Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

Antraigues usually looks peaceful, but this weekend the village came alive for the annual Ardèche chestnut festival, drawing people from across the mountains." Crisp autumn air and the scent of woodsmoke greeted us as we walked out from our townhouse and into the square just as the festivities were beginning.  Villagers mingled, voices rising in laughter as they awaited the evening's revelries. Tables were loaded with honeyed figs, freshly cooked chestnuts, soft cheeses and crusty bread.  The rich aroma of roasted meats drifted from fires crackling nearby, while children scampered about, their joyful shrieks echoing off the stonewalls. As darkness fell, the festival really got going  Everybody clustered together, clinking glasses of chestnut beer and warming spiced wine.  At long tables, families shared platters piled high with food. ...

It has been raining for three days in Antraigues. This is not a complaint. The oil stove is going, Rita is somewhere in the kitchen with a pot au feu that has been simmering since this morning, and I am on the sofa with a book I have been meaning to read since March. The plaster walls in this house crack a little more each winter. The light goes early. By three in the afternoon we have the lamps on. There is a particular quality to a rainy day in a village of three hundred people when you have nowhere to be. The sound of it against the terrace. The smell of woodsmoke from somewhere up the hill. The fact that the only decision of the afternoon is whether to open another bottle before or after dinner. We have been moving more or less continuously for seven months. Cities, trains, new apartments every few weeks, the low-level administration of being always somewhere temporary. This is not temporary. This house has cracking plaster and a sofa that has been worn into ...

We have a house in the Ardèche region of southern France, and on our many visits over the years, we have explored the countryside quite a lot. We have crossed its rivers, driven through the mountain passes, and visited many of the old medieval villages. We were actually beginning to feel confident that there were no major surprises left for us in the area. The other day we were proven completely wrong. A local friend told us that some hidden remnants of an ancient capital city actually lie just a few kilometers from our house. The ruins of what was once the center of the Gallo-Roman country of Helvia are more than 2000 years old. They sit atop the Jastre mountain, with no road signs or tourist brochures giving any indication that they even exist. They are completely covered by wilderness and have been lost to common memory for centuries. This was something we simply had to explore, and like two modern-day Indiana Joneses, we decided yesterday to climb the mountain and try to find this...

Photo: Finn Tranter After several months of living in the constant light of the big cities, are we finally back in our house in the small village of Antraigues in the south of France. We definitely miss the pulse and all the funny times in the big cities, but at least have we regained the completely black night skies here. Far away from the bright lights of modern city life, the sky is totally clear. It lets thousands of stars show themselves, and we really appreciate that it is a rare gift to find a place without any light pollution. In the cities, you quickly forget what an incredible amount of worlds there exists above our heads, but here in the quiet Volane valley, surrounded by dark mountains, the sky is just amazing. Last night stood we on a grass slope outside the village and saw all the familiar constellations rising - the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and the square of Pegasus. When we stood there and looked up into infinity, came a real...

We have been in Alfama for six weeks, which is longer than we planned, and we are leaving tomorrow. The bags are out. The apartment looks like it belongs to someone else again, which is always the strange part of leaving a rented place. How quickly it stops being yours. Six weeks is long enough to stop being a tourist in a neighborhood and start being something slightly more difficult to define. The woman at the corner café stopped asking what we wanted after the third day. The cat on the steps of the miradouro learned that Rita would stop to acknowledge it and I would not. The steep alleys, which nearly finished us in the first week, became something we navigated without thinking. Alfama is not an easy place to live in. The streets were not designed for anyone in a hurry, which is either a feature or a problem depending on your relationship with being in a hurry. The cobblestones are polished to a degree that makes them genuinely dangerous when it rains, and it rained several times...

The splendid city of Lisbon presents countless wonders to uncover, but there is one exploration that has risen to the top of my agenda: Finding a specific tree, and below that tree - a place that belonged to my mother's youth! Many years ago she visited Lisbon with some friends. It was during the heat of summer, and she often told about how one of those friends persuaded the group to climb a steep hill to sit in the shadow of a grand tree.  Not once, but several times during their weeklong stay.  As the years went by, my mother kept the many visits as a fond memory, but I never heard the reason why they had to climb that hill.  Now - years after her death - I have the time in Lisbon to finally find this tree. And perhaps discover  why they returned, again and again, to sit and reflect in its shadow? The internet can be a good solver of life's puzzles - and I did find an answer in one of its far corners: When the fabled P...

The unmarked door in the alleyway gave no indication of the feast that lay beyond. We knocked twice, and curious eyes sized us up before the door creaked open. Tonight we were visiting one of Lisbon's 'Chinês clandestinos', the illegal, non-regulated Chinese restaurants, which opened some twenty years ago during a wave of immigration from China. In a city that at the time was notoriously unwelcoming to immigrants, these underground eateries were sanctuaries, and some exist to this day in the narrow back alleys inside the multi-cultural Mouraria neighborhood Often on an upper floor and with no outer signs at all - just  perhaps a red Chinese lantern swinging high up on the wall The staircase was steep, grungy, and strewn with graffiti, but stepping inside on the first floor, we were immersed in delicious scents of Szechuan spices. We were led past the narrow kitchen, dodging woks ablaze with oil and a cook yelling...

I’ll admit I was a bit nervous walking into my first attempt at making Pastel de natas ; those dangerously addictive Portuguese custard tarts.     Michael and I have eaten them about every single day since we came to Lisbon. We've even tried them at Pasteis de Belem , the legendary bakery which claims to have the original secret recipe, but I’ve never tried my unskilled hand at crafting their intricate layers. Until this morning, when I stood ready with about ten other newbie bakers.    Luckily, the chipper instructors at the cooking class reassured us that we’d all be custard experts in no time. Martha and her colleague demonstrated how they carefully stretched the dough, explaining that it should be made so thin that you would be able to read a newspaper through it.  Soon I was elbow-deep in flour, attempting to coax my dough into ultra-thin plates, possible using a few c...

Last night was our first night in Lisbon.  We had just arrived after a journey of about thirty hours, and we were sitting on the balcony of our apartment in Alfama, looking out over the terracotta rooftops that slide down the steep hill toward the Tagus. We were completely finished. Then, from somewhere in the alleyway below, fado started. We had chosen Alfama partly because of fado; the neighborhood is where the music comes from, and we have loved it for years. But knowing this and then actually hearing it drift up from the street on your first night, while you are sitting on a balcony in the dark looking at the river, is a different thing entirely. We went out to find it. A woman was standing in the doorway of a café a few streets away, eyes closed, singing to guests who had gone completely quiet. We stood outside and listened. We could not understand the words. It did not especially matter. Fado is mostly about loss; lo...