France and some of the people who inhabit our 'hood

We just got back from our yearly spring trip to Provence to work on the gardens, and to get the houses ready for the summer rentals. We had terrific weather and an all around good time....it was just a big bonus to get out of the snow here.

I could kick myself for not taking more pictures of the people there, because I could have saved myself a thousand (at least) words, but I wanted to blog a little about the guy who we buy wood from every year. His name is Daniel, and he lives in the next village from us. He looks like the Unabomber but maybe even scruffier, speaks French, English, German, and Cambodian. Shocking in a country where people tend not to be even bi-lingual. He has a Cambodian wife and together they tell me that they speak English. It seems pretty broken to me, but apparently works for them. After the wood delivery, he told me that they had just bought a new farmhouse, have no electricity, do zero shopping at the grocery store because the food is all too full of chemicals, and they grow or slaughter all of their food. They have a toilet and use a hose to pour in water to flush it. They cook over a stove with wood. He does have a cell phone and I asked how he charges it, and he told me he goes to his mother's house. Bernd later told me that they also eat at mom's house a lot. So much for the "old ways." The wife told me that she did not like our house and the way it was built, and for some extra income they build houses for their friends, but only out of stone and wood, not the plaster that our house is constructed with. The criticism of our house and the comments about food in the grocery store struck me as their own little manifesto. I asked how they mangaged to live without a computer and he said that if someone gave him a computer he would immediately give it back. They got a kick out of my complete hysteria over the thought of this. I told them that for me, life without a computer would just be no life at all. They looked at me like I had come from another planet.

Then we also have some other neighbors who have a holiday house in our neighborhood, but come from the area of France just south of Alsace. They are friendly people, and the man, Piorot seems to really love Bernd. They invited us and the rest of the 'hood for dinner one night, as they had hauled 35 Kilos of pork and sauerkraut from where they live to Montagnac for a charcrute feast. Never in my life have I seen so much food piled on a plate, and everyone, even the tiniest of women mangaged to stuff it all in. There was more meat on my plate than I would normally consume in 2 weeks, and a mountain of sauerkraut. There was no way I was going to risk the inevitable intestinal rebellion by eating all of this food, so I had a few bites and stopped. There were of course also appetizers, cheese, and dessert involved in this meal, as well as a variety of wines and champagne. Poor Bernd, who seems to be the new best friend of the host, had to eat and drink everything, and literally staggered home at the end of the evening. By the next morning he was not feeling so great, and basically lived in the bathroom for the next 2 days. At one point we were worried about how we would make it back to Munich without a porta-potty in the car. Poor guy. So the moral of this story is that being German does not guarantee you immunity from the fermenting nature of sauerkraut.

I asked Bernd later if he had understood the fire hose French that was spoken by Piorot directly into Bernd's left ear all night long. He said "of course not." He thinks there might be a dialect involved, but maybe the French was just going in too quickly. Piorot is an all around lovely guy who is zany and a lot of fun to be around. And he makes the kraut from scratch.