Ologies with Alie Ward - FIELD TRIP: I Go France and Learn Weird French Stuff

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

Consider this an audio postcard from my first vacation in 13 years. I travel a lot for my other job (as a science correspondent on Innovation Nation for CBS) so I am out of practice on jet-setting for the sake of pure fun. But Jarrett’s family was headed to France so we cashed in some points and tagged along. Join me for some weird stuff I googled on the road, from pastry wars to royal cosplay, wax death masks, angry mobs, filming locations, things you can’t collect in a park and eat, how to get along with French waiters, what to do if a loved one starts sobbing in public, one of the best ways to see Paris, cider that tastes like flowers, a theme park with a hidden agenda, and the fall fashion trends that were confusingly ubiquitous. Also, how to wash socks in the sink. Let’s go to France. A donation went to CarbonFund.orgOther episodes you may enjoy: Field Trip: Natural History Museum, Minisode: Travel Tips, Foraging Ecology (EATING WILD PLANTS), Indigenous Culinology (NATIVE COOKING), Bovine Neuropathology (HEADBUTTING)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's your internet dad who hadn't taken a vacation in 13 years, Alli Ward, and I'm sending you an audio postcard from a trip I took to Paris this week. Y'all, I broke the drought. I took a vacation, the first one that wasn't a work trip in so long, although this is kind of like, you know, when you write a postcard, like from a cafe, maybe you're pensively squinting into the distance over a tiny cup of coffee and just drinking in vibes, but you don't have stamps and so you give up and then you just mail it when you get home and you hope that no one notices that the postmark is from Burbank. So we flew over an ocean yesterday, I'm now home, I'm back in the arms of our dog baby, but I wanted to just

put together some memories and facts and some weird shit that I learned while I spent a week in France with your pod mom, Jared, and his mom and sister and nephew. We took a little fan trip, they were like, we're going to France, you wanna join us? And we were like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, we calculated, we had some points lying around, we're like, let's just go. So we went. So I'm just going to tell you about some stuff I saw and learned, you don't have to listen to this, but I figured I learned some weird stuff while I was there. So let's just do the mini-so theme and then you can come with me and learn some weird France stuff. No jet lag, no passports, no life savings, or Franch needed. Pack up, come on,

let's go, let's hit the road. Okay, so when you go to France, you are there for pastries, but you have to say that you're there for history. We had a cab driver ask us on our last day what we did and we were like, man, we ate and we walked and we ate and then walked more and he just said, so no culture. And in that moment, I felt my soul leave my body at a shame for a moment. But then you know what, I roped it back with some logic that said, hello, walking and eating is culture, but people will judge you if you don't spend any time looking at old stuff. So one of the cultural things that you can do in France is you can walk through houses of dead rich people. And I also just learned that a big

ass house is called a palace, technically only a royalty live there. So you can't go to someone's house and be like, oh, this is a palace unless they are wearing a crown. So as you may have guessed, we went to Versailles. This is the world's most renowned dead rich person house. And we took in some of the opulence that led to the owner's downfall under the feet of an uprising populace. Because no matter what history you learn, I always like to find the thread of Greek tragedy, like how did greed and hubris fuck you over in the end. So let's examine it. Let's get back to this mansion. So Versailles, all right, it's about an hour's drive outside of Paris. And it started as a rustic hunting lodge in the 1600s. But the royal line of King Louis was just like in an

HGTV frame of mind and kept doing renovations and additions. And now it's this giant building and the one time royal residence in the center of the French monarchy. This thing is 680,000 square feet of house. Do you know how many rumbas you would need for that? You would need rumbas going 24-7 all the time in every room. The last king who lived there was Louis XVI, who was married to someone named Marie Antoinette, an Austrian princess. And I'm sure this is not breaking news to you, but Marie Antoinette liked money and to spend it. And even though she apparently did not say that the famine stricken French should simply opt for cake in the absence of bread, she did build her own mini palace behind Versailles. She built another palace behind the palace.

