One of the advantages of having a compact small village with a tall tower (pictured here, view from our roof terrace) right in the middle is that you can mount speakers on the top of the tower and pretty much every resident is within earshot of anything you broadcast.

Hence every weekday morning here in Aniane, somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m., a little introductory bit of music beams over the rooftops, and then a very well-spoken man delivers the morning announcements.

These consist of everything from “the road to St. Guilhem is having some work done on it this afternoon” to “registration for kindergarten starts on Tuesday.” On Thursday morning we received an overview of the merchants selling at the outdoor market.

Every announcement is carefully repeated twice, which is very helpful for those of us without capacity for rapid French processing.

After the last announcement, without any fanfare or good-bye, the public address system just fades away until the next day.

Which bring me to the other village-wide broadcast issue, and that is the chiming of the clock on the hour.

Or rather, the chimings, as there are two sets.

And they’re not on the hour: the first is somewhere around 8 minutes to the hour, the second follows a couple of minutes later. Each chimes out the hour-to-come itself (8 gongs for 8:00 a.m., for example).

Perhaps it’s more a “get ready, 8:00 a.m. is coming in just a bit” than an actual “here’s what the time is.” Or perhaps it’s based on some sort of intriguing French timekeeping of which I’m unaware.

Once I’ve gained enough confidence to ask, I will go down to City Hall to inquire as to the nature of the gongs — “Bonjour Monsieur. J’écoute qu’il y a deux cloches qui announce chaque heure, mais on s’announce en avance de l’heure — pourquoi?” With apologies for spelling, grammar and vocabulary skills long atrophied.

Before I left Canada I dumped a mix-CD my Dad made me into my iBook so we would have some music to listen to on our trip. I’m shocked both by the breadth of my father’s musical tastes, and by how much our tastes in music are aligned. Here are some sample tracks:

• Rosemary Clooney - Autumn In New York
• Ry Cooder - Cancion Mixteca
• Blackie and the Rodeo Kings - Lace and Pretty Flowers
• Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way
• Emmylou Harris - Red Dirt Girl
• Gordon Lightfoot - Steel Rail Blues
• Mark Knopfler - The Ragpicker’s Dream
• Cesaria Evora - Esperanca Irisada
• Colleen Peterson - Crazy
• James Keelaghan - Kiri’s Piano

This from a man who is also an afficianado of all manner of classical music and has a deep appreciation of jazz (we were raised on Moe Koffman, both on LP and live).

Mom and Dad are going with Johnny and Jodi to see U2 live in Dublin later this spring; given that my last rock concert was Supertramp at CNE Stadium, I dare say that leaves me with parents who are hipper than I am.

I realized on Friday that it has been more than 10 years since I visited a zoo where the signage was in English. In 2003 we visited the zoo in Barcelona, and then later that summer the one in Quebec City. In 2004 I returned, 25 years after my first visit, to the zoo in Split, Croatia. And on Friday we visited the zoo here in Montpellier.

As a result, I know a lot of animals only by their Spanish, French or Croatian names. Animals like the addax (pictured here). What the heck is an addax, and why don’t we have them in Canada?

The French seem wild-animal crazy. Every since we left Paris a week and a half ago, Oliver’s been spotting giant billboards for this zoo or that safari park. Orléans was overrun by what must be the single most effective publicity campaign I’ve ever seen, with posters for the ZooParc de Beauval on almost every billboard, shop window and bus shelter in the city.

As a result of this effective publicity, Oliver decided from the get-go that his number one desire in France was to “go jungle.”

While we had managed his desire somewhat, by Friday we could no longer resist, and so to the jungle we went.

The Montpellier zoo — the Parc Zoologique de Lunaret — proved interesting on several counts.

First, it was free.

In the era of super-zoos with heated biodomes and IMAX theatres that charge $50 for a family, this was remarkable. One pleasant side-effect of this was that, in addition to zoo-goers proper, the zoo was also home to joggers, people on their lunch hour and other casual users of the space you don’t see in other zoos.

