A mixture of thoughts

In France Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie has been in overdrive trying to prevent the conflict in the Middle East from spreading to France, which is one of the few European countries to have both a large Arab population and a (relatively) large Jewish population (the UK is the other). I attended a rally in support of Israel Sunday morning in the park by a tree planted in memory of Itzhak Rabin. There were some inspiring speeches, including one from an Israeli diplomat. I have the feeling the French press is starting to understand Israel and the Jewish community a little better, but it's a slow process.

After the rally S. and I toured the main mosque in Lyon. The visit had been arranged between the mosque and one of Lyon's reform synagogues several weeks ago, and it was decided to go ahead with it, despite the recent events. It was a wonderful experience. The people were very warm, and the mosque is beautiful. Our guide explained some of the basics of Islam in a straightforward manner. I told him how to say a couple of things in Hebrew and he was so appreciative. All the visitors went away feeling they had learned something important. The synagogue and the mosque also arrange regular get-togethers between Muslim women and Jewish women. The women have discussions, or they invite a speaker. Mostly, they just get to know each other. I wish we could have more moments like that, because here too, there isn't much mixing between the two communities. Deep down I think most people want peace, mutual respect and understanding, but the radical elements put such pressure on the ordinary people. I know that Arab-Jewish discussion groups exist in Israel, too, because I hear about them every now and then when I'm riding in the car listening to Radio Judaica Lyon, but it's rare that I hear or read about them in any other media.

Following the wedding of S.'s friend's son in Jerusalem, we celebrated the "shabbat chatan" in the hotel with our friends' families. During one of the meals I left the group, who were singing Jewish songs, to fill up my plate at the buffet tables. As I walked past a group of Christian pilgrims in the other part of the dining room, one of the men made the sign of the cross over himself before eating. Meanwhile, all of the people working in the hotel were Arab. You find this mixture in other countries, too, but there's something special about it in Israel, in Jerusalem, thanks to Israel's policy of open access to religious sites. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the three religions could always co-exist in such harmony?

I read a wonderful book last year, called "Three Cups of Tea". It's about an American who survives a failed attempt to climb K2, one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas, only because of the hospitality of the local people in the northern reaches of Pakistan. After that experience, he decides to devote his life to building schools in that region. He realizes that it is most important to educate girls. Whereas educated boys move away from their remote mountain villages when they grow up, the women become the cement of the local community. They become nurses and engineers and teachers. They have fewer children. They cause the general socio-economic level to rise. But there are so many cultural and religious impediments to this process.

The Palestinians as a people have made so many tragically bad decisions. They have had a painful lack of good leaders. And they still haven't understood that they must take their destiny into their own hands. They must stop crying "Help us!" to the world and help themselves. And they have a powerful weapon: the womb. In the short run this will make them more numerous, but in the long run it will work against them, because the faster the population grows, the harder it will be for them to climb out of poverty. After September 11, 2001, when people were wondering why Islamic terrorists had attacked the United States, B., who was seven at the time, said, "Maybe they're jealous."

Anyway, I know "our" side of the story pretty well, but I know very little about the other side, about what Arab people feel and believe, as individuals.

This year too in Jerusalem

Last year at this time, B’s bar mitzvah and our subsequent trip to Israel brought me out of blogging slumber in order to write about non-political events. This time, it was the wedding of S.'s childhood friend's son that drew us to Israel. The geopolitics nearly overwhelmed us.

It is difficult to find words to describe my feelings upon reading that people were being killed just a few miles from where we were vacationing, on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border: a mixture of sympathy for both Gaza’s and Israel’s civilian victims and an understanding of Israel’s anger and need to protect itself.

Unavoidably, our sympathies lie more with the Israeli side. The eldest son of my Princeton classmate S., whom we visited again this year, is probably in Gaza right now. Our thoughts and prayers go out to him and to his family. I'm biased, and it seems to me that the Arabs of Palestine brought this tragedy on themselves when they voted for Hamas in the first place. Of course this vote was only the latest in a long string of bad choices the Palestinian Arabs have made over the years. But it's not too late. All Hamas has to do is renounce terrorism and stop firing rockets into Israel, and the war will end.

Not that we really felt the war in any way while we were in Israel last week. Had we not seen newspapers, scanned our favorite websites when we had internet access or discussed politics with people we met, we might never have known the difference. In fact, once I did know what was going on, I would have preferred a few more reminders, such as more thorough searches and other security measures.

In entering Tel-Aviv’s Friday crafts market, Nahalat Binyamin, a security guard was checking backpacks, handbags, and the like. I purposely opened only one of the two zippered compartments of my backpack to see if he would ask me to open the other. He didn’t. Okay, that was one day before the Israeli air raids started.

At the end of our 10-day stay and five days after the start of Israel’s military operation, we attended the wedding in Jerusalem. I was expecting to see a security guard at the entrance with a list of guests to be checked off as people arrived – and showed identification. In fact, there were no security measures. Maybe in both cases there was profiling going on. If so, it was a very discreet operation. The wedding itself was a moment of joy. I wish N. and R. much love, long life, good health, healthy offspring, success, tolerance and mutual understanding in their future life together.

Security was very present in the Old City of Jerusalem. There were soldiers on every corner, or so it seemed, although they were mostly engaged, like police and security personnel everywhere, in giving directions. I embarked on an international relations mission of my own, intent on finding Mafouz, whom I had met along the via Dolorosa last year (see this post). It was raining, it was late in the day, and S., B. and D. were waiting for me in a café in the Jewish Quarter. Time was of the essence. I darted in and out of the market streets, up stairways and past the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. What seemed like a wondrous collage of cultures last year started to look like a huge, open air souvenir shop this year. At one point, only a few meters from the spot where I had met Mafouz and thought he lived, I stopped to ask a shopkeeper if he knew him. He recruited me instead to “help him” write a sign in English for his shop, then insisted on giving me a “gift”. He put together a set of earrings I knew S. would never wear, because the clasp was made of some unidentified base metal. Then he explained that one of the earrings was a gift; the other was not. I felt I was caught in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I managed to extricate myself, but after a few more enquiries, Mafouz was, alas, nowhere to be found.

While in Israel we heard that many Gaza residents would like to be rid of Hamas. In our Tel-Aviv hotel, one of the valets told us that the (Arab) hotel manager has family in Gaza. He said that when he goes there he sees Hamas “officials” driving around in luxury cars while the rest of the population cowers. I would have liked to see confirmation of this in the press.

The articles I read, in the New York Times and Le Monde, seemed more balanced than during previous cycles of Arab-Israeli violence. Perhaps this was due in part to the Israeli government’s concerted media strategy together with its restrictions on media coverage from inside the Gaza strip itself. With each passing day, however, the media tide seems to be turning against Israel’s intended message. Images, it seems, speak louder than principles.

