Les Aventures de Madame Beaubien: Le Ventouse

Toilettes are an important part of life wherever and whenever you travel. Knowing how to use them, how they work and where they are is ESSENTIAL when you are living in France.

One thing I learned about the toilets--at least in LePuy and in Lyon--is that they flush with a vengeance and that it’s best to put on the lid to prevent the water from splashing all over you AND the seat.

Another thing to know is that toilets are not readily available in France as they are in the USA. Thus, you have to plan both your timing for use and the quantities of liquid you consume. Cafés and restaurants usually have a facility, but you must be a customer to use them. I haven't seen any gas stations in the downtown area where I live and go to school, so it’s important to plan ahead when I'm en route.

Unfortunately, the two toilets for women at school aren’t always functioning and there is usually a long line to use them. One usually works and the other either lacks paper or a light—and there are no windows. Only the cold water for the sink works and the hand dryer doesn’t stay on very long, so I resort to drying my hands “camping-style” on my pants.

I learned another hard lesson after just two weeks of too much gourmet cheese and tasty French bread and not enough water: they are gastronomically binding. This can make flushing the toilet problematic and cause and also cause an overflow of water on the floor. So a handy mop, bucket or a supply of sop-up towels is useful to avoid seepage in the apartment below. 

Recently I had the unfortunate experience of an overflowing toilet and fortunately, my apartment copine (mate), Marie Therese (M.T.) was there to help me. Even though it was a little difficult to understand her French as the water started to overflow, I did manage to understand her to say: “What did you do?” I was at a loss for words except for “où est la mop?” Fortunately, she understood me when she saw what was happening. She quickly gave me some sop-up towels and a bucket because she didn’t have a mop. I scurried as fast as I could to clean up the water.

After I finished cleaning the floor, I took a bit of a rest but was concerned that the toilet wasn’t yet ready for use. I needed to use the toilet again, but was afraid it might overflow, so I went upstairs to use the one in the Cinquième (the other sisters’ apartment on the 5^th floor). M.T., Rose and Marie Phillippe were entertaining another sister, Cristianne, who was visiting Rose for her birthday celebration. (We had just returned from a Lebanese-style meal at a local restaurant.) When M.T. saw me, she asked me what I was going on.

“I’m afraid of the toilet on the Deuxième,” I said in my broken French that could best make my point. “Do you have a plunger?”

M.T. didn’t have a plunger (ventouse), so she asked Rose if she had one. Meanwhile, I’m sure that Marie Phillippe and Cristiene wondered what the heck was going on with all this whispering.

Humor did not escape either M.T. or me as we laughed throughout this whole situation. Fortunately, I was successful in my use of the plunger. M.T. congratulated me that I both knew how to fix the toilet, that I quickly cleaned up the water, and that I was willing to do it all. Well, c’est pratique!

M.T. went back up to the Cinquième to be with the sisters and later told me that during their prayers in the afternoon, she couldn’t keep from giggling about this latest aventure de Madame Beaubien.

La vache!!

Les Aventures de Madame Beaubien: Three Sisters -- and I Don't Mean Chekhov

Sisters Marie Phillippe, Rose and Marie Therese receive a gift book on Michigan

I am now in Lyon and living with three Sisters of St. Joseph of the Lyon, France federation. They have made me very comfortable as I move into my new home for the month.

Marie Phillippe and Marie Therese are both retired teachers. Marie Phillippe taught the little ones while Marie Therese taught in grades pre-school to 12. Rose was a parish minister. 

The three sisters have lived together since 2012. They have one apartment on the 5th floor where two of them live and another on the 2nd floor where one lives. I am residing on the 2nd floor. Their kitchen, TV and community room are on the 5th floor.

On Saturday, Rose took me shopping for an Internet connection, which took an odd turn. The 5th floor has the Internet, but the 2nd floor connection is less dependable. Then we looked for a cell phone that texts and allows me to call the USA. This little shopping trip took three hours and I was fortunately able to keep up with Rose, who is 76. She spoke to me in French most of the time and by some miracle I understood beaucoup! 

Hôtel de Ville

Opera House

The sisters live in the Part Dieu quarter of the city on Chaponay Street, which is near the Foch-Roosevelt quarter where a friend and I stayed last summer. The school for my French language classes is near the Hôtel de Ville--a huge, majestic building that we circled several times when we were lost. There is a square behind the building where people gather for various rallies. The Opera House faces the front of the Hôtel de Ville and people hang out there a lot, too. (Europe is definitely an outdoor culture. People even take their coffee in outdoor cafés--during the winter.