The Parc Lunaret is very, very spread out, and as a result feels strangely “unzoolike” and more like a large park that happens to house addax and lions and endangered otters. The entire complex is forested, and this forest is criss-crossed with a variety of “tours” of differing lengths that take one through a one group of animals or another.

Animals at the zoo were generally “moated” rather than caged, with a deep stonewalled pit between animal and person rather than a metal cage. There were exceptions to this for the more deadly animals: the lions and cougars and wolves were in bona fide cages, cages with signs saying things like “Attention: This Animal Can Murder You” plastered on them.

Animals aside, one of the more delightful aspects of the visit was being deep inside groups of young French preschoolers during their tour. Given that my French language is at about a preschool level, I could actually understand most of what they were saying, and being surrounded made for a very lyrical cacophony.

Oliver said his favourite animals were the camel and the butterflies — butterflies we spied flying freely through the park on our way to the car.

For me, it was the addax; such a stately mysterious beast.

I would be remiss if I didn’t herald the arrival of Lucy Kent Blake-Williams, new daughter to Tessa Blake and Ian Williams.

We visited Ian and Tessa last summer at their house in upstate New York; some quick gestation date math suggests that Lucy’s conception occurred sometime very soon thereafter and so I’d like to think that Ian and Tessa were inspired, at least in some small way, by Oliver’s wonderfulness, to jump into parenthood.

You can read the poo-by-poo tale of Lucy’s new life over at Ian’s blog.

We’ve now put over 1,600 km on our leased Peugeot Partner, and in doing so I have learned quite a bit about driving in France.

If you’ve never driven in France, the most important thing to note is that, at least from my experience, it’s safe to ignore the travel guidebook warnings about crazy French driving (for example, “The vaunted French logic and clarity breaks down completely on the asphalt,” The South of France by Cadogan). Drivers here are just like drivers anywhere, and driving the streets and highways of France is much like driving the streets and highways of Canada. Indeed if anything I would characterize French driving as more sensible and predictable than I’m used to in the U.S. and Canada.

There are, after all, only so many ways to operate a vehicle, and I’ve found that, at least so far, the same prudence exercised at home is fine here. There are some procedural differences that need paying attention to, of course, but cars still have four wheels and one driver, and things work basically the same way here as you’re used to at home.

I’ve made note of some of the more interesting of these procedural differences.

Most obvious are the speed limits, particularly on the autoroutes — controlled access highways akin to the 401 in Canada or the interstates in the USA. The maximum speed on the autoroutes is 130 km/hour (that’s 80 miles/hour). By Canadian standards, that’s awfully quick, and it’s taken a week for me to get used to driving a vehicle going that fast.

By and large, drivers seem to stick to that speed limit or below; at least I haven’t been passed by anyone going any faster yet.

Amazingly, trucks are limited to what appears to be about 90 km/hour — and they stick to this religiously. On the 401 in Ontario it’s the trucks that set the pace, and it’s not unusual to be caught in an 18-wheeler sandwich, or to have a large transport pull up behind you in the middle lane and flash its lights to get you to move over.

On the autoroutes here, trucks — to this point in my experience without exception — amble along at a gentle 90 km/hour in the right hand lane. It’s wonderful for we car drivers.

I’ve noticed that how drivers use turn signals when passing on the autoroutes is different than I’m used to from Canadian practice: rather than signalling a lane change to the passing lane, then turning off the signal until changing lanes back, the signal is left on for the entire duration of the pass, similar to how one would pass on a two-lane road in Canada. I still can’t get used to this, but I’m trying my best to adjust, resisting my urge to shut off the signal halfway through.

There is an excellent network of highway rest stops along the autoroutes, and we stopped at several on the route from Paris south to Aniane. These range from single “toilet and parking” rest stops to full-fledged restaurant, gas station, playground and dog-walking rest stops. They were all clean and well-outfitted and the assumption seemed to be that you were going to provision a picnic for you and your car mates, so most rest stops had a store with a full range of sandwiches, meats, cheeses, and high-tech coffee makers capable of generating almost any beverage. This was all a welcome change from the Tim Horton’s, Mcdonalds and Wendys that have taken over the rest stops from Montreal west to Toronto.

