Un Diner Presque Parfait

Last night we finally got together at Caroline's place in La Grande Motte for sushi as we had been planning since our first sushi night. Jean-Christophe picked up Cressida, Elena, Elena's friend Philippe visiting from Paris, and me.

We made the trip to La Grande Motte and found Caroline's place. It's a nice house owned by her grandparents. She is quite lucky. She has one cat that's hers and 2 kittens she is nursing to health after finding them abandoned a few weeks ago. The color pattern is quite interesting on her cat. Her face is dark on one side and light on the other. Just like in that episode of Star Trek.



We started out by making the sushi. My first time. After a discussion we decided on a course of action. Jean-Christophe recorded it for posterity for revenge after my jabs at the French for not knowing anything about sushi. ;-) I did the first roll--a kani-mayo roll. Crab meat with mayonnaise.

First make the rice. Then chop in some vinegar. Be sure to add enough.


Then get a sheet of nori.


Lay it out on the mat.


Spread some rice on.


Add the crab. Elena was either trying to show me how to roll it.


Roll it up.






Elena did the rest of the makis while I tried to turn cocktail shrimp into ebi nigiris. They didn't look well formed, but they tasted good.


Voila!


Then we sat down to eat.





We talked in half English half French about all sorts of things and just had a nice time.

Cressida then cooked up a marinated chicken dish. And Caroline made a salad. When all was said and done, we had all eaten and drunk various beers, and wines to our hearts content. We had 6 flavors of ice cream. And finally finished with sake in little cups that showed a naked lady in the bottom of the glass only when there was liquid in it--thus presenting a dilemma: drink or look?

We kept one eye on the Eurovision song contest through the evening. My favorite was Spain. The French guy seemed to be hampered by some really bad camera work. There was apparently quite a controversy because he would sing in English.

After the contest ended but before the results were announced, we went out for a walk in La Grande Motte. We went down to the sea and admired the forces of nature, then walked around where there were still bars and restaurants serving those able to already vacation.

After that, we piled in the car and headed home. It was a very fun party. Our sushi wasn't bad at all. In typical south of France style, we went to bed at about 1:30 am. The French can party!

Here are my Un Diner Presque Parfait notes:
Cuisine: 9 (my roll was too thick and my shrimps were malformed)
Décoration: 10
Ambiance: 10

OVS Freezes on the Comedie

I just got back from a cool OVS event. About 150 of us OVSians met at 7pm at the Pavilion Populaire near the Montpellier Tourist Information Office. We then strung ourselves out and walked toward the Polygone which is the mall in downtown Montpellier. Then about at 7:15, all 150 of us froze. Stopped cold in whatever position we were in at the time. We remained frozen for about 3 minutes.

I had noticed a musician and dug out a couple of coins to give him when I froze. So there I was with 2 50 cent coins in my left hand, and my right hand in the pocket putting the money back--frozen for 3 minutes. I wish I had 3 more seconds to actually be in the act of dropping the coins into his hat. Oh well. Two women came by and figured what I was up to, so they took a picture of me. There were a few people with cameras taking video. It's kind of cool because the people who weren't in on it had various reactions. Some stopped and watched. Some just went on their ways. One English speaking person on a cell phone told the person at the other end that there was a flash mob. It was fun to see them wandering around all us frozen people.

I broke character once--cracked a smile for a second. But other than that, I stayed still the whole 3 minutes of whatever it was. And when it was over, I did in fact drop the coins into the hat of the musician.

I'll post You-Tube video if I find it. The OVS link to the event is: http://montpellier.onvasortir.com/sortie_read.php?Id=16919

Hopefully it will bring some more publicity to OVS because OVS is the best events organization I've ever been a part of. The software is excellent (I recently bumped up to a gold star and Elena to a platinum star, btw). And it's nice that an event like this can bring out 150 people on a Friday evening.

Edit: Some YouTube

Freeze sur la place de la Comedie
Uploaded by ielosubmarine

More Sushi

Last night Elena and I went to the house of a guy named Stefane. He invited about 20 people over to his place for homemade sushi. It was a fun and interesting night. Stefane is about to head off to Japan for a vacation, so I guess it was a sort of Bon Voyage party. Elena and I brought wasabi peas and Japanese sembei thingies as a snack. It was fun watching the guests try the wasabi peas--none of them knew what they were in for. Ha Ha!!

