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Wishing you all much luck in the new year.

Auntie Did saves Christmas!

Auntie Did has just become a 'European Liaison', or something. Anyway, she's being paid to schmooze in the Old World. So what do you do with a weekend off in Brussels? Why, it's just six hours from the charming hypermarchés of central France!

Our poor Dickensian heroes were debating how seriously to tackle Christmas this year. They were even wondering whether to bother investing in a Christmas tree. Suddenly, with a glissando of chimes, Auntie Did swooshes in from magical Belgium and, with additional financial support from the Fairy Grandmother, furnishes them with a wondrous, marvellous, miraculous Christmas tree!

No, no, the other Christmas tree!!

Aww... With Tinkerbull, the tiresomely enthusiastic seasonal bovine.

So rather than take Did in our new car through the picturesque mountains of the Auvergne, we took her to two -- yes two -- hypermarchés in the fantastical heavy commercial districts of Lempdes and Le Brezet.

We'd been past the Marché St. Pierre in the old town with Jinu in the morning, but the dreary anorexic excuses for festivity that Mother Nature was offering us left us unispired. By comparison, the artificial conifers of the Retail Kingdom of Polymers were plump and voluptuous, right down to the imitation pine cones. And what variety! We were touched by the beauty of the simulated frosts. We were enthralled by the neo-industrial Orwellian anthracite grey tree, which would have been quite the statement decorated in silver tinsel and blanching neon lights. But of course, in the end, we went classic.

Man triumphs over Nature, with easy-to-follow assembly.

Having adorned the dwelling, Auntie Did was not to stop there. The Clermont-Ferrand Christmas lights were fired up on Saturday evening, and Auntie Did took us there in her magical #9 bus. Sure it was cold and blowing a gale, with intermittent showers, but did that stop Auntie Did from taking us up in the Ferris Wheel? Rhetorical question, fool!!

I'm missing photographic evidence, though. You'll have to imagine us dangling fifteen storeys up in the gondola, with Jinu's pushbike and three screaming eleven-year olds on board, cross-winds spraying us in the face with a fine mist of drizzle, Jinu as still and silent as an undertaker. Image-wise all you get are mood-telling shots from Auntie Did's Blackberry down below.

The other big thing, of course, was for Auntie Did and Ian to meet. He was her youngest nephew to date -- she didn't meet Jinu till he was seven months. He smiled his coy smile at her, and was magically ungrizzly while supine in her presence for about half an hour. That's about twenty-five minutes more ungrizzliness than he can typically muster. Then he demanded pickles.

Hooray for Auntie Did!!

Grands

Cheese in a hotel.

The Grandparents arrived in Clermont just as their marriage odometer was clicking over to 40 years.  It was a low-key celebration but the goon and coon were superb, and the company obviously without peer.

Champers in a nearby apartment.

Their arrival coincided with start of semester, which is to say my debut as a French lecturer.  Thus, I could fret comfortably about my grammar without worrying about dinner. 

Incidentally.. My French?  Just precisely good enough.  For instance, it was three weeks before I realised I didn't know the French verbs for 'add' and 'subtract'.  That this is even possible is testimony to how little we use them in mathematics, I guess.  But I had few moments of complete incoherence, so long as I stuck to my familiar abstract territory and didn't wander into the neighbouring minefields of pendulums, shock-absorbers, geological formations, or philosophy.

Jinu, meanwhile, was being a metro train.

A #419 metro train, to be precise.  Actually, this was a little out of character, since usually we were all buses.  He referred to all of us by our route numbers only for weeks.  Gran was particularly amazed at his dedication when Ian cried in bed and Jinu ran in urgently yelling, "the number 5 bus is crying!!"  I think the paediatric OT in her was trying to suggest the gentle end of some kind of spectrum.  Grandpa helped put this in context.

There was considerable discussion about the proper order of the colours.  The only canonical solution, of course, was to follow the optical spectrum, with higher energies towards the top.  For the record, Jinu was in bed through all of this.

Ian has his enthusiasms too.

Like Jinu he seems to be a big fan of Gutenberg technology.  But he has also continued his early sincere interest in face-staring.  Much more so that I remember with Jinu.

His other thing is a constant demand to be involved.  His gaze from his pad on the floor follows us across the room, until he cries when we step out the door.  It's impossible to eat dinner without him.

Cute!

Wearing thin.

It was pretty darn nice to have dinner served for us every evening.  I slowly regained the art of adult conversation in the evenings, between reports of Jinu's idiosyncrasies of the day.

Actually, in looking back through the photos around the house, I started to notice a pattern.

