Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Transported
April 8
Renée is mon ange de conduire, or, in other words, the remarkable woman who so selflessly has put herself at my disposal to drive me to and from school, for no apparent reason other than friendship with my landlady Michele, and now with me. She does not speak any English, and her lower teeth lean sharply inward, so that her French is projected over an underlying gust of air to create something between a whistle and a lisp. I would say this reminds me of the difference between Mexican Spanish and Barthelona Spanish, except that I don’t really know much about either. In any case, the French here is much different from Parisian French, and there often seems to be an extra NG sound attached to the end of words here. Its rapid fire, too, flying by at a dizzying speed for a novice like me.
Like many women in their 50s and 60s in France, Renée’s has hair dyed a very strange and unnatural purplish-red color and cut quite short. She was born in Bonnieux, as was her father, who recently passed away, much to the sadness of the whole town. Several people have told me about him, sitting every day on a stone outcropping in front of his driveway on Rue de la République, carefully taking note of all the village goings-on. He was the town character, apparently, as well as its sage and collector of local gossip. I don’t know who all Renee lives with now—certainly her mother-in-law, and I think also her mother, and presumably there’s a husband somewhere, but I’ve never seen him. One of the few things I have understood her to say is that she has a daughter who is a travel agent in Apt. She tries to teach me words in French as we drive the five kilometers to and from Lacoste, and she does some really superb pantomiming in order to help me understand. She can be seen walking up and down the narrow street to the Café Saint Andre — which seems as if it will be my home base, since it is one of the few places with WiFi — in jeans and bedroom slippers, and she always greets me as if I were a dear old friend, with the three-kiss salute (right, left, right, as opposed to Paris’s two-kiss left then right) and a remapping of her lined face into a delighted smile. Her glasses magnify her eyes to an almost startling degree, which gives her a look of extra sincerity.
She and Michele introduced me to Frederique, the one-man-show at Café Saint Andre—part waiter, part maître d’, part town busybody. (I wonder if he took over as the gossip hound when Renée’s father died, or if they were in competition when he was still around.) I don’t know if Michele or Renée specifically said to him, “This is Carla, take care of her,” but he wasted no time taking on that role, and has tried to mother-hen me into a corner since. “How old are you? I am 46.” “You have a fiancé? Why not?” “Where is your family? My father is dead.” (Only it comes out more like “My fazer iz ded,” in the most perfect Pépé la Pew accent you can imagine.) He looks like a little owl, with a round face and glasses and a bald spot right on the pinnacle of his scull. He is small, like most French men, but with a hard, round gut out front, and he moves quickly, more like a scuttling seabird than an owl, except when he is smoking and looking up the street to see what’s going on up there, which is much of the time. He announced the very first day we met that he was coming to stay with me in San Francisco this winter. What could I say but OK? This guy is my connection to the Internet, and therefore the world. And his English is comparatively great to everyone else’s in town. “I was butler. In New York,” he has told me several times. I don’t know what kind of cred he thinks that endows him with, but ten years in Brooklyn has certainly made him the only person in the village I can have an actual conversation with.
Renée and Fred must talk several times a day, because it’s impossible for me to give him any news of her without him shutting me down and telling me he knows all about it. He widens his eyes and arches his brows at me and makes a perfect O of his mouth when he says, “I know! See told me dat!” He informs me that Renée is a little batty, though I think the actual word he used was fou — or crazy. This statement clearly does not cancel out his loyalty to her, he’s just reporting the facts. He says she’s on some kind of permanent disability, having had what I interpreted to be a repetitive stress injury by his demonstration of typing on air, and according to him, she has settled quite nicely into the non-working life. He still thinks she is slightly compromised, though. “See forget everyzing,” he tells me. He gave her a pair of pants to sew a button on, and she lost them. He’s told me about those pants at least five times already.
But indeed, just yesterday, I was waiting for her after class at the spot she had indicated she would pick me up, and she did not come. I waited there for about an hour before lighting off on a trail in the general direction of the village. I had read that there were signs and hand-painted symbols on the trails to guide hikers, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. It was fairly rugged walking — lots of steep climbs and descents, like all the terrain here, and a stream to cross and lots of mud from recent rains. I had my very heavy computer bag with me and many times wound up at forks where I stood for a moment before making an arbitrary decision about which direction to pursue. Lots of the little roads I ran into turned out to be just exceptionally long driveways, and I had to backtrack when they ended at a gite or stone house. From the higher slopes, I could sometimes see my village perched atop its little mountain, and this was encouraging, though the distance and height less so. Also, two days before, I’d taken a fairly significant spill on a cobblestoned street in the dark and had slammed one knee and seriously torked the ankle on my other leg (not to mention putting a hole in the one pair of jeans I brought), so that was a hindrance, too. But I soldiered through, finally giving up on the trail, which seemed to be meandering far west of my destination, and started going overland, which was an adventure. I traversed several cherry orchards and walked between rows and rows of grapevines that were just starting to show the tiniest green leaves, picking up what felt like pounds of caked-on mud that adhered to my boots up past my ankles and gave me a Frankenstein gate. I climbed between brambles and skirted numerous ancient stone walls. I think I barely escaped electrocution with some wire fencing around one property — I recognized it from my horse-pasture experience. I met some farmers in an old truck who vaguely waved me toward Bonnieux when I asked, and after a while, I finally hit the main road to the village. It was nice to know I was on the right track, but that was where the huffing and puffing really began, as the ascent got really intense. The last leg of the journey, up the steep incline along the fortified walls of the old city, toward my apartment in the ramparts, was really the worst physically, with the burning lungs and the complaining ankle and the sore ass, but I was semi-elated to have made it back to the right place. I stopped at Renée’s house to see what had happened and to make sure she wasn’t combing the countryside with hounds looking for me, but she was fairly blasé about the whole thing, expressing with arms open and shoulders shrugged her confusion that I had not been there when she came to get me. She had gone to the wrong café, it seems. She didn’t seem terribly concerned, however, which I found a little strange in comparison to the uproar of protest it causes here if ever trouble to carry a dish to the kitchen or get into the back seat, rather than the honored front, of a car with other passengers.
The whole hike, surprisingly, took only about an hour and a half, but I napped a good three hours afterward and had to wrap my ankle in part of an old cut-off sock to try to get the swelling down. I’ve got to get a car.
Renée is mon ange de conduire, or, in other words, the remarkable woman who so selflessly has put herself at my disposal to drive me to and from school, for no apparent reason other than friendship with my landlady Michele, and now with me. She does not speak any English, and her lower teeth lean sharply inward, so that her French is projected over an underlying gust of air to create something between a whistle and a lisp. I would say this reminds me of the difference between Mexican Spanish and Barthelona Spanish, except that I don’t really know much about either. In any case, the French here is much different from Parisian French, and there often seems to be an extra NG sound attached to the end of words here. Its rapid fire, too, flying by at a dizzying speed for a novice like me.
