Vive la France

I first went to France — to Paris — when I was 19. Maybe 20. I remember eating omelet sandwiches while sitting on cast iron park benches. I remember seeing the pointillist painters and going up to look the gargoyles in the eye at Notre Dame Cathedral. I had a mean English boyfriend with blue eyes and a room in the attic of a walk up building. We ate bread and olives and leaned out the window and watched people strolling in the streets below. I remember the statues outside the opera and walking through the neat city gardens and seeing her, the Mona Lisa, and thinking how small she was in that salon of absolutely giant romantic paintings, and also wondering how she felt behind that thick protective glass.

I went back to France after I graduated from college. I drove around alone in a borrowed Citroen 2CV stuffed full of camping gear and art supplies. I stayed at a sprawling empty resort on the Riviera in the off-season; I was the only hotel guest; I had a suite that seemed miles from the vast empty dining room. The hotel was pink and the manager set plates of food in front of me and was patient with my high school French. I shopped the markets in the villages of the Dordogne and picnicked near Lascaux, the site of the famous cave paintings, and  baked in the sun in the amphitheater in Arles. I drank cafe au lait and slept in my little backpacking tent at the cheap “Camping Municipal” campgrounds.  Once I was surrounded by big French men with mustaches, men with their arms crossed over their bellies. They stood, leaning my way, because I’d popped the hood on the little blue car to find out what that rattling noise was that was driving me a little bit nutty. I couldn’t identify it and the car continued to run like a top until I returned it to its home in Switzerland at the end of my grand adventure.

I’m leaving on Monday for Bordeaux where I’ll spend a week as a guest of the Bordeaux Wine Council. I’m attending the Bordeaux Wine Festival. I will wander vineyards with educated wine writers, eat some surely spectacular food, learn how to taste wine properly, be addled with jet lag, ask a series of stupid, amateurish questions about wine, and continually wonder how on earth I ended up on this guest list. I’m one of four US writers invited, the others seem to know three or four things about wine, whereas my vocabulary is limited to statements like, “Meh, I don’t like this,” or “Oh, this is yummy.”

I am excited about returning to France. On my solo trip through France, I had an excellent time and Paris, well, Paris pre-art school can’t be spoiled even by a mean English boyfriend. As a result of my time there, I concluded that the French had received a bad rap; all my interactions were warm, kind, patient, and even when the vendors corrected or explained why my French wasn’t quite right, they did so with good humor. The food was amazing, always, no matter if I was in an empty dining room with a delicately presented game hen or on the curb with a fistful of baguette and a slab of locally produced cheese. My memories of France are highly polished, but I don’t believe they’ve become glossier with age. I think that France was that wonderful to me when I was there, two different times, a younger and completely different person, albeit with a better grasp of the language than I probably gave myself credit for.

This time I have some expectations, but mostly, I expect Bordeaux not to disappoint and to remind me that France was beautiful and welcoming and also, delicious. I plan to embarrass myself with my poor French and the fact that I have no epicurean vocabulary, and I plan to be madly frustrated that the trip is over when I head back to the airport to fly home. I think this is a good plan.

And yes, I do wish you were coming with me, you know who you are.