Something else that gets mentioned by the travel guidebooks is the “daunting roundabouts.” Although once more common in Canada, these have gradually given way to stoplight-driven intersections or cloverleafs in much of the country, to the point where many Canadian drivers rarely encounter them. By contrast, it’s rare to encounter a traffic light at all when driving outside of the downtown core of cities here — almost every intersection is controlled by a roundabout, and the process of leaving a highway and entering a town often involves navigating three or four.

The “daunting” part of roundabouts, as far as the guidebooks are concerned, regards who has the right of way. I can’t understand how there is any confusion at all about this: every single roundabout I’ve encountered has been clearly signed with “cédez le passage” and a standard, familiar “yield” sign. This is simple, and it all makes so much sense — and makes traffic flow so much more smoothly — that it’s hard to imagine any other way.

Apparently at one time there was a competing “the person entering the road from the right has right-of-way” system in play, and that may be the source of the confusion. As near as I can tell that system is no longer in use, although this may simply be because I’ve been ignoring it.

I had an idea, again well-ingrained from repeated guidebook reading, that parking in France, especially downtown, would be a problem. Again, the opposite has proven true: we’ve found ample parking in the downtowns of Orléans, Clermont-Ferrand and Montpellier. Montpellier alone claims 12,000 underground spots.

Parking is cheap too; we’ve never paid more than 3 euros to park, and this for spots that in Boston would bring a fee of $30 or $40 for the same amount of time. And parking is well-signed: as soon as you hit the downtown you start to notice “P” signs, and often these are electronic signs that include the number of open spaces.

One thing the guidebooks do have right is that it’s more expensive to fill up the tank here. We’ve paid between 0.97 euro and 1.08 euros per litre for the “gazole” (diesel) our truck takes, which, at about $1.60 Canadian, is almost twice what we’d pay at home. Of course we’re driving a much more fuel efficient vehicle here, and that reduces our real driving costs to the point where we’re really not paying double what we’d pay at home to move around.

Perhaps the greatest difference we’ve noticed in a different philosophy in highway directional signage. In Canada the focus of signage is on what road you’re on: you can’t drive for very long on any road in Canada without seeing a prominent signs saying “401” or “Rte. 2.” Here the focus is on telling you where you’re heading, and the route number is much smaller and often left out completely.

Last night, for example, to get home from a trip we took west, we had to follow signs for Narbonne, then Béziers, and finally Montpellier. We were seldom conscious of the actual route number we were on, or the route number we were looking for; we simply felt our way from city to city.

Regardless of the signage, we made our way.

Because the Partner looks more like a truck than a car, Oliver is very insistent that we call it a truck and not a car. Indeed every time I say something like “we’ll take the car to get there” he immediately corrects me with “truck!”

I’ve a backlog of blog posts ready to go, so I’ve got get in the truck and follow the signs to Gignac and Clermont-Hérault now so I can get so WiFi and upload them.

More as we motor on.

It turns out that my WiFi-enabled tree in Gignac has gone quiet, or at least there was no signal when I stopped by this morning. Thus I was faced with the choice of either heading back into the traffic maelstrom of Montpellier, or heading east to the virgin territory of Clermont-Hérault. I choose west.

After overshooting the Clermont-Hérault exit, which required an additional 18 km round trip to go down the Autoroute to the next exit and loop back, I arrived in the town and powered up the iBook for some WiFi sniffing.

At the end of the main street I hit what I thought was pay dirt: a really strong signal, and in a nice shady alley to boot. However once I parked and set myself up in the alley, I found that the WiFi, nice as it was, wasn’t actually connected to the Internet, which rendered it useless for my purposes. Onwards.