The interesting thing is that French people know next to nothing about sushi. When the dinner was served, everyone gathered around it and proceeded to commit every sin in the book. I saw people passing food from chopstick to chopstick (a practice reserved for bones of the dead), people biting the sushi in half (faux pas), people not knowing how to use the wasabi. People not knowing the purpose of ginger (to freshen and cleanse the palate). At one point, one of the dishes of wasabi got empty enough that I could pour some soy sauce into it and mix the remaining wasabi a bit. It was humorous to me. I think more Japanese people need to come to France. It is interesting that there is really a difference between Atlantic migration and Pacific migration. Since Elena and I live on the Pacific rim, we have been exposed to much more Asian culture on a far more regular basis. Anyway, I give the host an A for effort and the cojones to invite OVSians to his place for sushi.

After sushi, the party started. Drinking, chatting, performing kept us occupied. I watched one guy take a bunch of pictures of one particularly attractive woman (he showed them to her later). They were excellent pictures--I'm not sure if it's because he's good at taking pictures or because she just looks so good. Mystery...

We left the party a bit early as our North American bodies aren't equipped to handle the Mediterranean late night party lifestyle. Whew! Those guys can party. And it was a Thursday, no less! The last thing before we left was a woman doing a couple of performance pieces. She did them with sign language as well since one of the partiers is hard of hearing. I wonder how different French sign language is from American Sign Language. I know the Japanese sign language is quite different. Anyway, she did two performances, neither of which I understood very well. I understood enough of the story, but I didn't understand enough to know why the punchlines were funny. Elena tried to explain the second story to me, but even with her explanation I didn't get it.

The first story was about 3 boys each who walks a different way. They went to the beach where they saw a voluptuous woman on the beach. But the sand was too hot for them to walk except for the third guy.

The second story was about a drunk guy who urinated behind a door. An old woman came out but he couldn't stop. She asked if she could hold his balls. He finally agreed. Then she squeezed them and knocked them together and told him not to urinate into her door.

As you can tell from my retelling, I must have missed something. Oh well. I guess the more important part was her telling of the stories rather than the punchline. Maybe it's like the Facebook movie reviews of many a French movie where the Americans say the movie is bad and the French say that you have to be French to understand the movie.

OnVaSortir.com Is Back

Whew! It took long enough! But it's back so Elena and I can have our fix.

Still Jonesing For OVS

Elena and I headed over to the Bibliotheque Americaine or Bibliotheque Anglophone to use the internet so we could connect to OnVaSortir.com. We have been receiving messages from other user who are able to connect, but we are still not able to connect from home. I was hoping that upon our return, OVS would be back, but no.

I sent an email this morning to alliancetelecom.fr which is our building's ISP, but haven't heard anything. Usually, and ISP automatically assigns a ticket number and auto-responds, but maybe this type of CRM software isn't used in France. Anyway, I had heard anything, so I sent another one.

Then I sent a message to completel.fr and explained my situation. Completel.fr is the company that actually runs the gateway. My default DNS is dns1.completel.fr and that is the DNS server that is timing out on the DNS request. Alliance Telecom seems to be a local retail provider that uses Completel's network. The problem is on Completel's DNS server.

Anyway, it is very frustrating to lose access to your favorite website. Especially since it has a self-contained email system that requires you to go to their website to read the email. I hope they fix it soon.

OVS Withdrawal Symptom

Ughh!!! Elena and I are addicted to the OnVaSortir.com website, but we can't get to it anymore. Other people we know can and do, but our building is unable to get to it. Everyone we've asked other than our receptionist of our building has no problem at all.

I'm not sure what the problem is. I wish I understood the guts of the internet a bit better. Anyway, here's what's happens. When we type http://montpellier.onvasortir.com into Firefox, Firefox first has to a DNS lookup. That fails. I used nslookup.exe and WireShark.exe (aka Ethereal) to see if I could see what goes on. As nslookup of a working site such as google.com works correctly--it immediately returns the nameserver of the domain. But an nslookup of onvasortir.com timeout after 2 seconds. Our dns1.completel.fr name server can't find the IP of the onvasortir.com nameserver. Damn you, dns1.completel.fr nameserver! Damn you to hell! It also times out on sivit.org, sivit.fr, and juridiconline.com which I found when trying to see if I could find anyone else with this problem on google. It was juriduconline.com because apparently, right after onvasortir.com was made, a cybersquatter registered the .org and .fr versions and the real OVS people were looking for (or giving?) legal advice.

