En Route with Andrew Hamilton: VI

 

 

Ring Around the Roissy

By ANDREW HAMILTON
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

The Last in a Series

Roissy, France
I usually hang a few days in Paris on the way out, but because of weather fluctuations, undoubtedly attributable to global warming. it was below zero Celsius in Paris, and I got an Air France flight direct from Ajaccio to Orly and took the Orly-CDG shuttle bus and stayed in the Hôtel Première Classe in Roissy, right next to the airport. It was only about 115€ from Ajaccio on Air France because there's competition with an EasyJet flight from Ajaccio direct to CDG. My flight to San Francisco was early enough in the morning that I didn't want to get up before dawn to make the regional train from Paris-nord to the airport.

There are five or six separate hotel bus lines from CDG to the hotel district on the edge of Roissy about five minutes away over spaghetti roads. The bus is free from the airport to the hotel but five euros from the hotel to the airport, at least in the case of the Hôtel Première Classe.

En Route with Andrew Hamilton: V

Hardly Boaring

By ANDREW HAMILTON

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]
Bastia, Corsica
I had some pretty bad eats in Corsica, but no worse than you're likely to find anywhere in France. I made the mistake in Bastia of having a cheeseburger and deep-fried potato lumps late one night in a tourist place on the waterfront, and the night before that a cheap pizza that turned out to be one of those crèmeux pizzas covered in the equivalent of hot white Velveeta.

On the plus side, they've got three major cuts of charcuterie that I could figure out, one being sausage and the other two being cured shoulder cuts off the pig, in different-sized chunks and probably from different areas of the shoulder. All of it good, cut up with your couteau de berger. Then there's a daube de sanglier or daube corse, wild boar stew. I had a bowl of that and it tasted just like beef stew, big soft yet chewy chunks of braised meat, so that I thought maybe they were trying to pass off beef as boar until I calculated that it wouldn't redound to their fiscal benefit to serve beef in pig country. I was expecting something like the best food I've ever had in my life, which was wart-hog prepared by a Dutch engineer's African houseboy in Tafiré in Côte d'Ivoire, but there turned out to be a long distance between wart-hog and Corsican boar.

En Route with Andrew Hamilton: IV

 

Cutting Edge

By ANDREW HAMILTON

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

Bastia, Corsica
I took an afternoon ferry from Nice to Bastia at the north end of Corsica. You never leave the sight of land, which I imagine is mostly the coast of Italy and then snow-capped mountains in Corsica, snow-capped mountains looming out of the wine-dark sea, in April. Italian ferries mostly, out of Genoa, exactly like the Aurelia, a Genoese "student ship" I took from France to New York in 1967, except that the five-hour trip was not long enough to have an amateur night where the waiters sang opera, and there was no saxophone band playing "Capri C'est Fini," or returning junior-year-abroad table mates talking about how they would never go to Berkeley because of all the Reds on the faculty.

En Route with Andrew Hamilton III

Nicietes
By ANDREW HAMILTON
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]
(One in a series)
Nice, France
There's a new street-car line in Nice. Did I mention that there's new construction, renovation, new public and private facilities, enthusiastic public maintenance all over France, right in the middle of this depression or gloom? The new Nice tram line runs from a north suburb down past the SNCF station into the center of town, turns east a block and then runs back up toward another northern suburb. You can pretty much walk a block and catch the same car you were just on over most of the route. It was excellent for getting from the train station to my new apartment. You're supposed to buy a ticket for 1.70 € from a machine at the station, but nobody buys one, except the people who are serious commuters and have a magnetic transit pass to flash against the composting machine. I bought a ticket when I first got on but observed myself to be in a car crowded with low-life style-jumpers and scofflaws and only ran it through the machine a week and a half later, just to see how it worked. There are signs all over the system warning that it's cheaper to buy a ticket than not buy a ticket, because the fine for not having one is 240 euros.

En Route with Andrew Hamilton II

Lyonized

By Andrew Hamilton

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

(One in a series)

Lyon, France

I went to Lyon because the the details about the trains to Dijon and the hotel accommodations in Dijon, where they have the mustard, are confused or murky and it was late and I was working out of the WiFi in a Korean hotel in Montmartre and later in some places down at the south end of town, off the Internet tourist maps. I spent three nights in the Korean place in Montmartre, in the Abesses quarter, a nice neighborhood, and then three nights in a flop down at Convention in the fifteenth, and a night at a hot-water hotel on the rue du Moulin Vert across from a restaurant that looked good but served some awful gelatinous codfish. More on food and on wine later, maybe.

The point of my being down at the south end of Paris, off the visitor map, was that I used to live there, across the street from the Abbatoir du Vaugirard, which was the horse slaughterhouse before they closed down all the city distribution points and moved them out to the suburbs, before they turned les halles into the Pompidou Center and turned the big abbatoirs at La Villette into the science park that nobody goes to.

En Route with Andrew Hamilton



Sacre Bleu at Sacre-Coeur
By ANDREW HAMILTON
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]
(The following is one in a series)
Paris
Here (above) is a photo of my favorite corner of Paris, the parc Nadar with its statue of the Chevalier de la Barre just downhill and west of Sacre-Coeur. There are probably better pictures available on the Internet, and I have taken brighter ones myself with better cameras than the Wal-Mart Smart-Talk Huweii smart-phone camera I had this trip, but this picture shows an early-morning version of the gloom that hangs over Paris from around late October until April. This is the real Paris as we know and love Paris.

