Assurances - météo - cuisine

Assurances in French is what we call insurance in the U.S. Car insurance, in this case. Today is my day to go down to Saint-Aignan and modify my car insurance policy. I need to add the Citroën, which I'll go pick up on Monday morning, and I need to modify the coverage (le contrat) on the Peugeot. It really doesn't need to be covered tous risques (collision, liability, comprehensive — all that) now. It's not worth much any more.

Here in France you tell the insurance company how many kilometers you think you'll drive in the coming year, and you pay accordingly. If you go over the figure you gave them during the year, you have to go back and have the policy modified. I don't remember ever declaring what my maximum mileage would be when I was in California.

On the left: this seems to be the color of the Citroën. I found it somewhere on the web, with the RGB values specified.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of weather we've been having for a few days now. Low temperatures right around freezing, with a cold wind blowing, have brought us periodic morning snow flurries. The afternoons are slightly warmer. It could be worse.

So it's time for good, hot, comforting food. I've noticed that Berie the black cat is eating much more than he does in warmer weather, and we probably are doing the same. How about this sauté of pork tenderloin (filet mignon) with spices, raisins, chickpeas, and sweet potatoes?

Cut the tenderloin into chunks and rub the chunks with spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, cumin, fenugreek, smoked paprika, hot red pepper(piment fort), black pepper, and ginger. Sauté the pork with onions and garlic, and then add some water or broth to the pan to braise the meat with cooked chickpeas and, if you want, some raisins. After 30 minutes, add two or three sliced raw sweet potatoes to the pan. Ten minutes later, when the sweet potato is tender, it's done.

Automobiles Citroën — a brief history

If you live in the U.S., where there are no Citroën dealerships and almost no Citroën cars on the road, you may think that the name Citroën applies mainly or exclusively to the famous old car called the 2CV or Deux Chevaux. You know, the car that looks like an old VW Beetle that might have been put together by somebody on an LSD trip.

I know that the name Citroën looks a lot like the French word citron, meaning "lemon." That's unfortunate, isn't it?

One of Citroën's first cars was this model A.

The Citroën car company was founded in 1919 by a French engineer (polytechnicien) named André Citroën. His factory was in Paris, on the Seine at the quai de Javel in the 15th arrondissement. Nowadays, that name has been changed to name the quai after him, along with a big park where the manufacturing facility used to stand. By 1920, Citroën was making more than 12,000 cars a year.

Célestine is one of Susan and Simon's Citroën Traction touring cars

In the 1930s Citroën designed and manufactured the revolutionary Traction Avant automobile. That's the one that came in any color you wanted as long as it was black, and it might be associated in your mind with 1930s-era gangsters. Traction Avant means "front-wheel drive." The Traction saved Citroën from bankruptcy. Our friends Susan and Simon of the Days on the Claise blog have two 1950s-vintage Tractions that they use to ferry tourists around on custom tours of the Loire Valley.

The legendary 2CV or Deux Chevaux

The Citroën 2CV was manufactured from 1948 until 1990. It was a "people's car" — inexpensive and sturdy, but basic. The name "two horses" didn't mean the car had just a two-horsepower engine, as some people might believe. The "horse" is a tax term in France. The Citroën C4 that I am buying has a 5CV engine, for example. It's real horsepower rating is 90.

A Citroën DS that I photographed in Alençon in 2001

The other model that Citroën was famous for was the DS, which was more of a luxury car — DS is partly a play on words because in French déesse means "goddess" — that the company manufactured from 1955 until 1975. It's the car with the famous hydraulic or hydropneumatique suspension. When you started the engine, the back end of the vehicle would rise up to the driving postion, and when you turned it off it would settle back down to its crouching position. The car's ride, as I remember it, was like that of a boat floating on gentle swells, and could almost make you seasick until you got used to it.

Today's little Citroën C3 is a "wink" at the old 2CV in looks.

