france

Birthdays
girl in floral dress playing mini bedroom toy
Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

I had a birthday recently and decided to take myself to go see “Barbie”. I was hoping for some fun escapism. Well… it was entertaining but it was also a story of a major existential crisis. So I’m conflicted. Not sure I liked it. But Ryan Gosling was excellent as Ken.

I can be conflicted about birthdays in general. Some good, some bad. Some have associations I don’t care for. Some happy occasions.

My mother writes about the menu for my second birthday:  hunks of cheese,  slices of bananas with peanut butter dabs all on a toothpick,  tiny buns filled with ground spam,  graham crackers with honey butter,  and then cupcakes with a candle on each,  coffee and Koolade. 
Sounds like an exotic ‘50s meal, doesn’t it?


My fifth birthday was memorable because the family had just survived a plane crash and landed at our final destination two weeks late – on my birthday. Another memorable one was in Lagos, Nigeria when my mother and I marked the occasion by opening a small tinned chocolate cake. They probably don’t make such a thing anymore…

In 1999, the last year of the millennium, I spent my birthday in France.
We stayed with friends in the suburbs who had a house and small yard and a son our son, Noah’s age.  They were about a ten minute walk from the train in a nice little village with a pretty chateau.  The first day was spent getting our new visas organized and trying to do some shopping.  On Saturday we wandered around the left bank and then the four adults went out to dinner at a very nice kind of ‘new’ French restaurant.  It was my birthday so we had champagne and wine and great food. Sunday was the boat ride on the Seine with the boys and then a walk through the Tuileries garden where there just happened to be some rides and of course Noah had to go on them.

We rented a car and on Tuesday left for Metz and the eclipse.  Metz is a very pretty town right on the river.  We scoped out the area on Tuesday and early Wednesday morning we headed out with the telescope, video camera and other cameras.  We set up our camp in the middle of the Esplanade which is a nice park right by the river.  The town had organized a big festival around the eclipse and so there were parades, music, etc. going on all day long.  It was cloudy. During the first half of the eclipse we were able to see it off and on.  But about 20 minutes before total eclipse it started to rain.  We could tell when the total was, though, because it was completely dark.  It was really cool.  All the flowers closed up and all the lights came on and it was really night.  Then during the second half it cleared up a bit and we were able to see more. Noah kept looking at the “moon” through his glasses. Nicholas got some good shots through his telescope.  And I got a new umbrella.  When we got back to Paris our friends who had gone 25 minutes north of Paris on the train said they had seen the whole thing perfectly.



From Metz we drove into Lorraine and the Vosges area.  We stopped at the Haut Konningburg castle which is a huge restored castle on top of a mountain in the middle of the forest.  You can see forever from it. It is really cool with a moat and drawbridge and inner yard.  It would be very hard to penetrate it.

From there we wound our way around down to La Bresse which is in the heart of a big ski area and lots of mountains and forest. Really beautiful.  Our hotel was very nice with a good restaurant.  We drove all around the area and went hiking around a glacial pool where Noah spent the better part of an hour throwing rocks into it.



On Sunday (the day before Noah’s birthday) we took the boys to the Bois de Bologne to the big amusement park there and I think they went on about 20 rides.  They had a lot of fun.  



Our last day in Paris we had lunch up at Montmartre with all the tourists in town.  It was kind of fun.

Chapultepec Castle

Chapultepec Castle

I lived in Mexico City for seven years.  I never saw any Cinco de Mayo celebrations until I moved to the USA years later.  In Mexico it is a regional holiday centered around the state of Puebla.  It commemorates the defeat of the French in the Battle of Puebla.  Napoleon III decided it would be a good idea to invade Mexico – for several reasons I won’t go into here.  The French army landed on the coast and marched in toward the capital.  As they reached Puebla, they met with heavy resistance.  Although there were only 4,000 ill equipped Mexicans, they were able to overcome and defeat the 8,000 well equipped French army on May 5, 1862.

Yay!  Margarita time!!

Unfortunately Napoleon III did not take this well.  The following year he sent a much larger army and was able to take over the Mexican government and place a puppet emperor at the head of it.  Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian was a Hapsburg and Commander in Chief of the Austrian Navy.  In May 1864 he arrived in Mexico as Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico.  He was accompanied by his wife, Charlotte, Princess of Belgium.

