It is time for the grape harvest, in the south of France. The summer has been fairly warm, and the grapes are ready to go — about a month sooner than they were a year ago. This is a big annual event in the Languedoc and surrounding regions, which produce a third of France’s win. […]

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Sometimes we forget that this part of France is not just thinly populated … it is rural. It is farmland. Vines, mostly, acres and acres of them, in every direction. Towns are small and grew up here as places to support working in the vines. In our town, population 600, many of the garages we […]

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We expect some chilly weather here, given that we are further north than 90 percent of the continental U.S. But this batch of weather has been the coldest we have seen in more than a year in the south of France. Tonight? A low of 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, below freezing. Tomorrow night? A forecast […]

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I like to attend Christmas Eve services. Preferably of the “candlelight” variety. I have attended one every December 24 since I was 13 — aside from one year in Long Beach when we got the starting time of a service wrong and arrived just as everyone was leaving. Options for church-going in this part of […]

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Another Christmas season overseas, another British-themed Christmas service, my seventh in eight years. We have done enough of these now that I even know the music to “Once in Royal David’s City”, which apparently starts every British Christmas service — at least among Protestants. In Abu Dhabi, the Anglican events tended to follow the regular […]

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This is one of those things that seems unworkable and maybe a bit crazy … right until you step in a pile of poo left behind by someone’s dog. The mayor of Beziers, the biggest city in this part of the Languedoc, wants to collect DNA samples from the city’s dogs. Why?

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We now have added the Languedoc to places in the world where we have had Thanksgiving dinner. That ends a period of five years out of seven when we celebrated Thanksgiving in Abu Dhabi. The exceptions were … when we spent it in Paris (inviting some people over to where we were staying) and when […]

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Hunting season in France seems to last forever. Which I would not have a particular problem with … if hunters were not beating the bushes for animals only a few hundred yards from villages, here in the Languedoc. When we first arrived in the south of France, early this year, I noticed that many people […]

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We expected “warm” in southern France. We did not expect “hot”. We thought we had left behind “hot”, back in Abu Dhabi. And in a sense we did. No highs of 118 Fahrenheit with high humidity, here in the Languedoc. However, perceptions of heat are impacted by considerations we had not necessarily considered. To wit:

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It was a teeny bit like the Retired Anglophones French Chateau Languedocienne Woodstock. Music, alcohol, cars parked on every spot not previously occupied by a vine … essentially a farm with no neighbors to complain about the noise … and lots and of gray-white-and-blue hair. It was quite the success as hundreds of people seemed […]

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