Talbert Pipes Life in France Adventures French Culture? A familiar sight to anyone from the US South (the truck, not me) French Culture? Ask anyone and they will tell you that France is the land of high culture. Whether it is fashion, art, wine, invention, food, or even pipes, the French are universally elite. Fortunately, there are some chinks in the armor that allow peasants like us to enjoy ourselves too! This isn't really an adventure per se, more a simple recounting of what it's like to be homesick and nostalgic and completely surprised all at once. Since the pick-up of the cats at the airport, we've both been quite depressed. I think this last capstone to the Things We Had to Do produced the subconscious realization that we were now cemented in place, and that place was a damned long way from home. It's been difficult to focus on work and finishing this website didn't help matters much, as it entailed sorting through our directories of digital pictures and seeing lots of familiar pics of our home in the US, family, friends, etc. According to the book "Culture Shock-France", by Sally Adamson Taylor, the third month is the cruncher and is when things are toughest. One still can't speak intelligibly, the frustration of everything being different has peaked, you're sick of being totally unable to find even the simplest things when shopping (or even read a phone book), and the longing for the familiar hits hard. Vendors of recognizable US products must do a tremendous business from depressed ex-pats, since we've spent the past week returning from the store with bags of Snickers bars, hot dogs, hamburgers, etc. Fortunately we did receive a wonderful surprise in the form of a box of microwave popcorn shipped to us by my parents. It is not just any microwave popcorn - we can get that here, albeit with a 20 mile drive - but Orville's Ultimate Butter, my favorite brand. Having one's preferred microwave popcorn brand shipped from across the ocean might seem insane but those who have been in similar straits should understand. The week progressed in fits and starts, with some small triumphs (one being a really spectacular briar pipe) and a lot of blind stumbling. Friday brought us a bizarre sight however. In the early morning we were awakened to the sound of big trucks pulling into the parking lot behind our house and shop. This lot is quite large and is a public lot of Herbignac, not our own, so it is sometimes used for oddball town functions like weddings. This time was different. There were trailers stacked with wrecked cars pulling in and creating a defensive wagon-circle in the lot, and along with them was a very familiar sight to anyone from below the Mason-Dixon line - a monster truck! By American standards it was a tiny little thing more akin to the earliest days of monster trucks, before they got bigger than houses, but nonetheless it was a weird vision to see in the morning Brittany sun. I've only seen a monster truck show once before in my life, when I was in high school and we visited the state fair. My brown-eyed girl and I saw the thing perform in a large baseball stadium and my primary memory of it was that it was the loudest thing I have ever heard, before or since. I came away with the conviction that monster truck shows were best enjoyed from within a concrete bunker on the other side of the planet. We investigated the one in our backyard and learned that the show was primarily a stunt driving show and it would begin around 9pm, with the truck after the mid-show intermission. This is a good time to insert the comment that I am often VERY glad that neither of us works regular hours... I knew right away that it would not be a night for sleeping until fairly late (or early). We spent the afternoon in the workshop being amused by the practice runs of the stunt drivers, who left spectacular black marks all over the lot as they did everything but backflips in their junkyard cars. Eventually the show folks erected giant canvas barriers all around the arena they were creating to keep away the curious onlookers who were gathering in hordes. The evening wore on and we worked on in the shop, until there came this huge blasting announcement in French from outside. Loud reggae music started thumping and the sound of tire squeals floated over the canvas. Curiosity overcame us and we left the workshop and climbed high into our house to the attic, where we found we could open our attic window/door and have a perfect view of the entire show for free. We had fun watching the drivers skidding around in circles and eventually got tired of standing so we dug out an old half-broken chair and a large sturdy shipping box to sit on, and cuddled up in front of the window with the cool Autumn chill floating in. I was instantly transported back in time by 20 years to the annual fairs of Davidson County, North Carolina. I loved those things - they were always the slightly spooky early sign that Fall was coming, when the motley crowd of circus-strangers would come to Lexington and set up the creaky rides and ferris wheel to lighten everyone's pockets again, and my grandfather would take me through the halls of animals to see the horses and goats and whatever exotic creatures they'd brought along. The whole feeling for me was best captured in Ray Bradbury's story of the October people, "Something Wicked this Way Comes". Of course, any genuine good ole boy knows that we should have been sitting on plastic coolers full of Pepsi and beer to make the scene authentic, but some adaptation is required when you're 6,000 miles across the planet. We watched the show until the intermission, when the announcer urged everyone to go buy more drinks and snacks. This, of course, zapped directly into my brain and ran down my spinal cord and through the house until it found the perfect accompaniment to the evening's entertainment - the big stash of freshly-arrived popcorn from home. I was down the stairs in a flash and shortly thereafter, I was completely 16 again... sitting shivering in a flannel shirt with a cute girl by my side munching hot popcorn and watching a gigantic truck drive back and forth over wrecked cars to the sound of carnival music. In the immortal words of Buckaroo Banzai, "Wherever you go, there you are." Finis