Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 1-4: Angers, Le Mans, and the Charles de Gaulle Airport

Dear readers,

As usual, I am going to have to rush my letter, as I have more to say than I can possibly get on paper in the next hour or so, and I need to shower and go to bed in preparation for tomorrow. I have to decide between returning to a city that I have already seen in order to see more of it and going to a village that has the remains of a Greek theater and offers some of the best views in Sicily. Life could not be wilder.

My memory of France is already fading--I did not take notes over my first few days (as I figured that I would remember everything). I remember getting to Angers by the skin of my teeth. My flight came in an hour later than scheduled, but transport to Paris Montparnasse proved good, as it is a straight shot by bus from the Orly airport. I got there early enough, in fact, to dash across the street to get something to eat; I found a place that sold cheap Chinese food and got, among other things, a Vietnamese spring roll, which gave me heartburn, as Vietnamese spring rolls always do.

To be honest, I have only the haziest sense of what I did on my first day in Angers. I expect that I went to the tourist office to try to find out how to get to the castles of Serrant, Brissac, and Plessis-Bourre (with a little accent above it). I remember that the employee of the tourist office with whom I spoke had no idea and told me to go to the bus station to find out; she gave me a schedules of tours of Brissac and buses there. When I got to the bus station, I learned that there was no convenient way to get to Serrant or Plessis-Bourre. The woman helping me got schedule after schedule out but could not find anything that would get me both there and back. When she grabbed the schedule for one company, she muttered, "No, they're on vacation;" she grabbed another and noticed that they only went in one direction. She left me with a handful of schedules and a cheap return ticket to Brissac. The schedule that the woman at the tourist office had given me was wrong.

When I got to the castle of Brissac, I discovered that the schedule of tours that I had been given for it was also wrong. I had missed the most recent tour by half of an hour, and the next one would be in two hours, just a few minutes after the bus back to Angers; I could kill two hours, take the tour, and wait another four hours for the only other bus to Angers (a mere 20 km away), or I could take a tour of the kitchen, wine cellar, and gardens. Needless to say, I choose the second option. The kitchen was large and full of pots and pans. The wine cellar was large, cool, and full of wine. As I walked through the gardens, I reflected on the nature of wealth and its role in self-identity. I took a leak where no one could see me and headed back to the bus stop.

My trip to Plessis-Bourre was the more exciting of the two. It turned out that there were no buses going in that direction, as it was a Sunday, and all of France (besides Paris) is closed on Sundays. I was ready to accept defeat and spend the day in my room when I mentioned the impossibility of getting to Plessis-Bourre to the hotel's receptionist. She protested that it should be possible if I took the train to the nearby town of Tierce (also with an accent about the 'e') and found my way from there--it would only be an eight-kilometer walk. We spent some time chatting--the woman had heard of that town in Canada in which people leave their car doors unlocked so that others can take refuge from bears as necessary--and I set off on my trek.

The train ride itself was remarkable for my first taking a train to a town twice as far from Angers as Tierce, then hopping on another train going right back to Angers in order to get to Tierce--I had to take a fast train, then a local one. Tierce turned out to be one of those towns that does not even have a train station--it was too small for one. I found a bar near the train station and got directions to Ecuille (also with an accent--sorry for not having them), which turned out to be essential (I had to go via a town that sounded like "chef."), and set off. The sidewalk disappeared as soon as I left Tierce, leaving me to walk along the roadway or, more often, on the grass beside it. I had not been smart enough to wear covered shoes for my trek, and something spiky in the grass gave me hives on my feet and ankles.

When I was about halfway to the castle, I asked a passer-by, one of only three other walkers whom I had seen, if I was on the right track. She offered me a ride the rest of the way but first had to get the car from her husband, who was playing in a Bocci ball competition. "We have a lot of events like this in the village," she explained--it was not like the capital, where everyone was anonymous. As we drove, the woman told me about her family. She had a daughter who lived elsewhere in France and a son who lived somewhere in Quebec. He and his girlfriend had been trekking through New Brunswick (or Labrador, or somewhere--some place far away) and gotten lost in the middle of nowhere; a passer-by riding her horse had told them to hold on, taking her horse back to the stable, grabbing her car, and taking them to her home for the night. "Now I am returning the favor," the woman said. "I will be able to tell all of my friends that I met a Canadian today."

