Bill under the mushroom-shaped fountain at the pool, a nice neck massage

Gilles predicts today will be the last nice day of summer. Clouds and rain are coming in, starting tomorrow. It’s also the first day of school. Kids here only get three weeks off, in August, and then they go back the first day of September. Lily is home now on lunch-break from school, and has a king’s crown made out of construction paper and staples. Everything’s in German, but she’s getting on fine.

You have similar signs of back-to-school here in Germany as you do in the U.S.: end-caps at the grocery stores full of cheap school supplies, for example.

I’ve been fumbling through the German language on daily outings, with a lot of apologizing and pointing. It was hard at the post office, mailing a package to Rome, but I made it through with charades (“by air, or land?”).

Our days repeat themselves, here: Saturdays I established as omelette day, along with Reggae to celebrate my favorite radio program in Seattle, but then we decided to do omelettes on Mondays as well, to celebrate the fact that we’re not working. Today is Tuesday, and we had omelettes again.

Dawn and I have been staying up after the girls go to bed, sipping wine and talking about our next travel plans. Then, the sun hits us around 7 each morning, and we lay there for a solid hour or more as it gets warmer. The girls don’t get up until the 8 o’clock hour (a nice change from Charlotte’s daily 6:30 a.m. ritual, back home).

By 4 p.m., I am thinking about beer. Beer here is incredibly cheap and consistently good. It’s all shades of greatness, but I am still in search of my favorite. The ingredients are simple – water, malt, and hops.

We have a snack, and then we prepare dinner: tonight, grilled pork chops with thyme, a tomato zucchini gratin, and fresh sonnenblumen bread from the bakery. I also discovered a Chôtes-du-Rhône in the market that’s about $12 USD here (but easily a $20 wine back home). So today I will go check the ’06. This is how we fill our days.

Last night, Gilles came by expecting dinner at 9 p.m., and called us berbers for having eaten already. Mom prepared toast for him with tomatoes, cheese and avocadoes, and he was satisfied.

Gilles may wind up being the only Parisian we get to know really well. After consulting with Miriam and Olivier about him, they confirmed he sounds typical Parisian, with a few telltale signs: one, the pride he takes in continuous learning and philosophy, and another, the pride he takes in his surname, how unique it is, and how impossible it is for people like us to pronounce it properly. When he talks about Paris, his spine straightens, his chest puffs up, and he begins waving his hands for emphasis.

It’s unclear to me exactly why he’s spent the last 20 years here in Besigheim, in this old, German village, alone. There were three failed relationships with women who put him in a state of despair he cannot overcome. Now he’s about to turn 61, the only real relationship he has is with his mother and my mother, and both of them drive him crazy. We get into at least one loud argument each time he is here, and he’s here almost every day. The other night, we argued about the pasta, and how close it was to being done. He is hard to work with in the kitchen, but good. And he does not tolerate anything that’s “off” (cooked wrong, seasoned wrong, etc.). He shows disgust often (last night to me: “You do nothing, all day.”), but as often, pure kindness and generosity. “I have nothing else to do – I have no one,” he says.

Categories: Travelogues