The Normandy Chronicles: Day Three: Honfleur and Run-On Sentences
I had great expectations for Honfleur, our next stop on the B&B inspection trail. My friend Lisa had rented a car last year and driven from Paris to Normandy and stumbled upon Honfleur. When she came back to Paris she gushed about the pretty port and the little town.
And it's true. Honfleur is a beautiful little Medieval town with its 11th century port, surrounded by picturesque buildings and waterside outdoor restaurants.But Galadriel and I are different kinds of tourists. We have this pesky little habit of wanting natural wine and organic food, served in quiet little restaurants owned by locals who will spend millions of minutes discussing the pros and cons of different wines for each course.
"Oh, this wine is best with the bread made from ancient wheat and the butter that's churned by the gnarled hands of a bewhiskered farm wife, seated on a three-legged stool (hand carved by her cow-herding husband) with the wooden churn (passed down from her great-great-great grandmother) wedged between her shriveled thighs and her rubber-booted feet planted firmly in fragrant hay in between sun-warmed recently-milked benign cows fed only with wild flowers. Now... what shall we drink with the snails - picked by hand at dawn, just after a full moon, from dew-moistened lettuce by vestal virgins and placed carefully in a mouth-blown glass container full of stone-ground corn meal for two weeks until they excrete only fragrant corn poop, then sent to their deaths, bathed in garden-fresh parsley and garlic and the butter that's hand churned by the gnarled...?"
You can see why it can take some time to select wine in France.
Anyhoo! Galadriel had just that kind of restaurant in mind, as we parked the car and walked with our noses high in the air, feeling like vestal virgins ourselves (well, that's a stretch), past the tourist-infested port-side restaurants, saying "Non, non!" to the waiters as they tried to lure us in with promises of the freshest oysters and crabs. It was getting late. Too late, even for French dinner. In my mind, I'm always thinking, "But, if we keep walking and trying to find this place, won't they be closed and we'll be left, bereft, on the cobblestone streets, as hungry as little beggars?" But I rarely voice these concerns, as they tend to reveal the fact that I'm a big worrier of the never-occurring evil.
"Oh, non!" Galadriel gasped as we turned down a side street and discovered that Alexandre Bourdas' restaurant Sa.Qua.Na was closed. Like corporate travelers, shocked by the fact that first class is full and their gold-card status lacks the power to eject undeserving cretins from the depths of their Corinthian leather seats and the effervescence of pre-takeoff champagne, we were indignant. This restaurant had the audacity to only be opened on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and every other leap year? "The Fooding guide said it was open on Tuesdays, Sundays and every other fêtes de Saint-Eustache!" Galadriel said, exasperated. Reluctantly, we turned our backs on Alexandre Bourdas' quirky opening hours to face the dreaded tourist restaurants across the street and resigned ourselves (well, I resigned myself; Galadriel wasn't going down without a fight) to prefabricated food and waitresses.
It was not pretty. We walked, staring at menus, then walked back, staring at them all again. A dark cloud gathered above Galadriel's elven head.
Me: (feigned cheerfulness) "What are you in the mood for?"
Galadriel: "I don't know." (pouty mouth)
Me: "Pasta? They can't fuck up pasta." (always the delicate speaker)
Galadriel: "Phlegh" (I took that for a no)
Me: "They all have seafood. I'm sure it's local and fresh."
Galadriel: (searing stare that said, "You have GOT to be kidding.")
Me: (my fake smile beginning to crack) "Okaaay. Erm. We could sit outside here and it won't be as noisy as inside and it would be cool and breezy and I'm sure there's something on the menu that's borderline fresh and ...?"
Sit, we did. There were two women sitting next to the only table left empty on the tiny sidewalk, a mother and daughter, with the daughter's baby sleeping soundly in a stroller. The daughter rose, seeing our distress, and moved the stroller carefully so that we could sit down next to them. They were smiley and nice.
The waitress...not so much. Perhaps she could smell our discontent. Or maybe it was the rather pointed questions Galadriel was asking, as she held the menu like it was recently fished out of the dumpster. Of course they had no natural wine. And the sardines had not just been fished out of pristine waters, placed in a hand-twisted twine basket, carried carefully by a fleet runner, barefoot and hair flying behind him in the salt-sprayed wind, directly to the back door of the kitchen and tossed, still alive, into a frying pan. (I'm making most of this up, since it was all in French and you can't trust my translations since I've been known to say to the waiter when he bends down to take my empty plate, "Oui, Je suis fini" which kind of means, "I'm dead, done-for.") The waitress became a bit, well, defensive.
So, the wine was terrible and the food was mediocre. But fortunately, the street entertainment provided a much-needed distraction. Galadriel's longing eyes were torn away from the shuttered Sa.Qua.Na across the street, by the appearance of a drunk man with a blue, rolling suitcase. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the cheap suitcase rolled along the cobblestones but would suddenly stop, as it's owner staggered a bit and tried desperately to make his head stop moving long enough to focus his eyes on the narrow street ahead. He was heading somewhere important, but I'm not sure he knew exactly where that might be.
We exchanged glances and smiles with the two ladies next to us. Four sets of wise women's eyes followed the one drunken man. I would give anything to see tiny thought and picture bubbles above all of our heads at that very moment.
"Poor thing."
"What's in that suitcase? Cockles? His clown outfit?"
"Who's the lucky girl?"
"He is going to try and kill us."
Guess who was thinking about impending death? Well, actually, those are all my thoughts. I have no idea what the rest of the girls were thinking.
He managed to make it halfway down the street, where a certain amount of foggy determination and a leftward tilt initiated with his shoulder as the rudder, impelled him into a bar. He left his suitcase, its telescoping handle still extended, looking forlorn outside the door in the middle of the tiny sidewalk. A moment later, as a drunken afterthought, he peered out the door, nodded his head at the suitcase as if to say, "Good dog. Stay." and fell back inside.
Content to know that the clown murderer was temporarily busy in the bar, we paid the bill, wished the nice ladies next to us a good evening and walked back up the hill to our B&B. I wish I could write more about this place, but I can't get Galadriel in trouble. And somebody, definitely not my mother, once said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
So, I'll just say that the bed was comfortable (but I couldn't help thinking that the red and black and purple flowered sheets covered up a multitude of sin stains), the decorations artistic (but the painting of a junk yard above the bed inspired several nightmares), the conversation with the little old couple at breakfast was sweet (even as I kept wanting to dive in and help her trembling hands as she tried to pass the tea pot to her husband), the bathtub had a magnificent view down the hill to the village and beyond to the green hills, the terrace outside our room was magnificent and the B&B owners were kind of well, kinky. I don't know why I would think that, other than the fact that there were many erotic photos, circa 1972, of the wife along the corridor to our room and the husband had a strange look in his eye and always, day and night, sported a fedora.
Instead, I'll tell you in the next post about the gorgeous B&B we visited the following day in Honfleur, where we hung out and chatted with the super-nice owners, drinking coffee, petting their cat and taking lots of pretty pictures. À Bientôt!
