English and French

Last night, we went to a quiz night at Domaine de Rambeau. This is a bed and breakfast place just north of Castelmoron, run by an English woman, Kim and her French husband Christian.

It was a great night. Those at our table were witty and knowledgeable. We had a lot of fun.

We met new people and learned of a local English/French association that had more than a hundred members. And there was a waiting list.

The association splits into a number of smaller groups which meet regularly, providing an opportunity for locals to learn English and vice versa.

We also learned of a photography club that meets in Castelmoron every Thursday night.

The guests at these Domaine de Rambeau functions are almost always English or fluent English speakers. Ordering drinks from Christian is the only time you need to speak French.

In contrast, today's repas des chasseurs or hunters' lunch was a French speaking affair.

Some weeks ago, we saw a flier for the lunch and were intrigued. So we rang and booked.

We arrived at Lebretonnerie, a tiny village 20 minutes by car from Castelmoron, at midday. Smoke billowed from the open charcoal fires at the front of the Salle des Fetes (community hall) and men with wide girths and checkered aprons readied racks of brochettes for the grill.

The lunch, which is put on once a year by the local hunters' association, attracts more than a hundred guests. I'm pretty sure Cliona and I were the only English speakers among them.

For pre-lunch drinks at the bar, there was a choice of apero... whisky, ricard or kir.

Chargrilled pieces of wild boar offal, with onion and capsicum, were offered as an opening salvo.

The entrée was a coarse country paté of local pork, served with tomato and cucumber which you dressed from small plastic bowls of vinagrette on the table.

Bottles of red wine were brought out and regularly replaced.

Next came slow-cooked venison in a white wine sauce, flavoured with bouquet garni, carrots, mushrooms and seasoning.

This was followed by a fillet of wild boar, with French fries.

Just when we thought there couldn't possibly be any more food, there was.

Large bowls of dressed salad (lettuce) and platters of soft cheese appeared.

Dessert was tarte aux fraises, sweet, new-season strawberries on a pastry base with custard cream topped with chocolate-flecked whipped cream.  Sparkling apple cider accompanied this course.

By now it was five o'clock. Lunch had been going for five hours.

I never found out when the wild boar was shot, but I did learn the deer had been winter killed and frozen.

Apparently, before boar meat is made available to members,  it is laboratory tested to ensure it is disease-free.

Hunting is a traditional activity in rural France. But the ranks of hunting associations are thinning. Young people are hard to recruit. The man next to me gloomily predicted that hunting may disappear in France in coming decades.

He was adamant hunting helped maintain the ecological balance. Without it, he said, the number of feral animals would increase and cause a lot of damage.

He said feral goats were the animals most frequently hunted, less so boar, deer, pheasants, rabbits etc.

The repas des chasseurs was a great gourmet and learning experience, another noteworthy day in our unfolding French adventure.

The farm at Fongrave

When we cycle to Fongrave, the next village along the river, we pass a great timber barn near the road.

There is a little farm shop attached to this barn.

Closed all winter, the shop is now open.

These items were all grown on the farm ...

The cost of this fresh produce ... 8,25 euros.

La Fabrica

We had a degustation dinner at an outstanding restaurant recommended by the concierge of our pension, Maria.

It was our last night in San Sebastian.

We started with an aperitif, sangria for me and cava (bubbles) for Cliona.

The "amuse bouche" was a vegetable soup topped with a creamy mousse in little glasses.

The entrée was prawn and cress on a mound of avocado mash.

Next came a scallop topped by caviar in a puddle of paprika-flecked velouté, showcased in a glass bowl.

Then a mushroom parcel in a cream sauce.

After that, a piece of baked cod ...

And squid in its ink.

For mains, I had a piece of beef on a bed of puree with jus, and Cliona had pork cheeks with apple chutney.

A runny raspberry sorbet with a tiny dollop of ice-cream was a palate-cleanser.

During the meal we drank a bottle of Vaga Cigala Verdjo 2016. I also had a glass of Javier San Pedro Rioja Alavesca with my steak.

Dessert was a chocolate extravagance for me, and a cheescake for Cliona.

This was our  "Babette's Feast" ... to say farewell to Donostia, a city of unforgettable pleasures.

San Sebastian ... a peak into some pintxos bars

Click on the images to expand and enhance

Pintxos bar

There are so many of them and they're all inviting.

We picked one where we could sit down. Most patrons stood at or near the bar.

Platters of delicacies are lined up along the counter at the end of which a forearm carved in bronze is pouring a bottle.

At the back of the place, we savour our pintxos and drink our wine, strong, full-bodied Spanish red.

An elderly couple take a table next to us. They are in their seventies, or maybe older. She is well-dressed and wears expensive jewellery. He is a short, thin man with close cropped silver hair and a ruddy complexion.

His kind eyes glisten as he leans over to introduce himself. He tells us this is one of the oldest pintxos bars in San Sebastian. He knows the owner. He asks where we are from. He tells us he once lived and worked in the United States.

His wife doesn't speak, she smiles.

He asks what we think of Donestia, the Basque name for San Sebastian. He is well pleased with our response.

As we get up to leave, he clutches my hand in a strong, warm grip and like a true Basque gentleman, he kisses the back of Cliona's hand.

He welcomes us to his city and wishes us the best of times.

His warmth and sincerity are touching.

These bars are such joyful places. Couples bring their children here. People laugh and banter and make new friends across tables.

You don't see a lonely soul, or a solitary drinker drowning his sorrows.

