Black Gold

Our friends Didier and Anne-Sophie invited us to lunch.  They said it would just be a casse-croute Provençal - literally “breaking crusts” together - so we didn’t expect anything fancy.

Boy, were we wrong.  Our first clue was during the apero.  In addition to the usual olives and radishes there were little toasts covered with a delicious blend of rillettes and foie gras.  Wow, those are each superstars in their own right, but together?  It’s kind of like when Lou Gehrig batted cleanup behind Babe Ruth.

And, hm, what are those little black chunks spread on slices of bread?  Oh la la, truffles.  We were in for a treat.

It seems that Didier is a huge fan of black truffles, the best of which come from Provence.   Truffle hunters search for this treasure each winter and Didier waits until the market is flooded with truffles and the price drops, then swoops in and buys a bunch.  He then jealously hoards them until some unsuspecting truffle lovers like us drop by for a meal.

So our lunch was a truffle extravaganza.  We had scrambled eggs with truffles.  We had little truffle sandwiches.  We had mashed potatoes with truffles.  It was glorious!   We drank fine wines that Didier had chosen because they went especially well with truffles.  Oh, and we also had some delicious confit de canard (duck leg), then a nice strawberry clafoutis Val had made for dessert.

Wow, we were stuffed after all that.  First our big lunch at Atelier for Val’s birthday, now this. 

We definitely need to go for a long bike ride to work off these meals.  Really long.  Like maybe to Finland.

KVS

Warning: Food Porn

I had the great fortune to be treated to lunch at my favorite restaurant, Atelier.  It was a 7 course affair - that somehow turned into 9 courses.  

The chef Jean-Luc Rabanel is both an artist and a master of bringing out the flavor of each ingredient.  And he cooks with lots of vegetables. So, we devoured our 9 courses without guilt.

Comme je suis gâté  (boy am I spoiled).

vvs

                                   Working up an appetite

Delicious, once we could find it

Cocktails anyone?

Pissaladière -   much better than it sounds!

Atelier's zen decor 

(note from Keith, handsome man not included)

Who knew you could make parmesan foam?!

Still eating our vegetables

Time to add some bull to our vegetables

Finally, dessert!

Goodbye Lenin

Here’s a test.  Which French political party’s platform includes the following?

-       Raise the minimum wage

-       Reduce the retirement age

-       Support the 35 hour work week at all costs

-       Establish highly protectionist tariffs to protect French jobs

-       Dump the Euro and bring back the French franc

-       Nationalize the banks

If you said the French Communist Party, you would be right.  But you would also be right if you said the Front National (FN), the extreme right party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The FN of Jean-Marie was built around security, opposition to immigration, and a generally nasty racism and anti-Semitism.  That got it 10-15% support in elections, but then it hit a ceiling.

So when Jean-Marie’s daughter Marine took over control of the party a few years ago, she tried to expand its base of support.  Part of this was by trying to detoxify the party’s image, getting rid of the worst of the racists (so far only partly successful).  The other part was by developing an economic agenda.

She didn’t want anything too mainstream, but rather something extreme to distinguish her party from the two big ones that run France.  And because the FN doesn’t seem to have much in the way of economic principles (or other principles, for that matter), she looked for something – anything - which would maximize her votes.

She was clever in picking economic populism.  The French working class has been devastated by a combination of globalization and general French economic mismanagement.  And their traditional champion, the Communist Party, is moribund.  It is described as a momie (mummy) that hasn’t evolved since the 19^th century.  Even today, its rhetoric consists of things like, “we must kill the evil capitalists and take all their money.”

Into this open field walked Marine Le Pen, suddenly the best friend of the blue-collar worker.  It is funny to hear someone who has lived most of her life in one of Paris’s toniest suburbs start to call herself, “a daughter of the People.”

But it has worked.  Support for the FN has roughly doubled, to 25-30% in recent elections.  It’s kind of crazy that voters who used to support an extreme left wing party start voting for the extreme right.  It’s as if the Maxine Waters branch of the Democratic Party suddenly joined the Tea Party.

The question, though, is whether support for the FN has reached a ceiling.  Already there is pushback on some of the wilder ideas, like bringing back the franc.  And it should be noted that the French Communist Party, even in the heyday of communism, never achieved power in France.

KVS

Take My Money, Please!

We decided it was time to get new bikes.  We bought a couple of cheap used bikes a few years ago and they are good but kind of clunky.  And pretty heavy when riding up those darned hills.

So we shopped around, first at the annual used bike sale in Cavaillon, then at the local shops.  Some of the brands here are unfamiliar so it took a while to figure out the right bikes.  We did online research, talked to our friends, took test rides.  Finally, after several days, we found bikes we liked.  Whew! 

It turned out that was the easy part.

The bikes we settled on were available through a local shop but had to be ordered online and delivered to the store.  I’m not sure why we couldn’t buy them directly at the store, but ok.  So we went online, selected the bikes, put in our credit card information and hit the button to complete the transaction.

Nothing happened.

Hm, maybe we put in a wrong digit somewhere.  Ok, let’s try again.

Rien.  But then a message popped up saying the transaction could not be completed.  After some research, we figured out that the website would not accept an American credit card.

No problem!  Let’s use our French card!  So we put that in were told that some sort of extra “3D” security step had to be completed.  This involved receiving a special SMS code on our cell phone, which of course didn’t work because we have a US phone number.  Not only was this annoying but it took several emails and phone calls to even figure out what the problem was.

Then we tried PayPal.  That always works, right?  Well, no, not if you haven’t used it in a while and it has an expired credit card.  So we updated the card info and tried again.  Nada.  After several more emails and phone calls, we learned that PayPal won’t accept foreign transactions unless you inform them 30 days ahead of time about your travel plans.

After more emails, we were advised to try a few other things:

-       Set up a French PayPal account.  That didn’t work.  Zut !

-       Sign up for a monthly payment plan for the bikes.  That didn’t work.  Merde !

-       Establish something called a “cash transfer for pre-payment”.  Guess what, that didn’t work.  Putain merde !

I keep saying that “we” were doing all this.  In this case, “we” means Val.  Anything that combines technology plus French makes my incompetence painfully obvious.  I pretty much cowered in another room while Val got madder and madder and her head started to burst into flames.  But I did open a few windows to let the smoke out.

Finally, we found hunted around on our bank’s website and found hidden there a super secret special phone number to call that would hopefully sort things out.  But they were only available until 10pm and by now it was nearly midnight so we went to bed.  The smoke had mostly cleared.

The next morning Val called the special number, which required her to enter pretty much her entire life history via the telephone keypad, then promptly dropped the phone call.  Several times.  I stood ready at the windows.

So she decided to call the international number via Skype and voila!  A live person!  Who actually solved our problem!

Now we are patiently awaiting the delivery of our bikes, while Val lays down with a cold compress on her forehead.

KVS