Les Fleuers

Though we've been home more than a month now, our memories of France are still fresh.  And none more so than les fleurs Francais! In every nook and cranny we encountered in the country of France there are flowers--beautiful and copious quantities of flowers.  They spill over windowsills, rock walls and terraces.  They wind their way up balconies and trellises and just about anywhere they can get a foot hold.  They grow up against old stone barns, Roman ruins, in cracks and crevices and are in pots of every color, shape and size.  They even adorn entrances of the most primitive latrines, are by garbage cans and are found in all manner of every out of  the way corner you can imagine. 
It is not by accident--all this beauty,  but rather a philosophy that permeates French culture.    According to *Lucy Wadham in her book "The Secret Life of France" the two most important ideals to the French people are pleasure/beauty and knowledge.  This, she says, is pursued more fervently than Truth or Duty.
Whether true or not, it certainly has had its effect on presentation and appearances in this fascinating country.  We never encountered one shop or cafe that wasn't simply exquisite.  Below, in amateur photo form, is just a small sampling of the beauty we have observed in our travels through Southwest France and Provence.
*Disclaimer:   While Wadham's book certainly gave a fascinating view of French life and thought, and helped validate what we saw and experienced,  I would not be able to recommend it due to its sexual content.

Loved their intertwining of fruits and vegetables in planters--here, Swiss Chard.

The French  art of window dressing--a

feast for the eyes! (You'd love it Lindsey!)

The French seem to find a wonderful balance

and playfulness of airiness, texture and lightness with colors--though hard

to capture on film.

 I saw so many wonderful containers I wanted to take home!

Notice the fresh flowers on our morning breakfast tray at

La Bonne Etape in Provence

Even amongst a coliseum's ruins a beautiful little cafe emerges in Orange!

A beautifully knotted bouquet of dried lavender adorns an entry

An all glass refrigerator showcases artfully

arranged foods at a  hotel where we stayed. 

Notice the rows of fromage blanc in darling small glass cups above!

A typical small grocery stand.

Fields and fields of sunflowers dot the Provence countryside.

Colorful French cafes--a dime a dozen!

A manicured terrace down to the water at Chateau de Losse (16th century) in Southwest France.

Driving through a small Southwestern village under a canopy of papery flowers

 that adorned everything during a special festival.

Do NOT Pass Port

Greetings, dear reader.  Finding Wifi in France (pronounced wee fee here) is a little like finding a needle in a haystack, not that I am complaining.  Actually, I've been frantically banging away at ye olde typewriter keys, but alas, no easy way to post.  Our home has internet but the French keyboard is a killer. At any rate, at last I have found a spot to hit the internet waves while touring the lovely & famous Beaujolais Wine Country in Burgandy!  Voila! Here is the first installment of "My French Memoirs".

                                                                        ***

July 29th turned out to be a day the French bound Hostetters will never forget—for two reasons. Though it had been a long flight from Seattle to London, the trip had been smooth as silk and virtually uneventful. Yes, it had been a long all-nighter and another all day of travel, but we were very tired, but happy all went so well.



We arrived at Heathrow 20 minutes ahead of schedule putting us there at 12:00 PM. It was a relief to touch down, even though we knew we had another leg to go on EZ Jet bound for Lyon, France. That flight left at 6:00 PM out of Gatwick. We were feeling prit-tee smug about how we’d planned a good amount of time to make the next flight.

“This should be a piece cake,” I said to Rahn. And until we hit the United Kingdom’s Customs counter we were blissfully unaware of the obstacles that lie ahead. But, as usual (for us), things don’t always go as planned. The lovely customs agent looked at us kindly asking to see our passports. I eagerly pushed mine towards the little pass through, anxious to get going. “Hmmmm,” she said, after a bit. “Do you realize this passport has been reported lost or stolen?” (Reason # 1 on the scale of unforgetable was about to unfold.)

“Hunh?” I said, giving her a totally blank stare. By this time my heart was racing a mile a minute and my brain was doing the same. “How could this be?” I asked myself over and over. I had slid through the Seattle airport liked greased lightening! I had even had my passport scanned there in the check-in kiosk without a hitch. It all seemed crazy and hard to believe.

