à la plage

In spite of my busy studying schedule, we decided last minute not to entirely forgo a vacation and spent a weekend in Trouville and Deauville, two sister beach towns on France's northern Côte Fleurie:
I loved Normandy's beach culture. It had this really humble, authentically French feeling. It was much less trashy than Nice became in the height of tourist season, and sophisticated in a less ritzy way than the smaller Côte d'Azur towns. This is Trouville's equivalent of a boardwalk--consisting of playgrounds and pony rides for children, gelatto and cocktails for their parents, and a plethora of cute sea-side cafés that were surprisingly cheap given their location. We went to a salad place for lunch (smoked samon for me; roquefort, ladons and norman apples for the boy) just to the right of where I took this photo.

Trouville is also where Flaubert (the author of Madame Bovary) used to take his holidays, so there were various tributes to him scattered around the town. The swan on the side of the hotel in this picture is actually bearing a sleeping Flaubert on its back--it's the "Hôtel Flaubert".
I was in love with this little girl and her huge floppy white hat. Here, she and her sisters are demonstrating one of the favorite French pastimes: pétanque (a ball-rolling lawn game, kind of like bocce ball). The beach had a special roped-off pétanque area (it's ideally played on dirt/sand that is packed down really firmly) and sets of the heavy metal balls to loan, but many families brought their own, plastic, beach-friendly versions.
Trouville town hall:
Trouville patisserie/chocolaterie. The decorative anchors and flower balls were the keystones of the town's picturesque landscaping efforts.
We managed to score a lovely hotel room with a last-minute discount.
The room even came with a sunny balcony, overlooking the center of town:
View of the pub, from the balcony:
And the night view, looking towards the strip of seafood restaurants. The restaurants' menus were virtually identical, but the hoards of French families on holiday didn't seem to mind. In fact, they seemed almost to expect it as a vacation rite: a bottle of white wine chilling in an ice bucket, an appetizer of terrine or smoked meats, an overflowing shellfish platter to share, or, of course, the French favorite: moules frites (mussels and fries). We opted for a fish dinner (with whelks as an appetizer...not sure how I feel about those). Ordering fish in France is always a bit of an adventure, because if the catch of the day varies from basic salmon or tuna I'm usually at a loss for the English translation. We had "julienne," which, looking it up now, is something called "sea burbot," a relative of cod. (It was delicious, in any case.)
We spent our second day in Deauville, separated from Trouville by a stream that empties into its exclusive harbors and boat clubs. Deauville is known as a haven for the rich, and it was evident from the moment we crossed the bridge and were met with polo, private yachts, and fancy homes and condos that were, rather oddly, built in a Strasbourg-esque, tudor style, and looked more like a winter ski home than a beach house to me:
The beach at Deauville was wider and more well-kept, but lacking the seaside cafe/bar culture of Trouville:
Little beach tents for overheated children to rest in seemed to be all the rage:
I don't see many children in Paris (or at least that don't fall into the category of either a) belonging to tourists, or b) the acting and dressing too-old-for-their-age inner-city teenagers) so it was kind of refreshing to see so many happy families and their very adorable, very French children:
Late afternoon shot of the Deauville beach, and its low tide wet sand. I've never seen so many hermit crabs in my life.
Even the stop in Liseux for a train transfer on the way home proved scenic; Tom took this shot of a hilltop basilica in the late evening sunlight.

Yamas!

Although we flew in and out of Athens, most of our time in Greece was spent on the island of Aegina (pronounced "egg-eena" with the emphasis on the first syllable), which is about 45 minutes away from the mainland by ferry. We had a little trouble getting there due to non-running bus and metro systems, which meant everyone at the airport was queuing for taxis. After we made it through the line and the 45 euro taxi ride we found ourselves at Athens' port city, the dreary, deserted and industrial Pireas, ten minutes after our intended ferry had left.

