In France to emphasise a point, they say “vachement” which directly translates to “cow-ly”, as in “like a cow”. This is one I’ll be bringing back to Wisconsin, where I have good reason to think it will be well received. Over the past week, Bennett has been, vachement, a great teacher for this kind of slang, and I’m starting to pick it up in conversation. He accompanies me for most interactions as a kind of language baby-sitter, making sure I don’t embarrass myself too much. That being said, one conversation in Paris left us both mystified.

On our second night in the city, the smell of hot cheese lured us into a small bistro right on the Seine. Given the choice between a table right next to an older woman, and one next to a chatty middle-aged man with glasses, we sat next to the older woman. Funny how the smallest choices can change the course of history. In this case, l’histoire d’un dîner. Things started off innocently enough. The woman’s gratin came, and she made a friendly show of how hot and delicious it was, pretending to warm her hands by rubbing them over the bubbling cheese.

Only once my gratin arrived did she lean over to our table to initiate earnest conversation. My French is not up to busy-restaurant conversation standards, so I let Bennett respond to most of her anecdotes, as I tried to catch a word here and there. At last, I grasped a thread of the one-sided conversation. The word “pomme de terre:” one I remembered due to its literal translation as “apple of the earth”. She was talking about potatoes, miming holding one to her wrist, and then the French word for wound…surely she couldn’t be talking about healing a wound with a potato? My friendly smiles and responses began to flicker, but she only leaned in closer, her eyes cloaked in heavy eyeliner widening beneath a curtain of gray bangs. After swallowing the last bite of my gratin (which sadly had not taken up my full attention as it should have) I pulled my mask back over my mouth.

“What a shame about the masks,” She told us, a sentence I could comprehend, for better or worse.

Bennett politely disagreed with her.

“There’s no point, it’s on hands, surfaces, everywhere,” She insisted, and we could only smile and nod while she earnestly gesticulated at us.

I began to worry how many particles of COVID this woman had just spewed on me over the course of dinner, but luckily (and perhaps unsurprisingly) she had already contracted it.

“I vanquished the disease in two days”, she said.

Impressive, surely, but hardly from a woman who told us in a low and sincere voice that she couldn’t wear watches because she absorbed their energy and caused them to stop. Not to mention the time she healed a man’s bruise just by passing her hand over it. It’s possible that she really was a sorceress! I don’t claim to have any authority judging supernatural powers, but it’s also possible that she was totally off her rocker, and had found the one restaurant in Paris where they wouldn’t check to see if she had a vaccine pass.

The rest of Paris flew by without major incident, even as money flew out of our pockets. We met up with Julia at a coffee shop close to her host family’s apartment.

“7.50? For an Earl Grey tea? You’re kidding,” Julia told the waiter, and with good reason.

I would have been upset with the cost on the whole, but every meal besides Julia’s tea knocked it out of the park. Having resolved to blow my savings before inflation does the job against my will, I figured I might as well eat up.

Sacre Coeur

Interior of Sacre Coeur, Paris

We caught our train to Nantes without a hitch, and I fell in love. With the train, that is. Blisteringly fast, smooth ride, clean and modern interior. The kind of machine that makes you whistle involuntarily when it glides into the station. I struggle to sleep in cars and planes, but I slumped within 20 minutes of departure. Maybe it was the jetlag, maybe the gentle rocking of the train car, or maybe the relief of a reliable and affordable public transit system completely overwhelmed and shut down my system.

Nantes, sadly, was a bit of a ghost town, a surprise given it’s large size. We hoofed it to the center of town for the gem of Nantes: a huge castle. I dearly wanted to don a scratchy tunic and jump back in time to stroll the monstrous ramparts as they should be strolled, halberd in hand. Words don’t do justice to the primeval sense of fortification that a castle provides the soul. Dying of dysentery at age 27 doesn’t seem too bad when those years are spent inside a castle with an actual moat.

View From the Ramparts

View from the Ramparts of the Nantes Chateaux

Keen to preserve that medieval feeling, Bennett and I also visited the coastal city of St Malo this week. There wasn’t a castle, but the entire city center was surrounded by 30 foot stone walls that dropped right down to the craggy surf, so the fortification effect remained strong. Not to mention the massive German WWII bunkers that dotted the coast, which were shelled into absolute oblivion by Americans during the war (nice).

A Blasted Bunker

A Pillbox that was Shredded by American Artillery

Most of our time in France has been spent in the city of Rennes, where Bennett is based for the year. Lots of young people here, and a certain “joie de vivre” in the streets, most of which are lined with historic buildings. Some of the ancient timber framed buildings have seen better centuries, and the Rennes government has an unnerving custom of postering massive pictures of ermine in the windows of buildings under renovation. Not ermine out frolicking in the hills either, but looming out of the darkness, staring straight ahead. Combined with the inevitable graffiti, at least one building on every block looks like something out of a twisted woodland fairytale nightmare dream.

A Scene From the Next Jordan Peele Film

Horrifying Ermines of Rennes

Luckily my sleep hasn’t been affected yet by the haunted ermines, and I’m actually sleeping better here than I did at home, now that the journey is under way. I spent a good couple of weeks pre-departure trying to plan my way into the perfect trip. I felt far from ready to break out into the world, especially after effectively cocooning myself into a sphere of COVID anxiety last year. It’s now been almost two years since I’ve felt 100% like myself for more than a few weeks at a time. My self confidence has taken a hit, and I think on a deeper level my choice to go to Madagascar was a last ditch effort to get myself back on track.

I can’t imagine an experience that involves more unknowns and less opportunity for successful planning. The coming months bring an opportunity for me to blunder and embarrass myself, and emerge more resilient. Even bopping around France has been a confidence builder as I have navigated French conversations, caught (and missed) god knows how many buses and trains, and adopted the French swagger that Bennett has taken up so well.

In 24 hours I will be on my way to the Southern Hemisphere! Expect lemur pics soon. Feel free to add comments below (or let me know if the comments aren’t working) and reach out if this blog format is working for you…or if you have suggestions for improvements! I’m new to blogging, so vachement, thanks for joining me for this new chapter.