La Dordogne: A Description Long Overdue

On May 8th and 9th, I went with my landlady and twenty-five of her masters students who were variously enrolled in either English or Religious and Culture Studies on a whirlwind tour of the Dordogne region. The students brought, variously, their parents and girlfriends and whoever else might want to tag along, so we had a pretty massive caravan that often encountered trouble making u-turns on one lane, dirt roads in the middle of nowhere.

I was planning a really elaborate post, but now that I've allowed so much time to pass, I've kind of lost interest.

The first day got off to a rocky start, but afterward was pretty fantastic. I showed up where I thought we were meeting, at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, which, in Bordeaux, is about the only time of the week that there aren't a large number of people out in the street -- just a few teenagers straggling home, still drunk, from last night's party, and the team of (rather ineffectual) street sweepers fighting the constant battle against cigarette butts.

When I finally did find the group, we were off. We drove for about an hour and then made several stops during which I expected us to get out and look at something,  but we ended up just waiting for more people to meet up with us. It was sunny out, briefly, though mostly it rained off and on all weekend, and my favorite part was just driving from spot to spot because we were on dirt roads surrounded on all sides by rolling hills covered in vines. It was beautiful. I didn't get any good pictures, really, though the windows of the moving car. This is a shame.

Our first stop was a church called Saint Eutrope in Guyenne (maybe?), which had been built in the 10th century and had a lot of interesting paintings on the walls, some of which had been obliterated during various remodel projects over the years. It cost a euro to turn on the lights and illuminate the paintings, and I'm not sure if that's a testament to how nothing is free in Europe or to how the Catholic Church never passes up a chance to collect money. In any case, we didn't stay long.

Our next major stop was a monastery called Plum Village, where they practice Thây Buddhism. The monastery is divided into three parts, for men, women, and couples respectively. It started out kind of awkwardly, since as we were driving into camp we got caught behind a lot of people doing a meditation walk and generally felt like we were disturbing everything. We stated to umpack our picnic and one of the guys came out and instructed us that, every day, they eat their lunch in complete silence, and that we should join them in parallel harmony by enjoying our picnic lunch in complete silence while they ate inside. He told us about how, every time we hear the bell ring, we should stop and think about life and peace before continuing what we were doing.

Having a picnic in complete silence was amusing, since we'd all brought various things to share. The French concept of a picnic was also amusing, as no one brought anything even remotely simple to eat, and there were as many tarts and canelés as other dishes.

In the end, lunch was over and one of the monks and an aspiring monk came back out to hang around with us. We went into one of the meditation halls and we talked about what Buddhism was about, what their sect was about, how they had become monks and what Buddhism had done for them. We sat in such a way that made me curse my knees. We did a few minutes of guided meditation, and when we stood up, we stood in a circle, holding hands, and sang a song. The lyrics were pretty touchy-feely, especially for people I'd never seen before just three hours earlier:

Mes chers amis,
Vous m'avez tellement cheri
Vous avez rempli mon âme
Je vous aime.

Which is to say

My dear friends
You have cherished me so much
You have filled up my soul
I love you.

As we left, they stood and chanted some kind of well-wishing chant for our journey and general well-being. It was an interesting experience that I thought might be unique -- if only it had been our only experience with Buddhists in the Dordogne.

Our next stop was a Zen hermitage not too far away, which was a lot less satisfying. We got lectured for a really long time about the nature of life and good and evil in the Universe, which was a lot more preachy and a lot less interesting than what we'd experienced at the previous place. One woman, while refilling a bird feeder, told me I had a "putain d'accent américain", but only after she had to ask me where I was from. They served tea just before we left. The grounds were the best part, by far, though the zen-ness of the garden, and foreign-ness of the grounds and plants, was a lot less satisfying, to me, than the natural beauty of the Plum Village, where they had used existing buildings in the French style to set up their monastery. It seemed a lot less Buddhist, even, to force everything into its proper appearance instead of going with what was already there.

From the Zen hermitage we made our way to Bernadette's house, where most of us were sleeping. We claimed beds and got situated. Luckily for us, Bernadette had about six extra beds which, when filled with European ideas about how much space is required for sleeping, gave most of us a place to sleep. The rest of the people had air mattresses or elected to stay at an inn in town or even made the "long" drive back home. Long by French standards, where a thirty-minute drive is an eternity and a fortune in gas.

My landlady turns out to be obsessed with irises, which were mostly in bloom when we arrived, though we had missed the wisteria above the front porch.

We had an aperitif on the porch. Every French meal (excluding breakfast, evidently) must be preceded by a cocktail. We had sangria and Desperados (which is beer with tequila. Think Smirnoff Ice -- kinda like that). We finally got in the car to go to the restaurant for dinner and took an unexpected tour of the back roads of Dordogne where there is a chateau every time you turn your head. My landlady says that the myth is that St. Nicolas was carrying a sack full of castles when he was assaulted by the devil and all the castles spilled out in the same area of Dordogne. In real life, most of them were given away for service to some king or other during some war or other. I could guess but it would, after all, be just a guess.

