research there when I was studying in Paris in 2002. Claire, my friend who lives and works in the city, has a different take on this place precisely because she actually has to use it. It may be beautiful but apparently it’s not exactly set up for function.
photo by Maman
The Sacré Cœur is just as impressive as the Bibliothèque, but on this visit I could barely focus on its beauty. Before I was allowed into the church, a man guarding the door required me to put on a long-sleeved shirt in order to comply with the some rather non-specific rules about decent dress. To be clear, he required me to do so as well as other women but allowed men to enter bare-armed without comment.
When I questioned the decency police about his sexism, he explained that men are not permitted to wear hats in churches but women are, as if that was supposed to make up for his discrimination. The problem with this argument is that for much of history (and still today depending on how you interpret doctrine) women were required to cover their heads before entering a Catholic holy place—meaning that not only were their bare arms offensive to a god who supposedly created those arms, but the tops of their heads were too. A lesson in logic for the doorman: reminding me of the past sexism of a church doesn’t make me want forgive its current transgressions.
I’m not sure who gave this man the little bit of power that turned him into a cretin, but I am comforted by the fact that his job just got harder in France. As Claire pointed out to me, with the nation’s new law against face-covering Muslim veils, the doorman must now ensure that visitors are covered enough without being too covered.
Maybe it would do us all a bit of good to remember that decency is more than skin-deep.
When I wasn’t picking on uneducated clerical-types who make their own churches look bad, Paris was pleasant. We visited with still more cousins, including the so chic and so fun Anna…
...and the lovely and talented Laure.
photo by Laure
Laure took this photo of me, and I really like the look of me in her portrait.
Altogether, this séjour was full of sweet moments with family and friends as well as thoughtful contradictions and ruminations on the nature of belief and identity. In other words, it was a mighty fine vacation.
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(3) Comments / Commentaires: Hiding from a rainstorm in a nettle
Thanks for sharing your trip with us, as it was so nice to see France through your eyes!
I love the nuances in languages and cultures (it’s why I studied languages at uni and why I’ll always be a linguist at heart, even if not in practise!) I spend hours thinking about how and why certain terms and phrases came into being and how there can be so many similarities and yet so many differences between them (like how I can guess what a basic text in Italian means based on my basic knowledge of French and I can guess what a Swedish piece of text means based on my knowledge of German, and yet I still cannot speak German like a native!) Seriously, I lay awake at night thinking about these things!!
It looks and sounds like you had the most magnificent time over there xx
Thank you, Ed and Amanda!
Also, I have some news on the vachement front. It comes originally from the negative form of the word “cow.” As in English, calling a woman a cow in French is rude, but in French the implication isn’t that she’s stupid but that she’s mean.
From there, “cow” was turned into an adverb that means “meanly.” For example, “I was cowly punished” means that the person was punished in an especially mean way. Eventually, vachement came to be used as the superlative form of “really” in much the same way as describing something as “wicked” or “ill” can mean that thing is amazing.
I may be able to explain the etymology, but it still leaves me cowly confused…!
Ed Hayes...
Bon! What a great log of your travels and adventure, thanks for sharing it. Lovely photo’s.
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Ed