After the Sunday Market

Orléans

J had two days off earlier this month for Toussaint (All Saints’ Day), so we took a short trip to Orléans.  This was perhaps not our most elaborately-planned trip; we decided to go after getting an email from the French train company advertising two-for-one fares and skimming a list of destinations within an hour of Paris.

Orléans is a city of about 125,000 people in the northern part of the Loire Valley.  It is about 80 miles south (and slightly west) of Paris.  Orléans might be best known as the site of a victory for the French (led by 17-year old Joan of Arc) over the English during the Hundred Years War.  Joan of Arc is one of the patron saints of France and she is known as the Maid of Orléans.  Walking around Orléans, you see signs of the city’s connection with Joan of Arc everywhere.  We saw streets named for her, statues of her, even a reconstruction of the house where she lived while defending Orléans (the original was destroyed in World War II).

Joan is Arc is memorialized in the Cathédrale Ste-Croix in the center of Orléans as much as she is across the rest of the city.  There are stained glass windows in the cathedral telling the story of her life and a giant tapestry depicting her hangs behind the altar.

We spent a relaxing few days in Orléans wandering through the medieval quarter of the city and along the banks of the Loire River.  

It did rain quite a bit, but we were able to stay dry visiting the cathedral, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, a cute wine bar, and (a first for us in France) a shopping mall.  The mall was adjacent to the train station and contained a huge Carrefour (a major French retailer) store.  We walked around marvelling at the giant store, which was similar to a Wal-Mart but was still distinctly French: the giant aisle of wine seemed to go on forever and prominently-placed refrigerated cases were full of discount duck and foie gras.

Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé

Beaujolais nouveau is a light, fruity red wine made from Gamay grapes grown in the Beaujolais region of France.  It is aged for only about 6 weeks before bottling and was traditionally enjoyed by the farmers of the region to celebrate the end of the harvest.  The wine is released to the public on the third Thursday of November each year.  While the date was set by wine distributors and the popularity was originally due to marketing more than anything else, it is a festive day in Paris.  Wine shops and grocery stores have tastings, advertisements about Beaujolais nouveau are all over the subway, and it can even be a reason to throw a party.

This year we stopped by a tasting in honor of the Beaujolais nouveau at the Caves Augé, one of the oldest wine shops in Paris (established in 1850).  They were serving raw oysters, charcuterie, and Beaujolais nouveau.  We even saw wine being bottled directly from a large barrel out on the sidewalk.

The wine-bottling operation is hidden behind the white boxes.

Légumes d'automne

We are having a vegetable-filled fall.  We normally get a vegetable basket every other week, but I can change the delivery dates if we are going to be out of town.  Several of our pick-up dates were pushed into the fall because of travel over the summer, so we have had a basket every week since we got back from the United States.

Pears, peppers, turnips, green beans, zucchini and cauliflower from a basket earlier this fall

Even with the steady influx of produce from the baskets, I can’t resist picking up other vegetables when at the market for our other groceries.  I recently tried out a new market on the other side of town and came home with some Green Zebra tomatoes, gorgeous purple carrots and kale.  

I was really excited to find the kale. It is easy to find throughout the fall in stores and farmers' markets in Chicago and I was used to baking it into smoked-paprika-dusted chips or wilting it into stews and soups.  When we moved to Paris I looked all over for it and was unable to find any.  I gave up on the search until a coworker of J’s mentioned The Kale Project in passing a few months ago.  It was fun to read the blog of an American expat who came to Paris around the same time as we did. Instead of shrugging and buying more cheese upon discovering the lack of kale in Paris (which had been my response to the situation), the author has been working to bring kale to Paris. 

I headed to the Marché Président Wilson to check out the stand of the Joel Thiébault after learning through the Kale Project that he has been selling kale this year.  The stand had more stunning vegetables than I could ever fit into our tiny refrigerator and I exercised restraint in only buying the kale, tomatoes and carrots pictured above.  As we’ve mentioned before, most of the stands in the markets in Paris buy their vegetables from the farmers at a wholesale market just outside the city. I was intrigued to find that not only was the source of my kale a stand run by the farmer himself, but that his family has had a stand in the market in that area since the 1800s!  The vegetables were delicious and the variety at Monsieur Thiébault’s stand was amazing.  I plan to keep visiting the Marché Président Wilson to see what else I can find as the seasons change. This was a good reminder to keep trying different markets around Paris, maybe someday I will run across someone with jalapeños for sale . . .

C'est le vote!

One interesting aspect of our time here in Paris has been that 2012 is a presidential election year for both France and the United States.  While we couldn’t vote in the French election, we made sure to request absentee ballots for the election in the U.S.  The Federal Voting Assistance Program has materials for U.S. citizens living outside the country (including active duty service members and their families) to use in requesting and submitting absentee ballots.  

I filled out our ballot requests and mailed them in while we were in Chicago in September.  U.S. citizens living outside the country request an absentee ballot from their last state of residence and each state has its own process for absentee voting.  Illinois allows voters to elect to receive absentee ballots by email, paper mail, or fax.  We requested both email and paper mail and received emails with all of the ballot materials attached as pdfs within a week of sending in the ballot requests.  Our paper copies took a little longer to reach France, but we were excited to see that they included very official-looking ballots.

We were even more excited to learn that we could submit our absentee ballots at a drop-box in the U.S. Embassy in Paris.  For two people who are always very enthusiastic voters, the more elaborate the ballot submission process, the better!  Absentee ballots need to be postmarked by November 5 in order to be counted.  By submitting our ballots to the drop box at the embassy, we did not need to pay international postage and had an excuse to visit the embassy.

We stopped by the embassy one morning this week before J went to work.  It seemed appropriate that we overheard two people with foreign accents energetically discussing the most recent debate on our way to drop off our ballots.  When we arrived at the embassy, it was a little confusing trying to figure out how exactly to get in to drop off our ballots.  The first set of guards that we encountered to did not seem to speak English very well and I had not thought to look up vocabulary related to embassies or voting.  It turns out that the words for vote and election are almost the same in French and English, but I managed to avoid saying either of those words and kept mentioning ballots (which did not help).  It took J blurting out “Obama!” while I pointed at the envelopes containing our ballots to get us directions to the correct entrance.  

When we eventually reached the place where the ballot drop box was stored and the security guard realized what we were looking for, she exclaimed, “C’est le vote!”  After confirming that the names on the envelopes containing the ballots matched our passports and verifying that the passports matched our faces, we were given a box to slide our ballots into.  The security guards in the room all applauded while we “voted.”  We concluded our somewhat confusing embassy experience by getting chastised by a guard for trying to take a picture of the building.

While we have already voted, Election Day is still almost two weeks away in the U.S.  For those of you in Illinois, the Chicago Council of Lawyers is a non-partisan public interest bar association that has prepared judicial evaluations of state judges seeking election or retention on the November 6, 2012 ballot.  Those materials are currently available online.