Rhys Bowen's Blog, page 33

In Praise of French Food

One of my favorite things about the French is the food. I have been indulging in flaky pastry stuffed with scallops, great pots of mussels with tiny slim French fries, duck breast in lemon and ginger. We have been buying various pates and cheeses to eat at the apartment with crusty bread. I've been walking to the bakery every morning to get my baguette, and maybe a raisin snail to go with it. And the pastries: strawberry tarts, cream puffs, eclairs, ah, sigh.

Some things are horribly expensive...

Vive La France--part Deux

Today we went by bus to San Jean Cap Ferat--a hairraising bus ride along the coast, ending in a delightful little harbor. You should see the size of the yachts--and so many of them. There is a lot of money in the world!
I took lots of pictures of villas for my book, and found the perfect one for my bad guy. On the way back we stopped at Beaulieu sur Mer to swim. Water temperature perfect.

Obervations on the French character as revealed in their shops:
The French are hedonistic. They care about t...

Vive La France

I'm in Nice and in heaven. It is glorious here: the sea is unreal shades of blue and turquoise, the sky is deep blue and the town nestles between shaggy green hills, dotted with villas. It's a perfect sized city with buses that go everywhere, making transportation easy. Those buses negotiate the most impossible winding roads with apparent ease--just rather terrifying for people like ourselves to look down at the sheer drop on one side.
I'm dying to get up to the little mountain villages but s...

Religion is not dead

All those nay-sayers who claim that religion is dead should take a trip to Lourdes in the summer. The place is packed with pilgrims from all over the world. The procession of thousands of pilgrims, many in wheelchairs, actually moved me to tears.In that procession there was a group from Slovakia, several from UK, some delightful Hawaian ladies in pink mumus and flower-trimmed hats, Tamils from Sri Lanka, some Chinese-Americans and of course zillions of Italians (praying louder than anyone els...

In praise of tea!

One of the things I've appreciated most about my time in England has been my favorite meal--tea. A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to do a TV program on the virtues of tea and why it was such a perfect meal. I was filmed hosting a ladies tea party (nerve wracking as a huge camera was pointed at me as I poured tea into china cups and took bites of cucumber sandwiches.)

The point I made is that tea is the ideal meal at which to entertain. The food is all there on the table. The only ...

Hair in London--or lack thereof

Following up on the wearing of headscarves, burkas etc in London... I needed a haircut and could not find a hairdresser anywhere in the West End. I'm sure they were lurking on backstreets, but not the ones I searched. At last in desperation I got on a bus and rode it until I saw a beauty salon... a very exclusive one, as it turned out (and correspondingly expensive) but the girl did a wonderful job and took over an hour on my hair, so I was well satisfied.

However, in the next chair was a man ...

Old London Town?

I'm in London and I'm asking myself, "Is this really the place I went to college and used to work for the BBC or is it a foreign city?"
Certainly foreigners outnumber Londoners in the area where I am staying. Men wear beards. Women wear headscarves, complete head coverings or even burkas. It is strange and most unsettling for me--because this is England and these are not visitors, they live here!
I have no objection to someone wearing a headscarf, especially if it is in respect for her religiou...

Land of my Fathers

I've just spent a couple of very wet days in North Wales--trying to show my grandchildren what I did when I was a child. But alas the weather was typically Welsh--it poured and poured. Great areas were flooded. The mountains hid themselves in cloud. Riding the train up Snowdon was out of the question.
And I'd also forgotten that Wales shuts down on Sunday evenings--we had a hard time finding a restaurant open.

But they loved the castles--it stopped raining long enough to do Conwy and Caernarfon...

In Praise of English Food

A lot of jokes have been made about English food. At it's worst it has been pretty bad in the past. I remember the cabbage boiled to death, the overdone meat, the greasy chips. But at its best it has always been superb--because it is good ingredients served simply. The beef has been living in a field, eating good grass, the chickens running around and laying eggs and the veg picked that morning.

I have been eating an awful lot of good food during the past week: the Sunday lunch with a piece of...

Summer Sunday in the English countryside. Part 1

I'm celebrating a perfect English Sunday at Merthen Manor in Cornwall. Went to local church where relatives knew everybody and now anticipating a huge Sunday lunch--well over 20 people I believe. (yes, the table holds that many)The roast was almost too big for the Aga! Ah, this is what I miss in the US--the feeling of family togetherness and neighbors just dropping in and being welcomed and people and dogs wandering in an out just as it was in manor houses in the past. It is a great feeling o...