Of the castle visit I have, sadly, little to say--that is, I could probably find things to say, but I have little time in which to say them. The castle had belonged to a member of the court who had secretly (as was necessary) practiced alchemy. Its rooms showed the progression in architectural styles, reflecting such changes as the French's having learned to blow glass from the Italians, leading to there being increasingly more mirrors in their rooms from the 16th century onwards (this was part of the spread of the Renaissance). When the tour of the castle was over, the tour leader called a taxi company to try to help me get a taxi back to Tierce, as I had bought a round-trip ticket for the train. The conversation that followed was one of the funniest that I have heard. Reception in the castle was bad, and no one had heard of the commune in which it was located. "The situation is, we're in a castle," the tour guide explained. "I have a client here who wants to take a taxi." It turned out that it would have cost 40 Euros just to get back to Tierce. I decided to make the trek on foot, glad that I had been spared a few kilometers of walking earlier.

My walk was, naturally, unpleasant--I did much of it at a run to save time--but I managed to set off in the right direction, growing increasingly more confident as the passing landscape grew more familiar. I made it back to the train station (or, rather, stop) with ten minutes to spare, happy that it had all worked out, as I had expected that it would when I set out (no matter how stupid one's plans, they tend to work out, based on my experience, in developed nations). Still, I learned an important lesson: I do not actually enjoy going to castles in the middle of nowhere; I only really enjoy those that are close to civilization. In fact, I do not much like being away from reasonably sized population centers in general. I have decided to apply this knowledge to my planning of future trips and of this one, as well.

Perhaps more interestingly, I got a much better sense of the provincial France (if not the same geographically) of which Flaubert wrote. To make a long story short, villages that are just twenty kilometers from large cities remain isolated and inaccessible by public transport; as the lady in the hotel lamented, young people have to leave the village for work, and those who live there drive to bigger towns for groceries, household items, &c., &c., leading to their not developing any local industry. They are small and, to use a cliche, sleepy: they are often dead quiet and each have a very beautiful church, but not much else. Two moments from my visit of Brissac especially stood out: a man asked me, as I was exiting a church, if there was anyone in there. "Yes," I said. "There are two people there." A bit later, at the bus stop, I watched young people congregating in preparation to visit the city, perhaps to see movies or go to a mall (or do whatever else it is that young people do). I remember an old man's walking toward a building next to the church. He had a terrible hunchback and proceeded very slowly. He took the short flight of steps up to the building and disappeared.

I suppose that I must have had a lot more impressions from my first couple of days in France--they will probably emerge over the coming days. I spent my last day in Angers wandering through the old town and touring the castle, which has a famous tapestry full of interesting symbolism (both religious and historical, as it partly depicted the Hundred Years' War). I ate lunch at a much worse place than that at which I had had dinner a couple of nights before--while the food was good, it was not spectacular, reminding one that neither duck nor French food is automatically good. (I should eventually try Shanghai duck to see what it really tastes like.) Le Mans had a gorgeous old town that I only found because I asked a passer-by with a map who had asked someone for directions if she knew where it was--she told me that she had been looking for a street that she had just found, and she gave me her map. Charles De Gaulle airport was what one would have expected: I sat at my computer, dozed for an hour or two, and ate a couple of pastries that I had bought in Le Mans for breakfast. These would be the last pastries that I would eat for some time, as I have gone on a diet, which I will explain (in brief--it is not that interesting) in my next letter. I watched some schoolchildren playing soccer with an empty plastic bottle in Le Mans before finding the old town. I met a couple of men from Morocco when I bought dinner at a lousy shwarma place near the train station, where I was in a rush to buy something before my train left. I scheduled my time a little incompetently, running back and leaping onto the train with only three minutes to go before it left.

I hope to write another instalment of this blog tomorrow. Perhaps I will end it on a more conventional note.

With best wishes,

Max