I went to whois to get some more information on onvasortir.com. They use a company called sivit.org for one of their nameservers. Well, it turns out that I can't get to sivit.org either--same problem--can't get the DNS lookup to work. whois also lists the IP of sivit.org and onvasortir.com. I tried to ping those. In all cases, the pings to the nameservers and http servers didn't work. Other people can get to these servers, so I don't know why can't--broken link close to our building, I guess.

We had OVS up briefly yesterday or the day before when I was running WireShark, so I did see a TCP request being answered by the OVS server, but the HTTP GET just died on the wire. So my packets were flowing to some port, but nothing on port 80. We have since restarted the computer, though, so we no longer have DNS information cached, I guess.

A few minutes ago, I sent an email to the support people for our building alliancetelecom.fr, but nothing so far.

So this post is a withdrawal symptom as my addiction to onvasortir.com is not being met.

Hike in Saint-Baudille

A few days ago, 5 of us did this hike. It's in the same general area as the other hikes. There is a mountain with a loop and a transmitter tower for Marseilles. We met as usual by the Malbosc tram station and headed up. It was a bit scary since there are blind turns on one lane/two way mountain roads. But we made it safely. We parked next to a goat cheese farm. Then we headed up toward the transmitter.





The weather was nice, but as soon as we made it up to the tower, there was a cold wind. Very cold. Hung out at the place with a map of the view and then went down onto a rocky plateau for lunch. Elena and I had sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil (yes, we finally bought some). Jacques had bread and sliced meats, and the other two women has salads in Tupperware.



After lunch, we found the road and went by road for a while until we got to a meadow for a siesta.





Elena tried to tell her joke:

A little boy asked his mother "how old are you?" His mother said, "You aren't supposed to ask questions like that to women." The next day he asked "how much do you weigh?" Again the mother told the boy, "that's not an appropriate question to ask women." The next day he asked, "why did Dad divorce you?" Again, the woman responded, "I'll explain it when you're older."

So the little boy told his friend at school, "my Mom won't answer questions like how old she is and how mucg she weighs..." The friend told him, "All you have to do is look at her driver's license. It's all right there."

So the next day the little boy was riding with his mom and he told her, "I found all the answers to all the questions on your driver's license. You are 42 years old and you weigh 145 lbs. And I also know why Dad divorced you--you got an 'F' in sex."

So that was Elena's joke. Then we slept.

When we woke up, we went back down to the cars, and went to buy some goat cheese. You need to ring a doorbell to call a farmer to buy the cheese. We did and she came and got out a round and sliced it into 8 slices. It was good. We all bought some cheese and then went out to a picnic bench to eat some.

Then, Elena wanted to get some wine. I'm not sure why she had a hankering for wine. In BC she never comes into winerys to taste their wines. We stopped at a coop for Montpeyrou local wines. We tried several wines. All were pretty good. I got 3 bottles.

Bronze -> Silver

The color of my star that goes next to my name on the OnVaSortir.com web site has gone from bronze to silver! That means the system regards me as a person who does about 1 activity per week rather than just 2 per month. If I do 2 per week, I get a gold star.

Elena still has her silver star. I wonder when she'll get a gold star.

Soubes--The Hike On The Edge Of The World

Today we went to Soubes. It is a bit north of Lodeve where Elena and I once ate a lunch. Since it's a bit far, we needed a ride and fortunately, there is a person willing to give us a ride near by. We met her in front of the Saint Denis church right across the street from Le Dome at the corner of Gambetta and Clemenceau. We didn't know that she would be taking more people, but she actually had 4 of us she was taking, long with her dog. She has a minivan, so it was a comfortable ride. Just the night before, Caroline decided she would be able to come (she's nursing the stray cats she found, and now they are capable of spending more time alone between feedings). It didn't look like she was going to be able to make it. I mailed her where we would meet but it was late the night before.

So we headed to Lodeve and beyond to Soubes. I hadn't realized that Lodeve is actually a sort of medieval town dominated by a large Romanesque church. Makes we want to go there.

/tangent start
If she ever returns to France, Elena wants to visit other places since she's already done Herault in Languedoc-Roussillon. And that makes sense. It's nice to see as much as possible. But I am still of the feeling, that I'd rather come back and visit Languedoc-Roussillon often. There is so much to do and see. And I prefer depth to breadth when traveling.
/tangent end

So we eventually found our group and happily Caroline was able to get a car to come. The town of Soubes is interesting. It has a number of tunnels or, more accurately, covered alleys, between the major streets. We need those in Seattle when it rains. We headed out to the mountain and did a loop. We went over the valley and saw breathtaking vistas of the old villages and buildings below.




