st.-malo: death to the death mope.

I'll flesh this post out more later today....

Still recovering from the whirlwind of the last 10 days, but made it out to dinner last night, my first solo outing without really speaking any French. I stopped at Gilles, but they were booked full, probably because they only have like 4 tables. To minimize the number of times I would have to go through the whole "access denied" routine, I went to the biggest restaurant in the guide, A la Duchesse Anne. I was again, denied...but ho! I must've looked really dejected, because after I turned to go, the elderly maitre d said "wait...you can have a table until 21h00 then you have to give it back". Yay! I think.

There were a lot of things that were nervewracking about the dining room: no music or extraneous sound; and my location was such that I always seemed to be under the watchful eye of a stern-looking elderly woman who seemed like the manager/owner (who ended up being extremely sweet...later in the meal she asked me what nationality I was, and I told her...as I was leaving she handed me a stack of postcards and told me "bon voyage"). But this and the extremely attentive waitstaff (more on this) served to put my table manners under the microscope, as it were, and I realized I could use a refresher course (haaiy!).

I could actually use a French course as well. I did pretty well I think, the waitstaff and owner seemed to become less suspicious of me after I ordered my extremely unhealthy meal: foie gras, coquilles st. jacques a la bretonnaise, and tarte tatin. And a really interesting Pinot Noir from Alsace: Maison Hugel & Fils.

As you know, I don't take photos of my food in restaurants as a rule, but thought I'd make an exception here. The quality is crappy because I used every spy/espionage trick in the book to take these discreetly.

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This was served with toast, and I'm not sure what those leaves are...ramps? Chervil? Anyway, they helped.

















Basically scallops and mushrooms in a white wine-cream sauce with a little Gruyere in there maybe, toasted nicely under the broiler. Totally decadent and a pleasure to eat.






















Tarte tatin. Next to my left hand you can see the huge pot of creme anglaise that showed up a second later.

on the road, day 10: brest to st-malo.

on the road, day 9: limoges to brest.

It seems that 10 nights in a row of unventilated smoke-filled hotboxes and a diet of 50% cheese is about all my respiratory system could take. I've got enough mucus in my body to start World War III.

Last night's show was just short of disastrous. Our sound man seems like just about the most laid-back guy on earth, but apparently this facade dissolves rapidly if you do something that offends him. For example, if you put a homemade limiter on the mixing desk that turns off the output of the PA if its level reaches 105db. This might manifest itself like this: after the band spends 3 minutes gradually building the intro to a song into something that's about to explode, the singer steps up to the mic to deliver the first line of the song, the band switches gears to take off behind him and.....his microphone shuts off, rather anti-climactically.

After much running around to determine why this might be happening, someone tells our soundman about the limiter and the look on his face made me want to assume a crash landing position. Even worse was when, after they'd apparently sorted it out, it happened again. The last thing I heard was a nice and Scottish "Can one of you fucking people please fucking tell me why the fuck the fucking thing's still on there?" I left the room as it was a bit painful to watch. A few minutes later I asked him if he needed any help and he said "Can you find me a wee bit of dynamite?"

On the upside, there's only one more show left. Brest is/was interesting because it's been the part of the trip we were all dreading: 600km on non-highway roads. We really had no idea how long it would take, but our best guess was 9 hours, which is a long time in the van even under the best conditions.



Turns out it wasn't bad at all, almost 9 hours on the nose. I spent the day trying to decipher my new Michelin guide so that we might avoid any more meals like the one in Bourges. In fact...I could be imagining this, but the Bourges lunch seems to have traumatized us a bit: we had a hard time stopping for breakfast/lunch yesterday because no one wanted to be the person who said "this looks good, let's stop" lest it be another bomb. So an hour after we'd decided we were hungry, we finally stopped at a petrol station, and by this time we were so famished we might've even eaten the Bourges food again. I saw Mr. croque monsieur on the menu and thought I'd put my tooth on him. No picture unfortunately, basically a ham sandwich on white bread with an inexplicable layer of bechamel sauce covered by melted cheese on top. I was so hungry I really don't have any idea if it was good or not. I think it was at least OK.



Later, for pre-dinner we stopped in Lorient, a very odd downtown area which at 4pm featured more open gun /ammo shops than open cafes. After a bit of a walk we found an open cafe in the faux-historic grand cafe style. Lots of older folk out for coffee with their tiny, well-dressed dogs: I saw two separate tables at which the dog was seated across from its owner, tail wagging, eager look on its face, the owner chatting happily to the dog as if this was the most normal lunch date in the world.