I circled a bit more around the downtown, and then headed to the outskirts to see if any of the suburbanites were WiFi-equipped. One of the frustrating things for a wardriver here in France is that the ISP Wanadoo has a gizmo for their subscribers that combines router, WiFi access point, and some sort of TV-over-Internet device. Nice for subscribers, but it has WEP (i.e. password required) enabled by default (which is, in general, a Good Idea; simply frustrating for me); there are 25 Wanadoo access points to one renegade WEP-free one.

Finally, on the edge of town near a Mcdonalds and right in front of a video store I found what I was looking for: super-fast WEP-free WiFi with a parking space in front so I could surf from the comfort of the truck.

My only limit thereafter was battery life and the video store: I had about and hour left on the iBook battery, and about 90 minutes until the video store opened and they would start to mind me taking up their parking space.

Fortunately my task list and my battery ran out at about the same time. I managed to update some Yankee web applications, answer all of my email, download some quick reference guides (I’d forgotten how often I use the web to look things up…) and even tried having an iChat with Dad (which didn’t work, seemingly because the AIM servers were offline this morning).

When I was done, I heeded Catherine’s advice to get something to eat and drink if I felt hungry and thirsty, but managed to ignore her advice to avoid Mcdonalds at all costs, thus making a hat trick of one-time visits to Mcdonalds in foreign countries in an “emergency” — Bangkok, Barcelona, and now Clermont-Hérault. I had a Royale with Cheese (really), which was piping hotter than at home, by suffered from all of the same downsides otherwise.

Thus sated, I got back in the truck and drove home. I decided to stop at Le Glacier, right next to the parking lot for the truck, for an iced coffee and a read through the Daily Telegraph (purchased earlier at the newsstand on the way out of town). Ten minutes in, Catherine and Oliver ambled by on their way back from the playground, thus rounding out our reasonable facsimile of everyday town life.

Returning to our house, we found that the l’Atelier de Musique next door, which had been uninhabited and silent until now, was in fact the studio of a hand drummer. He’s been at it for the last two hours in the back garden with intensity. Faced with the choice of treating this as unwanted noise or an unexpected gift, I chose gift, and have been bouncing along with him at the keyboard throughout.

Yesterday we spent the afternoon up the road in St. Guilhem de Désert which, in Prince Edward Island terms, is the Cavendish to the Montague that is Aniane.

While the travel guides tend to characterise Aniane as “a drab little town,” if they mention the village at all, St. Guilhem de Désert warrants descriptions like “nestled in a steep and wooded ravine rising from the gorge, the reddish roofs of its medieval houses contrasting with the electric green of the surrounding trees” (from The Rough Guide to Langeuedoc and Roussillon).

While there is no model space shuttle in St. Guilhem de Désert, and it certainly does have a striking location, like Cavendish its tourism star appears to have sucked much of the life out of the town, leaving craft shops and candy stores in its wake. Every flat piece of ground is taken up with pay parking lots, and a cup of hot chocolate costs $4.50 CDN.

That all said, we did spend a pleasant afternoon there, in no small part because we discovered that Catherine + Oliver = Peter in teeter-totter terms, and there was a great playground near the parking lot.

But back to Aniane.

Drab or not, we’re quite enjoying our little life here. Aniane is a medieval town too, with streets no wider than a single car (or, like ours, too narrow for any cars at all) arranged in chaotic maze-like fashion with not a right angle in sight.

Fortunately for me, Catherine, who cannot read a map if her life depends on it, has an excellent directional sense, and once she’s traveled a route, she can easily find the same route again. For me it’s a whole new ballgame every time, and so it usually takes me twice as long to get anywhere in the village. I’m slowly starting to recognize the various visual cues — flower pot here, recycling bin there, pile of sand around that corner — that help me find my way. Having Oliver at my side — he’s inherited Catherine’s directional abilities — is a big help; yesterday he led me all the way from the boulangerie across from the big church to our front door.