Andrew Hamilton Reports....

Letter from Trinity Center, California
Playing Chicken

Richard,
You Rittenhouse Square co-op guys might not have noticed, but out here in the suburbs, the exurbs, and in the remote mountain hermit shacks we build chicken coops and raise chickens.

Last spring I joined the Chicken Revolution and made a chicken coop out of the old outhouse, took pictures all along, and I was thinking of making a web-site to send a link to BackyardChickens.com.

If you remember, the last time we talked I was coming back from a vin-ordinaire tour of Normandy that ran through Easter. At the San Francisco airport I got an e-mail from my neighbor who was collecting the eggs, reporting that the bear had come on Easter night and eaten all the chickens.

The rooster, Louis, survived the first night, and another neighbor heard about it and came by and set up a remotely-triggered wildlife camera to get pictures of the bear when he came back to eat Louis. Given a choice of neighbors, I would have preferred one that would catch the rooster and keep him in the garage until I got back, but the bear pictures are a reasonable consolation prize.

So here are the bear pictures. That's a big bear, for this neighborhood. The old outhouse is five and a half feet high at the back end and 44 inches wide. Hope he enjoyed the damn chickens.

Next dispatch I will explain the new electric bear-deterrent devices, and going to the gun store to get a new gun in case I have to shoot this guy. I sold my deer rifle about fifteen years ago, never having shot a deer with it and having realized that I didn't want to shoot things all that much.

Have you been in a gun store lately? It's gotten to be almost as bad as going into a music store, a bunch of guys hanging around disapproving of your qualifications for picking up an instrument. Most of the merchandise is military-style stuff designed to deal with whatever Obama is bringing down on our heads, plus the Arabs. It's hard to find a bear gun, it's just a bunch of weird fat guys in camo standing around talking about high-capacity magazines and laser sights and pistol grips for their post-apocalypse weapons. Back in the day it was the same fat guys, but at least they were talking about shooting animals and about recipes for squirrel burgoo, and a white guy was assumed to be a descendant of Minutemen. The only real difference is that the gun manufacturers must be getting insane rich.

Anyway, here are the bear pix. That's my rooster Louis that he's fixing on eating, if he can pound on the top of the coop long enough to get Louis to run down to the bottom where he can grab him.

Andrew

Letter from Philadelphia
R.I.P. Thelma

Andrew,
Remember, I used to live on a fifty-acre spread in northeastern Connecticut. Back then, the Carreño-ettes got it into their heads that they were going into the egg business -- on my dime. OK, I'd buy the laying hens (chicks), they'd raise them in a coop I built near the barn, and they'd sell their farm-resh eggs at school. (The teachers were eager buyers).

The hens went alayin', and all was well. Particularly with Thelma, from whom we sometimes were able to extract two eggs in one day.

Then came Mr Fox. One, two hens down.

I secured the coop.

Another hen gone. Finally, Thelma got nailed.

So much for the kids' egg business.

But Mr Fox finally got his. I found his entrails one day. Dogs, probably.

Anyway, never met a fox I liked. Why these anti-foxhunters whinge, I'll never know.

Richard

Letter from Sete, France

Oops, am I missing anything?
Off with his Head!
By Andrew Hamilton
Junto Senior Staff Reporter Bio

Sete, France
I've been in Sète going on three months. Been using up all my textual ruminations in e-mail exchanges with the old ladies who went to an old school of mine when I lived in Paris. I take the TGV to Paris next Sunday, stay three nights, and catch a flight to San Francisco on Wednesday.

I haven't been doing much. Swimming in the Mediterranean on the few sunny days and trying to avoid going to the same restaurant twice.

I did get a haircut, and talked about politics with the barber. He asked what I thought of Obama and I told him I waited 40 years, and I'm sticking with him. I asked him what he thought of Sarkozy, and together we concluded that Obama is better. Sarkozy's approval ratings are down in the 30s, and were never of any account in the south. This région went almost entirely Socialist in the elections a couple months ago. The only region with a majority for Sarko's party was Alsace, which is practically Germany.

At the pizza shop yesterday, another customer buying six pizzas said something to me, and I said I didn't understand. He told me something uproarious about cutting a head off, and everybody was howling like hyenas. After the other customers left, I asked the pizza cook what they were talking about and he said that it was the anniversary of cutting the king's head off, and since I was English that was the funniest thing ever. I asked if it was Louis XVI and he said yes, and I'm still wondering why telling an Englishman about decapitating a French king is so hilarious. These are a mysterious people in their humor (By the way, I'm an American).

The pizza cook wanted to know about southern-France style wildfires in California, and he knew that the Terminator is governor. I gave as my excuse for being in Sète that I was looking for a place to live, but that the language is a problem because I can't speak French so well. He said yeah but that I do OK in 'the ensemble,' which was encouraging. I explained that understanding was the problem, and he said, of course you can't understand us, we are sètois. The people of Sète are proud of the incomprehensibility of their lingo.

I had the 'Royale': ham, mushroom, and cheese. Best pizza yet, by far. I'm going to go back next week and get the merguez and poivron. By the way was that Louis XVI Royale?