At this point in the afternoon the menu was limited to 5 sandwiches and a salad or two. For research symmetry I had the croque madame, which was basically a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread with no inexplicable layer of bechamel sauce but instead a raw egg on top. This was pretty good, easily the best-looking thing at the table. Everybody else's sandwich looked as if the ingredients had simultaneously fallen off of the grocery store shelf, during an earthquake or robot attack perhaps, and had coincidentally landed on top of each other. Good baguettes haphazardly sliced as if in self-defense, filled with the cheapest, most carelessly prepared ingedients. Just thinking about them is depressing.

In fact, today's meals and the evening's dinner would really drive home the fact that it is very very easy to eat badly in France, as we have repeatedly shown. I've done better than most b/c I'm such an embarrassing food geek and my menu selections are the result of my vast alien brain's nearly blinding ability to calculate the potential goodness of each menu option. But for the average shmo....man.

Last night's dinner was the last one that we would place in the hands of someone else. It was in the hotel restaurant (and as such paid for by the venue), which smelled like a Asian market fish stall when we walked in. Now, we are in the harbor, on the water, but this is not a smell that inspires confidence, particularly because there was not an Asian in sight (joke!). We proceeded on to a overly bright dining room (mt, you would've instantly died I think) which featured a "seafood buffet" of boiled shrimp, escargot (seafood?), and assorted fish/shellfish salads. Um, no.

I had the soupe de poissons and the poisson du jour, which turned out to be something called Colin, which is also the name of our soundman, who also ordered Colin, which led to much obvious but nonetheless funny humor. It was all....bleh. Fine, I guess. I can do better. You could do better. And the fries: every single damn fry I've had here is the most greasy, limp thing you've ever seen. Anyway, as Dustin Hoffman would say in his incedibly bad Italian accent during his incredibly bad performance in Perfume, "basta". It was now time to take the reigns of our destiny and pull or yank or whatever you do in that situation.

on the road, day 8: bourges to limoges.

This is a photo of something I would never in a million years do. A bee landed on Terrie's finger while we were having coffee after our quite awful lunch in Bourges. Actually, the bee landed on his arm first and walked its way up to his finger with Terrie coaxing it along. I myself would've been halfway down the street after the bee landed on me...I have a well-documented anti-stinging insect policy.

It turns out that Terrie's bar for insect tolerance was set extremely high during the year he spent driving around Africa in 1995 or so. He and Emma toook a Land Rover to the Sahara and basically drove around for a year, also hitting the Congo, Chad, and plenty of other places where no one does this. Some of the roads they went on hadn't seen a vehicle in 6 years according to locals. I'll get to that in a minute.

But when Colin and I cringed over the fact that Terrie was letting this bee have its way with him, he said: "Bah...when we were in the Sahara, hoor, that was heavy. Some days you really had to run for your life. Because the insects were so thirsty, hoor, if a bee or wasp found out that you had something like a tomato with you or in your car, they would go back and tell all of the other bees or wasps, and in 10 minutes, they would all show up for the tomatoes and start stinging you without being provoked, because they needed the tomatoes. and you just had to run (maniacal laughter)."

"They also had these little bees called sweat bees that wouldn't sting you, but they wanted your sweat. And as soon as they found you, your face would be black with them, crawling up your nose, under your eyelids...you just had to wipe them off like shaving cream, hoor (maniacal laughter). It was crazy! Some days we had to stay in the car all day and only come out after dark because they were so bad."

"But the most aggressive insects were the termites....Emma and I were sleeping on these foam mats and one night we heard this tack tack tack tack tack (mimes large mandibles chomping) and we looked down and they'd eaten half the mattress (maniacal laughter)."

He then went on to talk about how you couldn't leave oranges in your car because the elephants would tear your car apart looking for them....and not to get between a hippopotamus and the water. But anyway that's why Terrie's not bothered by bees.

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Terrie is bothered by undercooked pasta and bland cream sauces, however. As are the rest of us to varying degrees. The most damning piece of evidence with regard to how bad the food was in Bourges is that Kat said it was "smaakloos", tasteless. And as Andy said: "if Kat complains that something is tasteless, then that's really saying something".

It had started promisingly with a good-sounding recommendation from the desk clerk at Kat's hotel, French home cooking with local ingredients. But we couldn't find it. And then someone who shall remain nameless spotted a place that advertised "fresh pasta" and went in. What followed was a splendid illustration of why it's worth spending a little time planning a lunch spot when on tour.