So allow me to conjure up an image of my own. The story begins in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Millions of ethnic Germans have been chased out of western Poland and across the Oder-Neisse line, Germany’s present-day eastern border. These ethnic Germans remain in refugee camps just over the border in Germany, refusing to integrate themselves into the rest of Germany, preferring instead to live indefinitely in the miserable conditions of the camps while demanding to be able to return to their ancestral homes in Poland, a "new" country whose right to exist they do not recognize. (For its part, Germany shows no interest in integrating them anyway, lest the economic strain the country is already experiencing be exacerbated.)

After a while, the refugees claim they are not really Germans after all, they are … Pomeranians and Silesians, and they demand the “right of return” to “occupied” Pomerania and Silesia. In the meantime, they elect a “militant” organization – international journalists alternately call the members “militants”, “activists” or “fighters” – to represent them, which starts sending suicide bombers into Poland in an effort to break Poland’s resolve and obtain the sympathy of the international community. Miraculously, the strategy works. Thus, once a fortnight or so, Szczecin (Stettin), Wroclaw (Breslau) and scores of other Polish cities and towns where the ethnic Germans used to live become a backdrop for carnage: an outdoor market, a crowded bus, a discotheque, etc. Occasionally even cities as far away as Warsaw and Krakow are targeted. It doesn’t matter how many civilians are killed during these attacks, because the world forgets about them quickly. However, it remembers that the exiled Pomeranians and Silesians are so desperate that resorting to indiscriminate violence is, alas, all they can do.

The Pomeranian and Silesian “militants” also forge ties with other European “militant” organizations, such as ETA, the IRA and the Red Brigades, who supply them with an arsenal of weapons of ever-increasing strength. Before long, they can fire rockets deep into Poland, generally from within the refugee camps, vowing to destroy the “Polish entity” and to drive every last Polish man, woman and child into the Baltic Sea.

In an effort to avoid civilian casualties, Poland generally takes no military action, but instead imposes a blockade around the refugee areas, carefully inspecting everything that goes in or out. This is only partly effective, however. Through complicity with their German friends to the west, the Pomeranian and Silesian “militants” smuggle in weapons, but don’t pay much attention to their people’s need for food, clothing, medicine or other basic necessities. The world condemns Poland for “besieging” the refugee camps and decries the abject living conditions of the people there.

Occasionally, Poland does take military action to crush the “militants”, calling them by their real name: terrorists. When this happens, Pomerania and Silesia become the world’s most important geopolitical hotspots, and with one voice, the entire international community calls for an end to the violence.

Now I ask you: could you imagine for one second that such a situation might actually be allowed to exist? And even if you could, how long would Poland put up with these shenanigans before losing its patience?
a) a month
b) a year
c) five years
d) 60 years

Now suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine such a situation were possible and that Poland did put up with it for 60 years. Now, finally, imagine that “Poland” is less than one-tenth its actual size, has around one-fifth its current population and has enemies not only on its western border but on its eastern and southern borders as well, and you have approximately the situation in which Israel has lived for much of the past 60 years.

Israel’s demands are so unreasonable, aren’t they?

********
Does peace still have a chance? I still hope so.

Safety in Israel

Since our return from Israel several people have asked us if we felt safe there. The short answer to this is "Yes".

I now understand the feelings of the many French Jews who are buying property in Israel. On the one hand, if you are bothered by the anti-Semitism coming from parts of the Arab-Muslim community here, you might think, as I did, that moving from France to Israel is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. On the other hand, they say, at least the Jews call the shots in Israel.

Such was our sense, for better or for worse, of the balance of power there. Incidentally, the feeling of long-time Israelis towards these French newcomers is ambiguous. The former see the latter as at least partly responsible for the sharp rise in real estate prices, while much of that now French-owned real estate remains unoccupied several months of the year.

The tortured relationship between Israel and its Arab neighbors, in particular the Palestinians, was barely noticeable during our stay. There are plenty of Arab neighborhoods, almost all of our taxi drivers were Arab, as were many of the employees in the Jerusalem Novotel. But we sensed no undercurrent of hatred, animosity or threat of violence. We didn’t venture into Hebron, Jericho, Nablus or Ramallah, however, the main cities of the West Bank, nor into Gaza.

The most recent cycle of violence began while we were in Israel, but I wouldn’t have known anything about it had I not picked up a newspaper. On the day before we left, a rocket fired from Gaza landed in an open area near Ashkelon. Here is the title of the article that appeared in the Jerusalem Post:

Israel fears 'strategic threat' as Katyusha hits N. Ashkelon.
250,000 within rocket range
IDF kills 9 Palestinians in Gaza strikes

Here is the title in the International Herald Tribune from the same day:

Israelis kill 9 in raids into Gaza

It wasn’t until I read the IHT article that I found out that Palestinians from Gaza had fired a rocket and even then, it wasn’t exactly clear which action was in response to which! Ironically, in the paper version of the IHT, there was a subtitle in smaller print that said something like “Rocket lands near Ashkelon.” The contrast was striking: the same two items of information were announced in two newspapers on the same day, but in reverse order and font sizes. So much for the impartial media!

The Holy Land

No matter the feelings I might have had about Judaism when I was growing up – joy, guilt, wonder, sorrow – the Jewish identity is so strong, so compelling that sooner or later it always reels me back in. In some periods of my life religion has played only a minor role, but it has always been in the background and always a part of my character, ready to sally forth at critical moments. Judaism’s values, the importance Jews place on education, the notion that everything is grist for the mill and therefore debatable are hard-wired in me. There’s some ineffable beauty about the 4,000-year tortured journey of this tiny people.

In the Diaspora, especially outside the United States, it’s hard to express your Jewish identity fully without singling yourself out or even cutting yourself off from the surrounding, Gentile world. This is frustrating. Jewish children know from an early age that they are somehow different from everyone else around them. This has always been both Judaism’s strength and its weakness.

Israeli hospitality and Jewish identity
Stepping off an airplane in Israel is like meeting an old friend. The barriers fall away and you can be yourself. You can live Judaism fully and completely. Indeed, our Israeli experience started with passport control in Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The woman in the booth looked at our passports and saw that B. had just turned 13. “Ah, bar mitzvah,” she said. “Mazel tov. Which parsha (Torah portion) did you read? Miquets?”
“No, Vayigash.” Not bad though. Miquets was the previous week.

This was to be a recurring theme during our two weeks in Israel: many ordinary people, not Yeshiva students or rabbis or other religious Jews, had a great deal of basic Biblical knowledge. We asked my cousins about it, and they confirmed that children in Israel study history starting with the Bible, or – dare I put it another way – study the Bible as history.