Luckily, we were still able to catch the last ferry out two hours later. Here is our first view of Aegina, whose port seemed all the more picturesque after our two hours of purgatory in Pireas. It was almost worth missing the first ferry to see the full moon rise over the island.
Our hotel, the family-run Kavos Bay, was at Agia Marina on the quieter Western side of the island
Due to our early, non-peak season arrival and the recent economic crises, we were the only tourists at our hotel (and almost on our side of the island). The result was that the island's many bars, restaurants and hotels were open but oddly empty--and exclusively ours! This is the patio of our hotel.
We also had the beach all to ourselves. The water was a bit cold yet, but definitely swimmable with a good dose of sunbathing before and after.
The coastline was pretty rocky. On our first morning we clambered around the rocks and across little coves to check out the tidal pools. The rest of the time we just found sunny rocks to lay on.

There were a lot of fossils in the rocks:
The only shot I got of myself was of my feet:
Look how clear that water is!
The little glimpses I got of corals, urchins and aquarium-worthy fish are making me really consider taking a scuba class.

We got VIP treatment in the town, where we were among the only clients. We ate out every night--"Greek salads" (cucumbers and tomatoes topped with a huge square of feta), fried feta, feta and peppers (seeing a pattern yet?), fresh fish, stuffed vine leaves and Greek variations on kebabs. We also spent a long evening with Mike at Mike's bar, a chill South African-Greek who gave us free shots of "rako", the island moonshine, and brought us fruit cocktails with sparklers in them. Yamas! ("cheers," in Greek)
Our hostel was about a mile's walk along coastline and through pine forest trails from the Agia Marina town center.

Watching the ferries and the fishermen made our St. Mary's spirits long for sailing
We woke up on our last morning to watch the sunrise...
...though we all agreed that the full moon over the water was more beautiful.

Nantes Jaunt

I spent this past weekend exploring another corner of Bretagne (Brittany). By "exploring" I actually mean "eating my way through", à la Eric Carle's very hungry caterpillar. This trip was organized by our French office assistant who has a taste for the gourmet, so we took full advantage of all of the fresh fish, kouing aman pasteries, salted caramel, crêpes and non-Parisian prices the region had to offer.

We started in Nantes, the capital of Bretagne and the 6th largest city in France, which was cute if rather bland. With a tram system, a small "ethnic" quarter, a medieval center and six-floor white buildings with wrought-iron balconies, it felt basically felt like a smaller, cleaner Paris with less people and wider streets. Highlights were visiting the little fortified castle in the town center, where you could see an old German war bunker from the WWII occupation as well as the site where the Edict of Nantes was signed. Before leaving Nantes we payed a visit to the Île des Machines exhibit, a "robotics" museum/workshop where one can see/interact with mechanical wood artwork vaguely inspired by the imaginary universe of Nantes-ian writer Jules Vernes. The coolest robot by far was an enormous wood and leather elephant, which is big enough to fit 40 passengers for a short jaunt around the square.

Next we hopped on a bus and continued on to a Muscadet vinyard on the edge of the Pays de la Loire Departement. The couple that owns and single-handedley runs the vineyard gave us a tour of the still rather dead-looking vines and the production facilities of their award-winning wine. I learned about wine production I hadn't known previously. Apparently you don't leave the grape skins in wine (too sour) and red grapes can therefore be used to make white, rosé or red wine depending on the delicacy and time-frame of the juicing process (for example, apparently all "authentic" Champagne comes from red grapes). Even if they don't do much for the taste, however, the skins are the source of the yeast, which ferments the wine by converting sugar into alcohol until such a point that it dies from the alcohol concentration it has created. (The difference between grape juice and wine is therefore simple pasteurization, which kills off the yeast before they get a chance to start making alcohol.) Afterward the wine-making lesson we were treated to a wine tasting of a young 2009 Muscadet (sweeter, almost bubbly, and more acidic) and an older 2003 one (drier, smoother). I liked both, but opted for the older as my souvenir.

We spent the night in La Baume, a small coastal town that was pretty, though pretty much like any Maryland or Delaware beach town in the off-season. The water was still a little cold for swimming but we enjoyed a stroll along the sand to find some shells, and our five course dinner was in a restaurant literally on the beach.
Saturday started with a trip to the marshes of the Presqu'il de Guérande, where the famous "fleur de sel" sea salt is harvested by hand from seawater channeled inland and concentrated in a series of canals and shallow pools. We toured the salt pools, then visited a co-op to purchase some local food products: jams from local berries, a seaweed tartar (also harvested from the swamps), Bretagne's famous salted caramels, and of course, salt. The salt looks like greyish rock salt and is valued by gourmet chefs for its delicate flavor. I'm not going to lie, I don't quite "get" it, but considering that a wholesale bag was only a euro I figured I'd give it a try.

