will WE play in Peoria?

Bill and I have been asked to take over managing the ISE mentor family program. As best I can tell, it basically consists of pairing incoming families with people who are already here and can help them out. The couple doing it now says it’s something of a headache… one of those sorts of things where you can’t make everyone happy all of the time and the people you don’t make happy like to tell you how you’ve failed. I can’t wait. Bill thinks it will do me some good to have something to focus on. As they say: on vera. (We’ll see).

Kaitlyn and I like to watch shows on Food TV that show you how things are made. Today she is jealous because I got to go to a chocolatier and see how chocolate is made. (It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t eat it. She is just that fascinated by how things are made. She’s just like her dad!)

I took part in a tour of Bonnat Chocolate in Voiron, France. It’s the same town where the distillery tour for the Chartreuse liquor is. But I’ve never actually gone into the little town before. It’s really charming and filled with quaint little shops and restaurants. Now I know for the next time I drag someone to the 3-D movie of monks making the green liquor.

Getting there wasn’t that easy. I rode in a car with a woman who’d “insisted” on driving. Turns out, she did so because she doesn’t drive here and thought it would be the perfect opportunity to practice. I wanted to shoot her. She was afraid to drive fast enough to keep up with the people we were following. And by fast enough, I mean the speed limit. She was terrified of roundabouts. Which can be a real problem driving here. Basically, she really pissed me off.

Once there, we went into this wonderful shop filled with all sorts of chocolates and pastries. We sat in the tea room where the owner and her daughter talked about the history of the shop, how they use different kinds of beans from around the world, then had us taste a few different ones to see if we could discern the difference. It was all good. And they really did all taste different.

Then we went back into where all the cooking is done. We started in the bakery for the pastries. There we saw an oven that’s been there since 1856. They still use it. We watched them pull some pastries out, in case we needed proof.

That was followed by the main attraction: the chocolate. We saw the room where they make the insides of the chocolates… that is, if the chocolate is one with a gooey inside. The owner’s son who was giving us the tour speaks very good English. But I still couldn’t quite understand his explanation of how they use some liquor that will kill you if you drink it and it is cold outside, yet it is perfectly safe to be in the candies.

This is one of only four chocolate makers in France that roasts and grinds its own beans. We couldn’t see the roaster, but we did see the room where the grinding is all done. It smelled amazing. Along the wall were giant bags of chocolate beans; next to the machines were buckets with the de-shelled fragments of the beans waiting to be ground and mixed with sugar and cocoa butter. He invited us to try some. So we did. We just stuck our dirty hands into the bucket of bean shavings destined to be made into high-end, expensive chocolates. The beans like that weren’t too good. Obviously, not sweetened yet. And the texture was like eating a coffee bean. Which is best done when wrapped in chocolate, so it was a strange flavor experience.

When the tour ended, we all flooded the store as if we’d never be able to buy any of this stuff ever again. I think I’ll go back.

I went to the mall today and couldn’t believe my eyes. No, they didn’t have clothes sizes for normal people. But they did have Kids. Real, honest to goodness Keds. With a little sign on the display showing off the familiar blue label. Granted, the Keds they were selling aren’t the tried-and-true plain white variety. They were sparkley. Or with fruit on them. But, hey, they were Keds. Maybe I won’t be a foot-fashion outcast the whole time I live here after all.

We’ve been having a tough time trying to figure out what we’re going to do this August. We had planned on taking our home leave then… until the company told us they won’t foot the bill. (They pay for us to fly home once a year… with extra baggage. The calendar for that year re-sets on the anniversary of our arrival here… which is in October.) We were going to just pay for our own airfare but the prices right now are just crazy. I’ve looked at cruises, beaches, Ireland, bike tours, all-inclusive resorts, villas in Tuscany.. nothing has quite been the thing that we’ve looked at and said “oh, yes, that’s the thing!” Tonight Bill said maybe we should just pay to go home, since that seems to be the thing we want to do. And since the Euro is pounding the dollar, it will cost us about the same. I don’t know…. I just don’t know….