In 1935, when André Citroën died, the company was taken over by the French tire manufacturer Michelin. In the 1970s, during the great oil crisis, Michelin tried to sell Citroën to Italy's Fiat, but the French government vetoed that move. Finally, in 1975, Citroën was taken over by Peugeot, and there it remains today. Citroën and Peugeot cars share many components and platforms, but the two brands still exist.

These days, Citroën has more than 13,000 employees and produces a full range of passenger and light utility vehicles. The C series has been successful — I'm acquiring a C4 — and the new DS series, while very different from the original DS cars, seems to be successful as well. The two brands Citroën and Peugeot combined produce nearly three million vehicles a year. None are sold in the U.S., however.

Car memories and stories

In the days and years when I commuted back and forth to work in California, I was driving 20,000 to 25,000 miles (30,000 to 40,000 km) a year. When I say "driving" it's kind of a euphemism. A lot of the time I was sitting in traffic jams on freeways between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I kind of burned out on spending a lot to time in cars, even though I've always really enjoyed driving. Here in France, we now drive fewer than 3,000 miles (5,000 km) annually, and that's fine by me.

For the first two years we were in San Francisco, in the late 1980s), I had a job in the city and commuted to work by bus or cable car. Then I found a better job in Silicon Valley. The car became a tool I needed to use to get to work and to get home, and I kept new cars. In California, I bought new cars in 1990, in 1993, and in 1996. They were VWs, each one bigger, more powerful, and more luxurious than the last. I managed to keep the last one for seven years. For several of those late years, my commute was short — only 25 miles in each direction. And for one of those years, I didn't work at all. I had been laid off.

In all, I also drove across the U.S. between coastal North Carolina and coastal California, a distance of about 3,000 miles (5,000 km), five times. Each trip took nearly a week. The first two times and the last one were with Walt. We drove his little Subaru to California from Washington DC in August 1986. That was fun — for four or five years we had been living first in Paris and then in DC, and walking to work and back home every day. We weren't burned out on driving. Walt stayed in California and I flew back to Washington to finish up the job I would be quitting there. Then he flew back to DC to help me pack up the apartment and we drove a truck full of our furniture and stuff across the country together, east to west, towing my own little Subaru behind it.

Fast forward 12 years. In 1998, after getting laid off from my Silicon Valley job, what did I do? I got in the car and drove for nearly a week to get to North Carolina. Just for fun, and to escape from the stress of commuting and working in the San Francisco area. As I said, I've always enjoyed driving but jeez did I hate sitting in traffic on freeways! When I got to North Carolina, I stayed for a week or 10 days and then my mother, her sister, and I set out to drive back to California. They said they had always wanted to drive across the continent. We had numerous adventures across the way, with stops in Alabama, Louisana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

For all of the years we spent living and working in California, Walt and I kept two cars. Walt had some years of commuting and hated it too, but for many years he was able to leave his car in the garage at home and take public transit to work. He found good work in San Francisco, where we lived, but I never could. I had to go to Silicon Valley, 50 miles (80 km) south. That meant 100 miles a day, or 500 miles a week, in the car and in traffic jams. I never knew whether the 50-mile trip would take one hour or three. During those years we were also flying to Paris once or twice every year for vacations, just to keep our French up to date (and to enjoy the food). In California, I listened to a lot of French music in the car, on CDs, and pretended that I was living in France, not knowing how soon it would be true.

Walt ended up buying a Jeep Cherokee in the early '90s, and he kept it for the last 10 years we were in California. We would use it to go on driving and camping trips along the California coast, up into the Sierra Nevada mountains and to places like Death Valley and the national parks of southern California, Nevada, and Utah. I lost count of the number of times, starting in 1997, that we (or I alone) drove down to the desert near the Mexican border to see CHM, who had a house there then. It was nine or ten hours  in the car each way, mostly on freeways but also on wide, scenic two-lane roads through deserts and over or around big mountains, with little or no traffic. I really enjoyed those trips and the chance to get out of the city and see what the southwestern deserts were like.