At the top we ate in a meadow. I looked at the diversity of bug life around me. I saw 4 types of spider--one with a little web in the ground, 2 types of busy ants, a grasshopper, a tick, tiny snail shells, a beetle, and a caterpiller.








Fredy brought a bottle of red wine. Yay! Some people, had cookies (including us).





After spending some time eating and resting and enjoying the sun and shade (it wasn't too hot), we went up over the mountain and started down the other side. We passed a dolmen--a sort of prehistoric grave, carved into a particularly slatey section of rock and closed off from the public by a stone wall more modern. We went through a section where a representative sample of the plants were labeled. Then we made it back to the village.

Once back, we rested, and had a beer/monaco/perrier/etc.

St Guilhem le Desert--Fenestrettes

Another day, another hike. One of the things onvasortir.com has is a star system. You get a little star by your name. Right now Elena has a silver and I have a bronze. The star indicates how often you do activities. I think Elena is shooting for platinum, and I just want silver. Jacques who leads many of the hikes Elena does has a titanium star--the highest you can get--for doing almost one activity per day.

So on Saturday we went back to St Guilhem le Desert to do a hike we had seen but not done--the fenestrettes. Before the hike, we went into the abbey. I had been in the abbey before, but it was nice to see it again--plus it was cool inside.



It seems that the trail was once used by shepherds to move their sheep from the city to the plateaus where they grazed. So it isn't steep at all. But it is covered with a very coarse rocky gravel. Here are a couple shots of us





We went up and got to the Fenestrettes. I thought they were windows, but no. They are an old buttressed road. Only about 10 meters long. Needed to connect the roads on either side of the mountian so the sheep can get to the plateau. A lot of work back then. I guess mutton and wool must have been valuable commodities.



Most of the hiking was in the open, rather exposed to the sun and it was a hot day. So we went through the water pretty quickly. I gave some to Cressida and had just enough to get back to town. After that we went to Zanzibar in Saint Jean de Fos.

Le Roc de la Vigne

Wow! What a nice hike. We did Le Roc de la Vigne with about 9 people. It is not far from the picturesque St Guilhem le Desert which is a sort of bounding board for a boat load of nice hikes.

It was organized by Jacques (aka Ushuaik) on OVS. We met right by the Malbosc tram station which has free parking right there as well. It's a great place to meet for both those with and without cars. Once we were all gathered, off to the trailhead...


We got there and started our climb up. It wasn't hard and after a couple of kilometers we found a cave to explore. It's a nice cave--deep enough to have really high ceilings, and it continuously slopes down. We penetrated about 80 meters or so. The last bit is a bit tricky because you have to watch out for a hole in the ground into which you wouldn't want to fall. There are stalactites and stalagmites, and all sorts of drapery on the walls. One stalactite was brown and hung about 2 meters down from the ceiling--looking rather like the cave was in the middle of a bowel movement--a feeling not lost on anybody given the amount of mirth and laughter the stalactite inspired. When were deep in the cave, we all sat down and shut off the lights. It was pitch black. You couldn't see a sheet of white paper in front of your face. Every hushed down. The only sound was water dripping--then somebody's stomach. Good for another laugh.

We sat in the dark for over a minute just enjoying the sensory deprivation. Then we all got up and headed out to the warm outdoors. We repacked our stuff and went off to the next destination--the peak.

It didn't take long to get to the peak. We stopped in a little sheltered area and set down our gear. Then we went over to the exposed part of the peak. It felt like entering a hurricane. It was so windy on that high peak. Way way off in the distance there was the Mediterranean Sea, but unless you knew it was the sea, you wouldn't necessarily recognize it as such. I made sure my hat didn't fly off--a definite risk up there. Wow it was windy. But as there was not a cloud in the sky and we were all sweaty, it was sooooo refreshing! Just absolutely refreshing.




After a while playing in the wind we ate our lunches. Elena had a sandwich she made with sliced cheese, red pepper. I had my sandwich with sliced chicken, mustard, red pepper cheese spread, lettuce, and tomato. Then we ate some apple pastries. Finally when all had finished their meals, we sat down and the Swiss guy broke out Swiss chocolate, someone had cookies, and a couple of people had coffee and tea for everyone to share. Delightful!