Like many women in their 50s and 60s in France, Renée’s has hair dyed a very strange and unnatural purplish-red color and cut quite short. She was born in Bonnieux, as was her father, who recently passed away, much to the sadness of the whole town. Several people have told me about him, sitting every day on a stone outcropping in front of his driveway on Rue de la République, carefully taking note of all the village goings-on. He was the town character, apparently, as well as its sage and collector of local gossip. I don’t know who all Renee lives with now—certainly her mother-in-law, and I think also her mother, and presumably there’s a husband somewhere, but I’ve never seen him. One of the few things I have understood her to say is that she has a daughter who is a travel agent in Apt. She tries to teach me words in French as we drive the five kilometers to and from Lacoste, and she does some really superb pantomiming in order to help me understand. She can be seen walking up and down the narrow street to the Café Saint Andre — which seems as if it will be my home base, since it is one of the few places with WiFi — in jeans and bedroom slippers, and she always greets me as if I were a dear old friend, with the three-kiss salute (right, left, right, as opposed to Paris’s two-kiss left then right) and a remapping of her lined face into a delighted smile. Her glasses magnify her eyes to an almost startling degree, which gives her a look of extra sincerity.
She and Michele introduced me to Frederique, the one-man-show at Café Saint Andre—part waiter, part maître d’, part town busybody. (I wonder if he took over as the gossip hound when Renée’s father died, or if they were in competition when he was still around.) I don’t know if Michele or Renée specifically said to him, “This is Carla, take care of her,” but he wasted no time taking on that role, and has tried to mother-hen me into a corner since. “How old are you? I am 46.” “You have a fiancé? Why not?” “Where is your family? My father is dead.” (Only it comes out more like “My fazer iz ded,” in the most perfect Pépé la Pew accent you can imagine.) He looks like a little owl, with a round face and glasses and a bald spot right on the pinnacle of his scull. He is small, like most French men, but with a hard, round gut out front, and he moves quickly, more like a scuttling seabird than an owl, except when he is smoking and looking up the street to see what’s going on up there, which is much of the time. He announced the very first day we met that he was coming to stay with me in San Francisco this winter. What could I say but OK? This guy is my connection to the Internet, and therefore the world. And his English is comparatively great to everyone else’s in town. “I was butler. In New York,” he has told me several times. I don’t know what kind of cred he thinks that endows him with, but ten years in Brooklyn has certainly made him the only person in the village I can have an actual conversation with.
Renée and Fred must talk several times a day, because it’s impossible for me to give him any news of her without him shutting me down and telling me he knows all about it. He widens his eyes and arches his brows at me and makes a perfect O of his mouth when he says, “I know! See told me dat!” He informs me that Renée is a little batty, though I think the actual word he used was fou — or crazy. This statement clearly does not cancel out his loyalty to her, he’s just reporting the facts. He says she’s on some kind of permanent disability, having had what I interpreted to be a repetitive stress injury by his demonstration of typing on air, and according to him, she has settled quite nicely into the non-working life. He still thinks she is slightly compromised, though. “See forget everyzing,” he tells me. He gave her a pair of pants to sew a button on, and she lost them. He’s told me about those pants at least five times already.
But indeed, just yesterday, I was waiting for her after class at the spot she had indicated she would pick me up, and she did not come. I waited there for about an hour before lighting off on a trail in the general direction of the village. I had read that there were signs and hand-painted symbols on the trails to guide hikers, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. It was fairly rugged walking — lots of steep climbs and descents, like all the terrain here, and a stream to cross and lots of mud from recent rains. I had my very heavy computer bag with me and many times wound up at forks where I stood for a moment before making an arbitrary decision about which direction to pursue. Lots of the little roads I ran into turned out to be just exceptionally long driveways, and I had to backtrack when they ended at a gite or stone house. From the higher slopes, I could sometimes see my village perched atop its little mountain, and this was encouraging, though the distance and height less so. Also, two days before, I’d taken a fairly significant spill on a cobblestoned street in the dark and had slammed one knee and seriously torked the ankle on my other leg (not to mention putting a hole in the one pair of jeans I brought), so that was a hindrance, too. But I soldiered through, finally giving up on the trail, which seemed to be meandering far west of my destination, and started going overland, which was an adventure. I traversed several cherry orchards and walked between rows and rows of grapevines that were just starting to show the tiniest green leaves, picking up what felt like pounds of caked-on mud that adhered to my boots up past my ankles and gave me a Frankenstein gate. I climbed between brambles and skirted numerous ancient stone walls. I think I barely escaped electrocution with some wire fencing around one property — I recognized it from my horse-pasture experience. I met some farmers in an old truck who vaguely waved me toward Bonnieux when I asked, and after a while, I finally hit the main road to the village. It was nice to know I was on the right track, but that was where the huffing and puffing really began, as the ascent got really intense. The last leg of the journey, up the steep incline along the fortified walls of the old city, toward my apartment in the ramparts, was really the worst physically, with the burning lungs and the complaining ankle and the sore ass, but I was semi-elated to have made it back to the right place. I stopped at Renée’s house to see what had happened and to make sure she wasn’t combing the countryside with hounds looking for me, but she was fairly blasé about the whole thing, expressing with arms open and shoulders shrugged her confusion that I had not been there when she came to get me. She had gone to the wrong café, it seems. She didn’t seem terribly concerned, however, which I found a little strange in comparison to the uproar of protest it causes here if ever trouble to carry a dish to the kitchen or get into the back seat, rather than the honored front, of a car with other passengers.
The whole hike, surprisingly, took only about an hour and a half, but I napped a good three hours afterward and had to wrap my ankle in part of an old cut-off sock to try to get the swelling down. I’ve got to get a car.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Fake It Till You Make It
March 31
Hey! Things are looking up! I managed to find a little market this evening and buy a few things to cart up the hill to my cave. (When Jon Von in Paris referred to his cave, he meant his wine cellar, but I mean it quite a bit more literally.) I am now the proud owner of two sponges, some coffee filters, a dish towel (lavette gaufrée), some toilet paper, a bottle of household cleanser, three hangers, and a bar (yes, a bar) of laundry soap. I also picked up half a dozen eggs, some jambon sec (very much like prosciutto, but thicker), some Brie, yogurt, a jar of tomato sauce, and some apples and bananas. (The French aren’t obsessed with perfectly yellow bananas the way Americans are, by the way. I get the feeling they wouldn’t dream of putting unripe fruit like that on the shelves.) Unlike in Paris, it seems to be OK here to handle the produce rather than allow the specialist (shopkeeper) to select it for you. I also went to a boulangerie and bought a baguette and an almond pastry. Jean-Camille told me there are two boulangeries in town, each owned by one of a pair of brothers. Apparently, they used to own a single shop together, but had some irreconcilable differences and now own competing bakeries. One, according to JC, is good for bread, and the other is good for pastries, as those were the specialties of the two brothers, respectively. I couldn’t remember which was which, though, so I bought one of each at the first of the shops and I came upon and hoped for the best. Somehow I can’t imagine truly bad baked goods of any kind here.
So a little more about my cave: all limestone walls and open rough-hewn beams where the stonework does not extend all the way up into arched ceilings. Some of the doors are heavy and unfinished, with ancient riveted hardware, and others, obviously added later, are lighter weight, without door knobs. I use my pinky finger in the keyhole to coax them shut behind me. The floors are either terra cotta tile, where they have been resurfaced, or natural limestone, which leaves a fine, white dust on your feet and any clothes you might let drop. There are recessed windows on the side of the building that overlooks the rolling hills below, but it is otherwise on the dark side, with some stones that actually seep moisture during the night. The apartment is in the actual ramparts, or fortress, of the old village, built into the hillside.