Sète is Georges Brassens' home town. Paul Valéry, too. But Georges is the one they name everything after. There is a music-hall on the other side of the Pont de Pierre called "Les Amis de Georges", subtitled "Brassens chanté par ses amis." Being a friend of Georges is like being, I don't know, a Kentucky colonel or a Daughter of the American Revolution, or maybe a guy whose University of Minnesota dorm LP's were stolen by Bob Dylan. At this club, a bunch of old guys sing Brassens songs, and for 35€ you can have dinner and listen on Friday and Saturday nights. Sounds like spectator karaoke.

A couple of days ago, I took the municipal bus to Baleruc-les-bains across the lagoon and walked along the shore to judge the recreational potential of beaches. There was a place on the trail with a mural and plaque commemorating the shack of the fisherman "Lolo," which was torn down when they built the path and rip-rapped the shore. Lolo was an ami de Georges. Georges and Lolo would go swimming in the lagoon and collect oysters and mussels and snails, and louncher on them. Louncher is a sètois word meaning something like "slurp down with gusto."

At Lolo's shack, Georges would play the guitar and they'd sing songs. Everyone visited Lolo in the 50s and 60s. Brigitte Bardot and Manitas de Plata are named on the plaque. Salvador Dali said if he visited he would enter through the chimney, and according to legend, he did. He's in the mural, his head poking out of the chimney. The total effect of the monument to the absent shack between the rip-rapped shore and a hedge screening condos was pretty sad in the cold wind and drizzle.

It started raining hard. Tourist restaurants were deep into serving lunch, so I had to duck into a pari-mutuel café, one of those betting bars full of hard-asses who don't particularly like you. Had a café express and waited 20 minutes for the bus; read the newspaper. There was an announcement of the American Day fête in Frontignan. There will be American football, baseball, basketball, cowboys, and Harleys.

The craze in France for the past few months has been the apero facebook. That's an apéritif party announced on Facebook that snowballs so thousands of people show up. In other words, to make a Philly allusion, it's like flash mob on South Street, but everyone drinking red vermouth. They've occurred in several of the cities and large towns, in a central plaza or park, with general rowdiness and a few people trampled or dying of choque éthylique.

An apero was one announced for Sète at the Poufre, which is the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville where there is a fountain with a monumental sculpture of an octopus. Poufre is sètois for poulpe, octopus, which is a local export base and the main ingredient of the famous tielle sètois or poufre pie.

For the apero facebook at the Poufre they had plainclothes cops circulating, and squads of uniformed cops and paddy-wagons. The Red Cross set up a first-aid tent and an ambulence stood by. The city council decreed that only plastic cups could be used, no glass. It was the eve of the Pentecost extended weekend, so it was going to be big. But hardly anyone came. The newspaper said that a few people grimly filled, emptied, refilled, reemptied, and refilled their plastic cups, but nobody went into shock. Many more people stood for a while around the outside of the square or on balconies to watch. The paper said a lone street trumpet player did his best to keep things lively.

It was speculated that either Sète already parties enough without Facebook, or that the apero craze has peaked and subsided.

Yesterday and today we have the neighborhood fête at Pointe Courte, a scenic fishing enclave a few blocks from here. There were kiddie rides, and sea jousting in the lagoon. That's like renaissance jousting, except you ride a ramp on the stern of a rowing boat instead of a horse. A couple of musicians in straw boaters sit at the base of the ramp playing haut-bois and drum.

The two jousting boats were from the Friendly Lance of Sète club, and they were both named Les copains d'abord. That's a Georges Brassens song and Sète motto, meaning my buddies come first. There's a hairdresser's shop across the canal called Les cheveux d'abord.

I asked that pizza man who told me it was the anniversary of the regicide if the sètois liked Louis XVI, since His Late Highness' grandfather created this town out of the mudflats in the 1606s so his kingdom could have a port on the Mediterranean. Pizza man said we don't like the king; same way we don't like anyone important. I asked if they disliked Sarko, and he said, yes, Sarko more than anyone.

I didn't get to ask him about Tony Hayward.

(Andrew Hamilton frequently writes from France. He divides his time between that country and a home near San Francisco. He isn't particulary fond of Philadelphia).

Wine. Oh!

Uncorked

By Andrew Hamilton

Junto Staff Writer Bio
If I had the tastebuds to back up a wine journal, the operation in the attached photographs would be on Page One.


This lady behind the table is selling Languedoc-Rousillon red out of a plastic hose. I'd have to mount both pictures in my wine journal because in one you can see the hose, and in the other you can see the wine tanks in the back of the van.


The heavy-set guy in the brown coat is tipping the dregs out of a plastic faux-wood barrel into a 1.5 litre plastic juice bottle.  You're supposed to bring your own bottle, but to his right you can see the cardboard cartons full of the empty bottles the wine-sellers brought in case you forgot. 


Next to the old lady hunching over her shopping cart in both pictures you can see bottles that she has filled, the sunlight shining through. 


I didn't buy any of the nouveau today, but I filled a bottle from the same cellars two years ago and it tasted... thin.  But it did the trick. 


