QUELLE COINCIDENCE DEUX

Speak of the devil: France was in the air yesterday, when I referenced my exchange-student stint in France. This morning I clicked upon a contest with a prize of two nights in a château for two, plus air. Details are sketchy; the E.U.’s advertising disclosure rules are not as rigid as ours, so it’s often impossible to get anything concrete beyond the names of the sponsors. In the case, that would be Air France and Hotels France Patrimoine.

In some ways, France no longer inspires me. But then I think back, to all this: I’ve sipped Chambord at the Château Chambord, had cognac with breakfast in Cognac, bumped into Alain Delon going into the movie “An American Paris” in Paris (when I asked him to let me take his photograph, he looked at me with hiss-eyes, and asked, “Qui êtes vous?” And I responded, all meek, “Je ne suis personne. Je ne suis qu’une américaine à Paris.” He relaxed and POSED for me. Then he proceeded into the moviehouse), I ran into former minister of culture Jacques Lang and famous photographer Marc Riboud and the Dali Lama when the Dali Lama was visiting Blois. (When we wrote as much in a postcard, our friends in Paris thought we were joking.) Oh, and I heard Joan Baez in concert when I was in Antibes with my high school French teacher, and a few years later danced with the Village People at some disco in Paris that was all the rage at the time. I was an au pair in Fontainebleau for a few months. I went camping with the Guides de France, first in the French Alps near Briançon and then in Provence, where we rented a wagon from a fellow who rented Gypsy wagons to people. And we bumped into a band of Gypsies, and all the Guides thought it would be fun to see if they could guess that there was a foreigner, an American, among them. (They did not.) Then there was a party in the château out near Chartres with a friend of friend who was doing his service militaire, and on the way home he threw a dud grenade into the Seine for fun. Then there was climbing to the top of the Puy de Dome in Auvergne and inhaling this pungent, lavender-infused air and practically having the wind knocked out of me over the beauty of it all.

Suddenly, there’s this tremendous pull.

To enter, folks have to answer three questions CORRECTLY. That’s a twist. I don’t think it’s fair for me to give away my answers, which I believe were correct. Suffice it to say that in two out of three questions, your process-of-elimination-skills should trump any knowledge gaps. The third question is also pretty intuitive. To enter, click HERE.