2023-07-05
Wednesday was a day with many small episodes plus one small adventure.
After the usual breakfast conversation Éliane and I set to work on correcting / revising my translation of the English text from my aspirational website www.frenchtheaterproject.com. We took as a starting point the first draft of the translation (un premier jet) that I’d made Tuesday with the aid of Google Docs’ automatic grammar and spelling corrections. Even so, it had a lot of basic errors around gender and number, around de vs des, and so forth. Beyond that a number of the sentences had to be reworked as my translations were sometimes plodding and cumbersome, and sometimes too highfalutin or full of imagery. Upon reflection, that’s probably the case as well for the original text I wrote in English eight months ago. There’s not a lot of text on the site, so we got through it fairly rapidly. I’ve yet to update the site, but I hope to do so before long.
After the translation exercise, Benjamin joined us for a short game of Scrabble. The French version of the game has a different distribution of letter frequency in the tiles and a different assignment of points to each letter, but the rules are otherwise the same. I was pleased to find I could play fairly effortlessly, at least in terms of finding legal moves that used five or six of my tiles each turn. We weren’t keeping score, and I wasn’t trying to optimize points, so I’m not making any judgment on how skilled a French Scrabble player I might be. But I definitely have the ability to find plenty of valid words that I could place from each rack. Being in the habit of doing French crosswords definitely helped, as those feature lots of words of 2-8 letters, and often have to use words that fit well in constrained grids. I might see if I can find an online French Scrabble platform where I can play against robots or even other players. I bet I could learn a lot of words that way.
We cut our game short to drive to Lastours, a small town near la Montagne Noire, where we had lunch at a 1-star Michelin restaurant (un restaurant gastronomique) named Le Puits Du Trésor. Éliane and Benjamin had an appointment in town at 3pm, so we opted for the simple menu découverte (starter, main course, dessert) rather than any of the more elaborate tasting menus. Even so, the chef sent us eight or ten other small plates throughout lunch in addition to the nominal three courses of the menu. I can’t even being to recall them all, but the ingredients were quite varied: artichoke, celery leaves, sweet potato, date-and-banana paste, pistachio, small anchovy-and-chocolate croutons, mini carrot cakes, truffled butter, dried pork liver, marshmallow, apricots, and more. Plus a bunch of edible flowers and little mini-vegetable like things I hadn’t seen before and can’t name in French or English. The three featured courses were good, but blended in with the parade.
The only downside to the meal was that we were under a time limit, and so everything felt rushed even though we arrived around 12:15. The restaurant probably thought we were ungrateful and even rude as we wolfed down some of the later offerings and didn’t linger over wine or have coffee at the end. Ah, well. We hurried out and Éliane and Benjamin dropped me off at the house on the way to their next engagement.
I spent the afternoon doing laundry and making my first plans for Avignon shows. Mostly I consulted Télérama’s pre-review of the festival and bought a ticket for anything they awarded three stars (or rather, three Ts). I didn’t look ahead much, but just went down the list and bought tickets sequentially, choosing dates more or less at random. But I couldn’t help notice a pattern – the majority of the highly rated shows were playing at just 2 theaters (out of over 100): La Scala Provence and 11-Avignon. I saw a number of shows at the first of these last year and there were at least a couple that stood out as excellent. I don’t recall seeing anything at 11-Avignon. But I wonder if there isn’t some kind of bias, perhaps as simple as which theaters host shows that can be seen in advance. I also purchased a ticket for a five-hour show that is part of the IN Festival at the recommendation of a theater professor I met at Avignon last year. In all, I’ve got tickets for eight shows so far and plenty of free slots in my calendar. So I’ll ask around for word-of-mouth recommendations.
Around 7:40pm I borrowed a bicycle from my hosts and returned to L’Orgeril winery at Pennautier where Éliane had taken me Tuesday. They operate a restaurant named La Table Cave du Château which Éliane recommended. The ride there, about 4 or 5 kilometers, was a little nerve wracking. The Google directions didn’t line up with reality — it had me cycling along “roads” that were little more than rutted tracks that ran through fields of nearby farms, and then had me cutting across open space where even Google didn’t claim there was a road. I ended up back tracking a little to take longer though more legitimate roads to the restaurant. I arrived some 15 minutes late but the restaurant folks were completely unphased.
Dinner was simple but tasty: “mediterranean” gazpacho with feta cheese, black Angus beef grilled with potatoes and zucchini, and a chocolate-crusted tart of apricots with meringue. It was served with an inferior glass of red wine from the winery. I’ve rarely had bad wine in France, but I’m beginning to think that the area around Carcassonne is not great for wine (I’ve tried a few others and they are consistently ordinary). For the second time in one day I felt rushed at the end of a meal, this time because night was falling and I had to ride home. Sunset was around 9:40p and dusk lasted until around 10:00 pm, but I didn’t have any lights on my bike. I took a different route, again encountered fields where Google maps told me there would be roads, doubled back, and ended up riding on the 60 kph departmental road for some 800 meters. I was covered with sweat and a bit amped up on adrenaline when I got home shortly after 10pm, so I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight. I’m writing this on Thursday, as I didn’t feel up to writing last night.
Two restaurant meals in one day is too many. Tonight I’m going to have a simple picnic for dinner.