Sunday was quite a day. For a while, we couldn’t have been more Catalan. Then, we couldn’t have been more American. First, we went with our new friends, Rosy and Clemens, to something called a calçotada. This is simply a lunch at which one eats a lot of calçots, which are sort of like scallions that have been attacked by Bunnicula. Remember Bunnicula? Actually, the onions go through what sounds like a rather tedious process of being planted, dug up, hidden in a shed in the dark, replanted, and covered in dirt. They don’t turn green. All this just to get in the New York Times magazine. Imagine.

So we drove outside of the city a few kilometers with some other people, friends of Rosy and Clemens, and parked ourselves at a little restaurant with smoke pouring out of it. The calçots are grilled over open flames, then wrapped in newspaper to steam themselves. Now, normally, we’re “restaurant fluent.” This means that we can ask what things are and at least look like we know what the waiter is saying in response. We can make sure our coffee is made by machine and not from a little packet of instant. We can even get a draft beer instead of one in a bottle.

But this sort of thing, kind of like I would imagine eating your first lobster or s’more might, presented an interesting challenge. Not only would we have to be vigilant about menu-reading and question asking (“It comes with ceps. What are those? Are those brains? Wait, no. They’re mushrooms, right? Ah, forget it.), but all within a sort of cultural tradition. We have long referred to this as the “Maple Syrup on your Hamburger Problem,” in which the juxtaposition of both syrup and ketchup on diner tables is invoked in Vietnamese restaurants as we try to determine the proper uses of the many sauces provided, all of which ostensibly have specific uses, but which are simply sampled at random by white folks like us.

Luckily, as we tried to look busy with the menus, someone ordered a lot of calçots. They come with these things:

• red sauce
  
• big empty plates, sort of like for a lobster
  
• bibs, also sort of like for a lobster
  
• one plastic glove per person, sort of like for sports physicals in high school
  

We put on our bibs. We put on our gloves. We sat still and watched. Finally, after learning enough, we picked up one onion each in our bare hands. Using the gloves, we stripped off the charred layers. While the glove did manage to keep one hand clean, it was in no way effective against the painful, searing heat emanating from the steaming onions. Leah was very talented at this activity, nonetheless. I was a mess. Eventually, after being peeled, the onions are dipped in red sauce and then sort of dropped into one’s mouth from above, like so. Then you throw out the leftover burnt part. The whole thing was fun, even though onions aren’t really a food as much as they are a flavor. It is the rare dinner invitation, I believe, that includes the sentence, “We’re having onions!” After a lot of onions, you definitely are done, but you’re not full.

Luckily, more food was ordered. Leah and I split something called cabrito, which is a baby goat. I honestly don’t know what has happened over here that makes us think of ordering baby goat, but that’s what we did. It was fine when eaten with sauce. Cabrito now goes on the list of

Things We Have Bought Here, In Spain, But Never At Home

1. pork
   
2. chairs
   
3. a washing machine
   
4. a heater
   
5. dressers
   
6. chicken that still had feet, head
   
7. and now, of course, goat
   

Following that, we had coffee and dessert and took a short walk. And then we went home and prepared for…the Superbowl, just like you people.

Or not like you people at all. See, we worked to enjoy Superbowl Sunday this year. Yep, we were the Official Promoters for our local pub, which has some kind of hookup to show the NFL via satellite. We wandered around the city, looking for overfed college boys in baseball hats, and handed them flyers. We also dragged along our friend Albert, who had to have the rules explained to him by our other friend Phillipe, who really speaks French but is good enough with the Spanish to help out. The whole thing really sounds much more elegant when it involves le quarteur-back.

We also organized our very first illegal betting pool, that thing where you sell 100 squares and then draw numbers and whoever matches the last digits of the final score wins. Try explaining that in Spanish. Somehow, we sold all hundred squares and, when announcing the winners to a contest no one playing understood, were only on the verge of a full-on fight one time. Oddly, it was not when that very same Albert won the first prize. He decided that the Superbowl was pretty fun, after all.