This was just 100% form over content. There were glass jars of artfully arranged dried pasta everywhere, wine bottles galore, Tuscan yellow on the walls and tablecloths, but wow what an absence of love in the food. They first brought out some bruschetta mozzarella that really just screamed Pizza Hut in every way: industrial, mass-produced, probably frozen and reheated. Then the pasta came out, accompanied by Parmesan granules (not grated parmigiano reggiano, but "Parmesan")...and everyone's pasta was uniformly undercooked, dry, and completely, weirdly tasteless. I myself had veal Marsala, which was OK once I salted and peppered it. But in general this was the worst restaurant meal I've had in a long time.

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Then it was off to Limoges. The venue was cute and downright petite, part of the university...it was a 10 year anniversary party, so the atmosphere was festive. More exciting than this was the fact that the opening band sounded like they might not totally suck. Dinner was better than average, brought in by a cook who was very proud of his work: a tomato-less ratatouille, a strongly herbal and spicy couscous, pork in a mustard sauce, and a nice green salad. The gig was fine, the PA was a little small, about the size of my home stereo, so the sound didn't really fill the space so well. Also, this was the smokiest night of the tour, and after this I would finally succumb to lung duress...I've been coughing and sneezing ever since. The opening act was in fact good and they was some nice people too.

on the road, day 7: montpellier to bourges.

So. this might not look like much, but this is the creature that came between me and a promising night of much-needed sleep. It's, against all odds, really...a rooster, just outside my fucking window. Doesn't this seem like a flagrant, obvious conflict, the rooster vs. the sleeping person? And this rooster taught me an important rooster fact that I was unaware of: they do not just do their "cock-a-doodle-do" thing at dawn, although they certainly do it then. No, they pretty much do it all fucking morning, or until somebody climbs out of their hotel window, walks the 20m to where they are crowing, and chokes the life out of them.

Which...I did not do, unfortunately. But the Montpellier Chicken Alarm Clock put a damper on my day. We had a long drive today, so we met at 10:30 and hit the road. I'm having a hard time remembering what I ate on the road this day. This could've been rubbery petrol fish day. I'll finish this post when it comes back to me.














































































Tonight was the only other night on the tour where love was really in the air. After Vanessa took off her dress and threw it on the ground in front of the merch stand, the pheromones must have started some sort of chain reaction in the air...we got out of there just in time.

Our rooms for the night were in a sort of dorm apartment thing...nice beds, but two to a room. I got Andy, who suffered through a night of my sinus breakdown in progress.

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Breakfast looked like this:

on the road, day 6: grenoble to montpellier.

on the road, day 5: genéve to grenoble, france.

Whew. Finally an internet connection AND more than 15 minutes to use it. We are in stunningly beautiful Grenoble at the moment, playing in a rather unbeautiful venue that looks like it should be hosting a high school talent show. Everyone is quite beat up as the result of a very late night in Geneva and so it will be interesting to see how the evening progresses.

We seem to be playing two kinds of places on this tour: the fun shows have been homey squats with very little support personnel, just two to three people working very very hard, also featuring home-cooked meals (fresh-baked brioche this morning!); the less fun shows have been at newish, sterile concrete boxes with more sound, tech, and hospitality people than there are musicians onstage. More on this when I get to post about the first few shows.

Anyway, today, thus far it seems to be the latter. On the positive side: I got to try andouillette today. Um...brace yourself, this is challenging food. In fact, if you're feeling queasy at all, I'd quit reading and come back when you feel stronger.

The thing is, in my initial France research, I'd read one sentence about it and knew that it sounded like something I'd end up eating...but the truth is, I probably should've read a little further. Here's Wikipedia's definition (edited):

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Traditional andouillette is made from the colon and the stomach of pig. In modern times, contents vary and normally contain intestines of pig, cow and/or calf. It is not to be confused with andouille sausage, which is much spicier, but more mild in animal-derived smells.

French andouillette...is an acquired taste and can be an interesting challenge even for adventurous eaters. It is sometimes eaten cold, as in picnic baskets. Served cold and sliced thinly, the smell, taste, and texture may be mistaken for an andouille, but on closer inspection the texture is considerably more rubbery and the meat has a more animal-like flavor.

