L'Envoi

One last observation about Montpellier, written from 7000 miles away in Texas.

There was a place to eat I always wanted to recommend, but never did for a very good reason: it was downstairs from my apartment, The Slum. When I was first offered this place, I looked it up on Google or something and saw there was something called Les Delices du Liban downstairs. Being exposed to the constant odor of a kebab shop was not my idea of a good time, given the way the ones in Berlin smelled. But I didn't have many choices, so I went to look at the apartment anyway. I took it -- now that I've got perspective I'll never understand why -- and figured I could find somewhere else if I had to.

As it turned out, Les Delices du Liban was a great place to have as a neighbor, largely because of this man.

Hani, looking just like himself, in Les Delices du Liban

As long-time readers will remember, the two lunkheaded Germans who moved me dumped my stuff in the street and buggered off to Barcelona, not helping to move me in, which is what I'd paid them for. Hani asked me, in English, if I needed help, and I said I did. He flipped open his phone and called his friend Ali, who humped heavy box after box into my apartment.

Hani speaks English, because he has two sisters in Canada. His place is very well located, both for the binge-drinking bars in the area (it is a truism among Europeans that eating a kebab after a night of heavy drinking will kill the hangover) and because when the Diagonal, the original-language movie house on rue Verdun lets out, the moviegoers get dumped right across the street. He also does a fine lunch trade. Lots of people from the community come to talk with him: he's kind of the unofficial mayor of rue Vanneau.

In the down time between lunch and dinner, various folks come to see him and they sit at one of the outdoor tables, talking, checking their e-mail on their phones (Hani has a plug they can use to recharge them if they ask nicely), and so on. Hani's wife is often there, with his adorable daughter, who was born about a year after I moved in. She has the full panoply of princess paraphernalia, and everyone who hangs out digs her. I tried to get a family portrait, but she was lying down on one of the freezers, sleeping.

Behind the green door lies The Slum

So, I hear you ask, what's the food like? Well, here's your choice:

Yes, I know the awning thingy is in front of the picture. The other menu is on a hanging piece of cloth that was, as Bob Dylan would say, blowin' in the wind.

On the one hand, you might say, a kebab's a kebab. But these are €4 well-spent. (For €7 you can get a platter which comes with hummus and fries and what passes for a salad). Of particular note are the two shawarmas, and, most especially, the taouk. In Austin, there's a place called the Phoenicia Deli, which makes an amazing chicken sandwich in pita bread with a pungent garlic sauce. I raved about it so much the Austin Chronicle has dubbed it the "Ed Ward Memorial Sandwich," and it is mentioned in my horrible Wikipedia entry. But the first time I had one of Hani's taouks, I knew what it was. (I should add his falafel is also great, particularly as part of his vegetarian plate). In a concession to a weird French preference, he'll wrap some fries inside your sandwich if you don't tell him not to. Tell him not to: you need to taste this.

Over the last couple of years, my teeth deteriorated to the point where I could no longer bite one of his sandwiches (or anything else, for that matter) so I had a taouk plate as one of my last meals, because I had to taste Hani's goods again. Over the years, we talked about this and that ("Are you afraid of me? Your President says you should be afraid of me because I am Muslim!"), and he would take packages for me when I wasn't there. He also loaned me his stepladder so I could change light-bulbs -- and taught me the word for "ladder" itself, which I had unaccountably forgotten to learn in high school. (It's escalette).

So I don't miss much about Montpellier these days, but one of the things I do miss is the odor of Hani's grill at lunchtime, which inevitably made me hungry. Also his good attitude, his friendly smile and wave, and his being a living reminder that Muslims and us infidels can get along just fine as long as we talk to each other.

Les Delices du Liban, 3, rue Vanneau, 34000 Montpellier. See pictures above for phone. Open from slightly before noon until late. Hani's not there all the time, but his food is.

* * *

This blog will go silent briefly as I move into my own house here in Austin. I'm going to redesign the banner as soon as I find a decent photo to do it with, and the focus will change to what happens when you've been away from your native country for 20 years. Those who want another perspective on that are directed to my friend Nikki's blog On The  Fence, wherein she returns from a similarly long residence in the U.S. to her native Germany. 

