Day 13 - Angers

My objective, upon my leaving Paris, was to see Chartres and then Angers. Plenty of trains went to and from Chartres; it is only a one-hour train ride; and the city itself is small enough that one can see the interesting parts of it in an hour or two. This plan, like many others, did not turn out. The trains for Chartres and Angers left from different stations, requiring me to take the subway between them, and I got a little lost, as Paris has two separate subway systems, and its designers had the pernicious habit of referring to both subway carriages and trains as "trains," meaning that one can rarely trust signs saying "trains this way" when one is looking for actual trains that go between cities. I accepted Chartres as another loss - one cannot win them all - and grabbed lunch at a Dutch pancake house near the train station, giving my last, unnecessary subway ticket to a young woman at a bus stop, who was very grateful.

In general, I tried to see far too much in and around Paris in the five days in which I was there, from which I hope to learn not to rush so much in future. One of the joys of Paris - one of the few joys - which I forgot to mention the other day was that one stumbles on all sorts of churches and buildings while merely walking through the city: one sees some things unexpectedly and fails to see other things that one plans to see. Although I did not see every church that I had scoped out on the map for the morning of the 10th, when I had already given up on going to Chartres, I had already started coming to accept that one cannot see every single church, historical city, or sight in any country. I think that the last vestiges of my perfectionism, as I had probably mentioned before, show in my style of travel, and I hope to conquer them, trying to get the feel for a place and enjoy myself rather than documenting everything that a country has to offer (which is impossible regardless). I left Paris yesterday afternoon with these thoughts, but I was also tired and felt ready to go home.

While I slipped into my typical oblivion on the train ride to Angers, my arrival there was magical. I found the hotel in which I would be staying within about three minutes and found myself in a city with breathable air and almost no buildings taller than three storeys. As it was almost dinnertime when I got there, I quickly sought out a place to eat, taking the hotelier's advice to look at a place around the corner. I learned there that it would not be open for another hour, and I considered crossing the street to look at another restaurant, but there were two lanes of French drivers in my way, all of whose days it would have made to run me over; I decided that I was fated to take the hotelier's advice. I bought another almond cake pastry to tide me over for the hour, bought groceries for the next night's dinner, explored the nearby cafes and other eateries to find a place to get lunch, and read a bit of poetry on my computer, showing back up at the restaurant at 7:00 PM sharp.

I love the nineteenth-century literary trope of saying, "If I were a poet, I would describe this in the greatest detail, but, alas, I am not," and then proceeding to describe something for several pages. I felt that some sort of momentous sentence was needed to start this paragraph, but I could not find one to try to sum up my experience of eating at a real French restaurant. To being with, some basics: although the place had a name, the sign out front merely said "restaurant." It displayed its menu outside - I will not eat at places that do not - but, when I went inside, the lone waitress, the wife of the cook, whom we could see working, told me that they only served one dish on Tuesdays: pitas with an assortment of "garnishes." I killed a roach or beetle of some sort that had started wandering up my leg as she said this; she said, "Oh!", and a look of consternation flashed across her face, but we continued talking as usual. She was in no rush as we talked; she was happy discussing the menu and France in general; and she did not pressure me to drink anything other than water. Service in France is pretty good.

It must have taken ten of fifteen minutes for the first part of my meal to come. The cook made the pitas in a massive kiln, an old-fashioned oven of several cubic meters, roasting them on a metal slat that he removed with giant metal tongs. The waitress explained to me that they were very hot, and that one ate them by cutting them open and filling them, like pouches, with the so-called garnishes that she was bringing me. The first two garnishes were some sort of garlic butter and pork paste, which was stewed pork cut up finely. Both were fantastic. These were later replaced with creamy, mushroom-based sauce and a ratatouille, and the final dish was baked Camembert cheese. For dessert I was brought smaller pitas, along with jam, a chocolate sauce, and a caramel sauce. By the time at which I finished, it was 8:30, and I thought that I was going to die, as I had been given enough food for two people. The restaurant was gradually filling up, but I knew that it would not be full by the end of the evening; there were still more flies than people in it. I sat motionless for twenty minutes, waiting for the waitress to bring me the check, until I saw the couple next to me get up and go to her. They had ordered wine with their dinner, and it was a wonder that they did not fall asleep in their chairs. I suppose that French people get acclimated to this type of food.