It went quite well with an evening meal of gros pain, cacaouetes-salés, a 150-gramme mélange d'olives vertes provençal et au pistou, and two or three pétits-suisses with sugar-lumps pressed into them and then whipped with a fork until the sugar dissolved.  To tell you the truth, that last course might have gone better with a Sancerre, but you play the hand as the terroir deals it.


Languedoc-Rouissilon, which until the publicity agents were called in recently was just called Rouissilon, is the ground between about Montpellier and Perpignan, noted in the past for the production of bulk French merlot, the kind of stuff that used to come with those stars molded into the glass of the returnable bottles, bouteilles consignées, the ones with those green plastic caps dimpled into the necks and covered with foil.  That stuff cost one franc per liter bottle in '67, which was about 20 cents American.  It was the Harvard and MIT of my wine education.


Now there's been a grand program of classing up the wines here.  I'm not sure how much of it is being done by the vintners themselves, and how much by whatever is the French equivalent of Madison Avenue.  In Perpignan, for example, they have installed sturdy glassed-over street tourist information billboards explaining the various varieties, quite professionally done but I could only guess the program's relationship to realities in the barrel.


Did you ever hear of the wine war, I think it was just before the first World War? Prices dropped to a level that would not sustain the industry, and the growers all over the region protested, gathering finally in Narbonne where the affair came to a head.  If you walk around Narbonne today the most interesting sight is the series of  tourist information tableaux following the geography and events of the wine riots.  I stayed there two or three nights last year, and remember only that it was a proud event for the area. 


According to the placards, the wine mob threw the mayor of Narbonne into the River Robin, which is a beautiful little stream that runs through the town. I believe he was fished out before drowning, and with a few loyal troopers made a stand at the city hall until the national gendarmerie came in relief.  This is an impressionistic memory of the events described in random posters around town, Richard, you'll have to google the rest.


On a different cultural tack, I recently spent a few days in Marrakech.  Flew there out of Seville for $37.00 on Ryanair, and let me say the Seville is the nicest city I've ever been in with the possible exception of Nîmes.  The Spanish towns I have been in are in general superior.  A large part of that may be that forty years under Franco left the kids with a genetic hesitancy to spray graffitti all over the central city like they do everywhere else, but Seville is something extra.


I intended to take the overnight train from Marrakech up to Tangiers, which is only about $75 for a single sleeper compartment, cheap considering that you don't have to pay for a hotel that night and the Morocco rail web-site claims they give you paper towels and breakfast.  However, the rains that had poured down on Lisbon and Seville the previous two weeks had blown out the train lines south of Tangiers, and the only thing to do was jump on Ryanair to Reus, which is the next suitable airport down the coast from Barcelona.


Ryanair and Easyjet seem to have affected a lot of places badly. They filled Marrakesh up with Europeans and English, in March, and I believe they are responsible for the same effect on the Algarve and various coasts of Spain, and they have contributed to the ongoing Anglicization of Provençe, since you can get to, say, Nîmes from Luton or Liverpool for a week-end for next to nothing if you hit it right.

Chapeaux

Why Sidney Greenstreet Was Cool in his Panama Hat By Andrew Hamilton Junto Staff Writer Mount Shasta, California My information is that they make Panama hats in Ecuador, in the towns of Montecristi and Cuenca, because the straw grows there. They're called Panama hats because they were sold to Gringos at the Canal. The initial standard was the optimo style, the one with the Sidney Greenstreet fore-and-aft ridge down the centre and no sweat-band, so you could roll it up and stuff it into a tube. The hat tyle still exists. So do the tubes. (See Lock's in St. James's, London). The weave pretty much defines the quality, and there is a wide range. Check the feel of a $49 Cuenca against a medium-grade Montecristi, costing, say $250 in the bargain bin. The finer the weave the better it looks and feels and the least likely it is to break or fray. The finer weaves get pretty supple, which is probably why they go for the Trilby or fedora style, since the material is too soft to support much snap in your wider brims. I got mine about half an inch too wide, and it's a little floppy in a breeze. Just wore my superfino to the 45th high-school reunion, where a the sun beating down on precancerous balding domes inspired a number of guys to wear white fedoras. I was sort of embarassed, because next to the real thing they all looked like they were wearing party favors or those hard-hats disguised as Stetsons. Didn't want to seem to dis my cohort via ostentatious head-gear. Christy's in London sells a lot of Cuencas. A market Cuenca is not as well-made as a Montecristi and is usually a starker white from bleaching the straw. You can tell a Cuenca by the edges, which are usually cut, folded, and sewn back, sometimes covered with tape, and even wired, while Montecristi straws are woven tightly back into the brim leaving a smooth, slightly irregular edge. Also, a Cuenca sombrero is not as somber, and you can see lots of light coming through if you hold it up to the sun. Look closely at the brim and you'll see changes in the weave, with looser weave toward the inside letting. A Cuenca also often ends up with a cloth sweat-band, which wouldn't answer in a good Montecristi. Would be like tying your burgundy Lobbs with plaid laces. To the undiscerning lubber's eye, however, a good Cuenca hat looks about the same as a Montecristi. It's when you get down into the Macy's or Samaritaine collection of clown hats where the difference is apparent.

All Aboard!

Photos: WritersClearinghouse News Service

Andrew
Hamilton
in Avignon?