Then I found out that we were actually on a loop. It made sense because it was supposed to be a 20km hike and it only felt like we did 5 km. So we went on. And on. And on. Until we finally made it to Estagnol--a small abandoned hamlet. We explored the ruins and stopped and ate a little more.





Then it was back to the cars. It was already ab out 4:30 when we got to the cars and we were all a little tired from the hike in the sun. So off to find a spot for a nice cold beer. We tried to go a place in St Saturnin de Lucian, but it was closed. So we went a bar called the Zanzibar in St Jean de Fos. I had a very refreshing "demi" which is a 25 cl house beer. It was only 2,30 euros. Five of us had demis, 2 had monacos which is apparently beer with 7Up and grenadine. Two others had something green.



After that we returned home. Whew! What a wonderful trip. Any nature lovers coming to southern France couldn't do much better than staying near St Guilhem le Desert and partaking of the hiking opportunities around there.

Also see Jacques' pictures on Picassa.

Brazilian Night at La Pleine Lune

We went to see the Brazilian night at La Pleine Lune, a club not far from our humble abode (right on the Plaza Roger Salengro where we buy all our vegetables in the open air market). It was "pleine" all right. The dance floor looked like the subway in Tokyo station at rush hour. It's a very small venue, but it was so packed, it took me about 3 minutes to traverse the 10 meters to the exit from the back. I'm lucky I survived.

We got there early--about 9pm. I recently learned the term "demi" which is basically the normal sized glass of the house beer--the default beer when you ask for just a beer--something we never do in Seattle where all the drinking places have mostly craft beers. Anyway, I got a demi and Elena wanted a red wine. So 4 euros later we had our drinks and a small bowl of potato chips.

Then we watched as people started filing in. The place kept getting more and more crowded. Until the dance floor was just a mass of humanity. A sardine tin of bodies wriggling to Brazilian rhythms. There must have been 200 people in a place that can seat--if all are seated--only about two dozen.

We went because it was organized on OnVaSortir.com, so we met a few of the people from that. Elena is still there as I type. Even in the USA, the music/dance thing isn't for me, so I made an early get-away. Bedtime for moi. But maybe I'll watch some new scenes of Pulp Fiction in French.

Le Dome Brasserie Language Exchange

On Tuesday evenings, a bar just down the street at Gambetta and Clemenceau called Le Dome holds an evening of language exchange. They also do philosophers cafes and other such events. On May 8, Elena decided to head down. We actually wanted to go on May 2, but I was sick then.

So we got there at 8pm. Already there were over a dozen people there. We knew some of the people who would be there because it was on onvasortir.com (as I found out that night, we can called it OVS). So we found the OVS crowd and started chatting. About half--probably a little more--the people there were French and the other half were from somewhere else. I was the only American, there was a Spanish woman from Barcelona, A Swiss guy from Bern. Elena is Canadian.

I ordered a beer (it is a Brasserie-self styled as a "Maison de Biere" after all) and Elena got a coffee. Then we started chatting with the people around us. People moved around a bit. Sometimes someone would catch wind of a language being spoken, and they'd head over there to speak that language. I wished my French were better. One woman helped me quite a bit. She asked me a question, and then corrected my answer to say it exactly correctly.

At the peak, there were probably a couple dozen people. Mostly speaking English and French, with a smattering of German and Spanish. The gender ratio was favorable--many pretty women who had to put up with all us old men--actually there were a lot of lady-killers there, too.

I plan to go there again with Elena. It's a fun event and you can't beat the fact that it's only about a 3 minute walk from our place.

On Va Sortir dot com

Just like kijiji.fr is a sort of craigslist for France, we found onvasortir.com which is sort of like meetup.com. But, in my opinion, much better.

Here is my account and here is Elena's.

You create a little profile and then you can join events. The events show the maximum number that can join. There is a spot that indicates when and where the event will take place and the deadline for signing up. A waiting list is shown. There are all sorts of events. The genders are separated by color (when I first met Elena after a hike down with Inside Edge, I asked what the male:female ratio was. She didn't like me asking. Here you can easily see it for yourself.) Members get colored stars (grey, bronze, gold, platinum, titanium) according to how often they join events.

I will go to Le Dome down the street for language exchange. It is something I was planning to do anyway, but now it's posted as an event! So it counts toward my colored star credit. Elena might go, but she's going on a hike the same day.