Meddling With Medieval Mysteries: Hiking through history in Southern France

by Fyllis Hockman

Climbing up the wide circular stone staircase to our hotel room in the Chateau des Ducs de Joyeuse on the first night, I knew this would be a very different trip. I could just as easily be entering a medieval castle as a lodging facility -- and then I found out I was, though I suspect our modernized room was a lot less drafty than those of the lords and ladies who preceded us.

The experience, near Les Oliviers south of Toulouse, certainly set the tone for our Southern France Walking Through History tour—conducted, ironically, by a company called New England Hiking. As we hiked through, around, up and over one medieval village after another, traversing castles and countryside and learning about the Middle Ages of the 11^th-14^th centuries, we were immersed in history.

Click to read more ...

Discount Métro Passes

by Travis Oltmann

Our time in Paris had ended and saying goodbye proved difficult. I would miss the poetic rain and inspiring architecture, the grooved and powdered cobblestones beneath building walls that spewed graffiti, and the cloaked alleyways with bottles of cheap wine dangling from our fingers. It was everything I hoped it would be, which meant it wasn’t a postcard or hopeful imagination. Beauty mixed with the tangible. Drug dealers peddled underneath the illuminated Eiffel Tower at night, angry drivers swore at each other as they circled the Arc de Triomphe, and the Place de la Concorde was covered in bird shit.

Adventures were on the horizon, Spain awaited with sangrias, tapas, sunlight, and white-walled promenades. The only obstacle was getting to the Eurostar terminal somewhere off Fayette. When traveling, I’m not the type of person that likes to know what the day will bring. Wandering and last minute decisions have always yielded more memorable experiences than schedules or crowded attractions. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the ideal personality trait when we needed to catch a specific train and had no directions or general sense of where we were going. It also didn’t help that I drank three grand crèmes at a sidewalk bistro before leaving and had to stop every two blocks and find a washroom.

The three of us stumbled into a train station with the aid of blind luck and selective stupidity. Late and irritated, we hurried downstairs, rushing so we could blankly stare at the French metro lines for thirty minutes. Best bet memorized, we followed the crowd to the ticket kiosks.

Standing near the waiting commuters was a Parisian shouting about a deal in broken English. Naturally, being the thrifty travelers we were (beer money>comfort), we decided to investigate the bargain.

Click to read more ...

Honoring America's Fallen Soldiers in Normandy

by Roy Stevenson

American Military Cemetery, Colleville, Normandy, FranceThe view from the top of the high, soft, sand dunes next to the American Military Cemetery at Colleville, Normandy, is great today. It’s a bright clear blue sky and I can see for miles. French fishing trawlers churn through the choppy, deep blue water, miles out to sea, leaving wide foaming wakes behind them. Gazing down across the long, deserted flat white expanse of Omaha Beach, I can see where the olive uniformed American soldiers debarked their landing craft, to shelter behind steel tetrahedrons, or sprint up the beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Descending the sand dunes, I walk the long 500 meters down the gently sloping beach to the water’s edge. It’s dead low tide. I turn around, looking back up towards the dunes. I’m amazed at how far away they are. They would seem like they were miles away, especially to a young soldier armed to the teeth and heavily weighed down with equipment.

It must have been terrifying trying to sprint up the beach into the teeth of a hailstorm of machine gun, rifle, and mortar fire. Of the soldiers in the first few D-Day landing craft, 90% didn’t even make it up the beach. In my mind’s eye I fleetingly see chaos, patches of red blood-drenched sand, and a flickering image of a young soldier in a soaked green uniform. “I must have seen “Saving Private Ryan” once too many times”, I think self-consciously.

Deep in thought, I trudge back up the steep, uneven sand dunes to the American Military Cemetery and walk along row upon row of perfectly aligned white crosses, on the vast 172-acre, smooth, emerald green-grassed plateau. The 9,387 crosses are a stupefying sight. They radiate outwards in perfectly straight lines no matter what angle they are viewed from.

Click to read more ...

Secrets Of A Paris 'Plus' Shopper

by Dorty Nowak

I skipped dessert today, which is not easy to do in Paris, where patisseries flaunt their delicacies on almost every street corner.  I was on my way to my favorite bistro when I passed a store whose name caught my eye, “Plus Madame.” Since I’ve never seen anything “plus” relating to women’s clothes advertised in Paris, I stopped to look. A sign in the window informed me that the store specialized in sizes 42.  42! That’s a size 8 in the U.S. and a size 10 in the U.K., but in France, it’s a “plus.”  Suddenly, so was I. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised after several years of trying to squeeze myself into French fashion. “Oh, what a pretty outfit. Did you buy it in Paris?” my American friends ask. Well, no, I didn’t. Never mind that with the weak dollar there are no bargains here. The truth is, I don’t fit into most of the clothes I try on.