A later boat ride through the swamps made me nostalgic for the Chesapeake Bay, whose shallow waters, grassy duck blinds, herons and crabs are surprisingly similar to those in Bretagne (although, of course, better--Maryland pride!). We ate lunch in the fortified medieval town of Guèrande, then walked around the picturesque village of Khérinet to see the rustic houses with roofs made of swamp grass. By the time I finally got back I was gorged with gourmet food, exhausted, and highly satisfied: both to have seen a little more of the "real" France beyond Paris and to have that feeling of returning "home" attached to Paris on the train ride back.

Bumming around Brittany

A trip to Bretagne (or Brittany, for you anglophones) has been at the top of my French "to visit" list for several years now, and thanks to trustfundergrad tuition I was finally able to make my pilgrimage to the land of crêpes, cider and cobblestones. Our first stop was Didan, a picturesque but otherwise unremarkable town known for its crêpes. I had a savory sausage and potato crêpe, followed by marzipan and salted caramel à la mode crêpes for dessert.

The next stop was St. Malo, a tidal beach town encircled by a medieval wall. A popular tourist destination during the summer (especially for British tourists, who can take a ferry across the English Channel), it's apparently not so balmy in March, giving us a chance to experience Bretagne's infamous and incessant wind and incessant rain. We shivered as we followed our great local tour guide aro und the rocky coastline, envying her outfit that wouldn't stand up to Parisian fashion standards but was definitely more practical: a windbreaker, a warm winter hat and rain boots.

The coolest thing about St. Malo is the fact that its waters are extremely tidal, meaning that huge stretches of beach and even a salt-water pool magically appear at low tide (the pool's diving board is still visible above the waves at high tide, to rather comical effect). Low tide also reveals a "path" (sandy ridge) leading to the tomb of writer Chateaubriand, who was a town native and fought for the right to be buried on a small island just offshore. Although I'm not a huge fan of Chateaubriand's work it was cool to once again witness the appreciation the French have for their literary legacies, which was also evident at the Hôtel Chateaubriand that we stayed at, located right next to the shrine-like site marking the writer's former house.

We also found a cute, childhood-themed bar, whose walls were adorned with dolls and old games and whose barflies sat not on stools but on swings! I was in love with the ambiance and the non-Parisian prices, although I was a little sad that we couldn't stay late enough to find out what happens when drunkenness and swings come together.

The next day put us just over the provincial border into Normandy for a hayride-esque romp through the tidal swamps with a few local fisherman. A tidal trap and seining net allowed us to examine some of the local sealife (see the skate pictured here), and the fresh sea air satiated my recent nostalgic longing for the Chesapeake Bay. Accompanied by a bunch of land-lubber NY-ers, I also realized how much practical aquatic knowledge I acquired as a result of my years camping with my family and studying at St. Mary's. I quickly found myself explaining how crabs breathe and how to pop off a shrimp's head and tail and the difference between flounders and dorade to a bunch of clueless underclassmen.

Our last stop on the tour was Mont St. Michel--a beautiful fortified island topped by an impressive abbey and cathedrale. This also gave me a chance to witness the Brittany/Normandy rivalry (ownership of the Mont has been and still is contested) as well as their fierce regional pride...natives of both places referred to their provinces and France as if the two were separate entities, as in fact they were in fairly recent history. (Both, however, are united in their scorn for the British, who were historically the reason for such intense stone fortification.) The Mont was pretty amazing, although more touristed than I had expected--apparently it's the top tourist destination in France after Paris. We wandered through steep and narrow shop-lined streets, enjoyed a shellfishy lunch, and toured the religious sites at the top, leaving in time to reach the mainland before the meter per second tide came rolling back in to cover the road and once again cut off the island.