“Yes, yes...I am afraid this is a stolen passport and my records show it was replaced. Do you remember this?” She asked.  My next intelligent remark was: “Ummmmm…..Well, I’ve had a couple replaced, so I guess that could be. (If you know us at all, you don’t need any further explanation here.) “But look, it says it isn’t expired until 2013. So, it must be the correct one—right?” (I think she detected my lack of self assurance.)
“No, I’m afraid not. In this case, we are required to confiscate it. I will have to speak to my supervisor.” (I must say, she seemed extremely kind considering she was a government agent and was about to nab my passport.)
The wait seemed like forever as Rahn and I bantered back and forth on how the heck this could have happened. We had been so proud of ourselves, being able to so easily find our passports at home. And surely if we had the passport replaced we would have destroyed the old one….surely....The more we thought about it and the picture on it, the more we realized this was probably not the passport we’d used two years ago to go to Italy. Mon Dieu! Once again, God was smiling down on the Hostetters. The British government decided to allow us to keep the passport, though they would not stamp it with the proper documentation. They did, however, stamp a piece of paper with an explanation. The choice was ours, we could “take our chances” and try to get into France on the old passport or go to our Embassy in London and get a temporary one issued. They were not at all reassuring France would let us in.


The latter option seemed smartest, but it was questionable as to whether we could pull that off. Would we be able to navigate the underground to get to London? Once there, would we be able to find the U. S. Consulate? And if we did, how long would the red tape of the bureaucracy tie us up? Then, would we quickly and easily find our way back to the underground to get back to Heathrow? In addition, if we made it to Heathrow, could we quickly find the right connection from Heathrow to Gatwick? And last, but certainly not least, would we make the flight connection from there to Lyon, France?

(Stay tuned, dear reader, if you’d like to know what happens next and Unforgettable #2!)
avoir~

Our French Connection

Off the Hostetters are about to go on their month long vacation in France where they will, no doubt, butcher that beautiful, romantic language. But we will try to speak it despite our severe limitations.  (Anna and Julie could tell you stories about our pathetic attempts to speak Italian!) 
Just like in the movie, The Holiday,  we are about to embark on our very first home exchange through http://www.homeexchange.com/. 
Destination?  Lyon, France, the second largest city in France and the Gastronomical Capital of the world!  We will be gone for  a month with two weeks in Lyon, and then another two weeks in Southwest France and the Dordogne region---home of fairy tale castles, story book chateaus and medieval stone villages. 

With two days to go, we are almost ready, but it's been no small job.  Not only do we have to prepare to travel for a month, but we had to prepare our home for our French family, Shireen and Laurent Vernay and their 4 children, not to mention writing a complete manual on how to run the house.  Believe me, there's nothing like someone coming to live at your place to kick you into high gear and Spring cleaning in July!  We tore into closets, drawers, cubby holes and all the rest, hauling loot to the Brann's upcoming yard sale or to our barn storage loft.  I guess I'm feeling a little insecure about the Vernay's since they own a boutique hotel in Lyon that famous travel author, Rick Steve's, gives a big thumbs up to.  That's a little daunting. They are an adventureous family who "vacationed" in far off Mongolia, so I guess a remote Northeast Oregon ranch will be a breeze for them.

Now we are down to the packing--The Dreaded Packing.  For one brief moment I almost adopted my friend, Carol Macardle's parent's strategy, of going with an empty suitcase, buying clothes at the Salvation Army, getting rid of them at journey's end and filling the bags with gifts to bring home.  How ingenious!
But, being feint of heart, I opted for paring down to one carry on bag. 