It is apparently the old Roman archbishop’s dwelling, and it was clearly built for defense. It is accessed from a road on the mountainside below, and you enter up several flights of uneven stone stairs in what I can only describe as underground tunnels. If you turn the wrong way, which I did yesterday, you wind up in an old lavoir, where the washing of clothes was once done (by whom? Monks? Soldiers? I have yet to find out the deepest history, but am very curious to). This dark and damp stone room is without lighting and looks for all the world like a dungeon. I backed my way out pretty quickly. I asked Michele in my broken French when I arrived if there were ghosts here, and her eyes got very wide and she said “Vous avez peur?” (You are afraid?) I thought that question to answer a question was worthy of a politician, but I chose to ignore its implications. So far, no blithe spirits, unless one manifests in the form of deep sleep, because I’ve never slept as hard as I do here. Jean-Camille said that was true for him as well. As a medical resident in orthopedic surgery, I can see this is a highly valued trait for him, and I almost felt guilty that I was occupying his special spot for la sieste when he came down with a head cold the night we met.
My room is another all-stone, arched-ceiling cell, but a beautiful one, with a recessed window and curved inset niches with painted phrases of biblical Latin outlining them. The colors in this room are incredible. All the stone was painted at one time, and that paint has worn to a variety of hues in muted blues, ochres, and mauves. Lying under this ceiling is an amazing experience—maybe part of the secret of the quality of sleep that descends on its occupant. A glass paned wooden door with sturdy patinaed hardware separates it from the main salon, with a pair of floor and ceiling locks on the exterior, rather than the interior—a somewhat disconcerting curiosity.
There are space heaters placed strategically around the apartment, but they don’t begin to touch the cold retained by the stones, except in my little bedroom, which I keep closed with the heat on. There is no Internet here, and a phone signal can only be caught in front of a vaulted window. Needless to say, there’s no TV.
A split bath has been built into yet another vaulted archway, and the water on the Chaud side of the big old antique sink is so hot that it quickly goes opaque. The shower consists of a drain in the floor and a hand-held copper sprayer. Tonight I tied my hair up in a T-shirt and directed that thing at various parts of my body (you can’t get wet everywhere at once) for about a half hour, trying to stave off the chill.
The other side of the bathroom contains only a toilet and a roll of pink paper in a flowerpot on the floor. While I consider low-flow toilets disgusting and lame (what's the point if you have to flush three times?), they’re hardly French-centric, and I don’t blame the country at all for excluding seats on public toilets. It's not like those paper ass gaskets actually protect you from anything, and every self-respecting woman should hover, anyway, in my opinion.
But I digress...
I have been informed that Bonnieux is a Catholic village, and Lacoste is protestant. This reportedly resulted in many bloody wars in the past. I am taking a class called Treasures of Provence, which I think will dig into some of this history, and I’m eager to find out about it, because all the true history books, as opposed to travel guides, about this region are in French. The villagers in Bonnieux seem to have a fairly negative view of Lacoste to this day, though their reasons are now different. Pierre, who is a good family of friend of my hosts the Matteis, claims that Lacoste is tres faux, having undergone rehabilitation efforts that compromised the authenticity and architectural integrity of the village. It does look more like the movie set of Chocolat than I could have ever imagined, but then, so does Bonnieux, in a slightly more rustic way.
The fashion designer Pierre Cardin owns the ruins of the Marquise de Sade’s castle in Lacoste, which sits at the top peak of the mountain, and according to locals, he bought up most of the village for himself and made the interiors of the houses much more modern and grand. The worst part of Cardin’s takeover is that he did not then rent the houses, but kept them private, for his own parties and events (he has apparently resuscitated de Sade’s tradition of holding grand theatrical events there, if not his other more exotic predilections). This effectively shut down any businesses in the village, and he reportedly hires shopkeepers to open the quaint little ?/ when he has guests. I think the American school in Lacoste must have changed some of this, however, since there are now classes held year round, and at least one or two brasseries that seem to capitalize off this and the Dimanche (Sunday) traffic to the protestant church there.
Since it is still March, not much is open here, but reportedly that should change in April. The fact that there was not a bus from Bonnieux to Lacoste and back, though these lines were listed online, seems to be very typical. When Jean-Camille was here, we went to the Departement de Tourisme to check on this, but even it was closed during its posted hours of operation.
A bit more on the cast of characters here: Jean-Camille is 27 and very handsome, despite a bad case of pellicules (dandruff) and a receding hairline. He has a real robust French look, with a heavy frame and a boyish smile, with one tooth askew, which—if you know me well—you know is a weakness of mine. I’d like to put him in a good pair of Levis, rather than these femmy French jeans, and see how much more that improves his appearance. Even so, I’ve counted up our age difference twice now (17 years, both times), hoping I could stumble upon some mathematic equation that would make a romance between us acceptable. His English is quite good, with some amusing adaptations to the language (“My sleep is very tight here.”). He already has an engineering degree, and is now doing his medical rotations in Marseille, (together? I don’t know. That would seem strangely acceptable here) where he and his mother both live most of the time. Michele is also a doctor, now retired, as is their good friend Pierre. Michele’s father was also un medecin, and maybe generations before him—who knows.
Michele is tiny and birdlike—no more than four and a half feet tall—with messy auburn hair and a beautifully lined and expressive face. She is somewhere in her seventies. I’m interested in the fact that her son is so young. I imagine she must have had him at around my age or older. She told me quite abruptly that Jean-Camille’s father is dead, but did not expound on the circumstances. It’s interesting the conversations you have when your language skills are limited. We skip all the small talk and get straight to the nitty gritty. She and Pierre both told me in their halting English, with genuine mistiness, how they adored and revered their parents (now deceased) and about the importance of family. Michele gestures to her chest and talks about affairs of the heart and the necessity of loving all people in an amazingly heartfelt and candid way. These are not the French you hear about from disgruntled Americans. The maître d’hôtel at the place where I stayed in Paris talked to me while I waited for my cab about the tendency in all countries for the people in the southern regions to be more open and warm than the comparatively closed and private residents of the north. It was an interesting point, I thought, and it has certainly been reflected here, where Michele has fed me because I wasn’t able to get to the store until now, clothed me because I didn’t bring a coat or umbrella, and arranged for me to be driven to and from school by equally agreeable friends and neighbors, who obligingly speak to me in their clearest French, coaching me on my responses.
Pierre, the bon ami of Michele, is also wonderful. He speaks from the front of his mouth, with sensual pursed and pouted lips, in a voice that seems to be filtered through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. This is somehow a very agreeable thing. His English is pretty good, and I think he likes to believe it is excellent. Also in his seventies, he has a firm, protruding stomach and a bald head that he shaves to maintain his look of overall hairlessness, with mixed effects. In the back, where it is difficult to reach, he has some tufts of hair he has missed. He wears a suit and starched shirt all the time, as far as I can tell, and he will allow himself to become saturated in the rain, declaring the he detests les parapluies (umbrellas). He has big ham-fisted hands and one of the worst smokers’ coughs I have ever heard. I can imagine him being a physician I would trust implicitly.
Dinner and petit dejeuner (breakfast) with the Matteis and Pierre, which I have experienced several times now, is a formal affair. In the morning it involves delicate china from a caddy parked near the table, and Michele insists on pouring the coffee and even the milk, despite the multiple refills necessary in these tiny cups. There are croissants and slices of baguette and a slab of butter that is scalloped along the edges, as well as homemade comfiture of some berry I’m unfamiliar with. A lot of inquiring as to how things are and imploring to take more is involved. Dinner is similar in that way, and involves at least four courses, beginning with un aperitif that involves being directed to a Louis XIV chair in a small semicircle of other mismatched antique chairs and eating salted peanuts and potato chips with champagne, or in Pierre’s case, a French liquor and water. My first night here, this was followed by an unbelievable savory tart, somewhat pizza-like in appearance, but with creamy sauce and cheese and razor-thin slices of potato. Then skinny little chicken legs baked on some leggy looking herbs and more petite potatoes and tiny individual heads of some kind of greens, anointed with olive oil and salt. Cheeses and bread come next, and then a pastry of a fruit they call “coing,” which is something like an apple or pear, but tougher, which I gather has to undergo some elaborate tenderizing process in order to become edible.