See you soon. 

France: The Last Days

The Slum cleared out, I moved to a hotel for two nights. I'd been curious about the Hotel d'Aragon, a nondescript-looking three-star around the corner that consistently got good ratings from the likes of Tripadvisor. Since it was the only affordable, semi-luxurious option (at around €100, lest you get the wrong idea of my concept of luxury) I grabbed Saturday and Sunday nights there.

It turned out to be (mostly) a good idea. For one thing, the shower had seven heads set in the wall and you could blast yourself, a great luxury after five years of the weak stream from the handheld hose in The Slum. I washed the last dust of the place off of me and met E and J for a glass of wine in the center of town.

As we walked afterwards, I passed a new place I'd looked at that had pig's foot and lentils as a daily special. I'd already decided on Le Chat Perché for my last meal on Sunday, so a couple of hours after I'd parted with E and J, I walked back up and got a table. Which, for Saturday night, was ominous: someone right off the street could get seated. Of course, there was only one of me, and sometimes that's a lot easier.

The meal was definitely okay: an odd "beef pâté" was followed by that pig's foot, which just hit the spot. The lentils were perfectly cooked with some carrots hiding in them, and I just wish I'd remembered about the tough layer of skin that always accompanies this cut, because I tried to eat it. It's not strictly the foot of the pig, but a nearby area, what Berliners call Eisbein. The one thing I didn't like at all about the restaurant was that instead of a wine card, they had a bunch of bottles you could choose from. I didn't know half of them, and the kind of wording one often finds on a card would have helped. As would not having to unwedge myself from my seat and wander out into the entryway. The place looks kind of understaffed (or maybe it was Sunday that did it), but despite their odd location on an almost-hidden street, I hope they have what it takes to make it. Nice folks

La Poule au Pot, 8 rue Collot, 34000 Montpellier, 04 67 86 96.

* * *

If I have a complaint about the hotel, it's that the proprietor is something of a fussbudget, and an opinionated one at that. The next day, when I asked him to get me a reservation at the Chat, he refused. "I don't like that place," he said. "Go to Le Grillardin. It's traditional. Or Bistrot Gourmand!" He could not fathom that I'd lived in Montpellier for five years and knew my way around, and had my own opinions, one of which is that Le Grillardin is overpriced and not very interesting. He pulled down a restaurant guide and began noting how few places were open on Sunday. I insisted that the Chat was open 7/7, so he called, got no answer after a few rings, and hung up. He then called Bistrot Gourmand, got their machine, and made a reservation for me. The punch line is that I wandered down there -- they're close neighbors -- and neither restaurant was open. I guess the Chat goes 6/7 in the winter, because I've certainly dined there on Sundays. I wound up at a hamburger/steak joint that was heaving despite it being 9:30. There are advantages to being the only game in town. And, to be honest, it wasn't bad: a plate of local charcuterie that was great followed by an odd disc of lamb, with a tender piece in the center, and a lot of seasoned ground lamb surrounding it, held in place (it had obviously been sliced off a larger sausage-shaped piece) with a ring of fat, which crusted up nicely during the roasting. A medley of winter vegetables -- carrots, turnips, pearl onions -- roasted in duck fat reminded me of the season. 

Chez Boris, 20 rue de l'Aiguillerie, 34000 Montpellier, 04 67 02 13 22

* * * 

The next morning at 9:24 I got on the TGV for Paris, scolded by the train guard for almost missing it. They're redoing the Montpellier station, and direct access to the trains is through one door, which sends you downstairs, then up to the right track. (No moving band for luggage, no escalator). The stairway to the track I needed was blocked at both ends, but the guy in front of me kicked it aside and hurdled the top barricade. I more modestly kicked it until I could squeeze myself and my luggage through. When I got there, I saw there was an open area leading directly from the street to that track. No signs, of course. 

My seat was backward-facing, which I don't much like, but it did give me the chance to see the town slide away one more time. I forgot to look for Pic St. Loup and l'Hortus, but I'm sure they'll still be there when I return. 

