The State of my world a million miles away....

McDonald’s, The Buffalo Grill, and a sketchy Kebab stand are our only options for dinner out here on the Technopole. McDonald’s is McDonald’s…I have been warned not to patronize the Buffalo Grill which supposedly is neither a steak house nor a wing joint…and the concept of a Kebab shack where they shave meat off of a giant composite, origin questionable, hunk of meat three feet tall disgusts me to no avail. Considering these meager options, out of sheer necessity I have been forced to concede and embrace my womanly domestic duties…I have begun to cook. My dormitory has a kitchen; if you can call a bare room equipped with a sink, refrigerator, toaster oven and two hot plates a kitchen. The Frenchies on my hall use it to cook nearly every night. They can somehow manage to sauté, boil, fry, sear, steam, and smoke every type of fish imaginable…So I figured if they could do it despite such ill-equipped facilities, so could I! I mean Martha Stewart survived in jail for five months, I can manage three months in middle-of-nowhere-France! So far the extent of my cooking is limited to baked chicken, pasta and omelets, but I expect to have accumulated quite an extensive repertoire of recipes by August.
Cooking was not an issue this weekend since it was spent roaming through the French countryside with my mother. We took the train to just outside of Tours and rented a car to better facilitate our drive through Chateau country. Being that I am neither capable of driving a manual transmission or able to read a map in the car without getting car sick, I was the designated DJ, attempting to find American music amidst the 8 radio stations in our pimpin’ VW Touren. Zach was our built in navigation system and my mother, she was our pilot. Having assured me that she had practiced driving a manual car before her trip I was blindly confident in her abilities…I mean she learned to drive on a manual, that sort of stuff is supposed to stick, right? Like riding a Bike… Needless to say it has been quite a long time since the Ford Pinto she got at 16, which was wrecked twice…
Our first adventure came as we attempted to pull out of the parking space at the car rental office…I knew in those five minutes as she struggled to reverse and pull forward, reverse and pull forward, that the next two days were going to be interesting, and that the least of my worries should be the fact that Zach was navigating…. It didn’t turn out to be nearly as bad as I had anticipated, in the end we were flicked off twice, forced to turn around three times, ended up two miles down a bike path instead of the road once, became lost four times, stalled out once, but frighteningly in the middle of a round-about, and accidentally stayed in reverse a couple of times. My mother and rental cars are not good friends, the last time she had one she managed to hit a deer in St. Croix…this time she only put one medium sized dent and scratch on the side of the car, but that was totally because the decorative cement ball at the entrance to our hotel came out of nowhere…
This weekend’s gallivanting took us through the Loire Valley, known as Chateau country south of Paris. The homes were enormous and intimidating, but looked as though they had come out of a fairy tale…an all too clear indicator of why the French Revolution took place…Check out my newly added pictures of the Loire Valley and Eiffel Tower on my Webshots:
Next weekend Zach and I head south to Provence for our first four day weekend, with days in Arles to stalk down Van Gogh, Avignon to tour the hardly used Papal complex, and Nice to soak up the sun on the French Riviera!