The only other slightly dodgy moment came when I took some pictures. A guy who looked sort of like a cross between Elton John and A Flock of Seagulls, decked out in an acidwash denim tuxedo, said, “You could get shot in this town for less.”

That, as any Barcelona resident will proudly tell you, is completely untrue. There were probably more guns on the Raiders’ team bus than there are in the hands of regular Josés in Barcelona.

I said that I didn’t think that I was going to get shot, but thank you.

He said, “Well, someone might cut you up, then.” As he said this, he made a show of flipping around what I was expected to believe was a butterfly knife. It was, in fact, one of those fancy wine openers that waiters use. Though I am a slow, weak, and easily frightened person, I refuse to be worried by people who “do” their hair and still wear acidwash. Still, I am polite, which is a good fourth to add to “slow, weak, and easily frightened.” I promised not to take his picture. Then he said, “I’m only kidding. Hell, I’m Canadian.” Brotz, if either you or your forehead are reading this, I would appreciate an explanation.

The game itself was as boring here as it was there, but we got to stay up until 4:30 in the morning to enjoy it. Plus, I got to say (I have no excuses for this behavior other than that I was desperately wanting to sell all those betting squares), “So, are you ready for some football?” into a microphone and receive wild cheering in response (I’ll be honest: It was fun.), and we got to hear people swear at Rich Gannon in Finnish, Danish, French, Spanish, Catalan, and English. And I am now alone among the people I know who have uttered the sentence: “You need to talk to my wife; she’s the one running the betting pool.” And we were not close to ordering brains all night. It was a pretty good Sunday.

Ok, it’s freezing here. Actually, it’s freezing here, as in “directly in front of the computer, or, more generally, inside the apartment.” Outside, it’s nice. It’s sunny most days, and it usually gets up to about 55 or 60. Why so cold inside, then? Oh, because no one has heat. Well, rich people have heat. It is sort of like that weird central vacuum system that some people get at home: not the kind of thing anyone ever talks about missing, but pretty cool when you get to experience it in action.

This odd difference in comfort between inside – cold – and outside – nice, leads to the equally odd habit of waking up, dressing as if we are about to go hunting for moose, and then doing whatever it is we do around the house. Then, after lunch, when it’s time to venture out, it’s time to change into normal spring clothes. Last week we took advantage of an especially clear day to visit Casa Mila. We had been there before, as you might remember, but we didn’t really tour the whole casa, just the attached museum.

This time, we went to the casa. Inside is a small museum with a lot of models built by Gaudi for his projects. It appears that he worked like something of a mad scientist, constructing elaborate nets of string and lead weights to look like the church, or whatever, would appear if it were upside down, then using a mirror to see what it would really look like. People in Barcelona love Gaudi now, but they thought he was nuts when he started designing buildings that looked like, well, like nothing anyone had ever seen before.

The front façade, for example, of La Pedrera, is one of the first not used to actually bear weight. This allowed it to be very curvy and include enormous windows and other fun things. Gaudi heaped so much stone on the Mila House that people here started to call it the “The Quarry” – La Pedrera, a name that has stuck. Inside, it is a fine example of Modernista architecture. It has excellent parquet floors, fancy woodwork, and wild marble sinks.

The roof, though, is something else altogether. Like many roofs, it has a number of exhaust towers and doors leading into and out of the top floor. Here, though, the towers are disguised in funky stone and mosaic designs. Some have faces on them. It also functions as sort of a solar oven used mainly, it appeared, for frying British and Japanese tourists. It was a delightful day.