Our visit to the Great Synagogue reinforced our feelings of belonging. B. & D. were amazed by the sheer size of it: fifteen hundred seats (Temple Emmanuel in New York is bigger, but they don’t remember it). This was their first tangible piece of evidence, soon to be substantiated elsewhere, that they were truly in a country where a majority of the population was Jewish. This intrigued them. Soon they (and I) were wearing a kippa around Jerusalem. Granted, three or four times a day we’d walk into a place that required us to wear one, anyway. But that wasn’t the reason. We were just proud to belong, and to show it. Now I know some American readers might now be wondering if it’s “dangerous” to wear a kippa in France. In truth, it does attract some unnecessary attention from elements of the Arab-Muslim community, but mostly, it’s that if you’re not religious, it just feels out of place. As I would if I wore my cowboy hat here in France. In Jerusalem wearing a kippa doesn’t feel out of place. Au contraire, it makes your heart beat in rhythm with your surroundings.

Whenever our guide book gave us bad opening time information, people seemed determined to help us. At the Rockefeller Archeological museum, we were initially met with an amused, but firm, “No, the museum is closed today.”
“But our guide book says …”
“I’m sorry. It’s closed every Tuesday.”
And then miraculously, “But I can let you in to climb to the top of the tower and have a look at the Old City? Would you like that?” Would we ever! He also let us walk around a sculpture garden in the museum. I felt like Jamie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler.

At the Tel Aviv “safari” and zoo, the entrance was closed, earlier than expected, but the young attendant at the gate felt sorry for us (must have been my brilliant Hebrew, more on that later!), and let us in, asking us just not to tell anyone. Oops, I just did …

Towards the end of our stay, I noticed that we hadn’t been subjected to the kind of gentle urging to move to Israel, to “make aliyah”, that I had experienced on my previous visit 25 years ago. Israelis we met this time were certainly very proud of their country, but they didn’t ask us why we weren’t planning to live in Israel. Was it my imagination, or was this just another of the ways in which Israel has changed in the intervening time? The country has been through a lot since then, including several waves of immigration.

Old City wanderings
The Jerusalem Novotel is just a stone’s throw from the Damascus Gate, near what was “no-man’s land” until 1967. From there, we set out on foot for the Old City. But first I took my family on a detour, guided by my 30-year-old book of walking tours, Footloose in Jerusalem. I figured if this stuff has been here 2,000 years, what’s another 30? Well, after circling a busy, tired-looking bus station outside the Damascus Gate for 15 minutes, what was supposed to be Jeremiah’s Grotto turned out to be a warehouse with a 14-year-old Arab boy driving a forklift. We never did get to the bottom of that mystery. We headed back to the gate, but not before visiting another out-of-the-way attraction, King Solomon’s mines. These are a series of underground galleries that extend deep into – that is, under – the Muslim quarter of the Old City. This is where stone was quarried for the First Temple and where King Zedekiah allegedly tried to hide from the Babylonians before his family was put to death before his eyes.

Then it was in through the Damascus Gate and into the bustling Muslim quarter of the Old City. Here, gravity draws you into the colorful, main market streets, but through diversionary tactics, I managed to draw may family off them and into the back alleyways. At one point, while looking at the map, as any good tourist would, I heard children playing around me and felt something plastic strike my foot. When I looked away from the map I saw a youngster holding a gun, which had presumably just fired the dart that had landed on my foot. Somehow, I understood this instinctively, although I will admit to a split-second of anxiety. Along the via Dolorosa, we asked a man for directions. His name was Mafouz. He told us about his love for the city we were exploring and that he was born in. He was Christian, and that evening, December 24, he was going to Bethlehem. He was already reveling in the expectation of it. We also saw kids pushing or pulling huge carts, laden with bread, sundry supplies or even eggs. I took a picture of the boy pulling the eggs. B. thought I shouldn’t have done it, that it was a form of Schadenfreude. Of course, he didn’t say it that way. He said, “He’s poor, he’s working hard, and here you come, a tourist, you take his picture. Ha ha, isn’t that funny, all those eggs?” He’s right, of course, but isn’t 13 a bit young for such middle-class guilt?

When we reached the Jewish quarter, the family breathed a sigh of relief. The first sounds we heard were those of children in a classroom. We were on familiar turf. We turned left and saw an archaeological museum. We turned right and saw a cultural center. We went straight and saw a group of four historic Sephardic synagogues. We turned another corner and came out onto a large open area where a group of female soldiers were sitting on benches, guns strapped across their backs. We walked down some stairs and found ourselves on the Cardo, flanked by art galleries.

We were home. All that remained on our agenda for the day was a visit to the Wailing Wall, the Kotel in Hebrew, the last remaining vestige of the Second Temple, destroyed in the year 70 of the common era. The Kotel is at one end of a wide plaza (access is through metal detectors), and is divided into two sides, one for men and one for women. So we split up, without much ceremony, S. to one side, B., D. and me to the other. It was only afterwards that I realized how emotional it was going to be for S. Her mother, who passed away last July, had never been to Israel. But how she had dreamed of going! So now here was her daughter, on a pilgrimage by proxy, with strangers to either side of her and no way of communicating. It was emotional for us, too. I felt a physical connection to the Wall and the 2,000 years of history since the destruction of the Temple that it represents for me. B. & D. were busily writing notes and searching for available cracks in the Wall. So was I, but I hadn’t noticed the tables and chairs set up for just that purpose. So I squatted. When I started to get up, however, I felt a shooting pain in my back. Usually that means that within 24 hours, I will look like a walking question mark; that is, if I can walk at all. The “Muslim prayer” position sometimes alleviates this, but it wasn’t the place for Muslim prayer. Miraculously, the pain did not recur.

Nearby a man was talking animatedly on his cell phone. Then he balanced the phone on a stone in the Wall and left it there for a few minutes. Why not? If you can fax a message to the Wall, why not phone one in directly? I offered to put D. on my shoulders so his note would be higher on the Wall (and possibly get read sooner), but he declined. Occasionally men came over to me to ask for donations to charities that allegedly help poor families. In truth, it was hard to tell where the charity ended and the begging began. Later in the week, we took a tour of the tunnel that runs along the wall under the Muslim quarter. It runs alongside the retaining wall of the Temple Mount, of which the Wailing Wall is part, and in certain places you can see just how far down the wall goes. Or rather, just how high the wall was before the intervening 2,000 years of building, destruction and rebuilding raised the level of the city up another 15-20 meters.

When I first walked through the Old City 25 years ago, it was a magical four-dimensional journey. Back then, I had never seen anything like it. The layers of time, the diversity, the strangeness of it, the beauty of it. This time, it was even more wondrous than it was then. More has been finished, excavated and developed, especially in the Jewish quarter. But something in me had changed. The sights were somehow familiar.

History
Every time we take a trip somewhere, we set out with grand, idealistic notions about how much our children will learn about the culture and history of the country or region we are visiting. Idealism usually gives way to disappointment at the first museum visit. At the Palacio Real in Madrid, jewel of Spanish architecture, decorative arts and repository of a few centuries of Spanish royal history, B. & D. spent most of their time playing with the buttons on the audioguide. So with the Palmach Museum, the Hall of Independence and the Museum of the Diaspora on the schedule, we expected the worst.