There is a café in town owned by a man who speaks quite good English, and who will also provide you with a Wi-Fi code if you purchase something there. Today I had a lunch there of the most excellent duck I’ve ever had, though my experience with duck has previously been mostly in greasy Chinese food. It was served with a vinegar reduction sauce and a mixed vegetable compote favoring grilled eggplant (aubergine, a name that makes me like it more), and some sort of custard-like cheesy thing topped with a single blackened tomato, which it took me some time to discover contained discrete amounts of potato. I won’t be able to eat like that every day, though, so I’ll probably have to mostly order a café crème in order to get access to his Internet connection. The owner, whose name I am ashamed I’ve forgotten, is res sympatetique, though, and he even talked to a rental car company on the phone for me today.
So slowly but surely, things are falling into place. And hallelujah and praise the lord, tonight I had tomato sauce on my pasta!
XOXOXOXOXO
Hey! Things are looking up! I managed to find a little market this evening and buy a few things to cart up the hill to my cave. (When Jon Von in Paris referred to his cave, he meant his wine cellar, but I mean it quite a bit more literally.) I am now the proud owner of two sponges, some coffee filters, a dish towel (lavette gaufrée), some toilet paper, a bottle of household cleanser, three hangers, and a bar (yes, a bar) of laundry soap. I also picked up half a dozen eggs, some jambon sec (very much like prosciutto, but thicker), some Brie, yogurt, a jar of tomato sauce, and some apples and bananas. (The French aren’t obsessed with perfectly yellow bananas the way Americans are, by the way. I get the feeling they wouldn’t dream of putting unripe fruit like that on the shelves.) Unlike in Paris, it seems to be OK here to handle the produce rather than allow the specialist (shopkeeper) to select it for you. I also went to a boulangerie and bought a baguette and an almond pastry. Jean-Camille told me there are two boulangeries in town, each owned by one of a pair of brothers. Apparently, they used to own a single shop together, but had some irreconcilable differences and now own competing bakeries. One, according to JC, is good for bread, and the other is good for pastries, as those were the specialties of the two brothers, respectively. I couldn’t remember which was which, though, so I bought one of each at the first of the shops and I came upon and hoped for the best. Somehow I can’t imagine truly bad baked goods of any kind here.
So a little more about my cave: all limestone walls and open rough-hewn beams where the stonework does not extend all the way up into arched ceilings. Some of the doors are heavy and unfinished, with ancient riveted hardware, and others, obviously added later, are lighter weight, without door knobs. I use my pinky finger in the keyhole to coax them shut behind me. The floors are either terra cotta tile, where they have been resurfaced, or natural limestone, which leaves a fine, white dust on your feet and any clothes you might let drop. There are recessed windows on the side of the building that overlooks the rolling hills below, but it is otherwise on the dark side, with some stones that actually seep moisture during the night. The apartment is in the actual ramparts, or fortress, of the old village, built into the hillside.
It is apparently the old Roman archbishop’s dwelling, and it was clearly built for defense. It is accessed from a road on the mountainside below, and you enter up several flights of uneven stone stairs in what I can only describe as underground tunnels. If you turn the wrong way, which I did yesterday, you wind up in an old lavoir, where the washing of clothes was once done (by whom? Monks? Soldiers? I have yet to find out the deepest history, but am very curious to). This dark and damp stone room is without lighting and looks for all the world like a dungeon. I backed my way out pretty quickly. I asked Michele in my broken French when I arrived if there were ghosts here, and her eyes got very wide and she said “Vous avez peur?” (You are afraid?) I thought that question to answer a question was worthy of a politician, but I chose to ignore its implications. So far, no blithe spirits, unless one manifests in the form of deep sleep, because I’ve never slept as hard as I do here. Jean-Camille said that was true for him as well. As a medical resident in orthopedic surgery, I can see this is a highly valued trait for him, and I almost felt guilty that I was occupying his special spot for la sieste when he came down with a head cold the night we met.
My room is another all-stone, arched-ceiling cell, but a beautiful one, with a recessed window and curved inset niches with painted phrases of biblical Latin outlining them. The colors in this room are incredible. All the stone was painted at one time, and that paint has worn to a variety of hues in muted blues, ochres, and mauves. Lying under this ceiling is an amazing experience—maybe part of the secret of the quality of sleep that descends on its occupant. A glass paned wooden door with sturdy patinaed hardware separates it from the main salon, with a pair of floor and ceiling locks on the exterior, rather than the interior—a somewhat disconcerting curiosity.
There are space heaters placed strategically around the apartment, but they don’t begin to touch the cold retained by the stones, except in my little bedroom, which I keep closed with the heat on. There is no Internet here, and a phone signal can only be caught in front of a vaulted window. Needless to say, there’s no TV.
A split bath has been built into yet another vaulted archway, and the water on the Chaud side of the big old antique sink is so hot that it quickly goes opaque. The shower consists of a drain in the floor and a hand-held copper sprayer. Tonight I tied my hair up in a T-shirt and directed that thing at various parts of my body (you can’t get wet everywhere at once) for about a half hour, trying to stave off the chill.
The other side of the bathroom contains only a toilet and a roll of pink paper in a flowerpot on the floor. While I consider low-flow toilets disgusting and lame (what's the point if you have to flush three times?), they’re hardly French-centric, and I don’t blame the country at all for excluding seats on public toilets. It's not like those paper ass gaskets actually protect you from anything, and every self-respecting woman should hover, anyway, in my opinion.
But I digress...
I have been informed that Bonnieux is a Catholic village, and Lacoste is protestant. This reportedly resulted in many bloody wars in the past. I am taking a class called Treasures of Provence, which I think will dig into some of this history, and I’m eager to find out about it, because all the true history books, as opposed to travel guides, about this region are in French. The villagers in Bonnieux seem to have a fairly negative view of Lacoste to this day, though their reasons are now different. Pierre, who is a good family of friend of my hosts the Matteis, claims that Lacoste is tres faux, having undergone rehabilitation efforts that compromised the authenticity and architectural integrity of the village. It does look more like the movie set of Chocolat than I could have ever imagined, but then, so does Bonnieux, in a slightly more rustic way.
The fashion designer Pierre Cardin owns the ruins of the Marquise de Sade’s castle in Lacoste, which sits at the top peak of the mountain, and according to locals, he bought up most of the village for himself and made the interiors of the houses much more modern and grand. The worst part of Cardin’s takeover is that he did not then rent the houses, but kept them private, for his own parties and events (he has apparently resuscitated de Sade’s tradition of holding grand theatrical events there, if not his other more exotic predilections). This effectively shut down any businesses in the village, and he reportedly hires shopkeepers to open the quaint little ?/ when he has guests. I think the American school in Lacoste must have changed some of this, however, since there are now classes held year round, and at least one or two brasseries that seem to capitalize off this and the Dimanche (Sunday) traffic to the protestant church there.