One reason it was delightful is that it would provide something to talk about with my intercambio, who many of you know as “Luis,” that being his name. His scary factor has decreased quite a bit, and in its place his dull factor has risen. I went to meet him later that day and told him about it. Do you like the architecture here?, I asked. Not really. Have you been to La Pedrera? Once, maybe. Ok, did you do anything fun for New Years’? No. For Christmas? Had dinner. The conversation got a bit more animated when I told Luis about going to a club after our bizarre Christmas party and nearly being beaten up by the bouncer for, I think, using the electric hand dryer. “You must have been scary,” said Luis.

“I was scared,” I said. “Scared. He was scary. Get it?” No. Twenty minutes later, I had acted out the following in a crowded coffee shop.

• Someone jumping out from behind a tree
  
• A monster with claws
  
• The bouncer, shoving me around
  

Then I wrote out the entire conjugation of “scared” in the present and past tense, pointing out how the past tense form is the same as the past participle. I tell you, it was riveting. Luis loved it. “A ha!” he said. “I am scared of things that are scary!”

Then I asked him, “Do you need to use that word a lot?” I guess now that that’s a personal question, but I was really wondering, like, why take twenty minutes to learn how to say, “I’m scared."? Personally, I’d rather learn how to tell a barber how to cut your hair, or something useful (Yes, I have had a haircut here, without really being able to say much beyond, “shorter” and “normal, please.” It was nerve-wracking.)

He said that he did need to use it, and I did not pursue this line of conversation. I changed the subject by asking about his hobbies. A gold mine. He talked for about forty-five minutes about his favorite, favorite thing to do. He was as animated as I’ve ever seen him, in our long…um…relationship. It was great practice for me, in the listening department, and now I’ve been exposed to all the vocabulary I’ll ever need, in the event that I attend, in Spain, any sort of gathering where the topic of conversation is…model trains.

Model trains. Are you in a model train club? I asked, implying, of course, that maybe other people could be involved. Yes, he said, but they only meet once a year. In Frankfurt, actually, which, I’ll bet you didn’t know, is the world’s model train capital. Mostly, he hangs around the house – “the house,” in this case, meaning the one belonging to his parents – and paints little trees, sets up fake hills, and puts the little guys where they belong. Then the trains go around in a big circle, just like you did when you were seven years old or whatever.

Then, when we were leaving, we had to walk past a model train store. There I was treated to a long explanation of how Lionel lost its place at the top of the electric train world to a couple of upstarts from the Frankfurt area. I realized then, hearing about the different types of track sizes one can purchase, that I should have asked for the words for “scary” and “scared” myself. I needed them both.

The Lune de Miel continues...Enjoy

Day 3

10:00
We check out of our hotel, even though it is our honeymoon, and wander two blocks to another one. We spend the morning poking around a weekly market in Arles. Many of the cities and towns in France have market days when vendors of all types set up shop. There is an amazing array of foods – lovely moldy cheeses, oysters, baskets of spices, and olives – plus textiles and other things. We attempt to buy oysters and have them opened right there but alas, that is not allowed. We buy some presents and some olives for a snack.

12:00
We consult the guide book and find out that we are supposed to be looking at a Cloister. We look at it from the outside. We go into a church next door. It’s a nice church. We decide that it’s time to go to a winery.

2:00
We are on the road to the winery. We have about four different useless maps. This exact journey, from the center of Arles, to a small farmhouse where they make what is supposed to be terrific wine, is rumored to be about two miles. It is the worst marked journey in France, and we drive around a lot before finding a store (more presents for…somebody else) where we get more directions. It’s about half a mile from the store.

2:02
We know we’re lost. We retrace our steps.

2:15
We find the winery. They seem to be using the same HVAC consultant as the Palace of Popes. Plus, the wine is awful. While the proprietor is helping another customer, we quickly say “merci” and run away.

3:00
We return to the hotel to drop off all of your presents and, since it is well past lunch, begin to think about dinner. We decide to return to St-Remy and eat in a Corsican restaurant that we had skipped on the first night.

6:00
Opie is hungry. We fill the tank of our economy car: 37 Euros. Essex County has this one on France. This must be how they pay for all those road signs. Or maybe with the tolls.

