Breizh Practices

I’ve neglected my blog for quite a while, it’s true. I had a multi-week run of family visitors followed by a week of vacation in the French countryside, because, well, it’s August, naturally.




We spent the week in Bretagne (aka Brittany or Breizh), a region in the northwest of France. It was my first French road trip, and I was completely floored to learn that you can actually spy castles from the highway. Seriously??? Ah, France, you’re too good to me. Maybe that’s why the road toll was an exorbitant 26 euros—aside from all the road maintenance, motorists are provided with knock-their-socks-off views that they probably shouldn’t be straining their necks to look at given the aggressiveness of French drivers.

Anyhow, it was such a joy to get out of the city and into the country. Oh, greenery, how I missed you! Oh, ocean, how nice to see you - I’ve always known I need to live near a big body of water and the Seine just doesn’t cut it. We rented a house in south-central Bretagne with N’s mom, sister, her boyfriend, and his three-year-old son. It was a nice mix of generations, personalities, French and English, and everyone got along swimmingly.


So what did we do? A lot of our activities were limited by weather. Bretagne may be gorgeous, but le temps is not. We had two clear, sunny days but the rest were overcast and always on the verge of sprinkles. On the nicer days, we enjoyed brisk beach walks, breathing in the invigorating seaside scent that my mother-in-law and I dubbed eau de wakame.

On the grayer days, we jumped in the car to explore the region: tiny villages boasting charming stone houses, gardens bursting with hydrangeas, lively marketplaces, and many ancient archaeological sites featuring menhirs (stone pillars believed to be placed in patterns by Druids and peoples before them, used for a variety of things from human sacrifice to acting as a primitive calendar).

One of the biggest kicks out of being in Bretagne was reveling in the old Breton language, which isn't really spoken that much anymore but lives on through town names and on many street signs. Just when I thought I was getting a handle on French, I was thrown into a strange world with places named Inzinzac-Lochrist, Kerveneac, and Plouhinec. In fact, due to its proximity to the UK, Breizh can trace some of its cultural roots to the Celts. It's most evident in traditional Breton music, which features kilt-wearing bagpipers.

We also sampled plenty of the local cuisine, including lots of fresh seafood and the ultimate treat, buckwheat crepes washed down with a crisp cider followed by the fabulously named, buttery, sticky-sweet dessert, kuign aman (pronounced kun-yah-mahn). Delish.

Then it was time to return to concrete jungle of Paris, where we had a very Parisian welcome indeed on our first evening back. Forebodingly gray sky, check. Ghost town atmosphere due to everyone being on holiday, check. Random urban violence, check: a middle-aged drunk couple in a bit of a melee—she had him in a headlock and he was gripping her ponytail, both of them were lying on the ground and too weak to fight the other off. Ah, how nice it is to be home.

To soften the blow, I have a tiny bit of work this week and then I head off on my second August vacation (I’m Frenching it up big time), this time to…drumroll...NYC! Aka, the homeland. It’ll be relatively quiet on the blogfront for most of the rest of the month. Yes, even la blogue must take its vacances d’août.