Many French eateries serve andouillette as a hot dish, and foreigners have been disgusted by the aroma, to the point where they find it inedible (see external links). While some find that hot andouillette smells of feces, food safety requires that all such matter is removed from the meat before cooking. Feces-like aroma can be attributed to the common use of the pig's colon (chitterlings) in this sausage, and stems from the same compounds that give feces some of its odors.

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Here's the best part: I ate it at a gas station...their plat du jour was andouillette au poivre avec ratatouille. Ah, France.
The photo above is not mine, but that's what it looked like: very very coarse-grained sausage, chopped instead of ground. The smell? Not great. When we walked in to the grill area of the restaurant you smelled it immediately...you knew it was an awfully, offally familiar smell. I was hoping that the smell I was smelling was not the eating I was going to be eating for lunch. It was.

And the taste? OK. Edible. I could maybe see ordering another one for comparison's sake, but...let's just say I probably won't be making my own andouillette at home. I'm very glad I tasted it though.

UPDATE: My apologies to everyone at the venue, it was the best show yet: 450 enthusiastic people from from teens to grandmas having a great time (and buying plenty of merch). The crew was really friendly and totally competent, and the band was on fi-yaaaaaaaaaaaa (to be pronounced in David Lee Roth's devil falsetto). A very sweet couple who had been buying CDs on and off throughout the night (and who helped me recover from a drunk person's red-wine spill into one of the CD boxes) approached us after the show and said that they owned an Italian restaurant, and would we like to come for lunch the next day. Yes, we would! Report to follow.

on the road, day 4: genéve, switzerland.

on the road, day 3: bern, switzerland.

on the road, days 1-2: belgian breakdown.

I don't have a lot of time to write at the moment, so i'll instead do that thing where the picture speaks for the thousand words, etc. These first two images really crystallize what the tour has been about so far. First, from Neufchateau, Belgium:

















and, in Nancy, France:

















Yes, that's right, the van died (for good) in Neufchatel. On the upside, being stranded in Neufchatel looks like this:


































That is, until you have to unload your van onto the side of the highway, and then it looks more like this:

















That is, until an amazing rescue team swoops down upon you from three hours away, packs you into their van, and then hurtles back across Luxembourg at death-defying speeds to land you at the gig just before you're supposed to go on. The second picture is from the next morning when the rescue van itself wouldn't start due to a misconnected brand-new battery...

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But everything worked out fine. Except for the yellow van being declared "a catastrophe" by the Belgian Volkswagen mechanic. There will definitely be more detail to come as soon as I have access to an internet connection for more than 30 minutes.

More relevantly for this page, on the eating front: I knew we wouldn't have much time in each city, but there has really been no time to do anything other than drive, break down, call for help, wait, get rescued, drive, load in, do the thing, pack up, find the hotel, find out that there aren't enough beds for all of you, toss coins to see who sleeps together, lose the coin toss, and then fidget until dawn.

What I'm saying is: it's been all petrol stations and backstage food. Add to that the fact we've only been in France for a few daylight hours so far, mostly Belgium and Switzerland.

But France is where the eating highlights of the trip thus far have occurred. It has illustrated that cliche of French cuisine "getting the simple things right": I had the best croissant I've had in a long long time at the hotel in Nancy, lightly toasted and crispy on the outside, chewy, airy, and lightly buttery on the inside. And the eating highlight of my trip so far has been an amazing grilled ham and cheese sandwich at gas station outside Nancy:

















It might not look like much, but what appears to be an innocent ham sandwich is actually a perfectly crispy baguette that's been grilled like a bruschetta, given a good once-over with real butter, and filled with good ham and better Gruyere. It's like a dream version of a ham sandwich. (to give Belgium some props, I had a perfect braadworst in Antwerp the size of my arm, with sauteed bacon and onions, mustard, and ketchup...a manly breakfast indeed).

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Other food notes: Let's see....in Opwijk I think a girl tried to hit on me by giving me a very tasty caramel (nice one) and then sitting on the CDs I was trying to sell (mmm...less good). It was hard to tell exactly what her intentions were because she was, I think, very drunk...after her first two sentences ("Would you like a caramel?" and "Parlez-vous Francais?") she became completely speechless (most probably because I don't parlez-vous Francais). But there is nothing quite like watching someone try to communicate while being doubly incapacitated by alcohol and a language barrier. Worrying and endearing at the same time, she was...I'm pretty sure she eventually found another target for her caramels of desire.

Speaking of incapacitation via language barrier, I will soon find myself in semi-rural France with not much French to work with. More on this in a bit. Til then, here's a picture of the rescue van hurtling through the Swiss Alps.