THINGS I LEARNED ON THIS TRIP:

1.Stay close to the things you want to see. Don’t try to cram in a beach vacation with a sightseeing vacation. Do one or the other.
2.Look up train time tables in advance. Don’t count on them actually having any at the train stations.
3.Hotel advice is better taken from Trip Advisor than from friends… unless I ask all the right questions like: are there ants in the bathroom? (yes) there’s a washing machine, is there a dryer? (no) is the beach right in front of the hotel sand? (no) do they bother to actually heat the hot tub? (no)
4. Go to cities with something in them you want to see. Enjoying our time in Barcelona emphasized how Lisbon was miserable in part because there was nothing there we were really interested in. Except the cruise ship.
5.It’s ok to go to the Hard Rock Cafe and Starbucks. They make us feel less homesick. There is nothing wrong with that.
6.Carry plenty of Kleenex in your pockets. And maybe a change of underwear for Kaitlyn.

Next May if we go somewhere for this obscenely long holiday weekend (Thurs-Mon), we’ll go by train or plane. The traffic is horrible. Not in Spain. It starts as soon as you cross the border. Several times we’ve come to a complete stop. And there’s never an obvious reason.

I guess we should have set that alarm clock.

**UPDATE**
It took 9 and a half hours from the time we left Carrefour till we got home. (That’s 12 hours since we left the hotel.) Bill eventually gave up on the autoroute and got off to try his luck on the two-lane highways. I don’t know that it got us home any faster but it made him feel better.

12 may 2008
part 2

Turns out today but be a holiday in Spain. We figured this out when we went to Carrefour to stock up on all the products they have here and not in France. It was packed. It was the kind of packed that at home, I’d have turned around and walked out.

Instead, we braved the crowd and filled our cart. We bought:

Oscar Mayer bacon
refried beans
canned jalapeños
pickles (hopefully they’ll be more like the ones we’re used to and miss)
mint gum (yes, it’s remarkably hard to find in France)
Rice Krispies
Cheetoes
plain tortilla chips
salsa

We also ended up buying yet more shopping bags. Then we realized no one was using the bags you buy. The stores here use plastic ones.

The one thing I forgot because it was too crowded to wander up and down every single aisle at leisure was Philadelphia cream cheese. It’s probably just as well.

We forgot to set any kind of alarm last night to make sure we got up at a decent hour to hit the road. We woke up at the same time we’ve been getting up the whole vacation… around 9. At least I’d packed a lot of stuff last night.

We checked out of the hotel and drove into Sitges for breakfast (no way am I eating at the hotel again). I’d seen a place with a sign boasting a breakfast buffet for 6 Euros. The breakfast buffet at the hotel was 13 Euros a person… and not worth it. The cheaper one was a heck of a lot better. I don’t know why but Kaitlyn threw a fit that we weren’t going to eat at the hotel. All weekend she’s been determined to insist on doing whatever it is we’ve just said we aren’t going to do. I can’t wait until she’s a teenager.

Earlier this weekend, I asked bill why it seems people we know all have wonderful fun-filled vacations. But now I realize why. If someone asks me how our trip to Barcelona was, I’ll say “we had a good time.” Which is true. But I won’t drone on about the rotten service at the restaurant or the long walk to reach the sand or probably even the rain. Now I know the answer to my question.

The guidebooks warn that the closest metro or bus stop to Park Guell is a good 15 minute walk. By driving into Barcelona (we’ve completely abandoned the idea of taking the train), we shaved about 400 meters off the trek. What the guidebooks fail to adequately point out is that the walk to the park is uphill. Up a very steep hill. So steep that the city installed long escalators to help with the climb. (There are stairs alongside for the hearty. Or foolish.)

Our first… vital… stop once we got to the park was the bathroom. Which was not especially close to the entrance. Naturally there was a long line. More unexpected – the bathroom attendant who doled out woefully small rations of toilet paper. I will simply say that we are all very fortunate that I had a travel packet of Kleenex in my pocket.

Kaitlyn really enjoyed the park. I hoped she would, but was a little worried since it’s an unfinished housing development donated to the city and left as such… not a traditional park with big chunks of grass to run on or swings to swing on. She had looked at some pictures in a book t his morning and really enjoyed finding the things she had seen in the pictures. Her favorite was the lizard statue… because it looks just like her little foam lizard we bought earlier.

When we walked through the Gaudi museum, which is inside a model home he’d built, Kaitlyn made up stories about each room and how much work it was for “her guy” to paint the ceilings, etc. I didn’t learn a thing about Gaudi, but had fun with Kaitlyn. I figure I can buy a book about him.