But that was then, and this was now. For the first time, they felt the museum exhibits were meant for them. They, especially, B. felt a personal, albeit distant connection to the people, whether Biblical or contemporary, whose lives and destiny were being explained to them. I certainly never felt this way growing up Jewish in the United States. Maybe because being Jewish was so ordinary to me, whereas they, growing up in France, see it as extraordinary. Perhaps those feelings then found full expression in Israel, where they began to understand just how extraordinary the destiny of the Jewish people has been.

The Hall of Independence is perhaps the most understated museum I’ve ever seen. It used to be the Tel Aviv art museum and is the place where the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948. The visit consists of watching a short film and listening to an impassioned presentation of the events of that historic day, delivered by museum staff. No multimedia experiences, no ancient artifacts, just the tables and chairs used that day. Not to worry, the Palmach museum filled in our knowledge about the birth of the State of Israel with its multimedia journey into the lives of members of this pre-statehood defense organization, which initially received training in the British army. The Museum of the Diaspora was a wondrous journey through the ages. I could have spent a few days there, but luckily, my family, as fascinated as they were by what they learned, reminded me that we might want to do a few other things in the next few days (eat, sleep, bathe, etc.). Finally, the Time Elevator, a cross between a cinema and an amusement park, helped us to sort out the Jeremiahs, the Hezekiahs, the Zedekiahs, the Herods and the myriad other important characters who have left their mark on the history of the Jewish people.

History is omnipresent in Israel. I suppose if you live there you get used to that and lose your wide-eyed innocence, just as I have become used to France's history. We Americans are very impressed by old things, I'm told. But it's hard not to be impressed by the ruins at Caesaria, which line about a kilometer of shoreline. Herod had another palace here, in addition to the one at Masada and the Temple he rebuilt and expanded in Jerusalem. Indeed, it was not François Mitterrand who invented the notion of "grands projets".

We did not go to Yad Vashem, the museum of the Holocaust. I don’t remember much detail from my visit there 25 years ago, only the piercing, harrowing nature of it, and I remember being overcome with grief and despair by the end of the visit. We didn’t want our kids, who are just learning to enjoy Judaism, to have that joy snuffed out, nipped in the bud. We were afraid that they, especially D. (9), might interpret, even unconsciously, the dehumanization and extermination of Jews as a deserved fate. We do not want them to think the whole world is hostile to them before they’ve had a chance to know why Judaism is so worth holding on to. Are we overprotective? Ironically, we have had two Holocaust-related experiences since returning to France, but discussion of these will have to wait for a future post.

Family & Friends
When my grandmother emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1917, her elder sister was already in Palestine, and her younger twin sisters went there shortly thereafter. Their descendents now live in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa and elsewhere in the country. So our family was largely spared the horrors of the Shoah. But if we were comfortably settled in the United States, the same expression couldn’t really be used to describe the way of life in Palestine and then in Israel since 1917. On my previous visit, I remember family members describing those years, saying “’We had nothing. Nothing.” Everything they had now, they had worked and fought for. Twenty-five years ago, I thought they were materialistic when they boasted about how much they had achieved and how much they had. This time I understood differently. They were proud, in a way that comes only through personal hardship, much more than I have experienced in my life. They’re still proud, although maybe they don’t wear their pride so much on the outside anymore. Israel has made it. It has an advanced, technological, Western-style economy.

We spent an evening in Jerusalem, an afternoon near Tel Aviv and an evening in Haifa with family members, most of whom I hadn’t seen in 25 years or had never met. But there was lots to talk about. There was much discussion of genealogy, as one cousin tried to glean as much information as he could about our family history from another point of view and input it into his genealogy software. R., our hostess in Jerusalem, is the widow of one of my mother’s first cousins. He was the first Israeli cousin I remember meeting. In 1968 he came to the States with his family, and the emotional link I formed with him and his immediate family was strong, and still is.

The emotional bonds extended beyond our family. We also saw a woman with whom my mother- and father-in-law had become friendly when we lived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It’s not always easy to make friends in later life, but she did. We moved to Lyon, her husband died and she moved to Israel, then my mother-in-law died. Through all this, she remained faithful, writing to us on all occasions, happy and sad.

S. was my roommate for two years at Princeton, and he has been in Israel a few years longer than I have been in France. He is now married and has five children, and all but one of them, plus his wife, were there when we came to have dinner with them at their home in Beit Shemesh. Their family seemed so loving and so united, and I imagine that the importance they place on their spiritual life and the energy they put into it had something to do with that. Life seemed like a common adventure they were all taking part in. S. was so enthusiastic about our coming to Israel that he wanted to get together more than once during our stay, which we did!

The Desert
The road from Jerusalem through the Judean Desert to the Dead Sea loses altitude very quickly after leaving the city, ultimately plunging to 400 meters below sea level, the lowest point on Earth. It also loses moisture. One might say it is the beginning of the Negev, and it is dry! Its barren slopes of ochre earth make Wyoming prairies look like lush, well-manicured lawns in comparison.

Ein Gedi is an oasis on the shore of the Dead Sea. The kibbutz there includes guest accommodations and now earns much of its revenue through tourism. We toured the celebrated botanical gardens containing plant species imported from all over the world, but our guide fielded more questions about the life of the people in the kibbutz and on the changes currently taking place on Israeli kibbutzim, than on the plant life we were observing.

At the Ein Gedi spa, you can see just how far the shoreline has retreated in recent decades. When the spa was built, I think the water came right up to it. Now it's about 500 meters away. You can even take a little shuttle bus to it. In fact, in the summer, you're probably well advised to do so. I'm not sure about the healing powers of Dead Sea mud, however. Either it or the water turned my skin white and left it smelling of sulfur until the end of our stay.

Masada, the ancient fortress that first served as a palace for King Herod, then as protection for the Jewish zealots who held out against the Romans for a few years after the Temple was destroyed, is only a few miles away. The one-hour climb by flashlight up a narrow, twisting pathway in the July pre-dawn darkness 25 years ago was much more technical and dramatic than ours was this time round. There was also a lot less to see back then. I remember kicking around the dusty mountaintop, looking into a huge cistern and a mikvah (ritual bath) and most of all watching the sun rise. Now at the base of the mountain there’s a museum housing imaginative displays of the artifacts excavated on top, with commentary piped right into your ears from the audioguide. The sheer number of everyday objects is astounding. You can now spend an entire day touring the top of the mountain, where much has been restored and another audioguide feeds you information for the duration of your visit. While we were there, a bar and a bat mitzvah were taking place. Interestingly, the tourist information seemed to place less emphasis on the collective suicide aspect of the zealots’ fate than I had remembered from my previous visit. S. had a similar recollection from her visit 17 years ago. We later learned later that there’s now some controversy over exactly what happened at Masada during those final months way back in the 70s. Back down at the gift shop I looked for the book written in the 1960s by the excavation team’s leader, Yigael Yadin, who had also been an Israeli military leader, but B. said bluntly, “No, it’s too old. Come on, let’s go.”