She built her own palace. And then behind that palace behind the palace, she built a backyard rural playground hamlet consisting of seven thatched roof houses with gardens. Each one of them was bigger than a normal person's house. But the queen and her rich friends would go to the houses in the backyard of the backyard of the palace and they would wear bonnets in simple muslin frocks and they would pretend to be peasants just for fun and dairy farmers just having fun. Like the most bonkers she shed aesthetic, but also cosplay of blue collar workers. Well, meanwhile, like real people were suffering and dying of hunger. So like pretty huge, not cool factor. People were pussed and her PR machine was already doing overtime. But I just imagine all of them quitting

in a fit of rage and opening a Nazi store or whatever the equivalent was in the late 1700s. Because Marie Antoinette was embroiled in a scandal. It's this 1784. There was a disgraced colonel who got catfished by a con artist who hired a queen lookalike pulled some literally shady shenanigans in the palace garden, pretended to be the real queen, but put the queen on the hook for a diamond necklace that cost the equivalent of $15 million. So this con lady put the necklace on layaway in the queen's name using the kernel. She made off with it. She left the country. She sold all the ice on the black market and the queen was like, I didn't even buy that necklace. Okay. And I have forged letters on crinkly 18th century paper as receipts, but people were still

like, yeah, right, lady. The economy sucks. You spend money like water. We're starving in the streets. You have a playground, Hamlet. I'm sure you bought the necklace. We're over your spending. You be a word. Anyway, this all happens in 1784, 1785. And in 1789, the French Revolution kicks off. In 1791, Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI tried to flee because a mob is about to storm the palace. But King Louis is dragon ass, can't make up his mind on where to go. So they get a late start on the road, like the worst road trip vibes ever. They pile into too big a carriage that was not inconspicuous for what they needed to accomplish. And people were like, dude, is that the king? Some guy who's a postman is like, pardon me, are you the king holds up a bank note and was

like, yeah, that's your face, motherfucker. And then they were caught trying to escape the mob. They were both imprisoned. And at 37 years old, Marie Antoinette's hair is said to have gone stark white overnight, which is a condition called Kennedy's Sabita or AKA, they call it Marie Antoinette syndrome. Although I looked into it, the scientific jury is still kind of out on if hair can turn white overnight. Some studies like a nature article from two years ago titled hyperactivation of sympathetic nerves drives depletion of melanocyte stem cells show that stress does mess with stem cells that might cause a person going through trauma to be blanched by sorrow in the queen's own words. What can cause that is a sudden loss of all the hairs

that are pigmented, leaving only the white behind. And that is a type of stress induced alopecia. But again, jury's still out, they're doing a lot of studies on poor stressed mice. Either way, the now white haired Marie Antoinette and Louis the 16th were both executed in 1793 via guillotine in the center of Paris in what's now called the Palace de Concorde, which is where they filmed that iconic scene from the Devil Wears Prada, where she chucks a cell phone in a fountain. How fucking nuts is it that you'll drive past a roundabout in the middle of the city that's the square where a queen was executed. And today it's just full of commuters and a hot dog stand. Oh, also, you know the wax museum Madame Tussauds in London and Hollywood and stuff? Okay,

so Madame Tussaud was French. She got her start because her mom's boss was a surgeon and a sculptor who was really good at making wax models. So Madame Tussaud learned from him when she was kindergarten age. She got an early start. She even tutored the ill-fated Louis the 16th's sister in art. But Tussaud was later arrested. She was sentenced to the guillotine, but she got out of it by making death masks of executed royals, including Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette, whose head bloodied her lap as she worked quickly to cast her features before the bodies were tossed in a grave in a French cemetery. And side note, watch out, because it's still spooked over and we have an episode coming up about French cemeteries, I think that you are going to like.

Also, Marie Antoinette's last words were, I'm sorry, I didn't do it on purpose, which she said to her executioner after she stepped on his toe. And apparently the executioner was one of a long line of executioners, like their son would be an executioner and then that person's son would be an executioner. And they say that the blade that her head is on display at met him, Tussaud's, in London. Creepy, macabre. But anyway, yeah, her last words were, I'm sorry. And as long as we're apologizing, let's talk French, shall we? So I took a few years of French when I was 12. But the only sentence I can really say with confidence is, pardonz-moi, je suis désolé parce que je ne parle pas bien. Je ne suis pas intelligente en français,

which means I'm so sorry I don't speak well. I'm not smart in French. But my wonderful sister-in-law, Samantha, heard that rather than saying je voudrais when you're ordering something, which means I want, it's more polite to say je m'aurai, which we looked up and that means I would die for. So we went about ordering things by saying, you know, I would die for a coffee or I would die for a chicken burger. And it wasn't until mid-trip that we learned we were supposed to be saying je m'aurai, which is I would love. And there is no chicken burger I would actually die for. But it's possible, I just haven't met the right chicken burger. But some sprouts of my forgotten French