6:30
Back in St-Remy, we find the restaurant and set out to make a reservation. A small glitch involving a preposition leads the restaurateur to believe that we want a reservation for many people: seven and a half, to be exact. He is, understandably, confused. He tells us that there is no room. Since the place is completely empty, we are confused and ask again. He asks a question that contains the word “enfant” and Leah figures out that he thinks we want to bring a child (the half perhaps). We manage to communicate that there will no children, only the two of us and slowly, we move down the road toward understanding. He is more than happy to reserve a table for us for seven-thirty and after asking our names, tells us that he has an American friend named Lee.

6:40
We walk around the town for a while buying more of you more presents. You’re going to love this stuff; we promise.

7:30
We return to the restaurant, which is called L’Assiette de Marie and is full of antiques and interesting decorations. We order dinner and a half-bottle of wine. We forget to mention that it is our honeymoon. The waiter returns to inform us that they are out of half-bottles and that we will be receiving a full bottle for the price of a half. The French are redeemed.

8:00
Food arrives. Corsican food is part Italian, part Provencal, part French, and so there is a lot of cheese everywhere and confits of everything that isn’t nailed down. There is also duck, lamb, tomatoes, cumin, zucchini, and chocolate cake. Everything is delicious. We have not been so full in two days.

Day 4

10:00
Feeling a pang of guilt about having started to discuss dinner over breakfast, we decide to atone by seeing some real sites today. We are leaving Arles, and we need to finish the day in Toulouse, about three hours East, but we are going to pack in as much Provence as we can.

11:00
We drive out of Arles and towards Les Baux, which is a little town built into the side of a mountain. The views are excellent and all one need pay for here is parking. Aside from dynamite vistas of mountains, streams, little towns, and vineyards, though, Les Baux is pretty much a tourist trap. Face out and it’s terrific. Face the town itself and you want to turn around again. We focus on the view.

12:30
We decide to leave and head for a very, very old Greek and Roman ruin called Glanum. Not a very French sounding name, but French it is.

1:30
We reach Glanum and park, like everyone else, on the side of the highway. We get some maps and begin to take in the ruins. The ruins are, as promised, very old and interesting - to a point. It’s pretty amazing to think about how old these structures are but as they are ruins, it’s difficult to picture what the whole thing actually looked like.

1:33
Leah begins talking about where we might go for lunch.

1:45
We find a small hill to climb, from which we can see all of Glanum. Yet another good view.

3:00
We’re on the road for Châteauneuf-de-Pape. We have heard good things about the wine in these parts. We drive up to a winery with an advertisement on the road. There are cars in the driveway. Good sign. There are also about seven pairs of shoes on the front step. We realize that the cars belong to the people who live there, and that those people aren’t answering the door on a Sunday afternoon. They’re inside, hanging around barefoot.

3:15
We find the “downtown” and walk into a bar. We ask about eating. The bartender laughs and says doesn’t even have any bread to give us. We decide against making any attempt to work, "Let us eat cake," into the conversation. Apparently, Châteauneuf-de-Pape pretty much shuts down during the winter. “Go to Orange,” he says. He does not mean Orange, New Jersey.

3:20
We wander into a basement wine store where there are tastings. We point and gesture and say enough words that the woman figures out that we want to taste the famous wine. Lune de miel is among the words. It seems to have no effect. We decide to buy some of the wine, at which point we decide, given the prices, that it would be worth a second effort to get free honeymoon wine. We work lune de miel into the “conversation” as much as we can. She gets very excited and congratulatory. “Soon, a baby?” she says. We pay retail for the wine.

4:00
We’re in Orange, looking for food. Nearly everything here is closed, too, but we find a kebab stand. The Turkish men who own it are excited to meet Americans, because they have a friend in American and they will be going to visit her in the summer. “San Diego, San Diego,” they say. “California, Las Vegas. Vegas!” They produce an envelope with a letter from their friend. The return address is Smyrna, Georgia. We finish our kebabs and wish them bon chance in Vegas, then drive to Toulouse.