Interesting that they reflect exactly the pairings of HJ and me with the lads.  I'd always assumed that our separation into teams was just a matter of practical necessity -- HJ being the one with the boobs, and Jinu being glued to what's left.  But now I'm starting to wonder if there's something deeper at work.  Could it be that I just don't find babies as engrossing?

But I digress.  Apart from adult conversation, one of the other perks of grandparents was that I drank more wine in September than during my entire time in France to that point.  And that despite my resolution on arrival in wine-land to sink more plonk at home.  HJ took the wind out of that resolution by getting pregnant.  Grandpa, on the other hand, was incorrigible.

Gran whole-heartedly took over Jinu's lunch-time school pick-up, enjoying watching the dynamics of the clusters of French nannies and American Michelin brides who gather outside the school gates at 11:25.  Then, when the teachers went on strike, she joined the army of French grandmothers which is dispatched on such occasions, filling the parks and the playgrounds of France.

Actually, the Grands did pretty well for French clichés, getting a teachers' strike, a public servants' strike, and a week-and-a-half public transport strike in their one month here.  Plus, they got plenty of rude and disinterested service in the shops, which kept them happy.

Jinu, meanwhile, was introducing Gran and Grandpa to the sights of Clermont-Ferrand.

Occasionally, Gran and Grandpa would sneak off to a nearby town alone for a slightly different viewpoint.

Grandpa investigates the spa-town suburb of Royat.

And then before you know it, it's over, and they're gone.  Jinu, forewarned that we'd be seeing off Gran and Grandpa's train at 8:00am the next morning, woke up at 3:00 screaming in fear that we'd missed them.  Or that we'd missed the train.  It can be hard to ascertain his priorities.

But it was great, eh?  Ian turned three months two days later, and the really hard part was over. 

Grand Paris

Two months since my last post? Really?? I'd better start with a chart, then.

Figure 1: Number of locally situated family members, as a function of time.

Right.  Let's begin at the peak.

 
A grand occasion requires a grand location, and we organised for the grand parental baton to be handed over in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles.   I carried an 18kg sack of beef in ritual tribute.

Halmeoni maybe left our apartment six times during her two months them, and that includes trips to the supermarket.  So her flight out of Paris was a crucial sightseeing opportunity.  HJ selected Versailles as the archetype of European opulence.  Not a bad choice for representing the continent to a first-timer. 

Jinu checks the map.

Gran and Grandpa specifically arranged their flights to get to see her for the first time since the wedding.  It was an amusing confusing trilingual day, with grandparents running in all directions.  Jinu got no sleep and nearly beserkered multiple times, until the shoulder-coma in the grand hall at closing time.  But they had a train.

Some random photos, none of really capture the imperial insanity of those gardens:

Now I'm curious too.  Prolly something motorized.

Big hedge!

Jinu and Halmeoni find chestnuts in a crazy anarchistic modernist addendum of the gradens (post-Louis).  Those trees are not aligned!  Still, I doubt they're really allowed on that grass.

Oop, a touch of imperial insanity!

No photos of Ian or HJ who, tired enough already, stayed at the hotel.

We five had rolled up from Clermont one day before the Aussies.  Ian loves hotels and Jinu loves TVs, so it was a reasonable first night.
 

The next day was like a rerun of Operation Groce! only in a more expensive location.  We had to move to a new hotel three doors up the street to meet Gran and Grandpa at 11:00am.  Thus, the first Paris sight Halmeoni saw was at 7:30pm.



When you've got two days to see all of Paris, and you're hauling 25kg of children, you need transportation.  It was a coin-flip between the bus and the boat, and we landed on the boat because I like saying Bateaux Mouches.  Paris' photo opportunities are conveniently laid out along the Seine, so it works.



Not so many photos of Gran and Grandpa, because they were usually on the other side of the camera.

And that's really all we saw of Paris.  It's too bad we didn't get to walk to the Eiffel Tower.  I have been there numerous times now, and every time I'm gobsmacked by its incredible size as you stand underneath.  From even just a few blocks away its immensity is lost in its meccano-like appearance.

Still, she was happy.  Gran and Grandpa too, who mainly wanted to see the grandkids at this stage.  And Jinu would be happy going to the dentist in Paris:




Then finally, there was the goodbye at Charles de Gaulle airport, and the rush of family was starting to dissipate.

See you in a year or two...

Watching her plane take-off.

I lied about which one was hers.

Some words on poo

Jinu's stomach bug has developed. Not in the medical sense, but in the literary sense.

