Japanese maples, roses, poppies - you name them - the gardens at Giverny seemingly were a random riot of color. That includes the inside of Monet's house where the clashing blues of the kitchen were intentional; apparently, bugs don't like the color blue. Note to self: Paint kitchen blue.
We also went for a brief jaunt into the medieval town of Vernon. Skipping lunch on the ship, we opted for a Croque Monsieur and San Pellegrino at a local cafe. Thought tempting, we didn't have to join time to join the Socialist Party, whose headquarters are located across the street.
At 6:58 p.m. many of the octogenarians on board, who must have taken a side trip to Lourdes, were able to cast off their canes and walkers and sprint toward the hermetically sealed doors of the restaurant, which only can be opened at the behest of the V lady and her electronic chime. Remember this is a Swiss ship.
Dinners are four courses (European portions) of miniature fine art, almost too beautiful to eat. Somehow we managed to survive. The following is a sample haute cuisine menu:
HORS D'OEUVRES
Tandoori chicken in green rice flakes, parmesan foam and tomato tartar
SOUP
Cappuccino of forest mushrooms
WARM APPETIZER
Pan-fried scallops a la Rouen with Tagliarini and grapefruit sauce
MAIN COURSE
Fillet of beef with herb-truffle crust and French foie gras sauce, vegetable strudel and potato cake
or
Poached filet of halibut on morel sauce, leek-fennel vegetable and rice
Clark and his father Ferg, part of a large, wonderful family from Toronto, Canada
Parisians are like New Yorkers in their love for their city. They think, "What else would you need? We've got it all." They mean their beautiful opera house, the largest museum in the world, the restaurants. They show this through their devotion to preservation. We discovered this and more on a three hour bus tour of the city. We didn't see an ugly building, which didn't surprise us. The French revere architecture as long as it's not too modern. Skyscrapers exist only in the suburbs.
Parisian monuments are a bit heavy on Napoleon and the military. Our reaction after being reminded of France's three revolutions (Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the Reign of Terror, Napoleon the imperialist dictator, and then King Charles) - didn't the French people learn from their own history, and did they forget all the negatives that accompany having a king?
The cruise director who communicates with us over the ship's intercom sounds like the woman's voice from the television series V. "Bon Appetit. We are at peace always." And speaking of V, we've fallen in love with a 9th grade boy from Canada named Clark; we've never met any other earthling child like him. He has bright, wide eyes and a broad smile (See picture above.) He's fully engaged with the world and the people around him. We ate dinner with him and his father our first night on the ship, and he is one of our preferred dining companions.
We realize we're on a cruise filled with patriotic Americans on their way to Normandy, but you'd be shocked (or maybe not) by some of them and their conservative parochialism. Here we are soaking up the French culture on a Swiss ship stunned into silence by one woman asking Deborah, "Are there any Americans left in Miami?" She changed the subject after Deborah responded, "What do you mean by Americans?" At breakfast another man denounced Mexican immigrants, illegal and otherwise, and cheered the "high-profile(ing)Arizona law. We recommend he watch the film A Day Without a Mexican.
You’re a college senior, an Anglophile majoring in English literature, and have no interest in teaching. You have no job in the offing, a yearning for adventure, and most importantly, you have no boyfriend. Securing a position as an au pair might be the perfect enterprise for you. An au pair is a young foreign visitor, employed to take care of children, do housework, etc., in exchange for room and board. Whatever you do for goodness sake, don’t mistake an au pair for a nanny, who has received special training to care for children.Lose the Mary Poppins image, but do entertain the idea of moving to an English-speaking country. Remember you want time to have fun; that means no changing nappies or investing in Rosetta Stone language acquisition software.
Why not head for merry old England? Interested? Then set your sights on London. Search the Internet for Help Wanted ads in the greater London area. Once you make the right contact and you’re offered the position, it’s time to get your passport, then away you go. When you arrive at Heathrow, your employer will be waiting for you. Expect to be nervous, which will exacerbate your jet lag and leave you dragging for nearly two weeks. You’ll be over the moon when you find out the rest of the family is on summer vacation in Ireland. Your new residence will be a late Victorian home with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme in the back garden. Your bedroom will be undergoing a Laura Ashley renovation. Two former ballet dancers who succumbed to Cadbury bars and sausages will be living in the separate flat on the third floor. You said you wanted adventure.
August gives way to September. It’s time for the children to return to school, and time for you to adapt to your new routine. Get up at 6:00 a.m., throw in some laundry, and put out breakfast for the children, the four children whose schedules you must commit to memory. While the children are at school, you’ll have to pick up, maybe dust a little. The domestic life might leave you with something to be desired, so you should focus on one area to master. Perhaps it will be cooking, even though the only dish you know how to prepare is something your family calls “super chicken,” chicken breasts baked with cream of mushroom soup and wine served over rice.