Actually, this is a mural on a lower level of Reading Terminal. It's been there as long as I've been in Philadelphia. That's 10 years. So it's at least that old. It's one of my favourites.
---RDC

Eating and Drinking My Way Through Avignon

What Would Have A.J. Liebling Thought By Andrew Hamilton Avignon, France. Last night, here in Avignon, I went back of the main visitors' area and found mostly Vietnamese restaurants and Arab kebab joints, so I went Viet, and got the €7.00 platter. Lead off with nems, which they have in all French Vietnamese restaurants -- they're like an egg-roll that you wrap in lettuce with some mint and dip in the sauce provided. And then I had chicken in the manner of Thailand, which was inoffensive lumps of chicken meat. Alongside, there was some pretty good salad, a pork pastry that tasted a little off, and a deep-fried vegetable, Vietnam turnip maybe. The rotten fish sauce bottle wasn't at my table, and I didn't bother to get up and get it. Wasn't too hungry anyway. Had orange juice instead of wine; didn't know you could order that in a restaurant and get it. The place turned out to be a wise selection, because it filled up with locals as I was trying to work the pile of Thai chicken down to where I could leave without insulting the cook. So it turns out if you walk three or four streets past its touristic center, Avignon is a more or less an average French town. I came up here to take a break from Marseille, which on a four-day glance seems to be more an emerdement than a town you'd want to live in, and because I couldn't find an apartment to rent until the end of the month. I was planning to go to Sisteron from here to cool down even more, but it turns out the only way is back through Marseille, so I may drop by Cavaillon and Arles first, or one or another of those other Provençal towns on the train line. It's been raining all over south France enough to blow out one umbrella, but today the sun came out and I broke out the superfino Montechristi wide-brim Panama (see my other Junto tale about this) and the Beretta jungle jacket from Harrod's, and a pair of genuine Perry Ellis black polyester trousers from Ross Dress For Less in Redding, California, and some tassel-loafers from the remainder bin at Penny's. I was effectively pulled to the four pins, as the French used to say and maybe still do, although being pulled to the four pins isn't what it was in our day. The high mode in France seems to be a business suit with pressed shirt-tails hanging out. Although there is always the Giant Dive Watch, which I will tell you about some time. Looking in the watchmaker's window is like looking through the Elvis plates in the Franklin Mint catalog. Now, for lunch today I dropped by the covered market near the Vietnamese restaurants and got 100 grams of stuffed olives and about 150 grams of a cheese called Tomme, which is a sharp white solid cheese that must come from around here because all the fromagiers have it. For downtown Marseilles, you can read fromagier as the cheese counter at Monoprix. Tomme is made from either cow's milk or ewe's milk, after the butter has been drawn off, the ewe's milk producing a stronger flavour. I opted for the mélange, half cow and half sheep. On the way home I bought a baguette at a bakery and a liter of orange juice at the grocery store. One of those chain small super grocery stores and the checkout girl asked me if I'd got the bread there, because I'd had madame would have cut it in half at the bakery and both halves would be sticking out of my pockets. The supermarket sales assistant was just making sure. She couldn't see the olives and the cheese in my other pocket, or she would have probably interrogated me about them as well. This morning I walked across the Petit Rhône on the highway bridge and took the free boat back. The only passengers were me and five loud teen-age punks until just before the boat sailed when 40 to 50 toddlers from the Motherly School got on. Two classes worth. They were all about two feet tall and were tagged like Christmas presents with their names and the école maternelle address and phone number. One class was organized by holding onto a red rope with a teacher at each end; the other class, just buddying up and holding hands. These kids couldn't have been older than 3-years-old. Some of them were sucking their thumbs, and they all looked baffled. I gave up my seat and stood on the open stern where I would have chosen to be anyway except, you know, the superfino Montechristi and a fairly strong Mistral on the river. The five teen-age punks moved to to the back too and became calm and well-mannered. I'm not sure how or why, but I have a feeling there was a lesson in this about what makes a Frenchman a Frenchman. Another reason I came up to Avignon was to get a Provençal tablecloth to brighten up my unabomber cabin. (As some regular readers know, my permanent home is in a wilderness area in northern California). So I stopped by the souvenir shops on the way back and bought a Scotchgard-treated cotton table-cloth,160 by 200 centimeters, the striped model, yellow and red printed cotton, with pictures of olives. It all happened so quick that the shopkeeper couldn't start his sales pitch until he was already wrapping it up. I think what I'll do now, I'll go back behind the square of the Schismatic Popes and find a place that sells fries, and buy a platter with some sort of meat to drip juice into them. Might stop and get a glass of Tavel, which is a the Rhône rosé that was A.J. Liebling's favourite on the Boul' Miche in the '20's. They have it for €6.50 a glass at the wine bar at the top of the Place de l'Horloge. Liebling, a food reviewer and critic for The New Yorker, claimed Tavel was a rosé not like your auntie's rosé, but a manned-up rosé, and I've always intended to see what he meant, and in fact have been frequenting the finest wine cellars of backwoods California to develop the expertise that might be necessary to judge it. The grocery store up the street has an AOC Tavel for €7.80, but I doubt I could reasonably kill a whole bottle in the hotel room, so I'll try the wine bar. Out on the street just now having an express at the café that I chose because it had a lot of old guys in it, I see a couple of well-turned-out local women order a big platter of french-fries, rosé all around, a basket of bread, and a big plastic squeeze-bottle of ketchup. A day later, I've already tried the Tavel. Got a glass at the wine bar, and it tasted a lot like the last rosé I had, which was Italian Swiss Colony Grenache back in the '60's, if you don't count all the Algerian Gris de Boulouane, which you probably don't because they bill that as gray instead of rosé, and it comes to town in tanker trucks. I think what happened here is the Liebling was a healthy young kid getting laid a lot and eating well and enjoying life and he let the Tavel get ahead of itself in his own mind. But there's nothing wrong with that' it's the way wine works for those of us who can't can't convince ourselves we taste differences among the vintages or strawberries and almonds in the glass, and I forgive him. Just to prove it I had a half bottle with dinner, which was dorade in pistou -- that's a small fish with a high forehead so it looks like a runt dolphinfish, or what they call mahi-mahi in West Coast restaurants. I had gone to the fish market and tried to memorize the names of the fish. Wasn't all that successful but I did learn to skip the seiche, which turns out to be giant squid that looks like what Kirk Douglas would be battling it with a harpoon in Twenty Thousand Leahues Under the Sea. Down in Sète they cut it up and mix it with octopus and make little pies out of and call it the local delicacy. In the market seiche looks like somebody dumped a half a dozen tubs of Crisco on a platter, unless they have one with the scary tentacles still attached. Got a haircut at the coiffure shop, and learned that they won't cut your hair in this country without washing it first.I'm told by my editor it's the same in Philadelphia. Barber was a nice young kid with full tatouage up both arms like a circus freak. When he found out I was American, he asked me if I knew a famous clothes designer in America, but I'd never heard of him. Turns out that whoever the famous guy is, he was born and raised in Avignon. I asked the boss lady whether it was normal to dosh the kid something, and she said yes, but it's not obligatoire, so I left him the extra euro out of 20.