Finally, in 2003 we sold our house in San Francisco and I sold my last VW, a very nice Passat that had quite a few miles on it. A young man from Palo Alto bought it. I was asking $5,000 for it, and he agreed to the price. He said he would get the money out of the bank the next day and bring it to me. I was surprised when two hours later that evening he rang the doorbell and said he had the money and was ready to go. He handed me a stack of $20 bills that he said he had gotten out of a cash dispenser using his American Express card. That would be 250 $20 bills. When I took them to the bank the next morning to put them in my checking account, I was afraid the clerks might think I was running drugs or something.

A few weeks later, we packed Walt's Jeep full of things we wanted to take with us to North Carolina and on to France, including the dog. We drove across the country one more time and spent a few weeks at my mother's house in N.C. while we waited for our French visas to come though. She had been nice enough to invite us to come and stay with her. That was our last trip across the country. The Jeep was very comfortable, and we had the time to drive the back roads and take a different route from any of the other times, going to places like Gallup, Santa Fe, and Tucumcari in the northern half of New Mexico; Oklahoma City and Tulsa in Oklahoma; Joplin and St. Louis in Missouri; and Springfield, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln (Abraham, that is). We also drove through eastern Kentucky and through the Great Smokey Mountains national park between Tennessee and North Carolina.

Anyway, even though we don't drive so much any more, we're now getting another car. We've had the Peugeot 206 for nearly a dozen years, after buying it used and in a hurry when we first got to Saint-Aignan because we absolutely had to have a car and renting one was getting to be just too expensive. I didn't think we'd keep the little Peugeot for very long, but I was wrong. Back in the early 1980s, when I lived in Paris (where I met Walt) I had a tiny Renault 4L for a year. That covered two of the three major automobile manufacturers in France. I've always wanted a Citroën and now I'm buying one. I hope it turns out to be as good a car as the Peugeot — which we're keeping — has been.

Parting Glances

I'm busy and preoccupied right now, so I'm glad to finish this series of posts about the village of Montréal in Burgundy. I obviously really enjoyed the hours we spent there last October.

Part of it was probably that there were no cars and few people. We could walk and take photos as we liked, and we didn't have to worry about Callie. She's a good dog and stays close to us anyway.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to live in Montréal however. There seemed to be little or no business activity or shopping opportunities there. There was a post office down on the main road, and also a café, but I didn't notice a bakery, a restaurant, or a grocery store.

Most of the houses in the old town were just beautiful. They came in several different styles, and the sunny weather made the old stones just glow. Some fall colors, flowers, and painted shutters added to the atmosphere.

The church and graveyard were also highlights of the visit. Somehow those parts of town and the houses and streets were immaculately maintained without making the place feel too much like a theme park or just replica of something authentic. It felt genuine.

As my title says, "parting glances" — above is a final shot of the Porte d'En-Bas, the lower gate to the old town, that I took as we were arriving back at the car to continue our route toward the village of Noyers.

We drove on to the nearby village of Thizy for a short stop. I just wanted to see what it looked like. As we got there, I noticed this sign that seemed to be inviting us to return to Montréal. Maybe someday we will. On that day in October, we turned to the left.

I'm of course preoccupied and busy because I'm getting ready to buy a car. The time has come, and the car I inspected and drove yesterday is probably the one I'll get. Walt is leaving it up to me to choose.

We don't need a new car. Unless I'm mistaken, we drove the Peugeot a total of 9,000 km over the past two years — that's less than 6,000 miles in 24 months, and it includes the trip to Burgundy as well as trips around our region: Blois, Tours, and the villages where friends of ours live. Having a different car won't change our driving habits.

I went and drove the car yesterday but I forgot to take my camera with me. Maybe I'll get a photo of the car today.

Bois sculptés etc.