9:00
We arrive at the Hôtel Albert I, which is quite nice, very reasonably priced, and staffed with extremely helpful people. One of them locks herself out of the room next to ours - while standing on the balcony, cleaning the windows - on the first morning we are there. She climbs over a little fence and knocks on our window, which is something of a surprise, to say the least. We let her in and, wordlessly, she goes through our room and out the door. Later, when she has composed herself, she will explain the whole story.

9:15
We strike out to find cassoulet. For weeks, we have been talking about cassoulet. When we told Gloria that we were excited for cassoulet in France, she scoffed. “The best cassoulet is here in Barcelona,” she said, before adding a quick concession. “Or in Castelnoudary.” It arrives in a huge bubbling ceramic dish, about a thousand degrees. There’s duck in there. And sausage. And more duck. And…a sort of round gelatinous thing. Hmm…could it be? Yes – a pig’s ear! More lune de miel luck. We also have a salad with hot foie gras. No two foods could be more opposite: lettuce and foie gras. But they are meant to be together.


Day 5

1:00
Having eaten a breakfast of nutella and some other things, we take Opie to Albi. Somehow we had gotten it in our heads that we needed to see the Toulouse-Latrec Museum. We decide to take the back roads and immediately wind up behind a house. Yes, a house. On a truck, but a house all the same. It is driving about as fast as you might imagine a house could go. The countryside is beautiful but the trip becomes dull. We switch to the highway.

3:00
We’re in the museum. Now we remember what Toulouse-Latrec paintings look like. They mostly look like you were looking at a cartoon of the Moulin Rouge, whatever that is, and a woman in black stockings and a blue hat with a big feather stepped right in front of you. But, ok, we’re in the man’s hometown. He deserves our respect.

3:20
After walking as slowly as possible through the rooms, we reach the end of the collection. Leah decides to enjoy the Toulouse-Latrec Comfortable Red Couch in the second of the four rooms, and Dan decides that seeing the entire collection again will make it worth six Euros. It works. The building and grounds of the museum are beautiful and we spend some time walking around. We leave and go to a fancy tea restaurant.

7:00
We’ve thoroughly researched Toulouse’s restaurants, and we’re having oysters tonight. They’re different from oysters in the US. They’re more…European. We order six and our waiter tries the hard sell. All around us, tables of people on holiday are ordering thirty and forty oysters at a time. “Six each?” he says. We stick. Then, later, we order six more. They are very good oysters. The only problem is our inability to ask for horseradish. If you can come up with a good way to order “horseradish” with only gestures and the words, “Je parle un petit peu de Francais”; “tres bien”; “pamplemousse”; and “Je me souviens,” then you can have one of the presents we bought.

9:00
Oysters do not a dinner make. We head back to the cassoulet restaurant for real food. We ask for a wine recommendation. They are confused. “This is France,” says the waiter. “All the wine is good.”

But you must like something better than something else, we say. He isn’t budging. He wants our order. After we order our food, he instructs us which wine will go best with our meal. He does not ask us if we want it, he just tells us what we are going to get. This is France. We happily overeat yet again.

Day 6

10:00
It is time to go home. We cannot eat any more liver. But cheese is a different story. We go to the big market on Rue Victor Hugo and ask a cheese man about cheese. In a moment of brilliance that would make Monsieur Richardson (Leah’s high school French teacher) beam with pride, Leah declares “J’adore fromage” (I love cheese) and manages to ask for a recommendation. We settle on a wonderfully melty-looking brie and a muenster. We are a little nervous about that one. Who hasn’t already had muenster cheese. It’s a little boring, no? Leah asks if it is strong, wanting to make sure that we have not been mistaken for cheese wimps. The cheese man assures us that it is strong and very good.