* * *

Paris was about two things:  the Roy Lichstenstein show at the Pompidou and dinner at a Cameroonian joint that evening. I skipped lunch in my haste to get to the Pomp, although I did walk there from my hotel, which allowed me to see streets I hadn't seen in a long while. They were jammed with (mostly) women shopping, as always. The quest for luxury never ends in Paris, sweeping all ahead of it as it expands into formerly unfashionable districts. Not that the Marais has been unfashionable in my time of coming to Paris. 

It was good I got there when I did, though, because as I exited there was an announcement that the waiting time to get into the Lichstenstein show was 20 minutes. I just waltzed in, and was captivated. 

The thing about Roy Lichstenstein's art is that it is what it is and doesn't exactly invite long contemplation. It isn't until afterwards that the ideas hit you, but you've had everything you needed to start the process in the first minute of looking at the work. No less than any other painter since the late 19th century, Lichstenstein was fascinated with light, with color, and, to a certain extent, with abstraction. Initially, he was fascinated with decontextualizing things: the two-panel war-comic painting Whaam! plays with the foreshortened image of the fighter-jet while rendering the explosion it has caused as something abstract, with that giant word floating above it. 

The huge canvas brings this home: you have to be halfway across the room to "read" the painting as the  comic panel it was originally -- and we have no idea who the American plane is blowing up, even so, or if the pilot gets out of the air battle unscathed. Even trickier are the famous romance comic frames, since we know nothing of the relationships being dipped into or how they turn out. Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But... is nothing but ambiguity: but what? But there's more to see in them, too, which the excellent captions at the show brought out. Take the iconic Drowning Girl: 

Not only do we know what's going on with Brad (who will undoubtedly save her), but the drama in the center of the painting can take away the droll hommage to Hokusai being played out by the water (not including the standard-issue water in her eyes). 

LIchstenstein seemed to be a restless type, though, and deeply concerned with his place among the masters, as he began first a series (continued for years) of representations of brushstrokes, but done in his meticulous style, as well as with his signature Ben-Day dots, and then he began to render these same images in 3-D as flat, freestanding sculptures. Where it really gets nuts is when he started painting mirrors, as depicted in comics, reflecting nothing, but needing to be identifiable as mirrors in the final comic panel, thus necessitating some abstract, but functional, lines to send the code to the reader. These he blew up as paintings, and then, thinking about them some more, as big round sculptures on pediments, the black lines holding the other colored areas in: hardly recognizable as mirrors (or are they?) and compelling as objects. My favorites are where he added another element: a painting of a lamp casting light, standing on a table, rendered as a 3-D sculpture of the painting, the light having physical form. 

I'm really happy to have caught this show, and it's instilled a new appreciation for Lichstenstein's work in me that will, inevitably, make me see other abstraction based on figurative work quite differently from now on. I hope you saw the show when it toured the US, and I'd say it's pretty damn imperative that, if you're in Paris between now and Nov. 4, when it closes, you hie yourself over to the Pompidou and check it out. You'll be glad you did. 

* * *

The evening was dedicated to not eating French food. The French prefer to ignore that they have large numbers of former colonials among them, and although some have developed a taste for Moroccan cuisine (which is every bit as subtle as French), it's hard to find a Vietnamese restaurant as we know it in the States, and as for the Africans, they might as well not exist. But exist they do, as M. Kouegang and his roommates below me in The Slum proved. My office/living room was just upstairs -- and upwind -- from their kitchen, and I began wondering what Cameroonian food was like. Left on their own, the guys mostly fried chicken livers, which was nice as far as it went. But when the girls came over, the music changed from aggressive American and French hip-hop to smooth grooves of the Congolese-based style internationale, with rhumba rhythms and interlacing guitars. And the girls cooked something else. 

So when a Paris-based American woman on The Well mentioned that a colleague had taken her and some of her other colleagues to a good Cameroonian restaurant, I was determined to find out. Thus, my last meal in Paris was up in the Barbès neighborhood in the north, where Africans of all persuasions mix and where the curbside vegetable stands must confuse the hell out of French people. 

