We’ve got a car!

Probably the biggest news since our last post is that we took the plunge and bought a car on July 31. The whole car-buying experience was interesting and a cultural adventure in itself! We had been putting it off because neither of us enjoys buying cars, even in the U.S. However, we were expecting houseguests, our friends the Katz-Balmeses from California, and we wanted to be able to show them around.

The vast majority of cars sold in France are made by Citroen, Peugeot, or Renault. It made sense for us to start there, so we went to the nearest dealership, a Renault garage within walking distance of our apartment. We were treated very nicely there. As luck would have it, they had a sales program (called “New Deal” – seriously!) that would allow us to buy a used car now and sell it back to them anytime in the next two years for a guaranteed amount. This was just what we were looking for.

We went away to think about it and perhaps visit the other dealerships. The next day we looked at each other and said “why don’t we just go ahead and do it?” So we returned to Renault and signed on the dotted line.

At first there were some issues – we have no French sources of income, and the Renault financing office said we couldn’t buy the car. But our salesman wasn’t easily deterred; he made some additional phone calls and got a yes from the boss of the person who had said no.

We had to get car insurance too, of course, but that turned out to be easy – Renault has a deal with an insurance company so we bought it from them. Now we’re the proud owners of a little blue 2004 Renault Clio with a diesel (pronounced “dee-ess-ell” in French) engine.

The whole process was much easier than I had feared it would be. There was none of the high-pressure stuff you have to suffer through in the U.S. When we said we were going to go home and think about it after our first visit, no one tried to stop us with any B.S. about how the deal wouldn’t be there if we didn’t buy the car that day, etc., etc.

Interestingly, it took a full week from the first day we walked into the dealership until we took delivery on the car. In the U.S. you often walk in and then drive out of the dealership in your new car the same day.

The other thing that was different and kind of fun was the “lesson” we got when we took delivery of the car. One of the mechanics showed us how everything on the car worked, from how to remove the deck over the trunk space to how to work the














radio (way more complicated than the rest of the car). It must have taken a good 20 minutes. Most of it we could have figured out for ourselves, but it was nice to be shown how it all worked.

Our friends John, Sherry, and Max Katz-Balmes arrived on August 7. We had a great time with them. Max is an active eight-year-old, and for his sake we focused on outdoor activities like going to the beach and going kayaking. Not that this was any great sacrifice!

On August 10 we departed with our friends to spend a week in Scandinavia. We took the train from Lannion to Beauvais, a town just north of Paris where we would catch a Ryanair flight to Sweden. Ryanair has extremely low fares, but they fly from secondary airports and don’t have many flights each day. So we spent the night in Beauvais before flying to Skavsta airport, 80 minutes from Stockholm, the next day.















Not that this was so terrible; Beauvais is an interesting town with a truncated cathedral. The cathedral was going to be one of the biggest in the world, but the nave and the tower they tried to build kept collapsing, so now it’s only a transept and a choir. However, it’s still huge and imposing and very, very tall.

Inside are two astronomical clocks which are quite dazzling. The more recent one still shows the time as it was measured in 1865 when the clock was built. Back then they hadn’t standardized the time across all of France, and they didn’t have daylight savings time either, so the clock, while still extremely accurate, is now one hour 52 minutes off the current time.

The next day, when we arrived in Sweden, we were picked up at the airport by Ivan and Ulla Husmark, who are old friends of John and Sherry’s. They’ve known them for 24 years, ever since Ivan and Ulla and their family spent a year in California. Ivan is a physician, like John, and is now mostly retired.

We spent the weekend at the Husmarks’ summer home in Olofslund near the town of Vingåker in Söder- manland near the lake called Hjäl- maren. It’s a lovely place, very quiet and green. Ulla is a great gardener, and we had homegrown potatoes, wax beans, lettuce, and peas. They celebrated our arrival with a traditional Swedish August dinner of crawfish and home-cured salmon and lots of beer and “schnapps” (Swedish vodka).

It was a wonderful evening; we sat outside on the deck and ate and drank and sang Swedish drinking songs (or listened to Ivan sing them). I’d heard about Swedish crawfish (called “kräftor” in Swedish) ever since I spent time in Sweden in my twenties, but since I’d never been in Sweden in August I’d never gotten a chance to actually taste them. They were really good.

The next day we went to a place nearby called Julitta, a large estate (4,000 acres) built on the site














of a medieval monastery. The manor house is from the 19th century and has a couple hundred subsidiary buildings. The property is now Sweden’s national agriculture museum. It was fascinating; there was a dairy on site, as well as a brick-making facility, a gene bank for various agricultural animals and plants, a small chapel, gardens, and a fire station. The interpretive material was quite extensive and gave a good idea of what life was like on a Swedish estate in times gone by.














The next day the Husmarks were going back to Stockholm along with our friends. We parted company with them and took the train to Stockholm where we caught the overnight boat to Helsinki.

There are two boat companies that run regular ferries between Stockholm and Helsinki. Apparently, before the European Union, you could save so much money buying tobacco and liquor in the duty free shops on the boats that it more than paid for the trip. I gather the crossings were pretty raucous in those days!

We had a little cabin on board which was actually quite pleasant and quiet. We went to bed at night and in the morning we woke up in Finland. We spent three days in Helsinki and took the boat back to Stockholm on the third night.

While we were in Helsinki we saw many archi- tectural trea- sures and had a ball visiting shops with beautifully designed household objects. We toured the home and studio of Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish architect and designer who came to the U.S. in 1923. Eliel headed the influential design program at Cranbrook in Michigan; his son Eero won the competition for the St. Louis arch.

We saw the home of the great Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius. We also saw a number of wonderful examples of Finnish “national romantic” architecture, which is Finland’s version of Art Nouveau/Arts & Crafts, and we learned a lot about the history of Finland, a country that in the past suffered from having two more powerful neighbors: Sweden and Russia..

The food was wonderful – lots of fresh, smoked, and marinated fish, especially salmon. We pretty much gorged ourselves on fish there. It was also raspberry season, and we inhaled at least a pint of raspberries each day, buying them in the open air market and wolfing them down immediately.

They also had a number of other berries for sale: gooseberries (green and red), red and black currants, strawberries, tiny blueberries, and cloudberries, which look like bright yellow raspberries. We didn’t try these, but we probably should have. I don’t know when we’ll get another chance at them. They grow only in the far north.

Once back in Stockholm, we wandered around Gamla Stan, the old part of town, and then flew back to France the next day. We spent the night in Paris and walked around in the rain to see the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower with our friends. We said good-bye to them that night. The next day they left to return to the U.S. and we took the train back to Lannion.

Now we’re home until our next visitor, Bob’s uncle Al from Oregon, arrives in early October.


Till next time….