12:00
We pack up Opie with the cheese and a baguette and leave Toulouse for Carcassone, another old walled city. When we pull in the parking lot, it begins to pour. We decide that it would be a good time for lunch. We discover that French muenster is nothing like the orange-sided stuff of school lunches. It is a very good lunch.

1:00
The rain stops and we enter Carcassone over a drawbridge. There are many, many stores selling armor, plastic swords, and postcards with pictures of Carcassone. We walk around, trying to find our way onto the one thing we really want to see: the outside wall. Inside, it’s just winding streets with shops, but from the wall you can see for miles.

2:00
It’s impossible. The wall is closed in the winter, it’s closed on New Year’s Eve, it costs money to enter. We give up and head back to find Opie.

2:15
The streets are more winding than we remember.

2:25
We make our way out. Just before the drawbridge that takes you to the parking lot, we find the access to the wall. Very nice views, just like we thought.

2:33
Opie is on his way to Barcelona.

4:30
We cross the border into Spain. This time, no one is staffing it.

6:00
We pay our last toll: 9 more Euros.

6:30
We refill the tank: 22 more Euros. Compared to France, Spain is a gasoline-buyer’s paradise. Have you ever saved 15 dollars on a tank of gas? That’s how we’re looking at it.

7:30
We take Opie home. Of course, the rental car place is closed. We call the main office. No answer. We call the 24-hour emergency helpline. No answer. Hey, it’s New Year’s Eve. We call the airport office. They tell us to leave it by the curb and put the keys in the mailbox. No problem. Somehow, they must know it’s our honeymoon.

Here is the first installment (days 1 and 2) of our trip to France. This is our first entry written in tandem. Days 3 through 6 will follow shortly.

Day 1
9:00
Scheduled departure time. We get out of bed and zip the backpack, then take the Metro to Avis.

10:00
We zip out of the Avis lot in Opie, a silver Opel Astra. He’s small but peppy. From this perspective – the inside of a car – which is one we haven’t had in months, Barcelona’s drivers look even more lethal.

10:30
We’re a bit north of Barcelona, and the landscape is starting to look real nice. There are castles. However, there are also strip malls.

10:35
No one’s moving. People get out of their cars and wander around. We get worried. But we take some pictures, because, “Hey! We’re in a car. In Europe.”

10:40
The police wave everyone through the small roadblock. A huge truck carrying oranges has overturned. It is the best-smelling traffic mishap either of us has ever encountered. We review other food disasters from history:

1. Thirty thousand pounds of bananas in Scranton, PA
   
2. The North End Molasses Spill (If you have an interest in engineering and a lot of time on your hands, try here for more on this one.)
   
3. Once, in this cheese plant in NJ, a worker fell into an enormous vat of something like Velveeta and was never heard from again. This really happened.
   

10:57
We pay our first European toll: nine Euros.

11:00
We zip into France at about 130 kph. That’s one hundred and thirty. No fear. Live to ride, ride to live. There is exactly one visible employee at the border, and he is looking at the scenery. The signs are in French, and we immediately realize that, our inability to talk notwithstanding, we are definitely more literate in Spain.

11:45
Following the directions we copied from Mapquest-Europe, we pick our way to Collioure. It’s a pretty charming little seaside fishing village where Matisse did a lot of painting. In the winter, it looks like Cape Cod: pretty much closed. Ok, not quite. There are people milling about, places to buy French things, and some restaurants. The restaurant we had read about in our guide book in closed but we find a funky Breton (as in de Brittany – the Celtic part of France across the Channel from England) crepe place. The kitchen of the restaurant is set up inside an old VW bus, which is inside the restaurant building and it’s full of crazy chotchkes and decorations. We settle on a Roquefort Omelet and a crepe with a fried egg in it. Who knew these people had greasy breakfast down so well? There should be French diners at home.

