pyrénées! pâtisseries! joyeuse réunions!

Boy, have I got a lot to share; gird your loins for a long blog! 

Last Wednesday, I flew to Girona (Spain) to meet up with my college roommate, Joy, who is spending a month in Europe. 

We picked up a rental car, and on Thursday we set off on an adventure.  We drove up into the Pyrenees, sticking to small mountain roads, and went through the tiny country of Andorra.  On the Spanish side, we drove through high, dry valleys full of pine trees and rocky vistas, and once we got over to the French side, we were in lush green watersheds, but Andorra was UGLY.  You’d think an itty-bitty country high in the Pyrenees supposedly founded by Charlemagne would be an idyll, right?  Well, millions of other people have thought so, too, and development has boomed.  Andorra is essentially a tax-free shopping center-cum-ski resort that has too much traffic.  We stopped, anyway, and had some delicious but overpriced paella, and continued on to the green valleys of France.

My first view of France was of sweeping, snowcapped peaks and windswept scree slopes descending to rushing creeks and waterfalls, which plunged down into fertile valley bottoms.  We meandered along tiny roads through even tinier villages, and the drive only became stressful when it started to pour, but even in the rain, France was beautiful. We arrived at our destination late in the afternoon: the teacup-sized village of Cescau, where we stayed in a house that had this view of the Pyrenees:

I know, right?  Heaven on earth!  Joy and I had signed up to be Help Exchangers (www.helpx.net), where in exchange for about 4 hours of work a day, we got free room, board, and conversation with some pretty cool people.  The family who hosted us actually left for four days to visit their in-laws for Easter.  After the first day where we met the family and organized the projects we planned on doing for them, we had the place to ourselves.  We woke up every morning and walked to the next village down the road, Castillon, to visit the two marvelous pâtisseries (bakeries).

Joy searching for grasshoppers along the road

Castillon

We indulged in chaussons aux pommes (apple turnovers) and pain au chocolat (chocolate croissants), and then we ambled back to the house and made coffee, and we munched happily on the back deck, looking out at the view.  Just in case you didn’t get enough of the view the first time, here’s what it looked like after a night of rain in the lowlands and snow up high:

The Hallelujah Chorus should be playing in the background...

Then, we’d put on some kickin’ music and get to work.  One of our projects was in a tiny hallway in the basement: stripping the wallpaper, re-plastering, sanding, and priming:

Joy won the longest-strip-of-wallpaper contest

After a couple of hours of work in the morning, we’d break for lunch and have goat cheese smeared over a baguette, or leek and potato soup, or a salad with homemade mustard dressing… if we hadn’t had the promise of gardening in the afternoon, it would have been difficult to go back to work after so much amazing food!  The garden was well-established and full of riotous vegetables, flowers, and weeds.

We spent the evenings playing card games and Scrabble and reading, and we fell asleep to chorus frogs chirping and we woke up to songbirds singing. 

HOLD IT!  If this were a movie, right now the film would screech to a halt, rewind past the idyllic bird tweeting, and James Earl Jones would start narrating the facts.  A French-American family handed over the keys to their rambling old house to two perfect strangers.  Those two twenty-something women were great friends from college who hadn’t seen each other in a year.  They out-gourmanded themselves every day with simple French home cooking.  They were in a quintessential mountain village, complete with slate roofs.  They were surrounded by pastoral, bucolic scenes.  AND THE VIEW!

The neighbor's house

Curious cows

No, this is not some fantasy I cooked up while sitting at home in my, er, Mediterranean island home.  This was the real deal.

On top of that, you know how any art or anthropology class you ever took started with those cave paintings in southern France?  Well, we went there!  There are actually several caves with different kinds of paintings (animals, hand-outlines, etc.), and Joy and I went to two of them.  First, we went to the Gargas cave, where there are over 200 negative hand prints with various fingers missing on the walls of the cave.  There are a few theories about the fingerless hands: people chopped off their own fingers, then put their mutilated hands on the wall and painted around them; lots of people with leprosy liked making hand prints; or there was some sort of symbolic significance of lowering fingers while painting.  The Niaux (pronounced “nee-oh”) cave has one of the best-preserved collections of the 25,000-year-old paintings.  After descending past stalactites and stalagmites and echoey drips and puddles, we arrived in a huge cavern covered with charcoal drawings of bison, ibex, and horses.  Someone asked why the same three animals were repeated over and over, and the guide said something like, “When you see lots of pictures of lions and lambs together, or of a main nailed up on two sticks of wood, you don’t have to ask what it means.  The bison, ibex, and horse were symbolic of something, and the people who drew them knew the story.  We can only get parts of the story,” There were probably paintings outside of the caves as well, but after 25,000 years, nothing is left, so we only concentrate on the few paintings that were preserved.

bison from the Niaux cave

My French is rather similar: I can catch three words every once in a while, but the rest is a mystery.  After the cave walks, I know a couple of words: tête (head), glissant (slippery), and flaque d’eau (puddle).  Those were pretty important for safely walking through a dark, dank cave, but if I heard a conversation on the street that happened to include the word “glissant,” I would have no context to place around it.  Scientists are now spending careers studying those one-word conversations represented by the cave paintings that remain.

Joy and I spent 6 days exploring the French Pyrenees, and it wasn’t enough for me; it was hard to find anything wrong.  Perhaps the chorus frogs that sang us to sleep at night were a little off-key.

We have now spent 5 more days hanging out on Mallorca, and Joy is leaving on Wednesday. It’s going to be quite a bit sadder and lonelier when she goes, but I’m not thinking about it yet.  It’s been a joyous two weeks!