These bars are a stand-out attraction, here, in this wonderful city.

This romantic pension

Pension Amaiur is one flight up an ancient timber staircase in the oldest building in San Sebastian.

This tiny, romantic hotel has many attractive features.

warm and welcoming

 

many doors feature a religious brass badge

looking down the stairs

This was the only street to survive the destruction of 31 August 1813, when English and Portuguese forces laid siege to the city's Napoleonic occupiers.

The nearby Santa Maria is a spectacular church.

the magnificent carvings and door at the church's entrance

The old city, historic and charismatic, has dozens of pintxos bars. It is a wonderful place to visit.

We are lucky to live close to the border and be able to enjoy two cultures.

A brassy surprise

We shuffled with the crowd along the aisles of  Les Halles ... Biarritz's famous food market.

Here was a celebration of produce, from the sea, from the soil, from the animals of the field.

The quality was evident. We could have spent hours there, but San Sebastian beckoned.

Outside, the intermittent rain was caught and spilled by parasols erected over racks of women's clothes and thin wooden crates of vegetables.

On the way back to the hotel along Rue Gambetta, we heard the sharp, metallic strains of a brass band, underpinned by the rhythmic clash of tambourines and the regular thump of a bass drum.

Eleven men and one woman stood in a line on the footpath. Theirs was joyful music and they beamed joyfully after every number.

Running late and wearing an apologetic smile, a  rotund, florid-faced man carrying a tuba joined the ensemble, a lead trumpet, a couple of trombones, a cornet, a euphonium, a couple of saxophones and percussion.

A tall, thin man in a cap sidled up to the players, stopping behind the trumpet player to look at the music that was clipped over his instrument.

The tambourine player pulled on a cigarette between numbers.

People gathered, drifted away and others took their place. The road was partly blocked.

This is an Easter Saturday tradition in Biarritz.

Biarritz

Well, it's only been about forty years.

I don't remember much, other than the beach and the Heath Robinson mansion on the cliff.

It is exciting to be here. The tourist season hasn't yet got into full swing, but the footpaths are crowded.

A surfer in a wetsuit peeled down to his waist is skateboarding the wrong way on a one-way street.

An immaculately dressed aristocratic couple go into a chocolate shop. A man lets me pat his young Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, the happiest of dogs.

Children are eating ice-cream. A stream of people enter and emerge from a tiny Patisserie Boulangerie at the end of our street. The sign at the front says it's been in the same family since 1910. It must be very good.

We reconnoitre a seafood restaurant down at the old port. We'll go there tonight.

We climb back up rough stone stairs that bring us to the foot of a grand cathedral, where worshippers are celebrating Easter.

Tomorrow we head across the Spanish border to San Sebastian.

Banking

We were warned about the French banking system.

After three months of frustration with BNP Paribas, we requested a switch to Credit Agricole (CA) Aquitaine.

Changing banks should be a straightforward task, but here it's a minefield. It is something so fraught a special law was brought in by Emmanuel Macron, the current front-runner in the Presidential elections, to make the transition less painful.

The transition is still painful.

At first, BNP refused to do it because the account is in joint names... and I alone had made the application.

Then, when the paperwork was in order, we were told it would take a whole month before the change was effected.

So, BNP alerted the various enterprises and utilities which we pay with direct debit of the impending change. But they did so before they transferred the balance to our new account. So the inevitable happened. Electricity provider EDF pulled a monthly amount out and put the CA account in deficit.

I then had to race in to obtain an overdraught facility for our CA account. Other amounts are about to come out, but still we wait for BNP to make the transfer.

Today, Cliona tried to use her new CA credit card to make a modest online purchase. But alas, the vendor said her card wasn't recognised.

sigh

On a brighter note, we took advantage of the warm Spring weather over the weekend to do two long cycles ... one up-river and one down-river.

Sunday's cycle took us to Clairac, where we had a relaxing pitstop at a cafe/bar overlooking the river and the old part of town.

Eymet and Issigeac

These are two charming medieval villages a half hour's drive north of Castelmoron.

They attract a lot of people from the UK, tourists and expats.

It's funny to walk the streets and hear English voices.

We drove up to Issigeac yesterday to look at its weekly market and to have lunch ... but the restaurants were booked out.

So we came back through Cancon and stopped at a village restaurant/bar.

Incongruous with the brasserie-style exterior, the interior decor was plain. There was only one occupied table, three men dressed like farmers who talked at the top of their voices.

But we noticed the back room was full of elderly people enjoying a buffet lunch, so we thought we'd stay and give the place a go.

The menu for 15.50 euro comprised an entre, main course and dessert. The proprietor, a rather gaunt, angular-faced man in his 50's, said if we took the lunch menu there was a soup thrown in.

Our meal was good and we rounded it off with the nicest dessert I've had for a long time. Cliona had an excellent creme brule and I had crepes filled wth ice-cream and dressed with a raspberry/cherry coulis.

Towards the end of our meal, a young woman and baby came in, much to the delight of the waitress, who we figured was probably the child's aunt.

She took the infant from her mother and waltzed around the restaurant for a few minutes, then moved to the back room ... which stopped the conversation. Many grey heads turned, eyes smiling up at the waitress with the baby in her arms. They all made such a fuss of that little girl, who was giggling and lapping up the attention.

The farmers left their table and threw a friendly "Bon Appetit" our way. They stood at the bar, where they drank coffee and continued their raucous conversation. One of them popped outside regularly for cigarettes, joined by the proprietor.

Issigeac

The archway entrance to Eymet's central square