2:00
We’re back on the road to St-Remy, way over in Provence. We flip through the radio. We have avoided the radio in Spain, because it reminds us that we don’t know what they are saying, and also because Spanish popular music is very…well, it’s not to our tastes. Actually, it consists of a lot of Mariah Carey. French popular music, on the other hand, is rap and rap alone. In French and English. Diners and a hip-hop community: so far, France is sort of like Essex County. Feel the romance?

4:00
We pull over at a rest stop. But it’s a rest stop in France, remember. It’s very romantic. Even coffee from a machine is good in France.

5:30
We pay our first French toll: 16 Euros. Then we get off the highway and drive through Nîmes. Did you know that denim was invented here? As the story goes, (according to the Fodor’s guide) Christopher Columbus used the lightweight, densely woven fabric produced in the city for the sails of his ships. The material became very popular and was exported worldwide from the ports of Genoa (“Gênes” in French – get it?) Then Levi Strauss got hold of it and used it for goldminers’ pants, changing the name bleu de Gênes to the more American-sounding “blue jeans.” The name of the fabric, of course, comes from de Nîmes.

The town itself is not much to look at. It’s pretty industrial and is described as a “feisty, run-down rat race of a town,” by Fodors, though it apparently also has a fair amount of cool old stuff. It looks like Route 22 in Union. Still New Jersey! Just as we had dreamed.

6:15
We see signs for St-Remy. French roads, aside from the big highway, seem to connect nearly every tiny town. Everything is perfectly marked. We pull into St-Remy as it is getting dark, stopping to ask directions to the Chateau. Saint-Remy-de-Provence is a beautiful, little village full of narrow streets and old buildings. Apparently it’s become quite popular among the Paris set, (and Princess Caroline lives there) but during our visit it is calm and serene. Plus, since it is the holiday season, there are tiny white lights everywhere. Very beautiful and romantic. We make our way to the Chateau, which is a little outside of the town, down a country road.

6:20
We arrive and check in. We explain that we speak un petit peu of the French. No one working there speaks English or Spanish. The gall of those French. We look at each other and the nice women who run the place.

6:22
They give up on staring and begin speaking to us in French. Since they are also walking up the stairs with a huge key (as in, about six inches long), we figure out that we are supposed to follow them. We are set up in the Nostradamus room. His name is everywhere in St-Remy as this is his hometown. The room is big, and it has heat. Perfect. It is eclectically decorated, with a good-sized wooden table in the middle, antique dressers and chairs, and red velvet curtains from floor to ceiling over the enormous windows. The color scheme consists of dark green with dark pink molding. Plus, the room comes equipped, for the celebration of Christmas, with a free bottle of wine and some beignets, which are stale French donuts. We are very content.

6:24
We remember that someone has given us the advice to tell all the French people we meet that it is our honeymoon. Apparently, they are so in love with love that they will give us lots of free things. We say, “Vin rouge, pour lune de miel!” The woman smiles and excuses herself.

6:25
We begin eating the beignets. They are stale, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t French.

6:27
The beignets are gone. We look in the guidebook for a place for dinner. Nearly all of them seem to require reservations. Knowing that talking to someone on the phone in French will be as successful as a vegan restaurant in Spain, we ask the hotel owner to help us make a call, so we can have dinner, on our lune de miel. She politely says no, explaining in great detail (in French) why they are not able to make dinner reservations for guests. Understanding nothing, we say “oui, je comprends,” and return to our room.

6:45
We decide to drive back into town and take our chances. We find a very delicious restaurant in which the myth that French food will not fill you up is laid to rest. There are courses in between courses. Everything is perfect. One of us gets poulet and the other saumon fume – fried chicken and lox – the love affair continues.

9:30
Having finished dinner, we do our best to lavish complements on the waiter, who speaks pretty decent English. He brings out the chef as we are leaving. He says, “The chef,” then vanishes. We ask him if he speaks English. No. We all look at each other, Leah fluttering her hands as she tries desperately to think of the right words. Finally, we yell, “Magnifique! Merci bien!” and run away.

