Extremely far behind .....

This is way, way old -- have had problems with internet connections, etc. But here it is anyway.....

Sorry for the long delay in updating all of you. I've sent out a number of individual e-mails to people, but am far, far behind in the blog. Also am having trouble accessing the blog, as it has been taken over by google and I have to do a google account and who knows what else before I can post this.

I've moved to new quarters. My landlords at the village house have returned to it for a couple of weeks vacation. I knew I would need to find something else, but they came back later than originally planned, so I had the opportunity to remain there for two additional weeks into July. Meanwhile I found this place, a newly created little vacation rental house (called a "gite" in France) which used to be an outbuilding of some sort and which I've rented through next April. It has one small loft bedroom, with downstairs living/kitchen/dining area. Its very tastefully done, very comfortable, and very easy to maintain. Tile floors, tile walls in the bath, etc. Its fully furnished, including washer and dishwasher, and *air con* -- I feel so special! I have a small terrace, for which I need to get some furniture. And parking right in front! I was formerly parking above my house at the church, about a block straight uphill from the house, which was not terribly convenient. My new home is at the edge of the village, so out one window I have a view of the hills behind the village, and the other window looks onto the neighbor's large garden with olive trees. Amusingly, right outside my bedroom window is the top of a Canary Island Date palm! Looking at the plants, I might as well be in San Diego. The native landscape is called Garrigue, and is very like the chaparral -- and the plants they grow here are a couple of kinds of palms, oleander, plumbago, ceanothus, geraniums, agaves and other succulents, redbud, crape myrtle ... you get the idea. My landlord is a bit older than I am, was born in the village and is a retired vigneron (wine grape grower) -- of course, everyone is either a vigneron or a retired vigneron. He's extremely nice, has a very good reputation in the village, and rides around on a moped sort of thing most days chatting up his buddies. Unfortunately his wife is very ill, sounds like she has alzheimer's and MS, not a good thing at all. My neighbors here are very nice also, the next door ones and those across the street with the olive trees both came and introduced themselves right away.

Pats will be here in the middle of August for 3 months, and on Sept. 2 Jessica and Riate arrive, so I look forward to having my buddies around. We will all be heading up to Burgundy and Paris, by way of some things we want to see. Rita has a good friend in Burgundy/Paris who we will be visiting. When they go back, Pat and I will return to Roquebrun for the vendange. Then some time in October she and I will return to Paris for the rest of her stay, and I will probably remain there until after the holidays.

I've made several friends here, which makes a huge difference in feeling at home. Jan is a Brit, has a house right up the road from me, and lives here half the year. She has 8 cats and 2 dogs, but really she's great. I know the 8 cats are questionable, but she is a fun and kind person and we've done lots of stuff together. Horst and Daria lived across from me in the village and are fabulous. Daria is an animal whisperer and Horst is a vigneron (what did I tell you earlier?) -- she's originally Polish and he German, they have been here about 15 years. Susan is an artist from New York, a former architect, who was on the street there on 9-11. Her husband, who keeps separate quarters here, is a Brit who is retired from academia and plays jazz saxophone (2 kinds). And Ella, another Brit, is a veterinarian who lives about 20 minutes away, a friend of Jan's, and a terrific person -- she and her 3 kids are off to Sri Lanka with some other vets to spay and neuter animals there, and do veterinary care, as a charity thing. They go every year to a country where the animals are in need of care, at the invitation of someone in the country. Jan has a constrant stream of visitors from England so I end up getting to know them as well, so it seems like I have an active social life.