Stop the Presses!

Andrew Hamilton Is Reading

in Barcelona

About April 4:

I went in a bar near the Sagrada Familia at night before dinner and there was a newspaper on a split rod hanging on a hook under the bar, a Barcelona paper called Lavanguardia. I grabbed one of those tiny hard tissues out of the napkin box and wrote down what was in it:

Along with six or seven pages of news reports on the G-20, a feature on Obama's equipe, with a graphic representation showing silhouettes of about eleven Michelle attendants, twenty or so attack dogs, around eighty Secret Service agents, Air Force One and two F-16's, the presidential limousine, a Marine Corps One helicopter and a backup chopper, and a Nimitz-class carrier off-shore with 91 combat-ready aircraft. This was like a graphic you'd see in Time Magazine, only in a daily paper and better, more informative, more honest, and cutting closer to the bone.

In another story there was a map of London with the various demonstrations and police clashes shown in red, and some notable landmarks in gray, including the London School of Economics, the Bank of England, Trafalgar Square, and Buckingham Palace.

Up front there was a top-quality action photo of Obama giving the terrorist hand-shake to a Jamaican bobby as he went into a meeting.

Between that front section and the reams of stuff about G-20 in the economics section you could find ten or so signed opinion columns and lots of apparently straight news reporting, a detailed obituary of the guy who created the Mr. Magoo cartoon character, recycled Fred Basset and Calvin and Hobbes comic strips along with a French strip that looks like Tintin but I'm not very familiar with that and it's hard to tell in Spanish, a two-page spread on the recent activities of Salman Rushdie, a story about an open-air piano concert on Las Ramblas that seems to have involved simulated sexual intercourse by a couple of actors on top of the piano, two pages on ski conditions in Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. and a story on the greening of New York City with a picture of Central Park and environs superimposed on a map of Barcelona purportedly showing how there is more green space in New York than the entire area of Barcelona.

I probably understand less than half of the Spanish, and less of the Catalan, but it seems that the news stories in Lavanguardia are comprehensive.... I used to think that Le Monde was in a class by itself, the best newspaper anywhere, but this Barcelona rag seems to be in the same league, at least as far as the ground covered and if you don't get all harsh about the international section. Catalonia has gone up twenty points in my book. even though I went down to the sea park development this morning and it seems like a step backward. If they want to build acres of last century's failing commercial real-estate, why not build it in the hills back of town, and leave the Mediterranean alone? Thousands of Barcelona pre-teens apparently would contest my opinion on this.