This small town of about 1,500 has four bakeries, two small grocery stores, two butchers, a half dozen restaurants, two newsstands, and, on the outskirts, a health food store that rivals any I’ve seen in Canada (and they sell only food; there wasn’t a “supplement” in evidence).

We are slowly discovering the complex inter-related opening hours situation: in addition to the “everything closed from noon to 4:00 p.m.,” each boulangerie is closed on different days, presumably so as to ensure that the town is never without ready access to baguettes.

This morning was market day, and the parking lot on l’Esplanade was taken over by all manner of nomadic meat, fish, fruit and vegetable sellers, with a smattering of sellers of socks, pants and underwear as well. We came home with oranges, raspberries, strawberries, lettuce, thyme-flavoured goat cheese, a baguette, two eggplants, some carrots and a basil plant. Oliver came home with a tiny dinosaur, purchased from two entrepreneurial young boys set up next to the fish stand; it cost him 20 cents.

We came home and had breakfast in the garden: pain chocolat, coffee, tea, juice, and raspberries. Despite being overrun by a team of small flying insects mid-meal, that it was sunny, 20 degrees and we were in France made for an almost perfect meal.

I have taken to reading, or at least trying to read, the Montpellier newspaper Midi Libre every day. While my French cannot support any of the details, I did manage to figure out about the new Pope, and I’m sensing that there is a grand political sea change happening in the country (although I can’t describe it to you at all). I can read the obituaries and the TV listings and the weather, and the reports of who got écrassé par une voiture last night.

I am off to my favourite tree in Gignac now, to find my WiFi sweet spot, grab my email and paste in a backlog of blog posts. Rumour has it that the other newsstand carries the Daily Mail, so I will hurry back before they close at noon to see if I can catch up on the English-language news.

The notion of “three square meals a day” has been drummed into me since kindergarten, so I simply assumed it was something akin to a natural law.

Imagine my surprise, thus, when on page 112 of Oliver’s new book L’imagerie des petits gourmands there is a section called Quatre repas chaque jour — “four meals every day”.

There, in addition to breakfast, lunch and dinner (le petit déjeuner, le déjeuner and un grand repas avant d’aller se coucher), we find mention of le goûter which is described as le plus petit repas de la journée which “permits us to wait for dinner.”

Apparently for this meal it is better that we “choose a fruit or a piece of cheese rather than rich cakes or rich sugary candy.”

L’imagerie des petits gourmands is a wonderful book, offering a complete history of food, in words and pictures, along with detailed explanations of how things like wine, olive oil and bread are made. Oliver and I read it every night after dinner. It’s published by Groupe Fleures in Paris.

In the six or seven years that I’ve had mostly reliable high-speed Internet in my office, I’ve become habituated to the everpresence of the network. And in the year or two that WiFi has been available at Timothy’s the Formosa Tea House — my “when I’m not at work or home” places — it’s a rare hour that I’m outside of the warm embrace of the net.

In addition to the “you can never go home [from work]” challenges that this has presented, it’s also led me to forget how things used to be, when we dialed into the Internet over the phone, and paid (and paid dearly, at least in the beginning) by the minute.

Back then using the Internet was like visiting the town well: you wrote up your email, prepared your HTML files for upload, and then, in one big “as quick as possible” dial-up session, you did your business. Then you disconnected until the next time.

Much of the focus on high-speed DSL and cable Internet has been on the additional bandwidth it offers, and, with that, the ability to transfer large audio and video files, play almost-realtime game, and the like.

Here in the French hinterlands, however, I’m forced to remember that the other change brought on by broadband is that it allows for synchronous use of the Internet.

We no longer visit the well every day: we’ve installed indoor plumbing and have a near-endless supply of water at the ready whenever we need it.

My situation here takes me to an interesting alloy of the old and the new: when I drive up the road to borrow some WiFi, I’m plugging in to high-speed Internet access — indeed it’s often faster than at home.

So I can update my podcasts, download large data files, and generally use the Internet at speeds to which I’ve become accustomed.

But I’m only online as long as I’m at the well.

