RESTAURANT TEN, UZES: RESTAURANT REVIEW

Ten sits just off the market square in Uzes, one of the prettiest villages in southern France. The newly renovated space is airy and comfortable with tables of sufficient size and sufficiently spaced to provide for a pleasant dining experience. Service was cheerful, fully bilingual, and attentive without being overbearing. The food presented well to both eye and tongue. And the rate of approximately 30€ per person for a party of five included starters, mains, a dessert or two, two bottles of local wine, and coffees at the finish. Reasonable if not cheap eats. 

So why am I hesitant to give an unqualified thumbs up?  It took me a while to figure it out.

Uzes is a quintessentially French village in a quintessentially French region of southern France. There are those who will say that the Languedoc is just as beautiful but less crowded and less expensive than its eastern neighbors. I know. I'm one of those people. But the fact remains that for many people, villages like Uzes are their vision of France. Add to that a market day filled with eye candy and if the atmosphere was any more French we'd all be wearing berets, blue and white striped sailor shirts, and singing La Marseillaise.  

Yet there we were. In southern Francce. In Uzes. On Market Day. Eating Asian fusion? Four of us started with artichokes tempura with a dipping sauce. Four of us chose sticky ribs for the main. Well prepared and inventive artichokes tempura. Sticky ribs falling off the bone and tasty. But Asian fusion. Our other choices? Ceviche, gravlax, or fish and chips were featured. 

No, I'm not one of those Francophiles trying to be more French than the French. And I understand why our friends chose a restaurant serving dishes that aren't available where they live. But my admiration for French cooking is boundless. And I just felt a bit out of place at Ten.

Try Ten for yourself. As I said at the beginning, Ten offers good food at a reasonable price in a pleasant setting served by a congenial staff. Just understand that it's a restaurant in France but it's not a French restaurant.

Read more reviews and takes on French cooking HERE.

UZES MARKET DAY IN PICS

By the time that 11h00 rolled around on a chilly November day, the Uzes market was packed shoulder to shoulder. I cannot imagine what it would be like on a Saturday in July. As many of us who live in the south of France full time have learned, the best time to go anywhere that a tourist/vacationer might spend the day is either before June or after September. In July and August, you take your life in your hands.

That having been said, the Saturday market in Uzes sprawls over a good portion of the town, has its share of both treasures and schlock, and deserves a visit.

GUNS IN AMERICA

Another month. Another mass shooting. What's going on? What do Americans think about it? How do Americans propose to deal with the situation?

We need more guns, Some People say. More good people with guns will stop more of the bad people with guns. Odd, isn't it, that even with 300,000,000 guns in the US, it seems as though the good people are never around while the bad people are shooting? Wait a minute, Some People say. Good guys shot the bad guy at that Texas church, didn't they? Well, yeah. After the bad guy killed 26, wounded 20 more, and decided to leave the church. OK, Some People say. That means we need more guns in churches. And that gives you a clue about the brand of Christianity espoused by Some People. Beat your swords into AK-47s.

OK, Some People say. How about the latest shooting in California? California has strict gun laws. That didn't stop the shooter. But Some People forget that California's gun laws are only as strict as the Supreme Court allows. And California is bordered by Arizona and Nevada, two of the least restrictive states in the country with no permits, no registration, and no magazine restrictions.

That's really the story of the gun culture in the US. In order to justify their inordinate, almost religious love of firearms, the opponents of proposals to register and/or ban certain types of firearms and to prohibit certain classes of people from ownership are forced to wander farther and farther afield from logic and reason. They will say that the rifles of Revolutionary times were as far advanced from their predecessors as an assault rifle is from 18th Century technology and that the Founders understood this. As if the Founders had anticipated a guy walking into a church with a weapon capable of killing an entire congregation in the time that it would have taken them to fire one bullet and maybe have time to reload fire one more. They will say that the Second Amendment guarantees an absolute right to firearm ownership when every other freedom guaranteed under the Bill of Rights has been limited in one way or another from the beginning and over time as circumstances have changed. 

When it's pointed out that cars are registered, inspected, and insured and their drivers tested and licensed, Some People reply that we don't blame cars when there are fatal accidents, we blame the driver. Why should guns be different? But guns are different. Guns are different because, when used as designed, cars are not deadly weapons. When guns are used as designed, people die. And the more guns that there are, the more that people die. The most recent studies show that for every one percent increase in gun ownership there is a 0.9 percent increase in the rate of deaths by firearm.