He was liked and supported by the conservatives but had problems with the liberal forces led by Benito Juarez who refused to recognize his rule.  Battles continued over the three years he was Emperor.  When the US Civil War ended, Abraham Lincoln supported Juarez and Napoleon III started to withdraw his troops.  Maximilian fought until the end but was captured and executed in June 1867.  In 1866 his wife, Charlotte, had returned to Europe seeking support for her husband but was unsuccessful.  She never returned to Mexico and spent the rest of her days, until her death in 1927, in seclusion.  They say she went insane and never acknowledged her husband’s death.

During the time they were in Mexico, they lived at Chapultepec Castle.  It is reminiscent of the palaces of Europe with one room leading into the next and all lavishly furnished.  It has big terraces with views overlooking Mexico City.  When we were in grade school we had school trips to see what is now a National Museum.  We could walk up the hill to the castle or we could enter the hill through a dark tunnel and take the elevator.  It was both scary and thrilling to risk taking the elevator!

Every year they would show the American 1939 movie “Juarez” on Mexican TV.  Bette Davis played Charlotte and she was wonderful.  It is a classic and I made sure I watched it every year.  I felt sorry for the European Emperor and his wife but the triumph over the French every year was exciting!!

Viva Mexico!  Happy Cinco de Mayo!!

Famous Expat Women

Karen Blixen’s farm in Kenya

I watched Out of Africa last night for the umpteenth time and it got me thinking about all the amazing expat women through the ages.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Karen Blixen was Danish.  She married Baron Bror von Blixen and they moved to Kenya in 1914.  He was kind enough to give her syphilis and she returned to Denmark after one year for arsenic treatment.  She lived through it and returned to Kenya for another 16 years. She ran a successful coffee farm for a while but always struggled with it and eventually was forced to sell the land.  Her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, was a big game hunter who died in a plane crash just as she was dealing with the loss of her farm.  She returned to Denmark and lived there for the rest of her life.  She wrote under the name Isak Dineson as well as a few others and a couple of her more famous books are:

Out of Africa  (1937)

Anexdotes of Destiny  (1958) – includes Babette’s Feast which was made into a movie

Letters from Africa 1914-1931  (1981 – posthumous)

 

Beryl Markam was English.  Her family moved to Kenya when she was 4 years old in 1906.   She became friends with Karen Blixen even though there was an 18 year gap in age.  Beryl also had a brief affair with Denys Finch Hatton and was due to fly with him the day he crashed.  She had some kind of premonition and did not go.  However she did go on to fly extensively in the African bush and was the first women to fly across the Atlantic from East to West.  She briefly lived in California married to an avocado farmer but eventually retuned to Kenya and became a well known horse trainer.  Her memoir (a very good read) is:

West with the Night  (1942, re-released in 1983)

 

Alexandra David-Neel was French.  She became an explorer at a young age running away from home at the age of 18 to ride her bicycle to Spain and back.  In 1904 at the age of 36 she was traveling in Tunis and married a railway engineer.  That didn’t last long since she immediately had itchy feet and set off for India.  She told her husband she would be back in 18 months but did not return for 14 years.  Her goal was Sikkim in the northern mountains.  She spent years studying with the hermits and monks of the region and eventually, dressed as a man, snuck into the forbidden city of Lhasa.  Her travels were extensive and you can read more about her here:

http://www.alexandra-david-neel.org/anglais/biog.htm

Her account of her trip to Lhasa is:

My Journey to Lhasa (1927)

 

Gertrude Stein was an American Jewish lesbian writer who moved to Paris in 1904.  She held “Salons” promoting modern unknown artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne.  During World War 1 she learned to drive a car and drove a supply truck for the American Fund for French Wounded supplying hospitals in France with her life long companion Alice B Toklas.  Her writing was revolutionary and influenced many modern writers including Hemmingway.  She was a strong minded woman with strong opinions and a copious writer with a great sense of humor.  She was a real character as all these women were.  One of the easiest books of hers to read is:

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas  (1933)

Another one I like very much is:

Ida, A Novel (1941)

 

Who are your favorites??