So, I thought I'd share with you what I'm taking for the month--mostly because I'm so proud of myself!  First, I threw in five pairs of pants:  white, black,brown, tan and a pair of blue jeans.  Then, four tops or tanks in a variety of colors, plus three shrugs (black, white & tan), one jacket, one maxi dress, one skirt, 2 pair of shoes, a hat and 7 pairs of underwear; plus, the various and sundry toiletries.  Like I said, it will all fit into a carry on bag, which we carefully measured to be sure it passed airline specs.  We will have our computer, for chronicaling our journey along the way and our Blackberry, for international calling. This is unfortunately necessary, since Rahn has several big deals going on in the law office right now. 
While all this work makes me sometimes wonder:  Is it worth it?  I am reminded of what Frances Mayes in her book Under the Tuscan Sun claims.  Traveling should change us, she says. I agree; and for us, it does. So, yes, it is worth it. I'm excited about what we will learn from others and how God will use us in this month.  We've even discovered our church's denomination has a work in Lyon, so we look forward to worshiping with the believers there.
For us, there are so many things to love about travel but at the top of our list is the commonality traveling brings. I still remember a sweet encounter at The Leaning Tower of Pisa when we were in Italy.  We met an older couple, obviously very in love, who asked Rahn to take their picture by the famous monument. The woman was carrying a large bunch of fresh flowers, a present from her lover upon greeting her at the airport. They were so happy that their story spilled over to us like a bubbling brook.  It was basically a tale of young love gone awry.  They broke up after college and went their seperate ways, but they never forgot each other.  Years later, they rekindled their relationship and decided to meet up in Italy--the day we too were there.  By chance (is there any such thing?) we were caught up in their story for that brief moment, never to see them again.  Yet, their sharing brought us together in an unusual way we will never forget.
We can only imagine what wonderful stories are awaiting this time around. One thing you can be sure of, I'll be journaling all along the way. But for now, I must bid you adieu; however, stay tuned!  I plan to share all about our serendipitous travels in the sunny, South of France right here on A Covenant Life.  

E. R. Pronto!

Wind, wind and more wind. It beats around the house, rattles the panes and nerves and sets the teeth on edge. I am tired of the relentless, cruel wind; and again, my thoughts turn to a time in Italy where the wind also beat mercilessly about our daylight basement apartment in Northern Tuscany. Invariably, it seemed especially worse when I was doing the laundry outside.
I'm not sure if it was the wind and cold that caused a roaring sore throat in me then, but whatever caused it, it was the worst I'd ever experienced.  It was so bad I was sure I had strep throat and strep throat in a foreign country did not sound like a lot of fun.  Going to the hospitale sounded worse, but go to the hospitale, I did.  The experience ended up in my journal.
E. R. Pronto
It isn’t easy finding the Ospedale (Os pee dall ee) let alone the emergency room in Barga, Italy if you don’t read or speak Italian. We did finally find the hospital. And we thought we had found the emergency room too because we saw a sign with the icon of a man on it, an arrow and some Italian words--one which looked vaguely like emergency. But every time we followed the sign it led us out of whatever building we were in. After following those signs a couple of times we felt a lot like the Keystone Cops and gave up on it.
We decided to ask someone, who pointed in the direction of yet another building. We arrived at where they pointed but still didn’t see anything closely resembling an emergency room. With yet another inquiry and another person pointing to yet another sign, we finally saw the word Pronto; which is evidently their idea of emergency. (Incidentally, it is also the word used to answer the phone, and I am guessing it means “ready”.) However, I’m not sure the Italians know the meaning of the word!
One thing we did finally figure out was that the signs we followed at first were “Emergency Exit” signs. (That would explain it.)  At last, we arrived in a bleak hallway and were actually met by a fairly young, cute—very cute—Italian doctore. With glasses propped up on his head, a tanned face and wearing blue jeans, he looked more like an Italian beach bum than a doctor. However, he was wearing a white lab coat and stethoscope. He asked me how long I’d been sick, and I told him more than four days. He noted that if I’d been sick that long I was probably going to make it. I replied that I was counting on it—and him.

It went down hill from there. He looked in my throat (not so bad, he said), felt my glands...Now I am feeling your glands and they are not swollen...and at last took my temperature, which was normale—naturally.

He seemed excessively nervous and apologized an awful lot.  Obviously,he didn’t know where anything was and as he slammed one drawer after another, kept muttering under his breath:   I am sorry, please be patient, I can find nothing and I know it is completely ree-dic-u-lous.

