I left Saturday morning and got into Dijon around 11am. We left for the Moulin du Chêne (the name of their mill, "Oak Mill") shortly afterward with Noëlle's friend Sophie, who was also visiting for the weekend. Sophie and Noëlle have been friends since they went to university in Paris together; now Sophie works for a French company's office in Shanghai and only comes back to France once or twice a year. It was a little overcast, but warm when we left Dijon.
We stopped and had lunch at a little restaurant in one of the nearby villages. I anticipated light café fair, but it ended up being a 5-course meal with amuse-bouche, appetizer, entrée, cheese course, dessert and coffee. All delicious! Then we made a quick stop to say hello to Belby, the little baby donkey who will eventually live at the Moulin du Chêne, who Orane named after one of the characters in Harry Potter (if you don't remember who he is, all the info is here). Belby the donkey is still quite timid and won't take apple pieces from our hands. She is so adorable when she prances around on her tiny hooves!
Then we walked down the dirt road to the moulin and spent about an hour wandering around the site and just enjoying the sunshine and the tranquility. I took lots and lots of pictures, but here are just a few:
Then around 6pm we headed back to Dijon, by way of an antiques shop that Noëlle and Joseph stumbled upon a few months ago and from which they bought an armoire. The shop is run out of one of the little barns of an old (think 17th or 18th century) farm owned by a couple. The "barn" which houses the antiques is stone and not much bigger than a single room, but just one of many buildings on the sprawling property. The couple and their two kids don't even live in the main part of the house, but rather in what used to be the wool-spinning workshop. The main house is technically inhabitable, but Isabelle, the wife, explained that the renovations necessary to make it truly livable are too expensive . She actually explained this on Sunday, when we went back to pick up the lamp that Sophie bought when we went to look on Saturday. Sunday we ended up staying for lunch and spending a good chunk of the afternoon there! But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Dinner on Saturday night was a simple affair, after the feast that was lunch. Noëlle doesn't like to eat the biggest meal of the day in the evening anyway, so this wasn't a big change. We had a simple but delicious salad and some cheese. By some, I mean 10 different kinds. To be fair, one of them was the Parmesean Reggiano slivers to go on the salad and another was the cancoillotte au vin d'Arbois which I brought along as a gift. So really, they had only planned on 8 cheeses. When we realized just how numerous our selection was, I decided to take a photo:
My favorites were the Saint Félicien (middle right in the picture, with the green label sticking out from under the top right corner of the cheese wheel), which apparently comes from a region down near Grenoble, and the fromage fort (literally "strong cheese," center of the picture in the cylindrical container with red on the label) which was sort of like a tangy and dense greek yogurt. I asked if it's ever called anything else, but apparently that's it.
Then on Sunday morning I went for a run before breakfast. For those of you who heard, I was injured for pretty much all of last week; I strained a muscle in my right thigh and, although I had no pain while walking normally, absolutely could not run. So I had to take nearly a full 7 days off, which was a little discouraging because I had planned to really get in shape during the vacation. As of Friday it was feeling much better, and I ran that afteroon without a problem. The run on Sunday morning was both part of my routine and a chance to explore Dijon for the first time since I lived there in 2009. As far as I can tell everything is exactly the same, except for all of the construction barricades for the tram. I ran by my host family's old house, the restaurants where I used to eat with the other Wake kids, the maison diocésaine where we had our French art class (not that I expected that to have changed), the hotel where we stayed when we first arrived before we met our host families, etc. Then after breakfast we headed out toward the moulin, with the plan to first stop and pick up Sophie's lamp.
It turns out we never made it to the moulin. We ended up sharing our lunch with the couple who owns the antiques shop (although it was mostly them sharing with us, since Noëlle had brought among other things a meat pie, and everyone in the family is a vegetarian). One of the things they shared with us was a delicious homemade cassis nectar, a very thick juice made from blackcurrants.
By the time we finished lunch it was nearly 3pm and still overcast, so we decided to skip the moulin and instead check out the Château de Bussy-Rabutin, a castle not far from the moulin. Although in the present day the area around the moulin is sort of the middle-of-nowhere, in the 17th century that was not the case. There were many château and estates in the area, and the economic activity required to sustain a château meant that there were plenty of workers living in the villages around them.
Château de Bussy-Rabutin is particularly interesting because of its interior decoration. Its most notable proprietor, Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, was exiled from the court of Louis XIV, for, among other things, writing a book called Histoire amoureuse des Gaules which exposed all of the illict court romances, including those of the king's favorites. 17 years of exile makes for a lonely count, so he decided to bring the court to his château and commissioned portraits of all of the important people at court, especially those he didn't like. Then he amused himself by writing humorous or biting captions about their reputations underneath each of the portraits. These take up not just the salon, but the bedroom, a long hallway, and a tower. There are possibly more, but those were the only ones I saw in the part of the château we were allowed to visit. And even though they're written in an Old French, we could still understand them and most of them were really funny!
Other parts of the château I found interesting: the pigonnier, a tower specially-built to house the count's pigeons. Apparently they were a sign of wealth in this era, and based on this picture you can tell Roger de Bussy-Rabutin was a pretty wealthy guy:
Also, the fruitier. In French, the place where they fabricate cheese is called a fruitier, and I've never understood why. Apparently, a fruitier was originally a place specially-designated to ripen fruit. The word is used in the context of cheese because it serves the same purpose: a place for cheese to ripen! I love it when linguisitic puzzles suddenly come together like that.
Sophie, Joseph, and Noëlle!
Well that was my weekend, I got back around 7pm on Sunday and Monday was my first day back to classes. I hope all of you are having a great week!
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