We eventually arrived in Sarlat, at the restaurant, where we met up with the rest of the crew. The wait staff seemed pretty annoyed, and I'm not sure if that was just because they had to work (this happens sometimes in France) or if it was because we were showing up at 11 p.m. with a huge group. It seems reasonable to be upset about this, especially because, since we were seated outside, they had to move us when it started to rain. We had a delicious dinner for 13 euros, which never would have happened in Bordeaux. I had a salad of various vegetables, a duck breast with truffle sauce, some mashed potatoes, some green beans, then some lettuce with some goat cheese, and a walnut tart, since walnuts are the specialty of the region. I should have ordered the foie gras rather than the salad to start, but after driving past the fields and fields of penned up geese without any water for swimming or any wings for flying, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I think foie gras is going on my list of things I don't eat because I object to the way it's produced.

One of the students' fathers happened to know a lot about the town and we went on a midnightish walking tour, where I didn't get a lot of great photos because of the lighting conditions. At some point in the nineties the town decided it needed to be more authentic (mostly for movies) and redid all the lighting in the city to be gas powered. Interesting trivia.

We finally made it home, with me dozing in the backseat, and all took turns using the one bathroom (two toilets, but only one sink for tooth brushing or face washing). Some eternity later, we went to sleep.

I woke up to my landlady repeatedly ringing the doorbell to wake everyone up, two minutes before my alarm was set to go off. We breakfasted on croissants and baguettes with various jams, coffee, and tea, out on the porch under the wisteria vines. My landlady's cousins came over from across the street and they chatted while we cleaned up.

We drove to Lascaux, which is the site of some 17 thousand year old cave paintings that were accidentally discovered in 1940 by four teenagers and a dog that fell down a hole. The caves were closed in the 1960s sometime, when it was discovered that there were chemical changes taking place that were destroying the paintings. Today, the original grotto is only open to scientists, historians, and really famous people, like the President of the French Republic and the British royal family. For tourists, they created a replica about 200 meters from the original, which
is supposedly an exact duplicate, square centimeter for square centimeter, of the original. We took a short tour through the replica and a two-room museum about the creation of the replica. There are no photos allowed even of the replica, "Lascaux II", which is why I only have this one photo of the ticket booth and a bit of the surrounding woods, but it was a very interesting thing to see. They light it very dramatically and the tour guide walks around with a flashlight to point out the high lights. Some of the depicted animals have been shown by the fossil record to have existed at the time, and some of them are fictional. The experts are mostly in agreement that the paintings are religious in nature and not based on the culture of hunting.

The rest of the afternoon was mostly a lot of driving around. We picnicked in a little clearing overlooking the Vallée de la Vézère, where there was rain falling into my sangria and I wondered bitterly about why it was so cold this time of year.

More driving around, and we visited a few more Buddhist spots, like this field that had "tsa tsa" in it. A lot of little stone Buddhas and various offerings from people, including candies and coins and an empty bottle of aftershave. By this time I cared a lot more about the wildflowers and the voices of tiny frogs in the field than the Buddhism.

We were on our way to another monastery. Luckily for me, this last was a Tibetain temple, where the practice is closed to the public. We ended up walking around the grounds a little bit, where my fellows on the tour embarrassed me by interrupting practitioners in their meditation, gawking through the windows of the meditation hall, and imitating customs that weren't theirs, like the practice of walking seven times around this white-and-gold monument. It seemed a little bit like showing up at a Catholic mass and taking Communion without having been through the necessary sacraments. I wanted to be elsewhere. Thankfully, we didn't stay long.

On the way home we passed through Périgueux, where we stopped to look at the cathedral there. It was massive, with a huge square tower above it. We didn't stick around long. We went briefly to look at the facade of the Free Masons building, and got a short explanation of the symbolism carved above the windows and doors from one of the fathers along for the trip.

We ended up at his house for dinner, and as it turns out, he's an avid collector of both Buddhist and Free Mason paraphernalia. I wondered how he came across all this Free Mason knowledge, since in France they are a completely clandestine society, where no one is supposed to know who is a member, let alone what the ceremonies or signs of rank are. He had several ceremonial swords in addition to different...frocks...of various designs. He cooked some confiture de canard, which is a duck dish, and a tomato and onion salad, and then we were off back toward Bordeaux.

I was ready to be home by the time it was all over with, but it was a good experience. I would have liked it to be a little less religion-heavy, but I guess that's what happens when you get a bunch of masters students and their professor together for a not-quite-field-trip.