At this point, Some People start throwing out statistics of their own, demonstrating that Some People are the Same People who find statistical anomalies to demonstrate that global warming isn't really happening, much less that there is a degree of human liability. Some People insisted that global warming had paused since 1998, an outlier year that was hotter than blazes. At least, Some People were touting a global warming pause until the last four years proved to include three of the hottest ever recorded. Some People apparently do not live in Miami where downtown streets flood every time there's an onshore breeze at high tide. Some People apparently don't live in Houston where there have been twelve catastrophic flooding events in just the past three years.

Some People are like Those People who were tobacco executives and stood in front of Congress and raised their right hands and swore under oath that there was no proof that cigarettes cause cancer. 

It's time that we let Some People know that we're mad as hell and we're not going to take any more of their pious rantings. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. And it certainly wasn't meant to prevent us from considering the safety and well-being of our children who, by the way, are shooting each other with regularity because Some People can't keep their guns out of their children's hands.

My posts of a political nature are collected HERE.

REPLACING A KEYBOARD: YOUTUBE MAY NOT BE YOUR FRIEND

I bought my Acer Aspire 5336-2615 laptop about six years ago when my old tower went on the fritz. It's been my home office, on my desk, main machine ever since. It doesn't travel. Well, it did follow me when I moved across the Atlantic from eastern Pennsylvania to the south of France. But it's not used as a portable. It stays parked on my desk most of the time. I use a tablet when I'm in other parts of the house or on the road. Oh, I do take the Acer downstairs to the router when a direct connection is desirable over my slower WiFi if I have large files to upload. Basically, though, the Acer just sits there.

It's been a workhorse for the simple tasks for which it is used. Word processing. Lots. Surfing the internet. Lots. Streaming video and music. Lots. No gaming but it is the platform on which I prepare a two-hour internet radio program every week. That means stitching together two dozen songs or more with appropriate commentary into a single MP3 file using fairly complicated sound editing software and a USB microphone. So it's a busy little beaver. Doubling RAM to 4 GB helped speed things up. And a 500 GB portable hard drive keeps the Acer's available memory within reason and assures backup in case of implosion. Given an initial price of about $350, I have had no complaints...until recently.

The left-side Shift key stopped working. I googled, poked around a bit, and discovered that uninstalling the keyboard and restarting might work. It did. Once. But using the right-side Shift key was a reasonable if inconvenient workaround. Not reasonable, however, was having to use the number pad when several of the number keys quit working. And not having the ( key available at all was simply unacceptable. The interweb agreed. There were no quick hacks. Time for a new keyboard.

New keyboards for my Acer are cheap as chips, even in France. You have to be careful though. My first search resulted in an AZERTY keyboard with the key tags in French. But QWERTY keyboards with tags in English are readily available.

Then I made a mistake. I watched a YouTube video showing how to replace an Acer keyboard. I thought that it was specific to my Acer. It wasn't. Or maybe it was but the presenter was simply an idiot. Bottom line? It advised pulling the damn machine just about completely apart. Whoa. Not for me. I'm a reasonably handy guy. I can put together complicated IKEA furniture that will function perfectly without leaving any leftover parts on the floor. But I will not gut my computer on my own.

Fortunately, a young lady lives just down the street whose car carries signs announcing her computer repair business. I called. She came. I'll call her Mlle D. Yep, the keyboard needed to be replaced. Up we went on amazon.fr. We made certain that we ordered an English-language QWERTY keyboard for the right model. A few days later, the keyboard having been delivered, I called again. Twenty minutes later, we were sitting together at the kitchen table. I watched as Mlle D opened a toolkit not much bigger than a couple of decks of cards, one on top of the other, filled with tiny tools. She attached a small screwdriver blade to a multi-purpose handle. And then, after taking out the Acer's battery, she proceeded to pry off the keyboard. Seriously. She pried off the keyboard. Carefully. But she pried off the keyboard. Simple as that.

Merde!

After pulling off the keyboard, disconnecting the cable from the motherboard, and attaching the new keyboard's cable without snapping the new keyboard in place, Mlle D reattached the battery to make certain that all was in order. It was. Snap after careful snap and the keyboard was installed. The price? Embarrassingly low. After all, she explained, you're a neighbor and it only took 20 minutes.

Sometimes, even when life throws you a curve, you can still hit a single. 