Day 2

10:00
We check out of the Chateau and wander straight into four or five nice dogs that inhabit the premises. The largest has chased the smallest into an iron gate, and when the smallest tried to jump through, he got stuck. He is furiously trying to get out, but as he walks, the gate moves. We step in and rescue him. It’s like a movie. We feel great. We tell the dogs that it is our honeymoon, and one of them agrees to pose for a picture.

11:20
We sit in a creperie in St-Remy. Leah decides to order the “andouille et fromage” crepe. The waiter says to Leah, “You don’t like it.” Dan sticks with the fried egg version.

Leah says, “Pour quoi?” He is no match for her. He gets the cook.

The cook says, “If ten Americans eat it, nine do not like.”

Leah says, “What is it?”

The cook says, “It is sausage…special sausage. From pig. You don’t like it.” Leah decides that she will order the andouille and that she will like it. It must be consumed, lest Americans be classified as wimps by the French. We will be the tenth American.

11:30
The andouille crepe arrives, as does the fried egg crepe. The fried egg crepe is great; it tastes like a fried egg in a crepe. The andouille crepe tastes like sneakers. Leah is undaunted, thinking maybe the taste will improve if she keeps eating. Though stubbornness can, at times, be an asset, there are other times when it’s not so helpful.

11:38
The fried egg crepe is gone. Much andouille remains.

11:41
Dan is enlisted to uphold America’s reputation as a nation of tough guys. Patriotism prevails over taste. The cook comes out and sees the empty plate. He says, “Pretty good.” We decide that it was not worth it and still wonder what exactly French andouille is, though we have our suspicions.

1:00
We get back in Opie and drive to Avignon. Among other things, this city a few miles north of St-Remy has a palace where Popes used to live. We go to the palace and get the audioguides and wander around. It is a very drafty palace, which might explain why the Popes picked up and moved camp back to Rome. Much of it is under renovation, so the audioguides say, in their very proper British accents, things like, “Now turn and face the east wall. Walk towards it. In the corner, in the display case, you can see a series of small photographs of the tapestries that are being restored. It is hard to appreciate the grandeur and beauty of the Papal Tapestries from these photographs, but take a moment to study them.” Thanks. Maybe if it weren’t so drafty, you people wouldn’t need to renovate everything while we’re on our honeymoon.

5:00
We wander out onto the famous bridge. These audioguides play the Bridge of Avignon song. It’s a nice bridge. We refrain from dancing on it.

6:00
We find Opie and scram for Arles. We are staying in a hotel that Fodor’s recommended, and that Leah called and e-mailed to confirm our reservations. We weren’t really worried about the confirmation, but it meant more ways to mention that it was our honeymoon. We talk about what free stuff we might get.

7:00
We check in to the Hotel Muette. Leah asks to make sure that the second night she asked to add via email, is all set. C’est une lune de miel, she adds. They nod. They haven’t received the email and unfortunately are full for the second night. We ask about other hotels. They give us a map. However, the room is nice and the hotel has “12th-century exposed stone walls, a 15th century spiral stair, weathered wood, and an Old Town setting” (Fodor’s again). We wander around Arles for a little while. It’s a nice old city and is where Van Gogh lived for awhile until they threw him out.

9:00
We head to dinner, where we gorge ourselves yet again on absolutely delicious food and wine.

This time, among the highlights is this fish soup that comes with huge croutons that you can dunk in there. There is also crème brulee, which always makes for a good evening. It has a fruit on it that we have never tasted before. We ask about it. The waitress says, “fruit exotique.” Indeed it is.

9:30
Back in the hotel, we find “andouille” in the French-English food glossary in our Fodor’s Guide. “Chitterling sausage,” it says. We are solidly among the nine.

Stay tuned for days 3 through 6 of the Lune de Miel.

Hey. As you can see, the blog is actually on the web site now. It's been a very exciting day in Spain, to be sure. The archives still don't work. But soon, soon.