Since it is still March, not much is open here, but reportedly that should change in April. The fact that there was not a bus from Bonnieux to Lacoste and back, though these lines were listed online, seems to be very typical. When Jean-Camille was here, we went to the Departement de Tourisme to check on this, but even it was closed during its posted hours of operation.
A bit more on the cast of characters here: Jean-Camille is 27 and very handsome, despite a bad case of pellicules (dandruff) and a receding hairline. He has a real robust French look, with a heavy frame and a boyish smile, with one tooth askew, which—if you know me well—you know is a weakness of mine. I’d like to put him in a good pair of Levis, rather than these femmy French jeans, and see how much more that improves his appearance. Even so, I’ve counted up our age difference twice now (17 years, both times), hoping I could stumble upon some mathematic equation that would make a romance between us acceptable. His English is quite good, with some amusing adaptations to the language (“My sleep is very tight here.”). He already has an engineering degree, and is now doing his medical rotations in Marseille, (together? I don’t know. That would seem strangely acceptable here) where he and his mother both live most of the time. Michele is also a doctor, now retired, as is their good friend Pierre. Michele’s father was also un medecin, and maybe generations before him—who knows.
Michele is tiny and birdlike—no more than four and a half feet tall—with messy auburn hair and a beautifully lined and expressive face. She is somewhere in her seventies. I’m interested in the fact that her son is so young. I imagine she must have had him at around my age or older. She told me quite abruptly that Jean-Camille’s father is dead, but did not expound on the circumstances. It’s interesting the conversations you have when your language skills are limited. We skip all the small talk and get straight to the nitty gritty. She and Pierre both told me in their halting English, with genuine mistiness, how they adored and revered their parents (now deceased) and about the importance of family. Michele gestures to her chest and talks about affairs of the heart and the necessity of loving all people in an amazingly heartfelt and candid way. These are not the French you hear about from disgruntled Americans. The maître d’hôtel at the place where I stayed in Paris talked to me while I waited for my cab about the tendency in all countries for the people in the southern regions to be more open and warm than the comparatively closed and private residents of the north. It was an interesting point, I thought, and it has certainly been reflected here, where Michele has fed me because I wasn’t able to get to the store until now, clothed me because I didn’t bring a coat or umbrella, and arranged for me to be driven to and from school by equally agreeable friends and neighbors, who obligingly speak to me in their clearest French, coaching me on my responses.
Pierre, the bon ami of Michele, is also wonderful. He speaks from the front of his mouth, with sensual pursed and pouted lips, in a voice that seems to be filtered through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. This is somehow a very agreeable thing. His English is pretty good, and I think he likes to believe it is excellent. Also in his seventies, he has a firm, protruding stomach and a bald head that he shaves to maintain his look of overall hairlessness, with mixed effects. In the back, where it is difficult to reach, he has some tufts of hair he has missed. He wears a suit and starched shirt all the time, as far as I can tell, and he will allow himself to become saturated in the rain, declaring the he detests les parapluies (umbrellas). He has big ham-fisted hands and one of the worst smokers’ coughs I have ever heard. I can imagine him being a physician I would trust implicitly.
Dinner and petit dejeuner (breakfast) with the Matteis and Pierre, which I have experienced several times now, is a formal affair. In the morning it involves delicate china from a caddy parked near the table, and Michele insists on pouring the coffee and even the milk, despite the multiple refills necessary in these tiny cups. There are croissants and slices of baguette and a slab of butter that is scalloped along the edges, as well as homemade comfiture of some berry I’m unfamiliar with. A lot of inquiring as to how things are and imploring to take more is involved. Dinner is similar in that way, and involves at least four courses, beginning with un aperitif that involves being directed to a Louis XIV chair in a small semicircle of other mismatched antique chairs and eating salted peanuts and potato chips with champagne, or in Pierre’s case, a French liquor and water. My first night here, this was followed by an unbelievable savory tart, somewhat pizza-like in appearance, but with creamy sauce and cheese and razor-thin slices of potato. Then skinny little chicken legs baked on some leggy looking herbs and more petite potatoes and tiny individual heads of some kind of greens, anointed with olive oil and salt. Cheeses and bread come next, and then a pastry of a fruit they call “coing,” which is something like an apple or pear, but tougher, which I gather has to undergo some elaborate tenderizing process in order to become edible.
There is a café in town owned by a man who speaks quite good English, and who will also provide you with a Wi-Fi code if you purchase something there. Today I had a lunch there of the most excellent duck I’ve ever had, though my experience with duck has previously been mostly in greasy Chinese food. It was served with a vinegar reduction sauce and a mixed vegetable compote favoring grilled eggplant (aubergine, a name that makes me like it more), and some sort of custard-like cheesy thing topped with a single blackened tomato, which it took me some time to discover contained discrete amounts of potato. I won’t be able to eat like that every day, though, so I’ll probably have to mostly order a café crème in order to get access to his Internet connection. The owner, whose name I am ashamed I’ve forgotten, is res sympatetique, though, and he even talked to a rental car company on the phone for me today.
So slowly but surely, things are falling into place. And hallelujah and praise the lord, tonight I had tomato sauce on my pasta!
XOXOXOXOXO
The Southern Way
March 28, 2011
Hi, all. Another pathetic post from a discombobulated traveler. I’m missing contact with my friends and family, but have already lost my cell phone once somewhere along the winding streets of Lacoste. It was returned to me this morning by a groundskeeper, so it must have fallen out of my bag somehow.
Also, I got home much later than expected last night. Despite a nice, colorful, and very official-looking schedule on the Internet, there does not, in fact, appear to be a bus to or from Lacoste. I found this out yesterday by waiting for a long time at the stop and eventually going back up to campus at dark to call a taxi. The cab driver confirmed it. As it turns out, there are all of two cabs here (two as in two cars, not as in two companies; here as in the whole region). They’re clearly not very reliable or available, and they’re very spendy, so that’s not going to be a long-term solution for me, especially since there are nighttime lectures and events I need to attend, and they double their price after dark. I tried calling a Ford dealership that the student coordinator at the school recommended for renting a car, but spoke to someone who did not understand English at all. I’m pretty apprehensive, since the last price I found online was $84 a day, which is way more than I can afford. I may as well buy a crappy car (if such a thing exists) if that’s the case! I’ll look into resources today, though there doesn’t seem to be any point in renting one until after I get back from (or maybe while I am in) Paris. A contributing factor to this conundrum is that, because I’ve never had occasion to, I don’t drive a manual transmission, and I don’t imagine that these narrow, hilly streets are the place for me to learn. So I’ll have to find an automatic, which I know is both more difficult and expensive here. Yikes.
But, wait. I need to say before anything else that this place is incredible. My apartment, Bonnieux, unbelievable. And my school, Lacoste, this crazy hilltop town beneath the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's Castle -- unreal. Getting a grip on reality and juggling the pragmatic necessities of life is difficult in a setting like this, with jet lag like this, but it has to be done.
