Our apartment, standing stones, and French class

As of today, we’ve been in France for two weeks. It feels like a lot longer than that, mostly because we’ve been so busy and done so much.

We’ve found an apartment. It’s on the upper floor of a sign-maker’s shop. The sign-maker himself, Monsieur Faggi, has been living there but is about to move in with his girlfriend, and he wants to rent out the apartment.

It’s on the banks of the river Léguer which runs through Lannion, and it’s furnished, which is a great advantage. In France, unfurnished apartments not only have no furniture, they also have no kitchen appliances or cupboards and often no light fixtures! We were prepared to furnish a place with garage sale furniture and secondhand appliances, but that would have been a pain. Now we won’t have to.

Mr. Faggi is an interesting character. He’ll be working in the shop on the bottom floor of the building during the week, so we’ll be around him more than we would with an absentee landlord. He seems to be pretty easygoing and a little eccentric, which should prove to be interesting! He’s never been a landlord before, and we’ve never rented in France before, so we’re all sort of winging it!

We now have our official French bank account and have arranged for a phone and high-speed internet service in the apartment. It’ll be installed after we get back from our trip to the south of France (more about this later) and after we move into the apartment.

This past weekend we took a three-day trip to southern Brittany to see the Neolithic standing stones (menhirs) in the area around Carnac. This is an amazing thing – literally hundreds of large stones are set in multiple rows that extend for thousands of feet. They are older than the pyramids in Egypt. No one really knows why they were put there. The one on the left is unusually large; most of them are 4-7 feet high.




This gives just the barest idea of the vastness of these fields of stones.




We also saw a number of dolmens, which are table-like structures of massive stones that were originally used as burial places. These are also mysterious. Originally, earth and stones would have been mounded up around these large slabs. Over time, the earth has eroded away, allowing modern observers to come up with many fanciful explanations for the dolmens' function. Among our favorites: altars for human sacrifice! Archeology has discoverd grave goods in abundance at these sites, leaving little doubt that the dolmens are tombs.

Here's the inside of a dolmen called "Pierres-plates":





















Often the stones are carved with strange patterns
that no one knows the significance of.


We also visited the town of Auray, where Benjamin Franklin arrived when he came to France in 1776 to ask for help from the French during the American Revolution. The quay where he disembarked is now called the “Quai Benjamin Franklin”, and the house where he stayed is still there and has a plaque to commemorate the occasion!


Before leaving southern Brittany, we took a drive along the "cote sauvage" (wild coast) on the west side of the peninsula of Quiberon. This is a beautiful area of windswept cliffs and dramatic rock formations. The water was a beautiful blue color.


There's a sign here that says "The sea is dangerous, even when it seems calm. Many people die here every year; don't add your name to the list of victims!"

On Friday, May 5, the day after tomorrow, we’re leaving to go to Provence for two weeks. First we’ll spend the weekend in Nimes, looking at famous Roman relics. Afterward we’ll go to Aix-en-Provence to take a 12-day intensive French course. We’re looking forward to this a lot; we’re excited about the improvement in our French that we hope will be the result, as well as the chance to explore Aix and Provence in general.

Part of the course will be field trips to various interesting places in and around Aix, including sites related to the life of painter Paul Cezanne, who came from Aix and who died 100 years ago this year. His life and work are being celebrated all year long there.

The only fly in the ointment is that we have to leave our little dog Teebie behind, and he’ll need to stay in a kennel for the first week we’re gone (pet-sitters are almost impossible to find here). I’m feeling a bit anxious about my baby, since he’s never had to stay in a kennel before! Luckily, our friend Christy will collect him and take him home with her for the second week (she can’t keep him the whole time because she’s going to be out of town herself for a week).

We don’t know what, if any, internet access we’ll have when we’re in Aix, so this may be the last blog entry before we come back on May 20th. A bientot!