Today in France is la fête de la Chandeleur, known also as Candlemas. It's crêpes day. We'll be having buckwheat crepes (called galettes au sarrasin) as our main course, filled with ham, mushrooms, and melted cheese. Then we'll have sweet wheat flour crepes filled with cherry jam or lightly stewed blueberries — or just butter, lemon juice, and a sprinkle of sugar — for dessert. One of each, maybe

In Christian legend and ceremonies, La Chandeleur marks the presentation of the Christ child at the synagogue 40 days after his birth. The photos here of wooden sculptures, which I took in the village of Montréal in Burgundy last October, depict another event in the life of Jesus: his baptism by St. John (the Baptist).

These carved oak figures date back to the 1520s and were the work of two brothers whose family name was Rigolley or Rigoley. Their work was funded largely by the French Renaissance king François 1er — Francis I. He's the king who had the Château de Chambord built here in the Loire Valley. He visited the village of Montréal twice, it seems.

I find myself wondering what the interior of this old church in the little village of Montréal, near Avallon, looked like 200, 500, or 800 years ago. It was built in the 12th century, but it was the site of restoration work in the 19th. Now the inside is very plain and all white, with few decorations besides the ones you see in these photos.

The figures above are, I believe the three kings — les Rois mages — who traveled from the east, following a star — to see the newborn Christ child, according to Saint Matthew. The beauty of the wood carving is evident.

Here are two web sites I've using as source material for this series of posts:

http://www.montreal89.com/index.htm and http://www.montreal-en-bourgogne.com/index.html

P.S. I'm going to look at and test drive a car this morning. This is getting serious. It's a car I just happened to notice on a dealer's lot on my way to the grocery store a couple of weeks ago. That's how I bought my now-14-year-old Peugeot when we first arrived in Saint-Aignan all those years ago. Wish me luck.

Inside the church in Montréal

The interior of the church in the village of Montréal in Burgundy is all white, which makes it very luminous. The church was built in the 12th century and restored in the 19th.

Its claim to fame is a set of 26 elaborately carved oak choir stalls dating back to the 16th century. The two figures below are supposedly the sculptors' self-portrait. They're having a drink during one of the breaks in their workday. King François 1er funded their work in the 1520s.

The old bell below, installed in the church in 1623, was replaced in 1994. The church doesn't have a bell tower; the defensive tower over the nearby upper gate (La Porte d'En-Haut) in the town's fortifications served that purpose.

Here's a photo showing the Porte d'En-Haut, where the church bells were located. Thanks to Google Maps street view.


More photos of the wood carvings inside the church tomorrow...

Montréal countryside views

We had some snow yesterday, but it lasted only 15 or 20 minutes at most and didn't stick on the road or the grass. The worst part of yesterday's weather was the wind — it was stiff and frigid. Walking out into the vineyard with Callie in the morning meant facing a freezing headwind, but the walk back was easy with the wind at my back. Good-bye, January.

Meanwhile, I'm doing another in my series of posts about Montréal in Burgundy. Here are some photos of the views out over the countryside that we enjoyed from the top of the village, near the church.

Above and on the right are photos of what the Michelin Guide describes as « une vaste ferme bourguignonne fortifiée » — a impressive Burgundian fortified farmstead — below Montréal.

I have too many photos and I'm not good at picking and choosing. Instead of leaving any of these out, I'll just make some of them smaller. You can click on any photo to see it at a larger size.

On the left and below, local Charolais cattle graze on green pastureland.

On the right and below, are views in two different directions.

Below, Callie is tempted by a country road that winds down toward the fields below. We didn't walk down there, but the dog enjoyed her stroll through the streets and parks of Montréal.

Finally, after our walk around Montréal, we got back to the car and headed over to the village of Thizy, which you can see in the photo below, off in the distance. I took some photos there too.

The weather here in Saint-Aignan is turning cold again, and it is a pleasure to look at all the green in these photos and remember how warm and sunny it was that October afternoon at Montréal in Burgundy.

