Okay, I know this should be obvious, but it never occured to me that the “un” and “une” in French that mean “a” in English are the same words as the “un” that means “one.”

I’ve been asking for “un baguette” for two weeks every morning, and the nice woman at the boulangerie has been repeating back to me “une baguette.” I couldn’t figure out why.

I am a dullard.

Every once in a while — usually deep inside an election campaign, and usually when something controversial was happening — you would see Merrill Wigginton, Chief Electoral Office of Prince Edward Island, on television and in the newspaper.

You’d see him on TV on election night too, reassuring everyone, for example, that even though there had been a hurricane the night before, everything was okay election-wise.

And if you choose to participate in any of the various public meetings on electoral boundary changes and electoral reform, you would see Merrill up at the front always prepared to answer questions.

What you didn’t see — and what I had the privilege of seeing right up close, for almost a decade — was Merrill Wigginton’s work “behind the scenes” ensuring the proper and efficient conduct of Prince Edward Island’s elections.

Merrill’s last day on the job is today, April 28, 2005; he’s retiring after many years of service to the public. We citizens of Prince Edward Island owe him a great debt of gratitude.

I first met Merrill back before the 1996 provincial general election. I was working on the provincial government’s website at the time, and that election was the first one to happen after the website came into being, so we met with Merrill to discuss the possibility of putting election results online.

Merrill was sceptical, resistant to the notion of having anything to do with the Internet, and I believe I came away from our first meeting feeling he was sort of a luddite.

What I came to realize over the years of working with him is that what I saw in evidence that day was the core of why Merrill has been the right man to be running the Island’s elections: he has always had his eyes firmly focused on ensuring the integrity of the process. What I (foolishly) took to be a knee jerk anti-technology stance was simply (understandable) doubt about whether results online would be timely and accurate to the standard he was comfortable with.

We did end up putting results online that year, and for all of the provincial elections that have followed; indeed in recent elections you’ll have found the results online before they appear on TV or on the radio because the system used to generate results for them is web-based, and also drives the results website.

And around those results we built a comprehensive website, containing everything from voter education materials to historical election results running back 100 years.

And so over the years Elections PEI moved from that initial “ah, I’m not sure” to become one of the most innovative users of web technology in the province.

Merrill has not done this alone, of course: his staff of Lowell Croken, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer, and Elections Officer Norma Palmer are an effective team in their own right, and they have always shared Merrill’s focus on what’s important about the electoral process.

Besides his willingness to hire me to craft web tools for Elections PEI — something I’ve enjoyed thoroughly, more so because of Merrill’s insistence that they be excellent tools — there are two additional things I take away from my years working with Merrill.

First is the degree to which Merrill was affected by his work overseas as a monitor of elections in places like Africa. It’s not every Islander who will jump at the chance to put themselves in harm’s way to help foster democratic elections half a world away; Merrill did jump, and what he brought back with him not only affected who he is as a person, but also made for better elections here.

More than anything, though, was the degree of humour, wit and patience that Merrill exercised throughout. You might think, for example, that life inside Elections PEI on the post-hurricane election day in September 2003 would have been a swirling, chaotic, stressful maelstrom. While the day did, indeed, have its challenges, Merrill was as calm as though it was just another day, and we all benefitted from this.

My enduring memory of that day is walking along Victoria Row, sometime after midnight, with Merrill and Lowell, wheeling our servers (Wallis and Edward) back to the office from the Confederation Centre where they had just powered the election. We were all exhausted, but we sat around Merrill’s office talking about how things had gone, what we’d learned, what we would do better next time.

There are many dedicated people in the public service of Prince Edward Island, people who take their duties and responsibilities seriously, who truly do feel that they are working in service to the public. Among that group there are a select few who “eat, slept and breath” their responsibilities; Merrill Wigginton is one of those, and he’ll be sincerely missed.

Down the street and around the corner from our house here in Aniane is the church of St. Jean Baptiste des Pénitents. As near as I can determine, it was constructed somewhere between 800 and 500 years ago. It’s no longer an active church, and is used instead to host various expositions.

This month’s exposition concerns Jules Verne, and on Sunday afternoon at 3:30 p.m. we walked down the rainy street to hear an “animation” about the show.

Entering the church — which is quite enormous and austere — we were greeted with a series of vignettes about the work of M. Verne, each concentrating on one of his major works and including very intricate models, large reproductions of book covers and movie posters, and other interesting artifacts.

I had it in my head that an “animation” would be something, well, “animated.” Actors, singers, dancers, sound and light shows, that kind of thing. I’m the kid who went to school in a science centre, after all.

It turns out, at least in this instance, the word meant something more literal: a 2 hour talk to “animate” the exposition — to bring it to life in words.

Oliver, good soldier that he is, lasted about 30 minutes into this animation until the combination of having to sit still and having to listen to an animated discussion in a language he couldn’t comprehend got to the better of him. Catherine volunteered to shepherd him home, and I was left to myself for the balance.

I was not without experience in this format, as when I took “French as a Second Language” courses in Montreal ten years ago, our renegade professeur decided it was important, contrary to the official curriculum, for us to get out into the community and experience real Quebec culture. As a result we attended many talks, performances, and movies, just under the radar of the course administrators. It was invaluable experience, and taught our ears how to hear in French.

On Sunday I surprised myself with the degree to which I could still hear in French.

The very, well, animated man delivering the animation began with an explanation of the exhibition itself. It was intended, he said, to be a museum, but unlike other museums it didn’t have little explanatory cards identifying the objects because the idea was for you to experience and interact with the items, not to catalogue them. He called the exposition a vrai musée.

We all then stood up from our seats and followed him around from station to station, all of us gathering around while he animated the displays.

And animate he did, with a wide-ranging presentation that covered everything from how other authors ripped off Jules Verne’s work with low-grade non-realistic knockoff books, to how the design of many of Verne’s fanciful inventions — from spacecraft to submarines — became part of the inspiration for the real world conception of the same.

He talked about the evolution of science fiction writing, how Tintin was essentially a derivative work of Verne’s, and how the design of “little green men” of science fiction followed the design of a particular sort of undersea creature in Verne’s work.

The general idea was “I’m going to start with Jules Verne, and riff on a variety of related topics for a couple of hours while you follow along.”

The effect was quite mesmerizing, partly because to be able to follow his rapid pace I had to switch off my “translate this into English really, really fast” system and just let the French wash over me, and partly because I was amazed that a sizeable group — there were perhaps 50 of us in attendance — would come out on a rainy Sunday afternoon to wander around a chilly church to listen to an lecture about a science fiction author. And he was covering very interesting ground, to boot.

To everyone else in the audience it seemed like this was the most normal thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. It was all really quite heartening and reaffirming, if a little weird, to see so much curiosity on display.

And I’m certainly inspired to go and read all of Verne now to fill in the details.

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.