The Modern City
Weatherwise, if our late December / early January visit was anything to go by, a winter in Tel Aviv is like a summer in Brittany. We spent part of one sunny day lounging on the beach and playing beach paddleball, right behind our hotel. We even dipped our legs into the water. Tel Aviv shopping centers glitter, there are some dazzlingly new office towers, and the oldest part of Tel Aviv, a neighborhood called Neveh Tzedek, bustles with activity, galleries and trendy shops. Nearby is an even older section, technically part of the old Arab city of Jaffa. Old Jaffa is now almost entirely Jewish, has great views of the city (sort of like viewing Los Angeles from Palos Verdes) and is also filled with galleries, shops, etc. But I wouldn’t hasten to call Tel Aviv a beautiful city. The construction materials used to build most structures seem to age poorly, so relatively new buildings look worn. This is in contrast to Jerusalem, where all buildings must be built with Jerusalem stone.

I wandered into one of the non-Jewish structures in Old Jaffa, St. Peter’s Monastery, while the rest of the family walked on into the large nearby plaza where several newlywed couples were being photographed. It was near the end of our stay in Israel. Inside, the church was decorated for Christmas with a tree, a nativity scene and other trimmings. Somehow it all seemed strangely familiar. Here I was in a country where most people are Jewish, where my background, customs and foods are dominant, yet seeing the church decorated for Christmas made me realize I was far from home. Normally at this time of year, I’d be seeing these decorations every day.

Hebrew
I tried to speak as much Hebrew as I could while we were in Israel, but whenever I did, especially if we were in a bit of a hurry, the cry of “Speak English” came from the back seat. Every once in a while, I met someone who spoke very little English. This was like manna from heaven, as new Hebrew words, phrases and conjugations would rain down upon me without the conversation switching to English. I was constantly looking at signs and printed material, trying to figure out as much as I could. Every language has its difficulty. In Hebrew, it’s hard to see a word and connect it with the spoken version you might have heard a half-hour earlier, because you’ll usually see it without the vowels. The word “renaissance” for example, becomes the equivalent of “rnsnc” in Hebrew characters and can be pronounced in myriad ways if you don’t already know the word. So, it’s easy to be put off by a mass of Hebrew text, telling yourself you can’t read it. But in fact, when I tried, I could always make out a few words, sometimes even whole sentences. R., one of my Jerusalem cousins, has been encouraging me to speak more Hebrew, and I want to, if only so that I can read her novels someday.

I began to wonder how Israeli children learn to read Hebrew, if they cannot “sound out words”. In France, debate has raged for decades about the best method: global or syllabic. So I thought that if Israeli children learned to recognize, to photograph new words, that could deal a coup de grâce to arguments claiming that only the syllabic method works and that the global method handicaps children for life. After all, 7 million Israelis can’t be wrong. Right? But then I noticed that books for children are usually written with vowels. So I asked some of our Israeli cousins about this and they said that in fact the same debate has raged in Israel for decades!

One of my cousins is a retired tour guide and used to take Israeli groups to many parts of the world. Once, he said, he was in the Basque country of Spain and people asked him how the Jews of Palestine ­– the future Israelis – had revived the Hebrew language. Indeed the advent of modern Hebrew is probably the most successful example of the revival of an ancient language. He answered that the Jews had a secret weapon: the Bible. The Bible is written in Hebrew. It’s all in there, verb conjugations and all.

The Far West

We have returned from two weeks stateside and it has been hard to get back to normal life. All we feel like doing now is planning our next vacation. Maybe we should eliminate vacations. They don’t refresh, they just feed our wanderlust. We had a blast. A bigger blast that we ever had before.

There’s a reason for this. All of our past US trips as a family have been to the East Coast. This allowed us to see my family and certain friends we see only rarely. On each visit, after a helter-skelter week in New York or Boston, we repaired to some New England resort for a second week.

Also in those previous visits, my parents were still alive, but ailing, so much time and energy was spent with them, trying to talk about meaningful subjects while there was still time, but ending up most of the time discussing medication, doctors’ appointments, the latest mishap, and future decisions. Over the years, there have also been other relatives who have fallen ill, or whose already weakened situation took a turn for the worse while we happened to be there. Often, we were glad to be present to offer what little help or comfort we could, but at those times it wasn’t exactly a vacation. So this time, we were itching to go a little further afield and, taking into account our aversion to heat + humidity, we were looking at the maritime provinces of Canada and the boundary waters of Minnesota. Then a stroke of luck occurred.

Around Easter, L., a former au pair for B. and D., came to visit. We started talking about our sketchy vacation plans, and she invited us to come to Eastern Washington instead for a real American West experience. The idea gradually caught on and we found ourselves getting excited about a trip to cowboy country. Cowboy country? Washington? Let’s see.

We weren’t exactly early birds on this, so our flight was somewhat circuitous: Lyon-Paris-Atlanta-Seattle. We left Lyon in the late morning on August 7, and arrived in Seattle at midnight, local time on the same “day”, which means it was 9 am the next day for us. Total elapsed time: about 24 hours. About as much time as you need to get anywhere on the planet. We must really have wanted to do this trip!

Invigorated by four hours of sleep, after which our bodies decided it was time to get up, we picked up our rented car and set out for Olympic National Park. We had reserved a Ford Escape, but they didn’t have one at the rental office, so they upgraded us to a Ford Explorer. The Explorer was cavernous and fun to drive, but was often thirsty. It got around 17 miles to the gallon on the highway, which we calculated to be around 15 liters per 100 kilometers. We were convinced there must be no Explorers in France, … but then I saw one the day after our return.

Back to our travels. Fatigue notwithstanding, we made it to our destination, Lake Quinault, on the western slope of the Olympic Peninsula, just outside the national park. We then spent three days at the Lake Quinault Lodge, located in the temperate rain forest that surrounds the lake and extends well into the park. Lush vegetation – mosses, lichens, mushrooms, ferns - covered everything. The forest canopy was dominated by Sitka spruce, red cedars (they really are red!), hemlocks and lots of garden-variety (at least to me) firs and pines. Nights were rainy and mornings were foggy, but afternoons were even partly sunny. One morning B. and I went canoeing on the lake. Unforgettable beauty! It rains little in the summer, a happy circumstance.

The only mistake we made was taking a day to go to Hurricane Ridge on the other side of the park, near Port Angeles. The town of Port Angeles was nice enough, the little of it we saw, anyway, and Hurricane Ridge was beautiful. From Port Angeles on the Strait of Juan de Fuca opposite Vancouver Island, you climb quickly to commanding views of the Olympic Range. At the end of the little hike we did once on top we could see both Victoria / Vancouver Island on one side of the ridge and the Olympics on the other. The climate was radically different from Lake Quinault, too. To give you an idea, the official statistics put precipitation at Lake Quinault at 160 inches (406 cm) per year. At Port Angeles and the surrounding area, it is estimated at 24 inches (61 cm). But in retrospect we should have stayed at Lake Quinault and absorbed another day of the luxuriant, verdant rainforest. The drive from there to Port Angeles, taking us through such hot spots as Forks, WA, was remarkably long and uninteresting.