You can watch a video of the right way to do it HERE. I wish that I'd seen it in the first place. The presenter claims that his website contains a searchable database that includes videos for many popular models.

LE COMPTOIR NATURE, LE SOMAIL: RESTAURANT REVIEW

If you live in our neck of the woods (Do French woods have necks?), and if you are into vide greniers (Car boot sales? Community yard sales?), then you've been to Le Somail. Twice every year, spring and fall, this quiet little community along the Canal du Midi is overrun with bargain hunters and with sellers both professional and private intent on convincing the assembled masses that their wares are indeed bargains. Tables line both sides of the Canal and the side streets of Le Somail for a couple of kilometers in total. It's a veritable smorgasbord for the discriminating trash hound.

We've had our share of luck. At various times, we've purchased a good-sized ceramic jardiniere to use as an umbrella stand in our entry hall, a collapsible wire egg basket that fits on top of the microwave but under the cabinet above, and there's a brass bell that we're going to use to replace our electronic doohicky as soon as I pull out my tools and figure out how to hang it.

Enter friends from Mexico. Cathey and Anna met at an exercise class at the Y in Allentown. Each having discerned that the other was an atypical Allentonian, they became friends. We became friends. And after retirement  took us to different countries on different continents, we've kept in touch. Anna and husband Hank have even taken to visiting us here in the south of France in the fall around the time of Anna's birthday and mine.

This year, Anna's birthday day fell on a Monday. She asked us to choose a nice restaurant for lunch to celebrate. Monday? And the week of a bank holiday to boot? Every restaurant that I called was either closed or fully booked. I finally tried a restaurant that had been recommended to us but that we had never tried, Le Comptoir Nature in Le Somail. They were available. It seemed dangerous to book a birthday luncheon for a foodie friend at a restaurant that we didn't know. But what else could we do?

So. Monday. Off season. Quiet. The sun shining warm enough to dine outside. And without one of those vide greniers happening, no hustle and no bustle. Did it work for us?

It did indeed!

Check out the website HERE. The setting right beside the Canal provides a postcard view. The menu has something for everyone and is reasonably priced. And how many restaurants do you know that list the sources of their meats and veggies and ice cream and such? Often, both the region from which they come and the name of the producing farm or family are included. Take the duck tasting platter pictured below. The website even names the family that produces the cereals that were fed to the ducks raised 'at liberty' that provided the foie gras and the dried duck breasts. Also on the plate you'll find fritons - duck fat cracklings - creme brulee with foie gras at the bottom, organic lentils, onion confit, and a nicely dressed green salad. Price? 18€. Cathey ordered what amounted to a full-on Frenchified tapas plate with 10 or 11 different meat and veggie tastes - also 18€. 

Don't wait for the next vide grenier. Worth a special trip.

Read all of my restaurant reviews HERE.

Duck Platter

Tasting Platter

VOX BIGERRI, QUARANTE: CONCERT REVIEW

I get it. Not everyone will make tracks on a Friday night to hear a group of Corsican men sing polyphonic music a capella even if the concert is free and takes place in an historic 10th Century abbey. There was a time when I might have passed on it myself. But The Southern Woman That I Married has managed to refine my tastes over the years. Even if certain genres don't touch my soul, at least I can be appreciative.

Take opera, for instance...

But this music does touch my soul. There's something about a minor key lament that strikes a chord. And when presented with confidence, skill, energy, and even joy, I can't help but be carried along with it. It's not music for every day listening, to be sure. You don't bop around the room to this stuff while you're dusting the furniture. But in the right setting - and L'Eglise Sainte-Marie in Quarante is a most proper setting - folks like the five men who comprise Vox Bigerrie can keep an audience of one hundred or more locals spellbound throughout an hour-long concert.

A quick word about polyphony, keeping in mind that I'm no expert. Basically, polyphonic music is music in which two different melodic lines are sung simultaneously. Most of us are used to single melody lines or melody lines enhanced by chords based on that single line. So polyphonic music can have an overly complex, even discordant sound to the modern ear.

Play the video above. If you like what you see and hear, head over to YouTube for more. The videos that Vox Bigerrie post are different, creative and enjoyable. Just as they are different, creative, and enjoyable as a performance group. If you have the opportunity, see and hear them in person. Wonderful stuff. And check out the annual Festival of the Troubadours of which this concert was a part HERE. The series of concerts lasts from June through October and the venues span the entire region.

You can read more about my takes on French life on my blog HERE. Enjoy.