June 24 Elysium

France is not letting us down in the nice weather department. We spend a bit of the morning strolling around Besancon’s music stores looking for some auxiliary equipment, and are confronted with a load of funny fliers concerning the French team’s pathetic behavior in the World Cup. I’m not a diehard futbol fan or anything, but the French team’s whinny, juvenile behavior being answered with an embarrassing defeat was pretty entertaining.

I make a bit of a miss-step on the road by suggesting we duck into Ikea for lunch. They don’t have Ikea in New Zealand, so this is the bands first foray into the Scandinavian labyrinth. But the cafeteria ends up being closed, and I get yelled at for taking pictures. FAIL.

And we’re off into the French countryside. Maybe all these fields of van Gogh yellows and ochre’s will get tiring, but for now it’s completely taken me into its cadmium calm. Things just get better as well roll up to our venue for the evening. Le Labo Sonore is literally out in the middle of nowhere. Up until 2 seconds before we arrive, I’m convinced I put the address in the GPS wrong. This is farming country.

I can’t even tell you exactly where I am, but it’s about 10 miles outside of Alencon (there’s a little hook on the bottom of the “c”, but I don’t know how to type a cedilla), somewhere in Normandy. The club is a compactly contained sanctuary with a bar, venue, and a full apartment for the bands. It’s surrounded with grass fields on every side. There are some stately, grand trees interspersed among the shafts of grains, and I feel a little bit like I’m in the that scene of The Shawshank Redemption when Red finds Andy’s box planted in the oak roots (you know, under the obsidian stone).

I tell the band that there’s been a change of plans and ask them what they’d like to do for the rest of the tour, because I’ve decided I’m never leaving this place. I stake out a place on the patio and alternate between flailing through learning to use my Euro store watercolors and reading Mrs. Dalloway. The sun gets a bit too intimate with my shoulders and leaves me with a slightly sore sensation of Sunshine clap.

Perhaps the French countryside is actually a Siren for the soul. I would probably end up destroyed if I gave into its enchanting calls. But for now, my will is strong and my soul is content.

Not only is this place transcendental, it sheds a bit of light on a question we’re been asking out selves for weeks. Every time we look in a host’s freezer, there’s no ice trays. What exactly do Europeans do for cold drinks? Well, tonight we learned how to make French ice cubes, and like a lot of things European, it involves wasting as much plastic as possible! Yay! You fill the bag with water, freeze it, and then pop out individual cubes. The excitement?