TGV Passenger, v3

This one was done on the Paris -> Lyon TGV train. I added more hair to the monsieur, ’cause the original one looked kinda sad in my sketch book.

Another good candidate for colored pencils.

TGV Passenger, v2

This one was done on the Biarritz -> Paris TGV train. I called my subject a Bordeaux business woman, because she dressed like one and got off at Bordeaux.

This one is a good candidate for colored pencils, IMHO.

[10/05/2006 Update] Actually, watercolor seems to weaken the drawing (and I’m not talking about the damage it did to the paper). I’m not sure why. Maybe something should just be left alone.

[10/08/2006 Update] I discussed the problem with David, and he raised 2 problems:

• not enough color contrast, and
• the skin tone was so [pale] yellow that it looked almost green.

So I added more French Ultramarine to the seat and pink (Yes, pink! Thanks to 永沢まこと Nagasawa Makoto.) to the skin. Still not quite ideal, but at least now I don’t get put-off by it anymore. There is much to learn about skin tone!

Le Salon du Gîte

(Hint: Click on the drawing to see the full sketching.)

Loïc, David, and I stayed at Domaine de la Queyssie at Saussiganc, waiting for Stéphane and Emmanuelle to join us, to spend the weekend doing wine tasting around the Bergerac region. Unfortunately, Stéphane’s car broke down shortly after leaving Lyon, so we had to explore this region on our own.

This was done after a day of wine tasting (David was only interested in Monbazillac’s white wine, especially its dessert wine) and before our Chambre d’Hôte hostess’s tasty dinner. If you plan to stay at Domaine de la Queyssie, do eat there, since Dominique is quite a cook. (More info about Domaine de la Queyssie later.)

Rocamadour – Part 2

Chemin de Croix, a winding pathway with 14 Stations of the Cross and leads up to the Ramparts, is right before the entrance of the churches (if you take the elevator down). Both David and Loïc had seen enough churches and had no desire seeing more torturous statues, so I hiked up the path by myself. I was curious what they were like (well, every status had a painful expression, really not much fun to look at) and what was at the end of the path. Not until I reached the top and found that the surrounding looked kinda familiar… and, there was our car sitting not far away from the castle!

I reached the castle and only got turned away by its 2 -Euro entrance fee! So I had to walked all the way down to get both David and Loïc to come with me. The castle is pretty much an empty shell; it provides the location to let visitors enjoy the amazing panoramic view, which is well Worth 2 Euros, IMHO.

Rocamadour – Part 1

Ah, Rocamadour! Ever since I read about it in Eyewitness Travel Guides’ “Dordogne & Southwest France“, I couldn’t forget about this amazing place. The architecture is incredible: a giant cluster of churches in the middle of the limestone cliff, a big fort at top, and a cute village at the bottom. I just had to go there, at least to check out its great stairway.

From “Dordogne & Southwest France“:

“The village became one of the most famous centres of pilgrimage in France following the discovery in 1166 of an ancient grave containing an undecayed body, said to be that if early Christian hermit St Amadour. Above the 12th-century statue of the Black Virgin and Child in the Chapelle Notre-Dame is a bell that is believed to have miraculous powers.”

We drove to the ramparts parking lot and got the elevator ticket at the nearby Tourist Information Office. This elevator goes down to the churches only; to go down to the village, one has to take another elevator. BTW, the elevator tickets are quite pricy, but it might come in handy to go back to the parking lot at the end of the day.

The churches looked like that they were carved right out of the limestone cliff! In fact, I saw the cliff was used as a wall inside of some of the churches. It was hard to film the churches with my little camera, but just to give you a taste of what they are like:





The great stairway is full of fossil!

We walked down the great stairway to the village. It was tough to do, because it was very windy and I thought that I was going to get blown away. But down in the little village, it was calm and touristy.

L’Hospitalet

We stopped by l’Hospitalet to ask the direction to our hotel and have lunch. Afterward a highly unsatisfying lunch, we checked what was left of l’Hospitalet, and the answer was “not much.”

From Michelin The Green Guide:

“The name of this village, clinging to Rocamadiur’s cliff face, comes from the small hospital founded in the 11C by Hélène de Castelnau to nurse the pilgrims on the pilgrim road from Le Puy (Auvergne) to Santiago de Compostela. Only a few ruins of this hospital remain: the Romanesque chapel, which is set in the middle of the churchyard, was remodelled in the 15C.”

The best part about l’Hospitalet is that one gets a great view of Rocamadour. Under the high wind, l’Hospitalet was lonelier than ever.

Le Gavage

We headed towards Rocamadour, the east end of our Dordogne trip. The distance between La Roque-Gageac and Rocamadour is not that far, but it took us almost 2 hours due to the windy mountain roads and the accidental force-feed tour.

We didn’t intentionally look for a force-feed tour, even though we’d been joking about it. During the drive, I voiced my desire of taking a photo of a beautiful blue-roofed, cliff-clinging castle. It took David some searching, but he finally parked at a safe spot with a good view of the castle. What we didn’t expect was that we parked right in front of a little goose farm (behind the wired fence, they quacked at us viciously); a little sign on the fence informing us that the force-feed would happen in 15 minutes at somewhere nearby and everyone was welcome to visit. It was an opportunity too good to pass by, so off we went for our first force-feed tour.

When we arrived at the old Monsieur ’s little barn, he was in the middle of his daily force-feed routine. David and Loïc greeted him and asked him various related questions; this nice old man answered them all and added some of his own opinions (“Geese are much better than ducks, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”). We were surprised by his operation; it wasn’t scary or cruel as what we had pictured, even though we already knew that geese and ducks here are treated much better than the US’s livestock.

He force-fed his geese only when they were ready (probably years, since the ones we saw were HUGE). In a giant barrel, he warmed up corn and softened it with water for easier digestion. He fed it to his geese and ducks 3 times a day for 21 days. He fed each goose for total 5 ~ 6 seconds of corn, and between each mouthful of food, he gently massaged its neck to help the food go down easier. He repeated the same 20-second process over and over. There was no cage, no tube attached to each goose/duck’s mouth 24 hours a day. In fact, the force-fed geese went directly back to play with their buddies.

We forgot to ask him if he clipped their wings. We couldn’t decide if the geese we saw earlier were just too lazy to fly away or if they weren’t able to. Other than that, we learned quite a bit about the force-feed business at our 10-minute tour, and the old Monsieur got a little human companion.

[10/16/2006 Update] From our friend Penny:

“That was an interesting account. I’d always had the impression that it wasn’t as bad as the animal rights people make it out to be. For one thing, geese and ducks have calcified throats and no gag response, so putting a tube down their throats is not hurting them. And they gorge themselves in the wild every year in preparation for migration anyway so the idea of doing that in a controlled way in captivity isn’t that unnatural. The animal rights people are really misguided – those ducks and geese raised for foie gras have much better lives than poultry raised for food, which are crammed into small cages and have very short miserable lives. If the activists care so much about bird welfare, they should be going after the poultry farmers, not the foie gras producers. I always think that the reason why they went after foie gras was because it was a low-hanging fruit, a rare luxury item that most people have never had and don’t care that much about. The hypocrites are too sissy to take on the big poultry producers where there are real issues concerning cruelty to animals.”

“I heard somewhere that the reason why the birds don’t fly away is because they need a lot of space to run up to speed before they can fly – sort of like a runway for an airplane.  In the farms apparently there isn’t space for them to run a straight path to accelerate to speed so they can’t fly away.  That’s what I heard or read someplace, don’t remember where.”