I feel fortunate to be in familiar places for this trip. It makes it a little easier to travel and begin this language experience. The last time I was here I was driving a car. Driving in Lyon is NOT a good idea by any stretch of the imagination. Too many cars, traffic jams, one way streets, and bicyclists who have no fear. It seems that my summer 2016 trip was a premonition or intuitive leap into the future since I am now here again.

On Sunday, Rose and Marie Phillippe helped me find the school and navigate the bus system. It's a 10-minute walk to the bus stop followed by a 15-minute bus ride and another 10-minute walk to the school.

Of course, I didn't have the address with me so the three of us went searching for the school. The sisters had the street name, so they knew where to go, it was just a matter of finding the right address and bus stop. Je m'ais senté mal! No big deal, Rose said.

On Sunday, we went to Mass and then had a dinner of vegetable soup, cooked endive, canulle (Lyon favorite) and a small container of goat cheese. I told the sisters about my time of working on a goat farm where I milked 9 beautiful goats, cleaned the barn, walked the pregnant does, and even caught a couple babies during delivery. The sisters were amazed. The farmer who I worked with has since expanded his hobby farm into a commercial dairy for cheese. In fact, he just sent his cheesemaker to Lyon to learn some new techniques. 

Lyon has a reputation for fine French food. The sisters at LePuy told me that we would get real French food with the sisters in Lyon. We've had some delicious meals--which included fish soup. Aounsa horrid but it has 2 or 3 different flavors that were VERY satisfying. I'm just waiting for the snails, but I hope they don't tell me what they are until AFTER I eat them.

Marie Therese and Marie Phillippe and I relax a bit with good and lively conversation--in French

Dessert--French style: bugnes.

  

Les Aventures de Madame Beaubien: Ride the French Train

If you want an experience of public transportation, you can't miss the French trains. Look at this sleek machine!!  Beautiful, clean, smooth ride, efficient....and they run all times of the day. The French train is NOTHING like Amtrak. I love Amtrak as I love trains, especially when they crisscross the country. But Amtrak is limited by poor tracks and it is secondary to the freight trains. Just one more thing that makes America NOT great. 

I met, Henrik, a young German college student who is traveling in France to visit a friend who is in his "gap year" between high school and college. This young man (sorry I didn't take a photo of him :( ) is studying geography and politics. He conducted a research project in college through the Erasmus Program (European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students), a European Union (EU) student exchange program established in 1987 for education, training, youth and sports.

Henrik is preparing himself for professional leadership positions that will have a global focus. He seems to be a very serious student aware of the importance of climate change and peace among nations. It is young people like him who will make the transition into the future of a new world that Baby Boomers can't even conceive. Henrik reminds me of the fine young people I worked with at Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Patty and I left LePuy on Saturday to head for Lyon where we will take 4 weeks of classes at Inflexyon, a language school. Line drove us to the train station and took our picture--two happy women on their way to French language nivana, the ultimate purpose of this trip to France. We will live im separate convents where the sisters do NOT speak English. The advantage to this arrangement is that we will not be tempted to speak English to one another and we will be forced to communicate in French. This is, really, the only way to learn French--or any language.

Les Aventures de Madame Beaubien -- Helicopter Rendez-vous

(I am going by my code name, Madame Beaubien, because it sounds more French than my name. Besides, I like being called Madame!)

Patty and I were just casually wending our way to the old city of LePuy when a helicopter began flying overhead. It was working on Chapelle St. Michel d'Aiguilhe (St. Michael's Chapel of Aiguilhe). Apparently, every once in a while they have to shore up the sides of the rock so the church doesn't come tumbling down. Whew!

Chapelle St. Michel d'Aiguilhe sits on top of an extinct volcano and was built in the 10th-11th century. To get to it you must climb 268 steps. I haven't done it yet, but word has it that the view is fantastique! 

Here it is from the view of my bedroom window sans helicopter. It's the church on the far right. The church on the left, also on an extinct volcano, is Cathédrale Notre-Dame du Puy, which dates back as far as the first half of the 12th century. That's the Blessed Mother sitting on top of the cathedral.

Les Aventures de Madame Beaubien -- Cooking Day

(I am going by my code name, Madame Beaubien, because it sounds more French than my name. Besides, I like being called Madame!)

I prepared homemade spaghetti for the sisters on Friday--Sicilian style (with raisins, almonds, cinnamon as well as onions, garlic and tomato paste) and they liked it. However, I was so busy trying to coordinate the main course of pasta with the salad course, the cheese course, and the dessert course, that I didn't get any other photos. I also have to learn how to slow down my pace in serving: wait until everyone is finished with each course and then wait a bit more. After all, it takes us about 1.5 hours to share a meal.