kind of blossomed as I was there for a few days. And I was able to say to locals, things like your dog makes my heart larger. And I hungry and promise to eat fast. And the restaurant owner replied to that in perfect English. Oh, you will know when we close because I will kick you out. But the biggest lesson we learned from a very friendly barman was just to say please and please and please and thank you a lot. So I learned to say s'il vous plaît, s'il vous plaît, merci, merci, merci. Also, did you know that a chocolate croissant is called a penne au chocolat in most of France, including Paris, but in the west and the south of France, they call it a chocolatine. And it's a culture war. People are very divided

on this. And I would like to thank Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, aka Dr. Headbutt, of the bovine neuropathology episode who I saw in New York days before my flight to France. And Dr. Headbutt is team chocolatine and has a small dainty tattoo of the pastry on her inner forearm. And I understand why. Because the only other time I've been to Paris was in 1999. And a week after I got back, I found a half eaten penne au chocolat in my backpack, and it was smushed flat. And I ate the hell out of it, no hesitation. So yesterday in the airport before boarding our flight back, I bought two. And I planned to season them by squishing them in my backpack for a few days. That is tradition. Now, if you're traveling to a country, then you

don't speak the language. One giant tip, bring corded headphones if you have them, because not only will you not have to waste the free pairs that they gave away on the plane if you need to watch movies, the ones that people just use once and then throw into a garbage can forever, but also a lot of places have phone sized devices with audio tours in different languages, like kind of like a podcast as you walk through a museum. But you have to hold this dirty brick of a device up to your face. So bring headphones for that came in clutch for me, an enhanced sanitizer and a mask. Does anyone wear masks on planes or indoors? Barely. Do I? Heck yes. My French is dicey enough and I don't need my health to be. Also, I always have bamboo utensils in my bag

because you never know when you're going to need a frickin fork or when you don't want to use a fork one time and then again put it in a landfill for pretty much eternity. So if you're traveling, also hot tip and you found yourself out of clean socks or undies, you can always sink wash them, wring them in a dry towel and then just lay the damp stuff out overnight near the heater and blast them with a hair dryer in the morning to warm them up for your feet and your butt. Have I done this many times? It's none of your business. Now, what about flying? What is the price that the earth pays for us to go gawk at a dead rich person's house or eat a muffin on a different continent? I'm glad you asked because I think of that all the time. First off, did you

know that packing lighter is easier on the fuel tank of a jet plane? So you can bring less stuff and you can do laundry if you need to. You can get an hour or two of living like a local at a laundromat or sink wash. And I have mentioned this in a previous mini-sode on travel tips. So I'm going to repeat it here. So flying is a huge enormous terrible carbon suck. It accounts for approximately 5% of global emissions. So travel, tourism, significant contributor to climate change. So how can you reduce this if you have a business trip or if you have a vacation coming up once every 13 years? So airlines with newer planes can have reduced carbon emissions. Also sitting in coach and traveling lighter can help. You can also look into different airlines

that have lower carbon emissions. For some reason, Alaska has the lowest carbon emissions of domestic airline carriers, partly just because they cram people in tighter, which is economical. Direct flights produce less carbon than once with more layovers. So if you want to spend a little extra money and a little bit less time, just think, hey, this is better for Mama Earth and me. Also, if you want to offset the carbon emissions from your travel, you can go to websites like carbonfund.org. They're going to be getting a donation from this episode. And you can look for different carbon offset programs. You can look around for different places that do this, but just make sure that wherever you donate to offset is a legit one. There are sites like

Charity Navigator that can help you decide which charity to go through. It's not terribly expensive in the scheme of a vacation, maybe 30 bucks each way flying across the ocean. And that goes toward tree planting, things like that. But if you can't offset, do it. And of course, we'll be making a larger donation than $30 for this episode, which wouldn't be possible without sponsors of the show, which you may hear about now. Okay, back to things I learned in Paris. One thing is not to walk nine miles in one day wearing high-heeled boots. Have I mentioned je ne suis pas intelligent en français? So day two, I was in so much pain and fashion be damned, I switched to a dirty battered pair of flats in my suitcase. So the last time I went to Paris was

in 1999. And chunky shoes, baggy jeans were of the moment. But right now, what's in style are chunky shoes and baggy jeans. So that's weird emotionally for me. Also, I saw so many beige trench coats. I'm going to share a tip. If you ever need to disappear into a crowd in fall in France, wear a beige trench coat, because whoever's on your tail doesn't stand a chance of finding you. You'd be one in a sea of them. And I almost bought one by like day two. So another place that we went is we happened upon this really lovely antiques market in the Place Saint-Sole piece in the middle of the city. I got myself a tiny pair of antique earrings. Jared got himself a vintage jacket. It is a beige trench coat, because the French just have a way