From Lake Quinault we set out for the Columbia River gorge. Over the past few years I have heard about a great deal of renewed interest in the Lewis & Clark expedition in America, coinciding with its 200th anniversary. Hearing about it in France, I hadn’t really paid much attention, but being “on site” made a big difference. Suddenly it became exciting to read of the two explorers’ travels along some of the same ground we would cover. I also remembered a National Geographic article I read recently about Sacagawea, the young, Shoshone woman who served as a guide and helped the explorers trade for horses to get over the mountains. We visited the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center at the mouth of the river, one of the many, many sites, museums and parks in the area now devoted to the subject. Even B. and D. were interested! They were also fascinated by how wide the river was at its mouth (almost 4 miles). They wanted to know how that compared to the Amazon.

People had told us the gorge was beautiful, and it was, but I think most of them meant the part near the mouth and in the Cascade mountains. In contrast, we found the most beautiful part to be just after the crest of the Cascades, where the mountains gave way to golden, rolling hills, then to vast stretches of light brown, arid landscapes penetrated by the sharply contrasting blue water of the river. Soon after The Dalles we turned north towards Toppenish, before arriving at L.’s family’s home.

Toppenish is on the Yakima Indian Reservation and is decorated with several dozen murals depicting life in the West. Yet it’s not a tourist trap or a reconstituted Western town. My father-in-law, who, like many of his generation in France, grew up with stories of cowboys and Indians, undoubtedly even more romanticized than what Americans grow up with, would have loved it.

We had met L.’s parents, J. and K., during the year L. was our au pair. They had come to visit her in Lyon. Now we were seeing them on their turf. There’s something magical about seeing people you have met on one continent a few years later on another continent. They looked the same, their smiles, their graciousness and their sense of humor were the same, yet the surroundings were so different.

We ate dinner outside, in the garden behind their home, as the sun set over this oasis in the desert. Flower beds, poplars, fences and horses were silhouetted against the darkening sky, as the heat of the day slowly drained from the air.

The climax of our trip was yet to come. The next morning we loaded our hosts’ four horses, Pete, Repeat, Fortune and Doc, whom B. & D. had already learned to distinguish from one another, into the horse trailer and set out for Omak, around three hours straight north, still in the state of Washington. After a visit to one of the many dams along the Columbia River, geology lessons about the “scablands” of Eastern Washington, an afternoon dip in the river and a meeting with a generous salmon fisherman, we arrived at Omak in time for the Omak Stampede!

Now I’m sure you East Coast dudes like me don’t know what the Omak Stampede is. And if your East Coast upbringing was as provincial as mine (I’m hoping I’m not the only one, you see) you didn’t know that rodeos were still an integral part of life in the West, just as baseball is or summer theater might be in another part of the country (or bullfighting in France and Spain). Well, I had no idea. I thought they were either a thing of the past, or were put on every now and then for tourists. So here we were, in an ordinary Western town, watching a show like hundreds of others that take place throughout the West all summer long. The events included tie-down calf roping, steer wrestling, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, barrel racing and more. All the events were fun to watch, but I found the barrel racing the most aesthetically pleasing.

S. suggested I ask J. about the condition of the spinal column of the average rodeo participant. J. is an orthopedic surgeon. He grew up in the city and has been in Eastern Washington less than 10 years, but I think he’s had a lifelong love of the West, its culture and its wide open spaces. He enjoyed the rodeo as much as we did, but when the discussion came to rodeo culture his views were decidedly more mixed. Rodeos provide him with a certain flow of customers, but I think he would prefer to see more of those customers healthy and without need of surgery. That would require their getting off the rodeo circuit, however. To give us an example of how accidents can occur during a rodeo, he said that if you wanted to dislocate a shoulder, the steer wrestling position would be the ideal one to adopt. He said his warnings fall on deaf ears. I suppose it’s like telling a pitcher that he has to stop pitching after rotator cuff surgery. He can’t. It’s his life.

As in other venues throughout the West, the rodeo was accompanied by a county fair, but unlike others (I think), there was a strong Native American influence. Omak borders on the Colville Indian Reservation and the Indians infuse a great deal of the energy into this rodeo. The most celebrated event of the evening comes at the end: the “Suicide Race”. The riders start at the top of an embankment on the other side of the Okanogan river, plunge down it, then cross the river and gallop into the arena.

But the rodeo was only a small part of the experience we were to have in the next few days. We had “chosen” Omak as our rodeo destination because J.’s sister J. has a ranch nearby. It is on 300 acres, surrounded by 1,700 acres of state and federal land. In other words, there isn’t a neighbor around for miles. By coincidence, S., the Seattle-based architect who designed the new main house they had built on the property, was also spending the weekend there with a friend and their respective children. The house was built in the valley between the hills, foregoing the commanding view from higher up, so as to preserve the traditional layout of the ranch. Instead, atop a nearby hill is a rustic cabin, with no electricity or hot water, nestled in the trees. This is where we stayed. P., J’s husband, loves to tinker, and has devised a system of (cold) running water in the cabin, fed by a rooftop reservoir, as well as a fan that runs on a 12-volt battery. The cabin is one of his smaller projects. Bigger ones include maintenance of his collections of antique clocks and antique cars, mending fences, and building a sturdy tree house for adolescent visitors (the key word here is “sturdy”). And planning strategies to prevent fires, his and J.’s biggest fear.

Remember the generous salmon fisherman I mentioned? He was cleaning fish he had just caught along the shore of the Columbia River, with B., D. and me watching. He asked if I would like to take one home. Suddenly I became embarrassed and thought we were being a little invasive, standing there watching, so I said no. Just then J. came over and was certain the offer was sincere. So he accepted. Now the fish he gave us was only a third the size of the two larger ones he kept for himself. Nevertheless, broiled, delicately seasoned and served with a Caesar salad, it still fed 14 people the next evening! While we were eating it, we said it was a shame we couldn’t thank our benefactor. It was far tastier than the Carrefour-bought salmon we ate a few days after our return to France.

Our meals in general at the ranch belied the American burgers-and-fries stereotype. Apart from the salmon dinner, we had roasted chicken in a prune and olive sauce, London broil with baked potatoes and asparagus, and raspberry, rhubarb and peach pies for dessert. And everyone sat down to dinner together. As the Seattle guests were leaving, another friend from Montana arrived with two boys right around B.’s age. So at all times there were at least 10-12 people present for our evening meal. Come to think of it, emphasis on mealtimes must run in the family, because back at J. and K.’s house, our meals were equally enjoyable, family events!