A bizarre and blustery weekend

This past weekend was, in the words of one of my guilty pleasure chick flicks, “surreal but nice.” It was dotted with strange moments and bittersweet overall—not only our last free weekend left in Tunisia, but also the end of any promise of real relaxation until the plane ride. Our schedule is going to really…well…suck…for these last two weeks. Somehow we have to write, memorize and perform a 15 minute skit and take a written test for Tunisian dialect, cover several more chapters of Al-Kitaab for MSA, sit one more regular weekly quiz, a written final, AND an oral evaluation of our language progress (and then, of course, there will be the phone interview we have when we get back to evaluate our fluency based on the standard scale as a reflection on the program and to determine our eligibility for future programs…).

I woke up early Saturday to meet Akira and catch a Louage to Cap Bon. Unfortunately, when I went to leave my room I found that the handle that has been tricky to use the entire time I’ve been here had finally decided to stop working altogether; I was locked in my own room. I tried to use a credit card to slide the lock open, but since the bolt part here is a solid rectangle and not the sleek, easily-manipulated triangle shape we have in the States, there was little I could do. Hearing my cellphone ringing in the other room (Akira, wondering where I was), I knocked on the wall to awake my host dad and tried my best to explain my dilemma through drywall-muffled French. I figured he would rustle up a screwdriver and pop off the plate for the handle, but lo and behold, he opted to just break the door down. I sat as calmly as I could on my bed for several minutes while he used his pent-up mosquito rage to break down the door (whose frame now has a chunk of wood ripped out of the wall near the still-nonfunctional handle...I’m using my bookbag to prop it closed-ish at night). A bizarre start to the day, to be sure.

Akira and I got in a Louage full of elderly veiled women (I love Louages! A new adventure everytime!) heading to El Houaria—a small town that somehow managed to be in the middle of nowhere in spite of its relatively close proximity to some of the most popular tourist beach towns on the Cape. Its one claim to fame is an annual falconry festival that we missed by about a month—outside of that, it’s a pretty sleepy town with its high proportion of falcon regalia as the only thing setting it apart from anywhere else. As was the case with El Kef, though, we enjoyed the chance to go at our own pace and be among “real” Tunisians free from the shadow of the tourist hoard on our program trips. Once there, we got a hotel recommendation from a group of French backpackers—48 dinar for the night, which was more than we’re used to, but it was cute and still a bargain by American standards. The hotel deskman gave us a little tour of the town, walking us to a sandwich café for lunch. We then hiked up to some ancient punic caves on the outskirts of the city, which served as limestone mines for the materials used to build the colosseum at El Jem and the ruins at Dougga that we had seen on early trips. I gave Akira an hour or so to get his geologist fill of the rocks before we went up to explore the cliffs and algae-rick tidal pools left by the angry waves that were smashing against the shore. Continuing trip tradition, we ate a melon and tossed the remains from the cliff face.

Later, after getting my soda snatched by the town crazy woman (bizarre incident #2), we caught a “taxi” (read: sketchy olive-colored car driven by the man who seemed to be generally recognized as the town “taxi guy”—we asked several people and they all referred us to him as if it should be obvious) to the beach. The beach was all Tunisians and not crowded at all. The water was the clearest we’ve seen anywhere so far, allowing us a good view of the little fish right under our feet, although the getting in-and-out part was surprisingly chilly. We missed the part in the guidebook where it told us that “Houaria” means “windy” in Arabic, and on our walk back to the hotel later we were both regretting not having brought jeans and jackets (what a shame, really…it would have been the first opportunity I’ve had to use the several that I brought). (Side note: one big benefit to the wind is that the hilltop turbines provide most of the town’s power). I stopped at a little boutique to buy a scarf to warm up with, and after trying unsuccessfully to rip me off, the woman decided that we were best friends, threw in the free “gift” of a hideously high-waisted pair of lacy underwear and begged for my number (bizarre incident #3). We got back to the hotel at about 8 and planned to rest for a few minutes before heading back out to dinner, but after waking up zombie-like at 10:30 we opted just to munch on some macroo cookies (the original fig newtons!) from the kind front desk man and catch up on some much needed sleep.

Sunday: not much to tell. Had to wait a while for the Louage to fill to head back to Tunis…learned how to make real mint tea from a sketchy table by the Louage station, walked around downtown a bit to find a bookstore for me to scope out French books (failure) and got some tea and shisha before we caught the crowded sweaty Sunday train back to our houses in the ‘burbs.