For one thing, French women have no hips. This is particularly apparent now that skinny jeans – which look like they are painted on – are very a la mode. Not that I, who actually has hips and a waist, have ever dared to try on a pair. Forget blouses too. The sleeves are cut for toothpicks. Even lingerie isn’t an option. Beautiful as it is to look at, on me it leaves far too little to the imagination. Dresses are a possibility, as long as I don’t mind the waists being near my armpits, and the lengths just shy of indecent.  

Still, I long to look like the svelte Parisian women I see every day, so I keep shopping. Too often I find myself in a dressing room, with an outfit that looked so perfect on the rack but on me, isn’t. Staring into the mirror, I feel like Alice after drinking the Mad Hatter’s potion – very, very big in clothes that are much too small.

Click to read more ...

Becoming A Fan

by Dorty Nowak

Hot and frustrated, I stared at the pieces of the supposedly easy-to-assemble electric fan that came with nine parts instead of the required ten. My apartment, like most buildings in Paris, has no air conditioning and, after several days of unremitting heat, I was desperate. I picked up the instruction sheet, ignoring the number for the help center that was probably located in China, and folded it into a fan. My makeshift fan worked surprisingly well, reminding me of a museum that I had been meaning to visit ever since I read several years ago that it might have to close.

Le Musée de l’Éventail, the fan museum, if mentioned at all in guidebooks, usually merits only a brief reference.  All I knew was that it was a museum about the history of fans. Not electric fans but, rather, the hand held kind that was an essential accessory throughout most of human history, including, for me, today.

Conveniently located near the center of Paris, the museum is housed in a typical Parisian building that looks like the others around it except for a large stone bas-relief of a fan on its façade.  Pulling open the heavy wooden door, I knew that this was not a typical museum. Steep steps led to a dimly-lit door beside which a sign announced mysteriously, “Mme. Hoguet.“ Wondering if I was in the wrong place, I rang the doorbell and waited.  After a long pause, an elderly woman opened the door, and I entered another world. 

Fans were mounted on every inch of the walls of a long corridor – ancient fans from Egypt, China, Greece.  I picked up a flyer titled simply “History” and read that fans can be traced to man’s earliest days. Originally the accoutrements of royalty, by the 5^th century B.C. fans had become a widespread fashion accessory. These early fans were rigid but, in the 7^th century A.D., a Japanese artisan created the folding fan after observing the wings of a bat.

Turning a corner, I entered a sunlit boutique where a riot of color greeted me.  Beautiful fans of all sizes and shapes were offered for sale, from very expensive to modest in price.

Click to read more ...

The Alignments in Carnac, Brittany, France

words + photos by Elyn Aviva

We drove around a corner and encountered an astounding sight: row after row of standing stones, stretching to the horizon. “Pull over!” I demanded. Barely waiting for Gary, my husband, to stop the car, I opened the door, jumped out, and ran over to the green metal fence that separated the stones from me. I shook my head in disbelief, in awe. So many stones, lined up and going—where? Why? They fit no category I knew: they were an enormous puzzle of countless granite megaliths pointing to the sky, rooted in the earth. Hundreds, thousands of stones lined up in slightly wavering rows that went on for kilometers, as if the stones were frozen in the act of marching—somewhere. What was the point? What did they mean? What were they for? The stones made no response.

Nowhere in the world has as many megalithic sites as Brittany, and Carnac is in the center of them. The amazing profusion of ancient remains includes isolated standing stones, rows of alignments, earth-covered tumuli, quadrilateral and oval enclosures, and table-like dolmens, each with its own energy and story.

The dolmens with their elaborately engraved interior walls are intriguing, but the 6000-year-old alignments fascinate me. Many of the original stones have been hauled off for re-use in nearby farmhouses and fences, but nearly 3000 menhirs (Breton for standing stones) remain. They are lined up in three sets of slightly undulating rows facing approximately northeast/southwest and extending for kilometers. Starting in the northeast are the Kerlescan alignments, followed by the Kermario alignments, and ending in the southwest with the Le Ménec alignments. The different sets contain from eleven to thirteen rows, and include from approximately 600 to nearly 1200 standing stones. Each set ends in the southwest with an ovoid or quadrilateral stone enclosure (or what remains of one). The cumulative effect of so many stones, so many alignments, extending for such a distance, is awesome.

Click to read more ...