of being very fashionably persuasive. He looks amazing in it, even though a few times I couldn't find him in a crowd. I was like, where did he go? He's in the beige trench coat. I'm never seeing him again. The best cider and crepes I had was at a cafe called Brits. And if you ask me, the extra brute are the dry ciders. They taste like liquid tiger lilies. I love them so much. And for more on ciders, you can check out the Ciderology episode, which we did last year. It's going to be linked in the show notes. It's great. My biggest regret of this whole trip is not finding a place that served cider in bowls. I should have looked into it harder. And I know I could drink cider out of a bowl at home. And maybe I will, because sipping a beverage out of a bowl when

it's on purpose and not because you refuse to love the dishwasher is pretty magic. Now, if you go to Paris to visit a garden, such as the Jardin du Luxembourg, you might notice that there aren't a lot of park benches, but there are these cool metal chairs everywhere. And I thought, such lovely chairs. I'm going to Google this for an hour back at the hotel when I should be sleeping off my jet lag. So now you have to learn about these metal chairs. So they decided that park benches weren't comfy enough. So they started putting out chairs, they called Senate chairs, because the Senate ordered that they be available for people enjoying the gardens. This was in the 20s. And then in 1990, they were redesigned by the company Firmab. And one thing that struck me

about all these chairs in the garden is like this perfect sage green color. And I was like, I bet there's a name for this color. They're all the same color. There's hundreds of them. And I looked it up. It's apparently called Reed Green, color number RAL 6013. And now I have to hunt down an equivalent and paint a bunch of chairs for my backyard, because I love them so much. Another observation about France is that everybody smokes everywhere, which was a real brain scrambler, because I was like, what is this? 1999 again? People just have enough Virginia slim for breakfast. I'm not used to this as someone who lives in LA. Vape clouds everywhere you go, they were baby smoking, dogs twisting, rolling papers. A baguette

asked me for a light. I was like, France, you're out of control, but you do you. At one point, I went into an art store to buy some chalk for an Instagram chalkboard post I was going to write on the sidewalk. I was going to wash it off with water, calm down. But two days later, I remembered that I had this pack of chalk in my purse. And I realized this is perfect if you want to make your husband's family believe out of nowhere that you're about to toast up a smoke at dinner and then be like, well, it's chalk. Are you guys glad I'm on vacation with you? Another fun thing that they had to deal with was me sobbing in public. Here's the thing. We all love Paris, but my parents especially love Paris. My mom is fluent in French. She's a city

girl and Paris is just, it's heaven to her. My parents went three times together over the years. They love to just sit and people watch on these little alcoves on the Pannouf, which is an old bridge. So while walking across Pannouf with Jared's family and thinking about my folks, spending their favorite days there, my face just imploded with emotion and my nose and my eyes crumpled onto themselves. And I just began leaking out of every hole in my face. And luckily, I learned the last few months to always carry a hanky for such an occasion. So I'm on this bridge, the autumn air is crisp and perfect. And I'm mopped up my face while Jared's wonderful family literally dog piled me on a bench with hugs as long as we're being weird. So my nine and a half

year old nephew was with us on this trip. And at one point he was like, do you want to see my favorite rock? I keep in my pocket. I was like, sure, buddy. And it was this nice, sharp, russet colored rock. And I was like, dude, you'll never believe this. And then I pulled my favorite rock from my pocket, which was the perfectly egg shaped black rock that I picked up from a garden courtyard a few days before when Jared and I got stuck in like an MC Escher parking garage situation. And we were apparently being watched by a guard on a speaker who voice commanded us and told us to get out of the courtyard. We were like, we got lost. But the guard did not seem to care that I took a rock from their gravel rooftop. But it's such a nice rock. Here's an embarrassing story.

We drove a few hours outside of Paris to a medieval themed amusement park featuring these historical reenactments. Like there's like a Viking siege and there's the Verdun battle of World War One and Roman chariot races live, like racing around this huge arena. Now this place is going to remain nameless, but it had 67,005 star reviews and is named one of the best amusement parks in the world. Every detail has been thoughtfully executed. Well, no actual execution reenactments, but everything from tiny real piglets romping in the mud in these recreated villages and ancient looking stonework. I mean, it was like Antoinette's Hamlet, but on a bigger scale and pretty cheap admission. So even commoners like us can enjoy it. So we went to three or four

reenactment shows before we realized that the message behind all of the historical reenactments was just about converting people to Christianity. And we were like, what? How does the website and Wikipedia, no one mentions this aspect of it, that there's like an overriding thesis to the whole thing? So if you're considering going to a place like this, do some digging first. Can I tell you one thing that fascinated and unnerved me about Paris? Okay, there's so many chestnuts on the ground and acorns. And I was like, I want to scoop these up and I want to roast them and eat them. And for more on this, you can see our foraging ecology episode with Alexis Nelson, aka Black Forager or Indigenous Colonology with Indigenous Kitchen's Mariah Gladstone.