In between these wondrous meals, there was a lot of horse riding to be done. The first day we rode a bit in the arenas to get used to the horses. B. & D. loved brushing them, washing them, petting them, and of course, riding them. At any moment, they knew instantly who was Pete, who was Repeat, and so on, as if they had been around them for years. But it was a little early for them to go out on a ride, so J., P., S., L., W. (L’s brother) and I went out for an hour or two. Until that day I would have said that the prettiest horseback ride I had ever done was at the Ferme de la Dame Blanche just outside of Lyon, where on a clear day, you can see the Monts du Lyonnais, the Mont Pilat, the Haut Beaujolais, and if you’re lucky, the Alps. But it paled in comparison to the stark, stunning beauty of this ranch ride. Part of it was wooded and part was open; part down in the valley and part on the hilltops. The afternoon light changed by the hour. From the top of a hill we could see a distant house, which was probably that of the nearest neighbor. The parched terrain caused clouds of dust to rise and branches to crackle with each of the horses’ steps, reminding me of P. & J.’s very understandable fear of fire.

The next day it got better for B. & D. They came with us, their horses each led by another rider. As comfortable as they felt, and as docile as the horses were, they – especially D. – would not have had the strength necessary to control full-sized horses on their own. Finally, on the third day, only B. & D. rode, and they stayed in the arena. Sometime later B. smiled and said he had been very pleased, because the horse galloped on his command and he was fully under control. For B., who doesn’t normally let his emotions show, this was tantamount to doing cartwheels. All the while, P., J., J., and K. were virtually giving lessons to all the budding cowboys, as not only were B. & D. riding, but so were the two boys from Montana.

At no time did we feel we were in the way or that the our hosts were overburdened or even burdened with all the work that goes with hosting so many people. They even added extra touches just to make it more fun. One morning, P. took us down into town for an ice cream ... in his 1931 Ford Model A truck. Another day, J. gave driving lessons in a little tractor to B., D., and the two boys from Montana. Granted, with only one forward gear and no other moving vehicle for miles around, there was little risk. But they could have driven it into a fence post or a ditch. Yet J. was as calm and patient as an experienced driving school teacher. On the last day at the ranch, we toured some other nearby towns, and P. drove his 1936 Dodge convertible.

After bidding farewell to the ranch, we spent another day back at L.’s parents house, including an afternoon at the Aquatic Center, where B., D. and I went on a high, twisting water slide for the first time – actually it was the first time any of us had been on any water slide – and another lovely, outdoor dinner. We also outfitted the whole family in cowboy boots. The next day we drove back to Seattle, stopped along the way in an outlet store center, and visited the Pike Place market, the Aquarium and the Tacoma Glass Museum. But as soon as we crossed the Cascades, we knew we had left the Far West.

To see a slide show of our trip, click here.

The summer ritual

The French traffic forecasters labeled Saturday, July 30 as “black”. The scale progresses as follows: green, orange, red, black. Only a handful of days in the year qualify for the dubious distinction of "black", and the day that traditionally signals the return of the July vacationers (“les juilletistes”) and the departure of August vacationers (“les aoûtiens”) is one of them. The traffic gods were not kind to the French motorist on this particular black Saturday. In all, there were 800 kilometers of traffic jams on the nation’s highways on July 30, just a little short of the distance from Paris to Marseilles.

Saturday is the heaviest traveling day during French vacation periods because most holiday rentals begin and end on a Saturday. If you rent your studio/apartment/villa from a real-estate agent, you generally have to get to the agent’s office before closing time, at say, 7PM or 8PM if you’re lucky, to get the key. If you don’t, you’ll have to make other arrangements for Saturday and Sunday night, because the agency won’t open again until Monday morning. Even if you don’t need to pick up the key, you don’t want to sleep in a hotel en route (although Lyon is a nice place to do it if you have to!) and miss a day you’ve already paid for. Great way to start your vacation, especially if you have the misfortune of having to do it on a tight budget.

The government has dreamed all kinds of schemes to encourage people to stagger their departure and arrival times. Color-coding is the most visible and audible system. Alternate routes are also recommended. The tolls, astronomically high from an American point of view (but the roads are in great condition) are lower at “off-peak” times.

This is my personal favorite: on the radio, announcements drone on about how motorists should wait until, say, 3 or 4PM before getting behind the wheel. This is great advice if you own your own apartment or villa on the Côte d’Azur and can wander in at any time of the day or week. The peak/off-peak toll system is just another added benefit for this needy minority. For the masses, however (see vacation rentals, above) this is not an option. Instead, the barrage of warnings simply encourages them to leave even earlier than they might otherwise have planned. Instead of leaving Nantes, Nancy or Nanterre at 9AM, they’ll leave at 7 or 6 or 5AM. And the result is the same, year after year after frustrating year.

To alleviate the situation and reduce driver stress and road kill, palliative measures are taken. Most trucks are prohibited from using the motorways on “black” and (I think) “red” days. Toll-booth operators distribute water, candy and other goodies for the back seat, plus an avalanche of documents dispensing advice. At the motorway rest stops, entertainers are on hand to help pass the time and take your mind off of how many hours you have been on the road and how many more you will need if the traffic stays as it is.

Now I must be ignoring some constraint so obvious it would hit me in the face if I would only deign to go out there rather than blog about it from the safety of my keyboard. Nevertheless, I humbly submit my proposal to solve this nagging, perennial problem. Furthermore, my proposal is right in line with French tradition, as it involves solving what is essentially a market inefficiency with a government decree. At worst the government would have to get a new law passed, but that shouldn’t be too much of an obstacle, now that Nicolas Sarkozy is interior minister. I’d trust him to think of some catchy phrase that would stir up lots of animosity and media attention. The government could introduce the bill shortly before a Parliamentary recess, have it be debated until the MPs go on vacation, then declare the law enacted (If the French constitution doesn’t have a provision like this, it really should get one; it’s very useful, but I digress, again!).

My proposal is this: firstly, require that half of holiday rentals in the most popular tourist destinations start their week on Sunday and end their rental week on ... you guessed it ... Sunday. Secondly, require that all holiday rental offices and real-estate agents that must deliver keys to arriving vacationers stay open not until 7 or 8PM but until midnight on both Saturday and Sunday. Simple, right? Is this brilliant or what?

Possible objections: 1) Labor law prohibits opening on Sunday, the day of rest, or staying open late. That’s why stores are all closed on Sunday, with rare exception. Get over it; hotels are all open on Sunday. 2) It would be too complicated to administer. Bakeries do it, pharmacies do it (I hear music), why not real-estate agents? 3) National security. Bingo, that must be it.

Summer camp for adults

In every couple or family, it seems, there is one partner or parent who prefers vacationing in the mountains and the other who prefers the seashore. Ours is no exception. S. prefers the seashore, whereas I never really learned to swim. I absolutely love the mountains; S. gets acrophobia. Recipe for disaster?

Last summer we did a week of each. We spent a week at Arcachon on the Atlantic coast of France, then a week on the French side of the Pyrenees. Arcachon is perched at the mouth of a virtually-enclosed bay famous for oyster farming/fishing. The beaches there, and especially the ocean beaches on the other side of the Cap Ferret peninsula, reconciled me with the seashore in the summer. They were uncrowded, and on the ocean side, the waves were wonderful. At low tide, B. and D. spent their time looking for crabs and seashells and building elaborate castles. That is, when they weren’t playing on Europe’s largest sand dune, the dune du Pyla. Since then, it seems we’re always meeting people who have some connection to the bassin d’Arcachon.