I am going to be dropping one of my classes, Continuity and Discontinuity in Architecture, and just keeping my Art History class, Treasures of Provence, and an online Historic Preservation class with the riveting title of Law & Advocacy. One reason for this is that I need the extra financial aid I’ll get by having fewer classes, especially since it’s now clear that getting a car really is going to be necessary. Another reason is that the content seems to be redundant with other classes I’ve taken, and so far the discussion of buildings has been very focused on Savannah, which doesn’t do anything for me as an eLearning student. (The only student not from Savannah, by the way, as well as the only graduate student, as far as I can tell.) So far, I feel like a complete fish out of water at this school, at about twice the age of all the other students. They’re all piping voices and creamy skinned and smooth faced. And every single one of them is beautiful. I wish this was something I’d known about youth when I had it – it makes even the more plain gorgeous and dewy and fresh… Anyway, as rude as it sounds, I’d like to spend as little time with them as possible and am glad to limit my days on campus to two. That won’t be an option next week, in Paris though. I had to ask to get a private room, which will also cost me more. Argh.
My adorable little hostess and landlady (she couldn’t be more than four and a half feet tall and must be over 70) has been so kind, feeding me since I haven’t had time yet to buy any food, clothing me since it’s been freezing and/or raining most of the time so far and I didn’t bring a coat or umbrella, and arranging for me to be dropped off at school by her good friend Pierre (who deserves a long description later, as does she) or her dashing young doctor son, who really makes me wish I were 20 years younger. But this can’t go on—she doesn’t have a car herself, and Jean-Camille lives and works in Marseille and only came out for Sunday dinner to meet me and get his new Mac. Michele’s English is as bad as my French, and though we limp along to the best of our ability, there’s a formality to our time together that is somewhat taxing. She is the type who will pour your coffee and milk into a tiny china cup and insist that you sit in the front seat of the car. Both nights I’ve dined with her, she first sat me down in a Louis XIV chair and fed me salted peanuts and champagne, and then served me four course meals. I can’t impose on her friends and neighbors for rides anymore, either—one of them is driving me this morning, and she doesn’t speak English at all. It makes me feel uncomfortable and beholden—not my favorite sensation.
Add to all this the fact that, walking up the steep cobblestone street to my crazy 12th-century apartment within the walls of the ancient Roman city fortress (much more on this later) in the darkest dark I’ve ever experienced, I fell last night and twisted my ankle something fierce. It’s all swollen and painful. I smashed up my knee on the other leg too, and tore the one pair of jeans I currently have with me, but that’s not as big a deal as the ankle, considering that all the streets here are steep, narrow, and made of slippery and uneven cobblestones. It also discounts my other projected form of transportation, at least for now, and that’s the three-kilometer hike between the two villages. That may be an occasional possibility in the future, but the path is pretty washed out right now, and is apparently pretty rugged, with streams to cross, etc. Cycling is also out, since this is the same mountainous path for bikes, and the main road is much longer and quite treacherous, with everybody whizzing around in their little Peugeots and Citroens and passing each other on these ridiculously skinny tracks above dizzyingly high drop-offs.
By the time I got home last night, nothing in this tiny village was open except for one brasserie, which was no longer serving food, so I had a glass of wine on an empty stomach while nursing my ankle and trying to convince a pair of local dogs to visit with me. (I swear the dogs here are as French as everything else. Quite self-contained and a little aloof—in other words they don’t put out.) Then I stumped on up to my very incredible and spooky dungeon and ate old pasta someone had left in the kitchen with butter and salt left for me by Michele.
So, talk about adventures! I know there must be a reason for all this madness. As you know, I have been pretty much queen of being alone, and it doesn’t get much more solitary than this. There’s a lesson here, but I don’t know what it is yet. And my reduced class schedule begs the question of what, exactly, I’m going to do with my time here. Aside from schoolwork, that is, which won’t take all of my energy. If I have a car, I plan on doing as much exploring of the region as I can. But I’m also facing the uncomfortable fact that, if I don’t write a book now, while I’m here, I don’t know under what circumstances it will ever happen. I’m just tiptoeing around the edges of this idea right now, feeling pretty cautious and dubious about it, but it’s what I’m looking at. Phew.
I love you all and I miss you. I miss Bodie and Ed. But I’m OK. Really. The scenery and my home here are mind-blowing, and if nothing else, I’ll have a lot of good stories to tell. Not exactly Eat, Pray, Love so far, but maybe Blood, Sweat, Tears...
XOXO Carla
Hi, all. Another pathetic post from a discombobulated traveler. I’m missing contact with my friends and family, but have already lost my cell phone once somewhere along the winding streets of Lacoste. It was returned to me this morning by a groundskeeper, so it must have fallen out of my bag somehow.
Also, I got home much later than expected last night. Despite a nice, colorful, and very official-looking schedule on the Internet, there does not, in fact, appear to be a bus to or from Lacoste. I found this out yesterday by waiting for a long time at the stop and eventually going back up to campus at dark to call a taxi. The cab driver confirmed it. As it turns out, there are all of two cabs here (two as in two cars, not as in two companies; here as in the whole region). They’re clearly not very reliable or available, and they’re very spendy, so that’s not going to be a long-term solution for me, especially since there are nighttime lectures and events I need to attend, and they double their price after dark. I tried calling a Ford dealership that the student coordinator at the school recommended for renting a car, but spoke to someone who did not understand English at all. I’m pretty apprehensive, since the last price I found online was $84 a day, which is way more than I can afford. I may as well buy a crappy car (if such a thing exists) if that’s the case! I’ll look into resources today, though there doesn’t seem to be any point in renting one until after I get back from (or maybe while I am in) Paris. A contributing factor to this conundrum is that, because I’ve never had occasion to, I don’t drive a manual transmission, and I don’t imagine that these narrow, hilly streets are the place for me to learn. So I’ll have to find an automatic, which I know is both more difficult and expensive here. Yikes.
But, wait. I need to say before anything else that this place is incredible. My apartment, Bonnieux, unbelievable. And my school, Lacoste, this crazy hilltop town beneath the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's Castle -- unreal. Getting a grip on reality and juggling the pragmatic necessities of life is difficult in a setting like this, with jet lag like this, but it has to be done.
I am going to be dropping one of my classes, Continuity and Discontinuity in Architecture, and just keeping my Art History class, Treasures of Provence, and an online Historic Preservation class with the riveting title of Law & Advocacy. One reason for this is that I need the extra financial aid I’ll get by having fewer classes, especially since it’s now clear that getting a car really is going to be necessary. Another reason is that the content seems to be redundant with other classes I’ve taken, and so far the discussion of buildings has been very focused on Savannah, which doesn’t do anything for me as an eLearning student. (The only student not from Savannah, by the way, as well as the only graduate student, as far as I can tell.) So far, I feel like a complete fish out of water at this school, at about twice the age of all the other students. They’re all piping voices and creamy skinned and smooth faced. And every single one of them is beautiful. I wish this was something I’d known about youth when I had it – it makes even the more plain gorgeous and dewy and fresh… Anyway, as rude as it sounds, I’d like to spend as little time with them as possible and am glad to limit my days on campus to two. That won’t be an option next week, in Paris though. I had to ask to get a private room, which will also cost me more. Argh.
My adorable little hostess and landlady (she couldn’t be more than four and a half feet tall and must be over 70) has been so kind, feeding me since I haven’t had time yet to buy any food, clothing me since it’s been freezing and/or raining most of the time so far and I didn’t bring a coat or umbrella, and arranging for me to be dropped off at school by her good friend Pierre (who deserves a long description later, as does she) or her dashing young doctor son, who really makes me wish I were 20 years younger. But this can’t go on—she doesn’t have a car herself, and Jean-Camille lives and works in Marseille and only came out for Sunday dinner to meet me and get his new Mac. Michele’s English is as bad as my French, and though we limp along to the best of our ability, there’s a formality to our time together that is somewhat taxing. She is the type who will pour your coffee and milk into a tiny china cup and insist that you sit in the front seat of the car. Both nights I’ve dined with her, she first sat me down in a Louis XIV chair and fed me salted peanuts and champagne, and then served me four course meals. I can’t impose on her friends and neighbors for rides anymore, either—one of them is driving me this morning, and she doesn’t speak English at all. It makes me feel uncomfortable and beholden—not my favorite sensation.