France is just like home, and completely different. For instance, emergency medical care. In most villages, like this one, when there is a fire or a medical emergency, someone notifies the Mairie (the city hall), and someone there sounds a horn, it sounds like a WW2 air raid siren. This calls the pompiers (firemen/firewomen) in to respond -- they may be in the bar, they may be working in their vineyards (remember they are vignerons), they may be in bed with someone else's spouse ..... They then get in their cars of on their tractors and drive into town (there are tractors going through town all day and all night -- most of which are very old tractors of a type no longer used in the US but which are perfect for going between rows of grapes). Then they get the fire engine out -- which is very state of the art -- and respond to the problem. So if you are bleeding heavily try not to, because it will be an hour before anyone shows up -- and if you need an ambulance, worse luck, that could take even longer. Today I encountered a rather serious accident on a one lane road through the vines -- there are a lot of that type of road, and they are used as shortcuts -- a head on collision between two pretty old cars (i.e., no airbags). They were completely blocking the road. When I got to it there were a couple of cars there which had arrived from the two opposite directions, and it looked like a fairly fresh accident. There were four cars and three people, one of the drivers was still trapped in his very damaged car. The people on the scene had obviously called for assistance, as they didn't ask me for help. The car behind me and I were able to back up to a point where we could turn around and go a different route. However, the accident was far from everywhere, and it probably took at least an hour for even the first responders to show up. You could die out there. Easily. I will probably not find out what happened but it was a reminder to pay attention. All of the roads here except the major motorways are either one or two lanes, and the hospitals are few and far between. Glad I have airbags .... And in the same vein, my 92 year old aunt and 2 cousins were here about a month ago -- Brian has multiple medical problems, including a bad heart (a couple of heart attacks and one bypass). I was kind of worried about him while he was here, as the house had multiple stairs, and the village has very steep hills. A couple of weeks after he returned home he went in for heart tests and while they were doing them he had a heart attack and required an emergency bypass right there on the spot. If that had happened here, he would not be alive. So anyone who wants to visit needs a medical certificate or clear instructions on disposition of their remains!! As a final note, I'm sure there are places in the US that are also far from medical care, but I've been living in a very urban area where there are hospitals all over the place.

There are a lot of gardens here which are "allotments" -- they are not attached to the houses, but are at the edge of the village, and if there's a river that's where they are located. I think this is true all over France, and probably Europe, as a result of the settlement patterns from medieval times -- the walled village for protection, and the gardens outside the walls. They are usually about the size of a city lot in the US, 50 x 100, and are planted usually with vegetables, but sometimes with vines or olives. Most of them are still in use, often by very old people. You see elderly men on their bicycles with garden tools heading down to their gardens, or riding on their mopeds to get there, or even coming home with huge wheelbarrows of vegetables . The gardens are very organized and beautiful, today I saw one that the tomatos had been trained up to grow overhead! Many of them have wells, or pump water from the river. In the summer there are also houses on the main streets that turn into little produce shops. They sell whatever surplus they are producing, opening in the morning and closing up around noon when they've run out of things to sell.

This weekend is the "Fete" in Roquebrun. Every village has one. There are live music concerts, big public outdoor dinners, sales of art, crafts, and flea market type things. Everyone stays up very late (quite normal here in the summer) and sleeps in (also very usual). Last night there was some kind of live pop music concert until around midnight. The Fetes are arranged so the nearby villages don't all have them on the same weekend. There are also hordes of tourists here right now. French, Nederlandaise, Allemagne, Anglaise -- not many Americans, haven't seen any Italians at all. This is the time of the year that all of the real money is made by the local businesses. There are many wine sellers (caves) throughout the Languedoc, many of them may have erratic hours throughout the year (you have to knock on the door to buy wine) but this time of the year they are open most of the day, except for the sacred lunchtime closing. There are two main types of wine merchants: The family run operations, where the generations are still on duty and a family member will be waiting on you when you go in to buy wine; and the "cave cooperative" which is just what it sounds like, a winegrowers cooperative. The Cave Co-ops buy grapes from the vignerons, and there is an option to just sell your grapes, or to get back "x" amount of wine based on your grape poundage. Some vignerons sell most of their grapes to the Co-Op, but retain some to make wine for their own use. This year I hope to get an opportunity to pretend I'm a peasant and help Horst with the vendange by picking grapes for few hours. These days I'm buying my wine from a family who has a cave in the village, although their domain is a few kilometers down the road. I'm buying AOC St. Chinian "en vrac" (take your own bottle and they fill it from the big tank with a hose) fo E1.40 a litre. Next time you're in a wine store check out the price of AOC St. Chinian, then start checking on the plane fares.

I really haven't scratched the surface here yet. I've seen a lot of villages, but not had time to actually spend an afternoon in them. I haven't done any hiking or exploring the countryside on foot. Too hot, really, this time of the year. I still haven't been down to the river beach here in Roquebrun, which is very popular. Nor have I spent any time to speak of at the Mediterranean beaches. Many of them are covered with concrete and highrise apartments, but there are some charmiing villages and unspoiled beaches that I hope to visit at a more calm time of the year. I am 3 months into my year in France and feel like I've just begun. At this point, I can't imagine coming back to the U.S. I really thought by now I would be homesick, but as it turns out I do certainly miss my friends, but I don't miss anything else. I feel like I've put my life in storage, and am living some other life. I look around each day and am amazed at the beauty here, and how kind people have been to me, and try to think of some reason why I would want to go "home". Its not that I don't like America or San Diego, I just can't think what's there (other than all of you) that I would rather have then what I have here. I'm very interested to see how that view many change over the next few months.