Becoming the family cook entails visits to the supermarket, in addition to the individual local shops. The problem is you have to drive there, and in England you have to drive on the left side of the road.
You could introduce the children to spaghetti and chili, which they will enjoy as long as the fire extinguisher (pitcher of water) is nearby. Make sure you’re home before the children to let them into the house, give them afternoon tea and then take them to dance and scouts. P.S. Learn to make proper English tea
Don’t forget that being American makes you vulnerable to ridicule. If you say OJ for orange juice, one of the children might say, “Okay, let’s have a little OJ.” He will say this with a Texas accent even if you’re from New England or a benign Mid-Atlantic state.
After dinner the father might challenge his nine-year-old son. “I’ll give you a halfpenny if you can name the capital of Iceland.”
You’ll never forget the son’s response. “Pity it’s not Rangoon, but that’s the capital of Burma.”
If you’re riding with the family on a day trip to Hampshire, be prepared to play the license plate game. Whenever a car passes by, you have to use the letters on the license plate to come up with a word where the letters appear in their original order. If you come up with the word vichyssoise from say VHY, one daughterwill stare at you in disbelief. British children, like their parents, believe they are superior to the colonists who broke away. Pretty soon you’ll believe it, too.
During the course of the year, you’ll go to plays and concerts and art exhibits. Your employers might arrange for you to take graduate classes while the children are in school. You’ll absorb the culture by osmosis and begin to enjoy eating Marmite. You’ll discover that films with the words au pair in them are often X-rated. You’ll start speaking with a British accent. You’ll learn to make bubble and squeak and to bake gooseberry tarts.
You’ll fall in love with British children. You’ll even celebrate Boxing Day.
In fourth grade Cheryl Adams and I used hand puppets to act out the Lesley Ann Warren version of Cinderella. In middle school we sang weepy Carly Simon lyrics into Cheryl’s tape recorder. By the end of high school, under the tutelage of Hector Levesque, Cheryl and I discovered we both loved the French language. Voila, Monsieur Thibault. Voila, Madame Thibault. Vous connaissez ma femme? During our senior year at Tiverton High School, Mr. Levesque took our French V class on a field trip 50 something miles outside of Rhode Island to Boston, where we wandered through the Museum of Fine Arts and then dined on Coquille St. Jacques in a brasserie near the Commons. Coke Key Sand Jock. The words rolled off our tongues, and the scallops, baked in a cheesy, mushroom cream sauce and served to us like Venus on a half scallop shell, melted in our mouths. As we swallowed our final savory bites, Cheryl and I recognized the I-want-to-go-to-Paris, but-I-just-know-we’ll-end-up-in- Montreal yearning in each other’s eyes. When Mr. Levesque’s niece Simone, a graduate education student, asked her uncle for two volunteers to help her implement a language immersion project, he approached Cheryl and me. Of course, we would stay after school several times a week and help Simone implement her research in effective strategies for teaching French. Cheryl and I appreciated the extra credit, which we could have used to offset our squeamishness for dissecting frogs in honors biology. We were much more comfortable serving as the research subjects, the frogs’ legs in this case. We loved showing off our fluency as we read aloud pages from Le Monde and then demonstrating our peerless reading comprehension through a series of higher order thinking questions. La Rive Gauche would overflow its bank when we finally arrived. Our trip began in London, England, in late June of 1979. I was nearing the end of my one-year stint working as an au pair for a family of journalists who lived in a late Victorian home replete with a conservatory and gooseberry bushes on Gwendolyn Avenue off the Upper Richmond Road in Putney. We rode the train from London to Kent, boarded a noisy Hovercraft to Calais, and took a bus to Paris. Our luxury fantasies had been dashed prior to our departure since we wouldn’t be staying at the Ritz, but would be sleeping on the floor of a Moroccan student dormitory, courtesy of a classmate of mine in a humanities course at Chelsea College. The temperature was in the upper 80’s with high humidity, Les Jardins de Tuilleries were long past their blooming, and the Louvre was closed because of a workers’ strike. A chocolate-filled croissant took the edge off, but the price of the sweet and a soda brought it back. The best part of our trip was meeting Tunisian rugby players, who were quite taken by Cheryl’s voluptuousness, my long blonde hair, and our ability to speak to them in understandable French. We were enamored of their dark handsome features and soft-spoken manner. They catered to our every whim (I’ll omit the urgent sex in a public restroom near the Folies Bergère.) and we ended up eating bull testicles in a darkened café in the Tunisian section of Paris. This was the closest either of us had ever come to living out the adventure and intrigue we’d witnessed at screenings of Casablanca. On our final day in Paris, we wandered through the Georges Pompidou Center and along the Champs Elysées to a century-old restaurant called Fouquet’s. Cheryl ordered sweetbreads, the thymus glands and/or pancreas of calves, lambs and piglets under one year old. I was torn between the coq au vin and the Coquilles St. Jacques. I ordered the scallops. I was ready to go home.