Jinu: [Sitting on potty, gesturing at his own belly.] The Stomach Bug is pushing out, and pushing out. It makes a hole, and it flies out, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... [Pinched thumb and index finger trace out a zigzagging flight.] ...bzzzzzzzzz, and it flies over my head. "Whaaaah! A Stomach Bug!!" [Ducks in fear.]
And then it buzzes onto your head.
Dad, say, "Shoo! go away!"

Me: [Sincerely] Shoo, Stomach Bug! Go away!!

Jinu: Bzzzzzzzz... And then the Stomach Bug flies up into the tree, and it makes honey.


Ah, sweet nectar of the bowel.

Actually, I'm jealous that I didn't think of this story-line myself. HJ deserves some credit for translating `stomach bug' into Korean literally, but it was Jinu who took it and ran with it.

I'm pleased he likes talking about poo. I don't trust people who don't like talking about poo -- it strikes me as duplicitous. Surely everyone likes talking about poo. Otherwise, you would have stopped reading by now, right? (You weren't eating, were you? If so, you might want to come back later.)

Yes, some of Jinu's best creative work is done at the potty. Every sacirfice to the Porcelain Gods is honoured with dutiful admiration, and often praise: "Waaow, it looks just like a --

• snake!
• fig baguette!
• tiiiiny lizard!
• ramp in an underground carpark!"

Or, on a really good day, in reverent tones: "A Crikey Poo!!"

We're still working on getting him to go there in the first place. Rampant procrastinator, he is. But when he finally goes, he does good work.

Back to life

France is waking up. Expect eight weeks annual leave in France; many of our professional friends get twelve. And August is universal slack-time.

In fact, it's mandatory. The university closes from late July to late August, and I am officially banned from my office. I can apply for special permission to enter on pre-specified days, but they warn you not to use the elevator -- if it breaks down you will starve to death. Also, bring your own toilet paper.

Thus, we are the only couple we know who were not at least three weeks away from Clermont this summer. And it's worth pointing out that, while in the Anglo world vacation typically means tourism, in France it means nothing but unwinding. Every French family from the upper middle class on owns a summer house in the countryside, and those that don't will rent a gîte. Somewhere where there's nothing to do, no internet, just good food and pleasant surrounds. It's admirable.

(We visited a friend's summer house in the Périgord for a weekend last year, at a time when I was to busy to blog about it. It was glorious. We ate fois gras and drank superb wine until 11:00 every night under the stars, while the kids explored the endless ramshackle garden. Maybe now's the time to finally publish some photos of that fabulous trip, to give a taste of the French summer life. So see below.)

Anyway, the fully-laden minivans have been rolling back into the city this week. The government offices are back to full hours, the local café's reopened, and our family doctor's working again.

I went back to the office a few days. It was hard for HJ, despite her mum being still in the house. Presumably things will get easier once Jinu's back at school, and a sort of natural circadian rhythm will set into the household, but the first week or so are going to be tough work even with the Aussie grandfolks in town.

Meanwhile, now that Ian has significantly defragilified, we're going in the opposite direction, trying to squeeze as much French summer as we can into Halmeoni's remaining days in France. We started slow, with a day-trip to Lac Chambon, nestled amongst the Puys.

Château de Murol in the background.


Halmeoni in the foreground.
(About to pick blackberries in the midground.)

Jinu happy to be at the beach.

Ian happy to be outside.

At work.

Baywatch shot.

Korean barbecue to finish the day.

Tomorrow's trip to Le Mont-Dore might be postponed a couple of days due to Jinu's stomach bug. The plan was for some cable-car and power-looking action atop the Puy de Sancy, followed by a douche nasale gazeuse at the établissement thermal. Maybe later in the week. Then we head to Gai Paris next week for the handing on of the grantparental baton. Three grand-parents in the same room? Lucky we got them a second grandkid!

____________________________________

And now, last summer...

Jinu, always first awake, and me, just this side of hung-over.

HJ up third.
The others, including the kids,
had better mastered French summer life.


So already starting to flag by the time Nina woke.


Exploring the neighbourhood.

Picnic with the gang at the local Chateau.

Jinu with Cat-Cat, our generous host.

Then cool off with a dip.

The dinner table at Cat-Cat's house.

It was the beginning of the end for our Canon PowerShot,
which lent the trip a slightly hallucinogenic feel.

We also visited the nearby Grotte de Font-de-Gaume on this trip, to gander at some 25,000-year-old bison. It's one of the few caves still accessible to the public, though it's very strictly regulated, and obviously no photos. It makes the ubiquitous Roman ruins seem like just a bunch of run-down shacks from the 1960s. It really throws the human condition into sobering perspective.