And I looked it up and it's a good thing I did not scoop up any of the chestnuts and try to eat them because the ones in Paris are horse chestnuts. They're not the same as sweet chestnuts, which are the kind that are roasted over an open fire and sold by street vendors. The horse chestnuts are toxic. You're not supposed to eat them. So that's why they were everywhere. I was like, why isn't anyone scooping these up? It's like, because you'll barf if you eat them. That's why. But sweet chestnuts, totally okay. They're just not the same ones growing in the garden. Now, why don't we eat roasted chestnuts in the US anymore, especially since there's that holiday song about them? Well, I learned in this trip that in the Eastern United States, they used to have

so many sweet chestnut trees, some that would live for centuries and grow 100 feet tall and like 12 feet in diameter at the base. But in the 1950s, a fungal blight tore through the population and killed them all. And now those woods are dominated by oaks and maples. Meanwhile, the edible chestnuts that we eat in the US are typically imported. And I want some. Speaking of food, I will tell you, I ate exactly one snail in France. And it wasn't the hot garlic butter bathed ones. It was just a boiled sea snail. It was served with a long metal pick to rouse it from its deathbed shell. It was very oceanic and cold and one was plenty. I had no frog legs, but there are plenty of them to be had in California. They're just still alive

and woefully so if you ask wildlife experts. Did you know that folks brought bullfrogs to California because the supply of endemic red-legged frogs had been over harvested after the Gold Rush? So this guy in Sonoma named Randolph Spreckles, an heir to the Spreckles sugar fortune, bought 12 dozen bullfrogs from the East Coast, hoping to breed them and sell them. But the big meaty American bullfrogs didn't taste as good as the other species, so no one wanted frog legs. And guess what? The bullfrogs escaped. Shocker, their legs are catapults. Of course they escaped and they eat everything, sometimes even each other. And some ecologists call them mouths with legs and they'll just stiffen an upper lip and smash them with rocks if they spot them. Kind of like

what we're supposed to be doing with those spotted lanternflies on the East Coast. New York, I visited you a few weeks ago and I smashed at least a dozen. So keep squishing those things. They look like polka dotted moths with red underwings, but they're just the grim reaper for trees. Just to ask Philadelphia, you see them, you smash them. Okay, let's wrap this up with a secret at the end. My favorite memory in Paris, we had walked about 10 miles a day all week. My shins were barking. My feet felt like bloody stumps. And Jared and I decided to ride those rentable stand-up scooters across a few neighborhoods. I'm so glad he rode motorcycles for years because he's good at being safe, navigating through traffic, and he's very

patient as I lag behind. But I have to tell you, being on an electric scooter, zipping past stone buildings and just gliding through roundabouts and bumping over cobblestones, wind in my hair on this crisp autumn morning, I don't know if I've ever felt so free and happy. And thankfully, I didn't even get killed by a bus. So merci, Paris. I shall remember it to jures all of the days. Also, if you go on a trip, challenge yourself to unpack as soon as you get home. Set a timer, tell yourself you're going to do it in 30 minutes, or make a deal that you don't get to open any mail or packages until your suitcase is empty and back under the bed. I did that yesterday, and I'm so happy because it would have been weeks if I didn't give myself that challenge.

Also, thank you just for accepting this field trip postcard in lieu of a regular episode this week. I just hadn't taken a vacation forever that wasn't for a shoot or for work. And now that I made it an episode, I guess I didn't realize I was working as I was enjoying it. But I hope that you get some pleasure in this next few days. I hope you get some good sleep. Turn in early and have a good coffee as the sun rises or explore your own city or neighborhood on a bike or a scooter if it's safe. Helmets, kiddos, please. Or just take an hour or two and give yourself a break. Check out a park, cry in public if you need to, cup bangs, text your crush, take a walk, have a pastry. We're only here for a little while, so let's enjoy it. Okay, bye-bye.

What about us? We'll always have Paris.