Agriculture Salon

We've been to the Chocolate Salon and the Wine Salon, and this weekend a colleague gave us tickets to the Agriculture Salon (which included chocolate and wine and every other conceivable thing with even the slightest, most tangential relationship to agriculture). The two previous salons each were held in a building at the Porte de Versailles, and were immense. This Salon was held in not one, but all 7 of the convention hall buildings, and words cannot describe how much there was to see.

We went into it expecting something like a giant indoor county fair minus the rides. What we found, though, was something much more complex, as one might imagine from a country that is still so tied to the land and the things that are produced on it. The main goal of the salon was clearly public education. If you weren't sure where food came from when you got there, there was no doubt about it by the time you left. We started in the animal halls (2 buildings). We saw the pigs (including baby pigs nursing from the mama pig), the goats, the sheep, horses from every region in France (with a lot of diversity), and the most enormous cows and bulls we have ever seen. The animal area also included a huge exhibit by McDonalds testifying to the apparent wholesome-ness of their food (less than three hours from chicken to nugget, that sort of thing). The kids did several of the activities including a quiz game where we had to find the answers to questions regarding various meat products in the displays (Which meat has the highest consumption in France? What nutritional minerals are found in higher quantities in meat than in any other foods? etc.). Ella was excited to win pencils with animal erasers, cow magnets, and animal bookmarks. They learned about eggs (and Ella wrestled briefly with the chicken/egg problem - which led to a long discussion about evolution on the Metro ride home). And both kids played a Jeu de l'oie about animal products. Jeu de l'oie is any game where you roll the dice and move around a board answering questions at each stop. To give an idea of how committed these people were to educating the young public, they encouraged Jonah to join in the game. Jonah would have been happy to just roll the dice and move his crocodile, but they insisted on asking him questions according to the rules like "How many bees live in a hive: 60, 6,000 or 60,000?" and making sure he understood the answer before moving on to the next player's turn. By that time we were getting hungry for lunch so we headed to the products of regions of France buildings (2 more buildings). There we tasted (among other things) cheeses of Normandy (along with a delicious cider). The cheese presenter lamented the lack of raw milk cheeses in the U.S., and delighted at the way both our children enjoyed the cheese (he said Jonah looked like an advertisement for the cheese industry). We wandered through crepes of Brittany, sausages of Alsace, foie-gras of Languedoc Roussillon, and even the mangos and pineapples of D'Outre Mer (The French Caribbean Islands). We next moved on to World agriculture (1 building), as Ella had her heart set on Italy. We were pretty exhausted by then, but decided to get at least a glimpse of the rest. We moved on to building 6 which had hunting (we skipped that), rabbits, and home and garden (excellent model greenhouses, organic forms of insulation, and other vaguely "earthy" home renovation strategies) . Finally, in the last building we found the "Vegetable Odyssey." Here Ella got to participate in an apple tasting (which included tasting various types of apple dipped in chocolate and deciding which they liked best), and a vegetable atelier (in which a chef gave them lots of different types of vegetables to turn into toothpick shish-kabobs, sprayed with olive oil). They got cotton candy (from the sugar booth) and checked out the giant tractor, while Abe and I enjoyed seeing the BioPower cars (that run on fuel made from corn or beets). There were still lots of things we didn't see, but we were all exhausted, so the rest will have to wait for another year.

This morning we met Stuart and Jane and their kids at the Place de Vosges playground (it was sunny, although still cold), and then to the Marais for a falafel lunch. After lunch, we went to the Jardin D'acclimatation where the kids were signed up for an atelier at the Musee en Herbe (a museum geared towards kids with exhibits on art and other topics). We were early, so we started by checking out the Gauguin exhibit. The kids had fun dressing up at Breton girls and then Tahitian girls. The made the Breton girls dance by spinning a cylinder with the girls painted on it. They smelled the flowers from Tahiti, and enjoyed finding the plastic fruits that were represented in Gauguin's paintings of Tahiti. During the atelier, the kids made ocean scenes (that were supposed to evoke Gauguin's paintings on the beach). Then, we checked out the other exhibit which was about major world religions. Again, the costumes were a big hit. They dressed up first as Muslim princes (which is apparently a custom for Eid al-Fitr) and then in Buddhist monks' saffron robes. Jonah loved the exhibit about Moses which featured a trough of water and an air sprayer (along with plastic figures of the Israelites and the Egyptians) where the kids could try their hand at parting the Red Sea. They had ritual objects from each of the religions that the kids could try to identify, a sukkah that the kids could build, a buddhist circle of life that the kids could complete with beads, and foods to figure out which religions eat certain things for certain holidays and which do not permit some things to be eaten at all. They had a mat and a Buddha statue for the kids to try out meditating. None of our children spent much time there, although Juliette (our friends' daughter) did ask, "Are you allowed to draw on the Buddha or something?" In looking at one especially violent poster in the Muslim area depicting men with swords and that sort of thing, Jonah mused, "I don't see God in this picture." Out of the mouths of babes. After a brief stop at the playground, it was all our kids could do to drag themselves on to the metro, eat dinner, and crawl exhausted into bed.

On a side note, Ella got her first report card from school on Friday. I don't want to brag, but we were amazed and proud to see that she got all A's (which stands for "Appris" [learned]) in oral communication - which included such things as "can express herself in an understandable manner," "can name objects, people, and feelings," and "can describe them in depth." It's possible that the teacher just has low standards (although the areas that the teacher reported Ella is still "in the process of learning" correspond well to the things we know she can't do, so that gives some confidence in the report), otherwise it is testimony to the tremendous strides Ella has made in learning French. Jonah expresses himself in French as well as he does in English, and with a flawless accent. As for me, I met this week with a conversation exchange partner, and passed an agreeable 2 hours learning vocabulary and grammar subtleties over a cup of tea. And Abe has been working through the exercises on a "learn French through art" website, and was promoted to level 3 in his French class. So, with several months left in our stay, it looks like our family might just end up leaving France with a passable knowledge of a second language to go along with our new found appreciation of unpasteurized cheeses.