Snowing in Northern California

Quick, Maude! Buy Milk and Bread! By Andrew Hamilton Junto Travel Writer Three feet of snow this last 36 hours or so. Still, the big storm is supposed to be tonight and tomorrow, which bodes unwelcome because tomorrow is Sunday and it will probably continue to snow over the Monday, and the county doesn't have money to pay overtime to the snowplow drivers. They graded the county road nice and wide this morning, so they might be able to catch up on Tuesday. This snow has been light and fluffy, it pushes off the deck like whipped cream, so all will be well if it stays cold and we don't get wet snow or rain on top of it. It was such nice snow that I dug a walking trench out the the covered wood-pile, and another one to the burn-barrel, and I even cleaned off the back steps. Mail hasn't come for four days, probably because CalTrans, caught in the budget crisis, hasn't plowed the snow away from the mail-boxes, and it's pretty deep there so the mailman would have to get out and trudge through it ten feet or so to put the mail in the mail-box. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night, sure, but two feet of slag off the edge of the state snow plow, that's another story. I dropped by the post office, which is closed today, to see if there was an announcement. Dolly, the postmistress, was moving around inside there, So I stood for a while outside the glass doors where she could see me forlornly looking at the bulletin board and maybe invite me in to get my Netflix envelope. I would have knocked but there is probably a USPS rule against serving me, and if she isn't married then she's one of the few potentially available old ladies in the north lake area, and I don't want to burn any bridges. From the post-office bulletin board, I learned that the Forest Service owns the borrow-pit at the bottom of Lake Grove Drive and doesn't want people to dump "vegetative waste" there any more, nor will citizens be allowed to borrow rock from there without written permission from the government. Lake Grove Drive is the next drainage downstream from here, populated by a bunch of low-lifes because they have grid electricity, the lazy man's way to satellite TV service. The Forest Service softened the blow, or justified it by claiming that the borrow-pit is a potential LZ for the helicopter ambulance, and so let's keep it clear. Also on the post-office bulletin board were something about the Frenchman Creek school board meeting, and a poster advertising the latest concealed-carry class. For all the rampant liberalism you hear about in California, this is still a western state, and the county sheriffs can issue concealed firearms permits so long as you take the class first. This latest sheriff has won two or three elections, and I suppose he's trading votes for carry permits. For some reason your woods-dwelling yahoo, who will probably never see a scary inner-city home-boy like those guys on TV, deeply feels the need to tote a hidden pistol. The sheriff seems like an OK guy --- I saw him last summer glad-handing citizens up at the Frenchman Creek Store. The only way I could tell he was the sheriff was he was wearing a polo shirt with his name and office embroidered over the pocket, a big advance over these guys who don't go anywhere without SWAT-team gear. Skiing out the front door was good Thursday and yesterday but too deep and soft this morning and too fast on the drive down into here where a downhill neighbor and his minions snow-blew it only one tractor-width wide so there was no room to turn and slow down. Last night I skied down to my next neighbor's just down the drive, and saw they were there, there was a foot-track pushed through the snow and smoke coming out the chimney, which explained the extra truck parked up at the county road. This morning when I went up to the county road to go to the Sasquatch they had dug out their truck and were just leaving. These summer people! They probably came for the three-day weekend but big, storm coming, no balls, time to scarper. I could see by their tracks in the snow that they were wearing those ice chains you strap onto your boots. Those would come in handy in a couple of weeks if it rains on this stuff and then freezes. To be fair, they may be coming back, and if I had a place in the Bay Area with TV reception and gas heat I'd be right behind them myself. The local market up the state highway has been owned by a recent immigrant from the flatlands this past two or three years. This guy was on the front page of the newspaper a while back because he won $15,000 in a blackjack tournament in Reno. This week's paper featured him bitching and moaning because he got turned down for a small business disaster loan he applied for because it was miserable smokey all summer from the forest fires and the tourists didn't come. There was hardly anybody buying the incredibly expensive stale crackers in the market all summer except locals. I got a 20 percent off flyer in the mailbox this fall and redeemed it on some potato chips and onion soup and sour cream. I usually restrict my major purchases there to potato chips because the price is printed on the package at the factory and they can't double it. The shop's proprietor doesn't like me much ever since I asked him to tell Andy, the UPS driver, to not deliver my stuff to the market, but deliver it to me the way he's paid to do, and he got excited and told me in an inappropriately histrionic manner that he has no authority over the UPS driver, which I knew to begin with. Plus, I caught him a couple of months ago loading up on stuff off the shelves at Winco Foods in Redding. It was sort of like catching him doing, I won't say it, something embarrassing, so even though we exchange no words about it we have this ugly memory between us when I go in there, as I did today to buy a half-gallon of milk for the coming snow-in. In addition to which, he now knows that I shop at Winco Foods instead of supporting his market. I used to go into there every few days to buy tobacco products. But, since I stopped smoking, I hardly ever have to face him. Today he was sitting behind the pay counter with his feet up on the window sill, gave me the no-smile civil greeting when I came in. He knew it was me because he could spot me out the window as I skidded up, so he didn't have to change expression . Of course, there is no life lesson here, since he deals with a lot of people besides me, and is a valued member of the community, which designation I have so far effectively shirked. OK, 4:18 pm and it's snowing hard, which is exactly what the Weather Service sent the warning about. I haven't ever seen snow like this anywhere. Yo, I'm not a global warming denialist, buy I am an honourably retired US Department of the Interior scientist who used to work with the sorts of numeric modeling that are designed to predict hydrologic events, but don't predict much more than an arthritic hip would. There's been a glacier growing on the mountain up here behind me for the last three years. I'll tell you what, I wouldn't advise anyone to sell his snow blower, although just to be safe you might still want to move back from the sea-shore (Andrew Hamilton is a Junto travel correspondent who lives in a small town in Northern California, the exact locale of which is unbeknownst to the Editor).

Letter from New Orleans

Gay Bars, Dining, Wine, and Tits -- Without a Hat

By Andrew Hamilton, Junto Wine & Food Writer

New Orleans.