The week in the Pyrenees was very different, but equally spectacular, and everyone acquired a taste for hiking.

Earlier this month, we spent a week in the Vercors, a mountain range southwest of Grenoble, sort of the foothills of the Alps. The Vercors is a plateau, with steep cliffs all around it and a series of parallel valleys running down its length. A natural fortress, it was used by French resistance fighters during World War II until the Nazis’ overpowering force rooted them out in July 1944.

We stayed in a family resort, run by an organization called “Cap France”. The main building was a converted sanatorium that used to cater to children believed to be at risk of developing tuberculosis. So there are lots of high-ceilinged, institutional-looking corridors, and small rooms. And I mean small! But, OK, we didn’t spend much time in the room anyway. Instead, we were participating in the hikes organized by the resort, bicycling, visiting a nearby market or farm, having meals in the dining room, watching the basketball camp that also shared facilities with us or dancing. We had a full meal plan, and meals were fun. Tables were for eight and we were seated as we arrived, so, therefore, with people we didn’t know. We met people from all over the country, from Strasbourg, Nancy and Lille. We met people from Paris and people from a small village in Auvergne. And everything was arranged for us: meals, daytime activities and evening activities. All we had to do was make our beds, which we didn’t. Summer camp for adults! No wait, in summer camp you have to make your bed ….

We went on five hikes during the week, including one full-day hike I did with B., and B. and D. were clamoring for more. Each hike was led by one of the staff, who stopped every so often to talk about some nearby flowers or point out a faraway marmot. They explained how to tell which animals had been where we were, and how the forest exists thanks to the ants (they eat certain insects that damage trees) and their waist-high ant hills.

The food was the only aspect of the week that came in for near-universal criticism. Complaints were both quantity- and quality-oriented. It was generally agreed that the price of the week was attractive because the food was … well, cafeteria fare, but, mind you, French cafeteria fare. And because of the size of the rooms. In a more expensive resort, the difference would probably be in those two parameters rather than in more extensive facilities. Maybe we’ll find out next year. Rendez-vous here in July, 2006.

On several occasions, we have looked for this sort of resort in the States. On the East Coast, the only comparable thing we found was the Smuggler's Notch Family Resort in Vermont, which looks like a lot of fun, but also looks huge and expensive. Peak summer rates are in the $2,500 - $3,000 range for a family of four, and I don't think this includes meals. We have also looked into dude ranches in various parts of the country. Many of them looked exquisite, but even more expensive, in the region of $1,500 per person per week. By way of comparison, the week in the Vercors cost the four of us a total of €1,400 ($1,680), all meals included. Even with the internet, however, it's hard to do this sort of research from afar. Suggestions, anyone, either mountains, seashore or that vast expanse in between?

Cross-country karma

Well, the Alps certainly were snow-covered. It snowed virtually every day of our week in Villard de Lans, as it had the week before our arrival, and the snow base was between one and two meters thick. You could ski on the picnic tables we ate lunch at last year. Temperatures ranged between –15°C (5°F) and –4°C (25°F).

Unlike most downhill ski resorts, Villard de Lans has a big cross-country ski area, and our family was split down the middle, voluntarily, into a downhill and a cross-country team. In the evening each team regaled the other with their respective experiences. We also did a half-day each of downhill and cross-country as a whole family.

As downhill resorts go, Villard de Lans is not very pricey. Downhill lift tickets cost €25 a day for adults, compared with €39 at Tignes/Val d’Isère. I looked at some US resorts and saw prices up to $70 a day, even at Killington in Vermont!! So despite exchange rates, come on over while the snow’s fresh!

Signing our kids up for ski lessons was, as it always is in France, hassle-free. Once you’ve reserved spots for them, you find their group, tell the instructor they’re there, give them a kiss and off you go to ski the black diamond trails while they’re in their lesson. No papers to fill out, no releases or insurance forms to sign. Trouble is, we’re not sure we’re happy it’s so hassle-free. Luckily, nothing happened to ours during the week, but we wondered how “something” might have been handled. What if parental approval or information about medical history (allergies, etc.) had been required before transferring a child to a hospital, operating on him, or administering medicines? Any French doctors out there have the answer to this one?

For me, downhill was the usual city-in-the-mountains scene, the annual urban transhumance. After a half-day, I had had enough of the drone of the lifts, the people everywhere, the weight of the skis on my shoulder or in my hands as I slowly progressed up the line to the gondola. Of course, when I say a half-day of downhill skiing, I really mean an hour of skiing, because the rest of the time is spent on a lift or queuing for one.

Or rather, crowding for one. At the approach to a ski lift in France, there is no crowd control, no ropes or barriers to create and maintain an orderly line. So you can’t really enjoy the scenery or have a conversation, because you have to concentrate on how you’re going to nonchalantly stick your pole between the skis of the person next to you, so he will be obliged to wait for you to pass. In the end I was not unhappy I had only planned to do a half-day of downhill skiing. This said, I did enjoy my two slides down the mountain.

As I was not part of the downhill half of the family, I spent the rest of the week in the serenity and quiet beauty of the cross-country ski trails, savoring an early morning “Bonjour” from a skier coming in the other direction, marveling at undisturbed snow piled high on fir branches pyramiding to a peak, reveling in the ability to turn back and have another look at something I’d missed.

It was also hard work. Three hours of cross-country skiing is three full hours of skiing. But it was hard mostly because I was learning a new skill: skating. Many other skate skiers, people in no better overall shape than I, gracefully overtook me on the uphills, while I sputtered like an old jalopy in need of a tune-up.

Which brings me to some popular received wisdom about cross-country skiing, at least here in France, i.e. that it’s either too difficult, tiring or boring. (Mind you, it wouldn’t bother me if most people continued to believe that!) According to my ski instructor, cross-country skiing used to attract people of all ages and physical abilities, but with the growing popularity of snowshoeing, people who weren’t really in it for the physical exertion part have been siphoned off. Little by little, however, skating is attracting a younger, more competitive-sports-oriented crowd. I wonder if the skating phenomenon is more recent here than it is in the US, where I think it has existed for around 20 years already.

At the end of the week, my lesson group did an all-day cross-country outing and skied to a restaurant accessible only on skis or by snowmobile. Log cabin on the outside, on the inside the theme was late 19th century hunter-trapper. Our instructor said he wanted to open a restaurant like it in New York, where he was certain none existed. Here's a picture of it:


"Malaterre" restaurant in the woods near Villard de Lans

I wondered if the New Yorker’s view of “French restaurant” was broad enough to encompass not only the three-star Michelin, the bistrot, the brasserie, the Provençal country kitchen and the crêperie, but also the mountain auberge. If so, the economist in me says there must already be one. Is there?