Add to all this the fact that, walking up the steep cobblestone street to my crazy 12th-century apartment within the walls of the ancient Roman city fortress (much more on this later) in the darkest dark I’ve ever experienced, I fell last night and twisted my ankle something fierce. It’s all swollen and painful. I smashed up my knee on the other leg too, and tore the one pair of jeans I currently have with me, but that’s not as big a deal as the ankle, considering that all the streets here are steep, narrow, and made of slippery and uneven cobblestones. It also discounts my other projected form of transportation, at least for now, and that’s the three-kilometer hike between the two villages. That may be an occasional possibility in the future, but the path is pretty washed out right now, and is apparently pretty rugged, with streams to cross, etc. Cycling is also out, since this is the same mountainous path for bikes, and the main road is much longer and quite treacherous, with everybody whizzing around in their little Peugeots and Citroens and passing each other on these ridiculously skinny tracks above dizzyingly high drop-offs.
By the time I got home last night, nothing in this tiny village was open except for one brasserie, which was no longer serving food, so I had a glass of wine on an empty stomach while nursing my ankle and trying to convince a pair of local dogs to visit with me. (I swear the dogs here are as French as everything else. Quite self-contained and a little aloof—in other words they don’t put out.) Then I stumped on up to my very incredible and spooky dungeon and ate old pasta someone had left in the kitchen with butter and salt left for me by Michele.
So, talk about adventures! I know there must be a reason for all this madness. As you know, I have been pretty much queen of being alone, and it doesn’t get much more solitary than this. There’s a lesson here, but I don’t know what it is yet. And my reduced class schedule begs the question of what, exactly, I’m going to do with my time here. Aside from schoolwork, that is, which won’t take all of my energy. If I have a car, I plan on doing as much exploring of the region as I can. But I’m also facing the uncomfortable fact that, if I don’t write a book now, while I’m here, I don’t know under what circumstances it will ever happen. I’m just tiptoeing around the edges of this idea right now, feeling pretty cautious and dubious about it, but it’s what I’m looking at. Phew.
I love you all and I miss you. I miss Bodie and Ed. But I’m OK. Really. The scenery and my home here are mind-blowing, and if nothing else, I’ll have a lot of good stories to tell. Not exactly Eat, Pray, Love so far, but maybe Blood, Sweat, Tears...
XOXO Carla
La Vie en Rose? Really?
March 26, 2011
Hello, my nearest and dearest. It’s day three on my French adventure, and I’m feeling more displaced and less giddy with freedom and wonder than I had anticipated at this point. Day one was pretty good, arriving at my super cute hotel (Hotel Caron de Baumarchais), walking around the Marais, going to the Hotel de Ville and Places des Vosges just to make sure it was the way I remembered it, and treating myself to a decadent French dinner at an outdoor café, complete with a demi bottle of wine. Yesterday, though, I felt unexpectedly blue. Paris is awesome, but when they say it’s for lovers, they have a point. It’s weird being alone here. I didn’t know how much I’d miss sharing it with somebody.
What a strange ride this has all been so far. I’ve been plagued with technological problems – crappy Wi-Fi signals, no networks for my iPod Touch (oh, that’s what makes it so different from the iPhone – you don’t pay for the service, you don’t get the service), banking snafus, a nonworking cell phone, and a general unfamiliarity with how to work with my new Mac. France is not wired the way the U.S. is wired, either. They seem to limp along fairly contentedly in what to me feels like the dark ages. So thus far, not exactly relaxing. But I’m on the train to Avignon now, watching neon green fields pass by at top speed. The cows are all white and the trees are all bare. The houses look like quaint little boxy models dropped into a diorama. I’m actually feeling pretty nauseated – not from carsickness, I don’t think, but just from general nerves. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. I had breakfast delivered (I actually just asked for a croissant and café crème, but they brought me the whole kit and caboodle – croissant, pain au chocolate, baguette, butter, two kinds of jam, honey, coffee, milk, fresh squeezed orange juice, a boiled egg, yogurt, and a kiwi. (How does one eat a whole kiwi? Peel it? Slice it?) And of course they charged me 17 euros for the whole spread. So French – they treat you like a queen, whether you ask for it or not, and you certainly pay for it.).
I overestimated my familiarity with Paris and the metro system and have suffered for my hubris in not bringing a travel book with me this time. I’ve gotten lost a few times and paid for cabs when I should’ve been on the train. Of course, I had this idea that there were apps for all that, not realizing how little access I would actually have through my iPod. Just finding the right train to get on this morning was a little nightmare in itself. The second I got out of the cab, a somewhat disheveled looking fellow grabbed my bags and asked if I spoke English and where I was going. He was no porter – he insinuated himself into the situation for a tip – presumably the way he makes a living – but I was grateful for his help, since I had no idea what to do or where to go. The cab driver looked at him disapprovingly, and I think wanted to warn me, but I knew the score from all my past experiences with homeless guys trying to direct me to parking spaces in the Mission, and for once, I was willing to pay for the unofficial aid. I was a little alarmed that he might abscond with my bags, though, and I trotted after him like the helpless female I have so infrequently felt myself to be (until this trip, that is). He kept up a good clip and, after encountering an error on the computerized ticket machine when entering the code I got online, he went through the line at the information desk and talked to the representative for me in super rapid French. Then he sent me in generally the right direction, with five of my euros in his pocket. (He looked at them twice, and I wasn’t sure if I had given him too much or too little, but c’est la vie, as they say.) From there, I wheeled around madly with my two giant bags, asking various people where to go in broken French and trying to understand their answers in equally broken Frenglish. It truly wasn’t self-explanatory, since my train information was posted with a different destination, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason with the platform and train numbers. I worked myself into quite a sweat tearing around. Once in the car, I hefted my mammoth bags onto the overhead rack with superhuman strength fueled by sheer panic. Now my back hurts. Duh. Even now, I’m a little skeptical that I’m headed for the right place. If I’m not, neither is the girl in the seat across from me, though, and she’s French, so I’ll follow her lead.
Ugh, my pathetic, broken French. If I gain nothing else from this trip, I hope I master the language a little. One thing that is both a blessing and a curse is that my accent is very good, so that when I say just a few words, people start pouring forth in their native tongue, and I’m then left to stare at them in mute incomprehension. My cab driver from the airport said he actually thought I was French at first. Maybe he says that to all the américainnes, though. I was semi-convinced that he drove me all over Paris to boost the fare before dropping me at my destination, because how else could the total be so outrageously high (close to $100 US???), but who knows. He talked a lot about politics and Obama and Sarkozy and Libya during the drive, and I just made noises like I knew what he was talking about.
I watched an episode of CSI Miami and another of X Files in French last night. I figure if I keep the TV on in the background, maybe one of these days I’ll actually start to catch what they’re saying. I pick out words and short phrases, but by the time I actively recognize them, a whole string of other sounds has already flown by. I was practically ecstatic to find a BBC channel this morning at 6:00 am, but that only lasted as long as it took for all the bad news to start pouring in – radiation levels in Japan, the military actions in Libya, etc.