I've been trying to figure out what this wine business is all about. I've been pouring different vintages into different glasses, tasting them in an effort to sense the strawberries and the bananas and the oak. So far I haven't been able to taste anything buy wine alcohol, but I do get a little drunk, like right now for instance. I got a bottle of cheap Côtes du Rhône going. A young, robust vintage from the roasted côtes alongside the Rhône. It has a taste not unreminiscent of that of ... wine.

So my Panama hat is coming in the mail any day. I pungled up $250 for a superfino Montecristi to wear to Marseille this spring, and it's coming in two weeks according to my man in Nicaragua. Is there any place in California I can get this thing blocked if it's not right? Maybe Cable-Car Clothiers in San Francisco, per chance? Is $250 too much to pay for something they sell as a superfino on the Internet? I swear I'd buy one at Brooks Brothers, only Brooks Brothers don't sell such hats any more, and there aren't any hat stores, except the ones that sell baseball souveniers.

Yo, is New Orleans about puke on the sidewalk? Not so much after Katrina, maybe. First thing, I drug my boy onto the free ferry over to Algiers, which I believe is where the cops came out and stopped Katrina refugees from coming over the bridge. It was inauguration day, and when the ferry pulled in you could see this little fake slave village the people built on the outside the levee, and they were having an Obama party. Everyone was going down into there, all friendly-like, like New Orleans is supposed to biracially be, and they were playing saxaphones and electric keyboards down in there, and there were placards about the West African roots of the slaves, mostly sort of ignorant, but good hearted.

There was one poster explaining different words that might have been used for okra back there in Africa. I could have told them that the word for okra all over West Africa is 'goumbo,' no secret about it. You get to be my age, you learn to treasure these secrets to yourself.

Got a Haircut

We came to a barber shop after the party, and went inside and, surprise, I got a haircut. They talked in New Orleans accent patois, and my friend who lived in Vicksburg a while and got into gumbo cookery grilled the barber on cooking. They wanted to know what the Californians though of Obama, and they grudglingly allowed he might do better than the last guy. Barber was a white-haired ole guy, explained his gumbo secrets, told a dirty joke about a goat with his neck caught in barb-wire, and explained that he wouldn't eat possum ever since the cow died on his uncle's farm and when the kids went to look at it, and found three or four possums inside the cow.

Back up in tourist New Orleans, this was January, of course, we walked around, had the beignets mounded over with powdered sugar, had some good food, walked into a bar every now and then. Walked into one bar where the people were mellow and friendly but then my friend discovered a fish-bowl full of rubbers by the door and decided it was a gay bar and wanted to leave. Later that afternoon, I had to piss and went into a bar for the toilet, ordered a bourbon and water and looked up at the walls and there were these animated electronic placards of large throbbing penises all around.

I asked the bartender, who I noticed was wearing a frizzy purple fur vest and a necklace, is this a gay bar? And he said why, yes, it was. When I asked him, he explained the boundaries of the gay section, buy I was only thinking of a way to leave without seeming prejudiced against the queer life-style, and I didn't memorize anything.

We went to some famous new pork restaurant over in the warehouse district and it was pretty good. Not half so good as the next day, though, when we went to the Acme Oyster Bar for both lunch and dinner. Nothing fancy about those foods, just raw oysers and oyster dope you mixed up out of the condiments at the table. Oh, my, it was good.

What's left of New Orleans above flood line includes the French Quarter, which is where we were most of the time. We walked down Bourbon Street a bunch of times. Pretty tatty, although not enough vacationing Presbyterians had dropped by to leave puke on the street. I kept seeing these African masks from my own Africa home towns in the vooddoo stores. I'd go in and ask the shopgirls where they got the masks, because I used to have friends in the business, and they either didn't have a clue, or said it was some wholesaler in Ghana. They had fair copies from all over West Africa, but all they were using them as bait for the rubes.

Shaved Armpits

This guy I went with is about my age, bald with a frizz of white hair, a guy I used to work with, a kind of middle-American cornball whose wife is happy to let him travel on his own, and who gets a kick out of touristing. I went to France with him a few years back, and he marveled at the fact that the people didn't stink the way they're supposed to, and maybe the women even shaved their armpits.

So we're walking down Bourbon Street before it is even dark, and this babe about three feet away looks at him and pulls her shirt up and shows him her tits. This woman was unaffiliated with any bar or club, and I think she was just doing it because she thought that's what you're supposed to do when you go to Bourbon Street. She saw it on television, on 'Girls Gone Wild,' or something. Pretty tatty, as they say, but not unwelcome and no harm done. Nice tits, if the truth be known.

Never did walk down to see the drowned places. They were nearby, but I felt as if it would be getting off on someone else's misfortune, so didn't make it.

On the whole, New Orleans looks like a fairly convenable place, especially over the river in Algiers, but nowhere near as calm and clean as Philly. I'm thinking of motorcycling there next summer and cruising up through the other southern cities, only because the motorbike is easy on the gas and I can sleep on the ground, at least in the West. If I'm lucky I got another five to fifteen years before incapacity, and there might be a good American town to pass the five to fifteen years in.

Otherwise, I've been trying to work up an explanation of how there used to be a train station where you could take trains out of San Francisco. It's not coming together.

(Staff Writer Andrew Hamilton lives in northern California).