Today has been wonderful and lazy. I was feeling relatively crappy when I woke up so I stayed in bed till 10am. After a couple of coffees I felt human. While I was making coffee, the Ursula, Helene’s sister, wandered past, so Ellen gave her a quick tour of the guest house.

Before we got up friends of Ellen came by to chat with her. We were invited to come down and see their house after breakfast. So, there we went. There house is very tall and narrow, right off the village square. It is at least 5 floors, and very charming, as are Leia and Ted, who live in Hayes Valley when they’re not here. Tiny tiny world.
We came back to the house for a light lunch of saucisson (preserved sausage, i.e. pepperoni, but much, much better), goat cheese, melon, tomato, avocado, onion, aioli, and the ever present bread (which is delicious and is reeking havoc on my digestive system. Grr.)

It’s gotten quite hot today - it got well into the 30s (i.e. 85-90 degrees). It’s dry so I can deal with it relatively well. Michael and his contractor Pascal grouted the newly laid tile on the patio of the guest house which was evil work.
Roy and I went on a short walk up to an old church above the village. The views are stunning, but the church itself was kind of blah. That in itself was novel, given how outrageously picturesque every single thing has been.

Roy is making a paella tonight. We went shopping for ingredients in nearby Salernes. I love grocery shopping venues. They’re so pedestrian, and give you an interesting perspective into local people doing a boring weekly/daily sort of chore. I can amuse myself looking at different store layouts in SoCal v. the Bay Area, so I thoroughly enjoyed today. First stop was a local organic co-op. It was 100% like a small Rainbow grocery. Everything overpriced, various things like rice and flour in bulk bins, lots of space turned over to boutiquey shit like soaps, and dodgy herbal cures, and incense… but there’s always 1 or 2 things you need at places like this. We were looking for rice suitable to a paella, which we found. I also bought a nasty little box of liquorice/menthol pasties to try to clear my sinuses out before bed. Total waste of 1,45 Euros. It was exactly like sucking on a rat’s ass, but didn’t do anything for my sinuses.

Next stop was Intermarche - your garden variety supermarket a la safeway/vons/pigglywiggly etc. It reeked of that special supermarket smell, but a tad fishier. You get used to it almost immediately though. Other than that, a fairly normal shopping experience. I found one weird product, and one quite familiar but differently named product to amuse myself. To the utter horror of everyone I am staying with, I bought a litre of Pepsi Max (The name of Diet Pepsi here. I really missed it. I am honestly bored with the wine after just a few days. I simply cannot get into it like anyone else I know. I have never gained a taste for it.). To balance out the diet pepsi, I also bought a bar of milk chocolate - something else I prefer over the more refined dark chocolate, which is sour and … dark to me.

After shopping in the serious heat we headed back to Entrecasteaux. We were all pretty wiped out, but Michael was hot and bothered to get out to the local winery before Ellen’s student arrived. Roy, Michael and I headed out to Chateaux du Grand Jas to pick up a box of rose… no really. They have beautiful branding too, imho.

We will pack tonight to prepare for our departure tomorrow. We fly from Marseille to Munich around 830pm. I invited Michael and Ellen to Marseille to lunch - beneficial to all - but Michael has to continue work on his patio. We are going to drive somewhere nearby to catch a train to Marseille.

[…]

I am liveblogging dinner (or at least I would be if there wetre. There is (humorous) drama over the paella. Roy was unhappy at the start because the paella pan wasn’t right. Michael insisted it was, so it continued. While the paella prep was happening, Michael’s baked apples sort of turned over in the oven… no prob with the apples, but the juice spilled on the bottom of the oven, so the house got a bit smoky.

Isabel called in the midst of this which was fun, but she didn’t have long to talk. We cooed loudly while the drama continued and Michael chatted with her.

Then we couldn’t locate enough lemons to garnish the dish. We thought there were lots, and there turned out to be 2. Orange alert. The aioli is not coming together. There simply aren’t the right tools to make aioli with. Tsk. Next, the paella broth wasn’t cooking off fast enough. Full red alert. Things could be thrown at any minute. Red alert.

The paella is now resting and we are assured by Roy it will be terrible, mushy, inedible. We can only hope the baked apples will sustain us.