Montréal : l'église collégiale

At the summit of the little village of Montréal in Burgundy stands a church surrounded by a graveyard. The church dates back to the 12th century and is known as la collégiale Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption. It was restored by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century. I found the cemetery very picturesque.

The photo above shows a sign that struck me as funny. It's posted on the fence right in front of the church, and it says "Space reserved for Father Jean Michel". My first thought was that the space referred to might be a grave. I think it was actually the priest's parking space.

I also enjoyed seeing the inside of the church, as did Walt. While he went in to look around, I stayed outside with Callie. Then I went inside and Walt stayed outside with Callie. That's how we have to do things. I'll post some photos from inside the church in a day or two. Maybe Sunday.

Yesterday I posted a photo of a salamander that looks suspiciously like the one that was king François Ier's "logo". Well, it probably is just that. I read this morning that François visited Montréal twice during his lifetime (first half of the 16th century).

From the church, there are views out over the surrounding countryside. It was all very green when we were there — photos later. Montréal was a fortified town, built on a high hill for strategic reasons. It seems that it was surrounded by vineyards until the end of the 19th century. The phylloxera scourge must have killed off the local wine business.

Montréal only about 8 miles from the town of Avallon. I didn't even realize that when we were there that Thursday afternoon, because we drove in from the other side. We had been in Avallon two days earlier. I guess if you lived in Montréal, Avallon is where you would go for shopping and other basic services like banks, doctors, and coiffeurs.

Montréal en Bourgogne : details, details

Not much to say this morning. I'm just going to post some pictures I took during our leisurely walk around the village of Montréal in Burgundy in late October 2014. If you read this blog regularly, you might find it repetitive with these kinds of details, but the fact is that I don't know who will look at the blog at what moment, or what post people will land on first, so each post needs to be pretty much self-contained. Details...

This set of photos shows a lot of details I noticed around the village and found interesting. The first photo above shows somebody's sense of humor, with a car license plate from the city of Montréal in Québec — « Je me souviens » — nailed to an old door in the village of Montréal in Burgundy. Next to it is a photo of another village house for sale. It looks like it might need more than "freshening up." (I just found a web site with photos of that house above. It has already been sold for 45,000 €...)

The photo immediately above is a mystery to me — what does this decorative detail on a house actually represent? Those curly things at the top look almost like eyes, but they're not. And what is that tree in the middle?

I really liked the way this unused doorway on one of the village streets had been condamné, as they say in French. Rather than put up a wooden door that would need paint and other maintenance, just fill in the gap with stones. Clever. And it has a nice salamander with it too.

Above, a beautiful window in an old house. How many windows can one photograph in a lifetime? The answer: millions, if one is in France. So many are so beautiful.

And doorways too. Potted geraniums nicely dress up that old stone staircase on the left above. And the door on the rignt shows how wood doesn't hold up to the weather all that well, especially in a damp climate.

Montréal in Burgundy: Houses

The population of the village of Montréal in Burgundy is only about 180. Most of the houses must be vacation places.

The shutters were closed on many of the houses. We didn't really see many people — half a dozen at the most — up in the old town as we walked around with Callie and took pictures.

Except that Montréal is so clean and spiffed up, it was a place that seemed frozen in time. Car traffic in the old town is restricted to residents only, if I remember correctly.

It was especially pleasant for a long, slow walk because it was sunny the way it had been the day before in Chablis, Tonnerre, and Irancy.

If you are interested in buying a house in Montréal, the one shown above is for sale — À VENDRE. I just found it on a real estate web site. The asking price is 90,000 €. At today's exchange rate, that's 102K US$.

Here's a photo of the house from the web site I found. Three bedrooms, 1 bath, 1 WC, 120 sq. meters (1300 sq. ft.), garage. It's described on the site as ancien (old). It looks like it could use some freshening up inside, as you might expect.