I may sound like a complete bumpkin saying this, but I’m eager to get to the countryside. I love Paris, don’t get me wrong. It’s spectacular, but how can you pass those unbelievable buildings and not comment on them to somebody? And I feel a little stupid walking around by myself with my head up in the air and my jaw slack staring at stuff. Plus, a Friday night in the Marais is filled with hilarity and hipster hobnobbing that can make quelq’un seule feel completely alienated. I know I did. I walked really fast around the crowds, like I had important business, but I was really just going to the Jewish quarter for a falafel.
And my god, I miss my animals. The thing about my sweetie dog Bodie, especially, is that I never feel really alone when I’m with him. He may act mostly as a silent witness to my life, but he’s company none the less, and I miss that snuggly, warm company so much I get a lump in my throat just writing about him. I hear tell from the folks that he is totally happy and at home, exercising his puppy-est tendencies with their dog. That’s awesome, but it doesn’t sound like he’s reciprocating my longing in any way, the little shit. He has reportedly corrupted Brinkley with his insouciant lounging about on heretofore forbidden furniture, but so far, he’s not getting any people food – even on the sly, so they’re still maintaining some kind of doggy decorum over there.
I hear cat Ed is hanging in there, too, making preliminary moves on the gal who is staying in my room.
Please write to me and tell me what’s happening there. I miss you guys already!
XOXO Carla
Hello, my nearest and dearest. It’s day three on my French adventure, and I’m feeling more displaced and less giddy with freedom and wonder than I had anticipated at this point. Day one was pretty good, arriving at my super cute hotel (Hotel Caron de Baumarchais), walking around the Marais, going to the Hotel de Ville and Places des Vosges just to make sure it was the way I remembered it, and treating myself to a decadent French dinner at an outdoor café, complete with a demi bottle of wine. Yesterday, though, I felt unexpectedly blue. Paris is awesome, but when they say it’s for lovers, they have a point. It’s weird being alone here. I didn’t know how much I’d miss sharing it with somebody.
What a strange ride this has all been so far. I’ve been plagued with technological problems – crappy Wi-Fi signals, no networks for my iPod Touch (oh, that’s what makes it so different from the iPhone – you don’t pay for the service, you don’t get the service), banking snafus, a nonworking cell phone, and a general unfamiliarity with how to work with my new Mac. France is not wired the way the U.S. is wired, either. They seem to limp along fairly contentedly in what to me feels like the dark ages. So thus far, not exactly relaxing. But I’m on the train to Avignon now, watching neon green fields pass by at top speed. The cows are all white and the trees are all bare. The houses look like quaint little boxy models dropped into a diorama. I’m actually feeling pretty nauseated – not from carsickness, I don’t think, but just from general nerves. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. I had breakfast delivered (I actually just asked for a croissant and café crème, but they brought me the whole kit and caboodle – croissant, pain au chocolate, baguette, butter, two kinds of jam, honey, coffee, milk, fresh squeezed orange juice, a boiled egg, yogurt, and a kiwi. (How does one eat a whole kiwi? Peel it? Slice it?) And of course they charged me 17 euros for the whole spread. So French – they treat you like a queen, whether you ask for it or not, and you certainly pay for it.).
I overestimated my familiarity with Paris and the metro system and have suffered for my hubris in not bringing a travel book with me this time. I’ve gotten lost a few times and paid for cabs when I should’ve been on the train. Of course, I had this idea that there were apps for all that, not realizing how little access I would actually have through my iPod. Just finding the right train to get on this morning was a little nightmare in itself. The second I got out of the cab, a somewhat disheveled looking fellow grabbed my bags and asked if I spoke English and where I was going. He was no porter – he insinuated himself into the situation for a tip – presumably the way he makes a living – but I was grateful for his help, since I had no idea what to do or where to go. The cab driver looked at him disapprovingly, and I think wanted to warn me, but I knew the score from all my past experiences with homeless guys trying to direct me to parking spaces in the Mission, and for once, I was willing to pay for the unofficial aid. I was a little alarmed that he might abscond with my bags, though, and I trotted after him like the helpless female I have so infrequently felt myself to be (until this trip, that is). He kept up a good clip and, after encountering an error on the computerized ticket machine when entering the code I got online, he went through the line at the information desk and talked to the representative for me in super rapid French. Then he sent me in generally the right direction, with five of my euros in his pocket. (He looked at them twice, and I wasn’t sure if I had given him too much or too little, but c’est la vie, as they say.) From there, I wheeled around madly with my two giant bags, asking various people where to go in broken French and trying to understand their answers in equally broken Frenglish. It truly wasn’t self-explanatory, since my train information was posted with a different destination, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason with the platform and train numbers. I worked myself into quite a sweat tearing around. Once in the car, I hefted my mammoth bags onto the overhead rack with superhuman strength fueled by sheer panic. Now my back hurts. Duh. Even now, I’m a little skeptical that I’m headed for the right place. If I’m not, neither is the girl in the seat across from me, though, and she’s French, so I’ll follow her lead.
Ugh, my pathetic, broken French. If I gain nothing else from this trip, I hope I master the language a little. One thing that is both a blessing and a curse is that my accent is very good, so that when I say just a few words, people start pouring forth in their native tongue, and I’m then left to stare at them in mute incomprehension. My cab driver from the airport said he actually thought I was French at first. Maybe he says that to all the américainnes, though. I was semi-convinced that he drove me all over Paris to boost the fare before dropping me at my destination, because how else could the total be so outrageously high (close to $100 US???), but who knows. He talked a lot about politics and Obama and Sarkozy and Libya during the drive, and I just made noises like I knew what he was talking about.
I watched an episode of CSI Miami and another of X Files in French last night. I figure if I keep the TV on in the background, maybe one of these days I’ll actually start to catch what they’re saying. I pick out words and short phrases, but by the time I actively recognize them, a whole string of other sounds has already flown by. I was practically ecstatic to find a BBC channel this morning at 6:00 am, but that only lasted as long as it took for all the bad news to start pouring in – radiation levels in Japan, the military actions in Libya, etc.
I may sound like a complete bumpkin saying this, but I’m eager to get to the countryside. I love Paris, don’t get me wrong. It’s spectacular, but how can you pass those unbelievable buildings and not comment on them to somebody? And I feel a little stupid walking around by myself with my head up in the air and my jaw slack staring at stuff. Plus, a Friday night in the Marais is filled with hilarity and hipster hobnobbing that can make quelq’un seule feel completely alienated. I know I did. I walked really fast around the crowds, like I had important business, but I was really just going to the Jewish quarter for a falafel.
And my god, I miss my animals. The thing about my sweetie dog Bodie, especially, is that I never feel really alone when I’m with him. He may act mostly as a silent witness to my life, but he’s company none the less, and I miss that snuggly, warm company so much I get a lump in my throat just writing about him. I hear tell from the folks that he is totally happy and at home, exercising his puppy-est tendencies with their dog. That’s awesome, but it doesn’t sound like he’s reciprocating my longing in any way, the little shit. He has reportedly corrupted Brinkley with his insouciant lounging about on heretofore forbidden furniture, but so far, he’s not getting any people food – even on the sly, so they’re still maintaining some kind of doggy decorum over there.
I hear cat Ed is hanging in there, too, making preliminary moves on the gal who is staying in my room.
Please write to me and tell me what’s happening there. I miss you guys already!
XOXO Carla
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)