[…]

The paella was utterly inedible. People were retching and throwing it back up outside. See Figure 1, below… actually it was pretty good. Not as good as his usual apparently, but tasty and not mushy in the least.

Today we went to the street marché in Lorgue.

It’s a huge spectacle of a street market… it has standard farmer’s market sorts of things - all sorts of vegetables, but the likes of which are just not seen at the the Alemany market, or even the Ferry building. Just gorgeous stuff. There is cheese, and meat, and fish, and cheese. Oh my god the cheese presentation made my head spin.

They are also cooked foods like rotisserie chicken and whatnot, huge 3 foot pans of paella cooking, junky sunglasses and shoes and the like, table linens, everything. Just about anything you would want to buy was here.

The only thing conspicuously missing was electronics… I was honestly hoping for a computer stall where I could buy an ethernet cable. Michael has relatively high speed access here and even a wireless router. But it’s configured to access machines by MAC address only, and we can’t figure out how to get into the preconfigured modem/router/wireless box. I was able to plug into the back of it briefly, then my cable *broke*. I brought along a self-winind ethernet cable schwag thing I got from a usability lab I used about 2 years ago. The lab was a piece of shit and so was this cable. The net result is that I am queueing all my blog posts and photos locally, and will publish when… ever. Hopefully I can find a cafe in Munich to sit, drink endless espresso, and push my gigabytes of pictures to flickr.

Anyway… we bought stuff for lunch and dinner at the market. Roy recreated a fantastic tart he had in Barcelona: Apples, goat cheese, beets, walnuts, and crystalized ginger vinagrette on a frisee salad. It’s going to be hard to go back to lunches at the cafeteria at work
Early evening, we wandered down the street to what would seem to be the other feature of the village. It started life as an olive oil factory, then briefly (but famously) made sisel rugs during the war, then was bombed out. It has been restored and is now occupied by a lovely swiss couple named Helene and Jean-Paul. The room at the bottom that holds the actual olive press is there entertaining room now and includes a beautiful grand piano. Ellen and Roy put on an impromptu recital of Schubert while we drank a few glasses of wine. (These pictures suck. The light was very weird and I could not get a good focus on anything. I was also taking them surreptitiously to keep them from getting self conscious while performing.)

We took another walk along the way back to the house to make dinner. Any direction you turn this place is a postcard.

Prepping for dinner took several hours - it was a leg of wild boar, which scared the hell out of me after having (and loathing) some ostrich a few years ago. I have had a moratorium on “interesting” meats since that ostrich, but as I was a guest (and hungry) I decided to shut the hell up.

Michael had never prepped it before, and was told by several folks that it had a strong flavor and only a small amount could be eaten (which worried me again). He rubbed it with juniper berries and garlic primarily and served it with a gravy made of celery, carrots, onions, and parsley. With it he served small potatoes cooked with fennel. Everyone raved over it, proclaiming it a cross between duck or goose and beef… I thought it was edible. It was quite tender, but the flavor reminded me somewhat of overcooked dark turkey meat. The potatoes (which I usually don’t eat much or any of) were scrumpdillyicious. Dessert was a pile of the same strawberries we munched on as we wandered around Lyon, with some fromage blanc (sour cream) and natural sugar.

Pre dinner, Ellen served an aperitif called a martini rouge, which was simply red vermouth served on ice with dash of lemon juice. Tasty, and not overly boozy. After dinner was “Marc”… an eau di vie (ridiculously fermented wine) that is perfectly clear and utterly disgusting to my palette. Though it has nothing to do with a scotch, it smells and tastes identical to all scotch/whiskey, and brandy to me. Makes my skin crawl. I had some wine instead
Dinner was over around 1030 and I wasn’t ready for bed. It was stupid gorgeous outside, so Roy and I wandered all over the village on little paths we had never checked before. It was a nice walk and got me settled enough for bed.

My cold is in the stage where it is fine during the day, but my throat/palette gets sore at night, and I need lots of chapstick at night to keep my lips from cracking. Bleh. It’s not clear if it will go full tilt boogie, or just continue to annoy me. Hopefully the latter.