Surprisingly, I got some work done that night, thanks to my abstemiousness. The hotel in which I was staying was so nice as to make the hostel in Paris seem like a bad dream: while it did not have a fridge, it had a normal-sized bathroom, comfortable bed, and evidence absence of dust. This was the kind of place in which one could spend a week or two, visiting nearby castles in the Loire Valley and getting fat off of spectacular dinners in the evening. I am inclined to say that the restaurant at which I ate in Versailles (the town), at which I was served wiener schnitzel, more or less, was a fraud and that French food is better than its German or Austrian counterparts. I discussed this at some length with the waitress the other night, as she was gregarious and I was the only person in the restaurant for some time. When I mentioned wanting to try a fricassee de volaille, or stewed game, in Bordeaux, she scrunched up her face in doubt, telling me that it was best in Anjou and that I had better try the duck farther south. (I just realized that this type of nitpicking makes me sound like a rich gourmand. Oh well.) I have made it my goal to try either duck or fowl before leaving France and to have pork cheeks, which I first tried in the French Alps. I do not know if the food that I will get on this trip will equal what I had in Chamonix, as I was on a tour that directed us toward high-end places, but it will probably be one of the highlights of the trip.

I forgot to mention two things in my earlier discussion. One, which I forgot again and just now remembered, is that, as I am choosing my spots with pastries and trying to learn to choose my spots with cities, I am not going to have fancy dinners every night, having decided to reserve them for cities known for their food. Tonight, for example, I had tinned fish (mackerel, this time; sardines are more expensive per unit of mass) and canned vegetables, which sucked (but were nutritious and very cheap). Tomorrow, in Blois, I am going to have something fancy, as I will probably do in Bordeaux. In Toulouse I am going to eat relative garbage (cheap, healthy food from a grocery store), and I will not eat out more than once or twice in Avignon. If all of this travelling can teach me to lead life with greater moderation and to see things less in black and white, I will have come out on top, even if it has entailed certain missteps and frustrations.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was being amused at seeing two brothers sitting side-by-side, looking at their cell phones before their dinner was served. I realized, perhaps before dozing off on the train to Angers, that travellers are lucky in being able to find magic in the everyday. Frenchmen going to Angers or Nantes on business probably do not find it very interesting, yet to a traveller taking the subway or a train can be exciting, as it is new. I do not know how to turn this into a life philosophy beyond recommending that all of us try to find some magic in our everyday lives; that is rather cheap advice, as I do not practically know how to do it, and I expect that I am parroting what anyone else would say anyway.

I regretted having to leave for Nantes the following morning as I went to bed last night. I felt that having spent a few days in Angers, perhaps with day-trips here and there, and giving myself more time for writing would have made for a more enjoyable experience and given me just as much of an understanding of what that part of France was as trying to tear across the whole country. My plans are set, however, and they are too intricate to be reworked on any large scale. The lesson that I have learned - or am, as I said, trying to learn - for the future is to pick my spots carefully rather than compulsively trying to traverse entire countries, seeing every major city on the way, and to spend more nights in a row at every given hostel or hotel that I choose. I should be able to make this trip work, as I do not have that much work to complete, after all, by the end of the summer, and I suppose that I have had realizations like this on every one of my trips. I could never have known that Angers would be so wonderful, that seeing so many different cities would be exhausting, or that seeing every major city or attraction was not actually necessary until I had tried it. Let us hope that experience teaches me in the future.

Half-timbered houses like this one make me lose my head.