While I'm on the subject of food, here is yesterday's meal, which will give you an idea of how we eat. 

First of all, we eat the main meal at 12:30, which consists of a meat or vegetable dish, vegetables, salad, cheese plate, and dessert.
At the dinner meal, we eat at 7 p.m. and have soup and something else light like a sandwich or vegetable dish.


Here is Line preparing the soup for dinner. First, she cooked vegetables in a crock pot and then used a mixer to thicken the soup in just water--no cream. Delicious! Healthy! No calories!

The cook usually serves the main dish or the soup. Of course, we drink a glass of wine with each meal. You can see the wine bottle in the center of the table in the photo below--a prominent position for something so good, so important, and so healthy, too.

In the second course, we help ourselves to salad and something else that sits on the next table. Tonight's something else was some delicious eggplant parmesan. The greens we had I've never eaten or seen before. They look like large four-leaf clovers but are called mache.

 
Et, voilá!!
la service complet....
c'est comme un restaurant chic!

Les Aventures de Madame Beaubien -- Ash Wednesday

Mercredi des Cendres

We celebrated Ash Wednesday by starting out at 8:30 a.m. with Mass at St. Pierre des Carmes, a church in downtown LePuy that was started in 1341 and completed in the 19th century. We walked about 25 minutes to get there. At times, there was only room on the sidewalk for one person at a time, so we resembled ducks or goats who follow each other single file. 

Walking is the common European way of going places--and the spaces that you traverse are often beautiful like the curve in the road above. Bicycle and public transportation are other ways of getting around. LePuy is a small city of about 19,000 Ponots (what its inhabitants are called), so you can move about very easily on foot (à pied). Besides, finding places to park the car is difficult.

 

I found this sign during our walk. Sebastian is my father's name. In the photo below is the street (chemin).

 

 

Here is the church both inside (my shot) and out (Google images). 

 

Here we are after Mass proudly showing off the ashes on our foreheads. Sr. Simone (far left) joined us at Mass and then afterward for dinner back at the Centre. Sr. Line is taking the photo.

Sr. Simone, Sr. Anita, Sr. Patty, Sr. Eluiza, and me

 The Mass was nice and, of course, I'm familiar with each of its parts. I can't yet understand full sentences in French, but I can hear the individual words and verb conjugations and pick up many nouns so that I have an idea of what is going on. In other words, it's not a jumble of babbling sounds. So I just looked around the church and appreciated its architecture--Gothic, I think.

On Tuesday afternoon after our main meal, Patty and I walked on this path along the La Borne River. La Borne is a tributary to the Loire River. The Loire is the longest river in France flowing north and west 634 miles and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean just south of the Brittany peninsula.

Les Aventures de Madame Beaubien -- Second Day

(I am going by my code name, Madame Beaubien, because it sounds more French than my name. Besides, I like being called Madame!)

Here are the sisters that I am staying with this week in LePuy. Left to right is Sr. Line (pronounced Lynn) from Maine, Sr. Patty from St. Louis, Sr. Anita from way south in Brazil and Sr. Eluiza from Sao Paulo, Brazil. 

We had a delicious main meal at 1 p.m. today that included meat balls, pasta with tomatoes, green beans (haricots verts in English and in French) and baguette. 

For the second course we had cheese (le fromage), cake (du gateau), fruit, and finally, coffee or tea. Of course, we had red wine with our meal. Eluiza was our cook.

This is a photo of the International Centre of the Sisters of St. Joseph. There are members of the community foundation in this area of France (Le Puy and Chambery) that are missioned all over the world. The Centre is one place where they can come for programs and retreats--at the source of their creation.
 There are 21 rooms at the Centre. Here is mine.

It's been a little difficult at first to adjust to such small places after living in a condo with 3 floors, but I'll adjust. Below is a view from the window in my room. I have to keep the drapes closed when I'm on the computer because the sun makes it difficult to see the screen. I also learned today that the sun is out almost every day. Coming from one of the cloudiest places on earth (due to the lake effect), I appreciate the sun, but will have to adjust to it when I'm on the computer.

Here's another view from my window of the two extinct volcanoes where they built a cathedral on the top of each one. The statue is the Blessed Mother holding the Baby Jesus. There is a garden in the cathedral where pilgrims who make the El Camino de Santiago de Compostela (The Way of St. James) begin their journey. They meet together informally and are given a glass of wine for good luck. Nice touch.

The Camino is a centuries-old walking pilgrimage across the top of Spain, although you can start from Lisbon, Portugal, or from Seville, Spain, both southern routes leading to Santiago de Compostela. Even popes have walked the trail. The route is marked by a shell.