So I write all of my email in advance, come armed with a list of websites that I need to consult, and once I’m online I “surf the web” largely by downloading RSS feeds into a newsreader for later reading.

It’s amazing what this does for my productivity. Not only because I don’t have millions of websites to distract me from my work, but also because the focus required to plan for my daily WiFi assaults makes me think in much greater detail about what it is I’m working on, what I need to continue, who I need to hear back from, and so on.

I’m a strong believer in, and builder of, the synchronous web. Almost all of the programming I do these days consists of building applications that run inside a web browser, applications that assume — demand — that the person using them is online.

I find it interesting that two relatively recent (and closely related) phenomena — RSS and podcasting — enable, among many other things, effective use of the web without connectivity. By allowing for asynchronous access to information — grab now, use later — technologies like these make total connectivity far less important than I’m used to.

One of the other things I’ve noticed here in France is that my now temporarily-asynchronous working life is far more relaxed than I’m used to. Part of this I can credit to good wine and clean air; but in no small way my stress has melted away in direct proportion to the decrease in the various “you’ve got mail” bleeps and bloops and telephones ringing and server alarms going off.

In a sense I’ve gone back to using the Internet on my terms: when, where and how it suits me. I’ve discovered that perhaps “always on” isn’t such a good thing, especially when it means that I’m always on too.

This peace isn’t sustainable — at least I don’t think it is. I’ve got a team back at home listening for the bleeps and bloops in my stead, and a set of colleagues who are willing to put up with the peculiarities brought on by a little bit of asychronosity for this month. Eventually I’ll have to return to my synchronous life.

But it’s worth spending some disconnected time out here if only to realize how connected I’ve actually become.

The other thing I’ve discovered here is just how powerful my little computer is. Again because I’m used to building web-based applications, I tend to treat my workstation as simply a skin over the network, and I forget that inside my little Apple beats a fairly capable heart in its own right.

Because I just can’t stop working completely, I’ve set up a pretty reasonable facsimile of the Internet, or at least my little part of it, here on my laptop. I’m running MySQL on several million-record databases. I’m running the Apache webserver (handily built in to Mac OS X), and developing applications in PHP (also part of OS X).

And getting this all running was as simple as bulk download from the mother server before I left. As a result of all this, I’ve now got both Almanac.com and YankeeMagazine.com running locally.

With that, who needs the Internet?

Well, that was interesting…

Every week Johnny and I get together over the phone with our colleagues at Yankee to discuss the progress of our various projects.

We’re used to these conference calls bringing in assorted far flung: while the Yankee folks are clustered in rural Dublin, NH, often some of their team are traveling and dial in from places like Washington or Florida. And Johnny was in Vancouver until a year ago, so we were at least tri-coastal for several years.

Today, however, was the first time I’d participated in the conference call while sitting in the stone-walled attic of a medieval townhouse in the south of France.

Here’s how it worked.

Yankee called Johnny on our Peterborough, NH VoicePulse Connect voice-over-IP DID number, which routed the call over the Internet to our Asterisk server in Charlottetown. Once he received that call on his phone in the office, Johnny flipped the switchhook and dialed the number of my Orange mobile phone here in France, with the international call going out via VoicePulse Connect as well (at about 30 cents/minute).

I answered, Johnny flipped the switchhook again, and, le voila, we were all connected. Three countries, two continents, three telephony technologies.

At least on my end, the quality of the call was surprisingly good; I didn’t feel like Wolf Blitzer on the line from Iraq — there wasn’t an “overseas echo” or a perceptible delay (although there probably was a delay; it just wasn’t that noticeable in the rough and tumble of the conference call). I’ll have to wait for reports from Dublin and Charlottetown to see what I sounded like on their end.

This experimental month in France is about many things, one of which is testing the whole “I’m a digital worker and can work anywhere” thesis. So far, it seems to be working out okay. At least if you set aside having to stand in front of a tree to pick up my email.

More from the frontier as things develop…