I never could figure out what he was looking for, since I could tell he didn’t think I was very sick. None-the-less I am guessing it was a syringe because he said he wanted to take my blood. Suddenly, he yelled loudly in Italian for the nurse, who was in the next room.
It was all less than professional--so much so--that now I was really starting to feel sick and wondered:   #1 if they had a clean needle and # 2 if they knew how to draw blood at all.
He repeated again that my glands were normal, I had no fever and my throat didn’t look very bad. (What was he trying to tell me?)
Here I was practically slobbering on myself so I didn’t have to swallow, and the pain was keeping me awake at night! At the moment, I didn’t care if the month passed and I went nowhere but from the bed to the toilet, as long as I could curl up into a little ball and keep warm.

He suddenly announced he would take the blaud, and we would just have to wait until the results came back. In the meantime, there must have been 4 ambulances which came and went with sick people—all old. We waited....and waited...and waited. Finally, the results were in…”As I said, Madam, no infection.”

We went back to our little Italian home on the mountainside, and I started the antibiotics my family doctor sent with me, but which I hadn’t wanted to take without evidence of an infection. Within a few hours, my sore throat  began to recede.  Oh well, I guess it only took one day out of our month-long vacation...such is a day in dolce Tuscany.

~alla fine~

A Trip Down My Tuscan Memory Lane

Wind howls around my house in the early morning ink similar to the winds that plague Heathcliff’s eerie mansion in Wuthering Heights. It lashes at the windows in hungry blasts, an insatiable desire to blow our home off its moorings. I snuggle deeper into my down comforter, trying desperately to drown out its maniacal wailings, enabled by our home’s low slung porches.
If I didn’t know better I could almost imagine Catherine Earnshaw, that star-crossed lover of Wuthering Heights, appearing at my window, her little ice-cold spectral hand scratching to come in. I bury myself even deeper into my winter bedding trying to sleep. It’s no use. The North wind’s loud moaning only drives me further from it. Yet, I am loath to rise.

In that place--between half awake and half asleep--my thoughts turn to another time, where driving snows and howling winds relentlessly blew around our home and kept me awake. Ironically, that windy experience was just about the same time of year as now.
Could it possibly be two years ago  we were winging our way to Bella Tuscany for a month long retreat in Northern Italy? Granted, February in Barga, Italy isn’t exactly peak season--for the above mentioned reasons-- but that didn’t stop us! A note from my journal about the conditions then says it best now:

Tuscan Cold

And let me tell you, it can be damp and penetratingly cold to the marrow this time
of year. I had read the winds could be deceptively frigid but I didn’t really believe
it. After all, we were really pretty close to the Mediterranean and it was almost
March. However, the books I read talking about the weather were right! Though
we had heat, our lodgings were as cold as Klondike; yet outside daffodils and
various spring flowers were poking their sleepy little heads up through the decayed
humus. The nights were absolutely freezing, but the air was crisp and clear except
for the smoke from the continual burning, which came from the Chestnut log decks
strewn throughout the mountainous hillsides. I could see that wood cutting could
have been a full time occupation in these parts.

Many people heat with wood or solar and Pietro, our host, was a very frugal Italian and
no exception. Their entire place ran off those two heat sources except for the light bulbs.
He used the energy saving kind of bulbs and even still, it cost him 100 Euro a
month to run just those. The government only gave them 3 kilowatts worth of
electricity.
Needless to say, the country is pretty much a NO Appliance zone! I did
have a hair dryer provided, but I might have gotten more air by blowing through a
straw!! We have a washing machine but all our clothes go out on the drying
rack, which makes for a lot of ironing–luckily, an exception to the No Appliance
zone.
Actually, I didn’t mind hanging clothes out because the fresh earthy smell of air-
dried clothes made it all worth it. Besides, I loved traveling through the hillside
seeing so many brightly colored clothes flapping in the breeze like so many flags
hung in neat little rows off a tiny balcony. When I get home I intend to run a
clothesline in the little courtyard behind my bathroom at the new house...

Finally, I give up sleep like a worn out lover and go to my computer to pull up pictures of that time and that place. It seems only yesterday, as I gaze longingly at photo after photo, remembering fondly a most delightful month.

Hmmmmm, I'm thinking, surely this is the stuff of many more blogs!

And so, dear reader, won’t you please humor me today as I take a stroll along my Tuscan trail down memory lane? Here, I hope to weave in and out of my blogs over the course of time never- before-postings of pictures and snippets from my journal, “A Month in Italy”.

~the end...for now~