But I gotta say, the ladies who ran this place sure were nice, and they sure can cook. Naomi had a whole tilapia smothered with onions, and I had a dish called folon, after the spinach-like leaves that make up a lot of it. There were also cubes of what I took to be beef, but I hope they were there for flavoring, because no known knife could have cut their tightly-packed fibers.

Whole tilapia, fried plantains

Folon: stewed vegetables with meat 

How to eat fried plantains: mix some nuclear hot sauce with mayonnaise (squeeze bottle to rear). No idea what the Maggi was for, but it was labelled in Polish, oddly enough. 

Shoot and run. No, no people appear in this picture. I quite ostentatiously avoided the crowd outside. 

Accompanied with a Cameroonian-brewed Guinness (at an astounding 7.5%, more than twice what it normally is), not to mention DVD-recorded Cameroonian pop videos whose production values were, um, not the highest, it was a great way to end my trip and sail to a new world. 

Restaurant "Le Chicago," Chez Odette, 54 rue Marcadet, 75018 Paris, 01 42 57 52 98

* * *

These two wonderful events were separated by an incident that put a fine point on why I am happy to be leaving France and why I hate Paris, though. It also made me late to dinner, but that was both because I made a mistake and I was so rattled. 

I was low on change, and went into the local Metro station, and discovered that there were two ticket machines. One took bills, one didn't. The one that did was broken. I couldn't use my debit card in the other one because, like all French machines, it requires a chip on the card, a technological advance Americans have yet to institute. So I walked over to the ticket window, where a very stoned African girl with a newborn baby was trying to negotiate something with the Indian-looking woman and the tall French man, but not understanding any of it. Eventually, she got what she wanted and drifted off, and they started trying to tell her to go through the gate where the window was. She was oblivious. 

Finally they noticed me standing there. "I'd like two tickets," I said, like an idiot. "Well, use the machine!" the Indian woman thundered. "I can't..." and the man cut me off. "Why can't you use the machine?" I told him I didn't have coins, just this €5 bill, and the machine that took bills was broken. "It takes Carte Bleu," he said. "I'm sorry, I don't have a Carte Bleu. I'm an American and..." "ÇA CHANGE QUOI?"  he thundered, getting red in the face. "ÇA CHANGE QUOI, M. L'AMERICAIN?" He said that last bit with a devastating sneer. I was dumbfounded. I was about to tell him my card didn't have a chip, but he started yelling "VA T'EN! VA T'EN!!" (Translation: "That changes what, M. American? Get out! Get out!"

It had been a long time since I'd encountered such hatred. It would have done no good to ask his name and file a complaint, of course, and my only recourse was to grab my fiver and head to the next station, in hopes that the machine there took my bill. It did. It wasn't anyone's fault but mine that I went to the wrong Poissonnier Metro stop, however. I had no idea there were two. Thank heavens for kindly cab drivers. 

That's it for France for a while. New city, new (metaphorical hill). To be continued. Stick around. 

Goodbye To The Slum

It all happened so quickly after not happening so quickly.

For the past few days, I'd been wrestling with boxes that EP had brought over in small quantities (disassembled, they're unwieldy, and he has to take the tram). I'd put one together, wrestling with the tape, which, charged with static electricity, would sink back to the mother roll and form a bond that was impossible to break, then spend precious minutes looking for the start of the tape to make my next seal with. With the box half-made, I'd load it with the stuff the movers weren't going to deal with and go through the whole sealing process again. I'd then usually discover that the box was overloaded, and that it was too small to accommodate the load. Tearing and bulging would result. I'd vow to do better next time, but usually as I was getting into the swing of things, I'd run out of boxes. In the end, I made a discovery: only Castorama, of all the bricolage places around, makes boxes that are worth a damn. Remember that next time you're moving within or out of France.

J came over at one point to raid my supplies of exotic groceries: Chinese and Indian stuff, mostly. She also got my fantastically-seasoned wok. I'll need to start working on another one. The disassembled apartment made her whip out her camera.

I am not really that fat. J explained that "It's the angle," and it is. 

At the point she took this, I could barely keep my head up, I was so tired, but later that day I went out and got some dinner.

Yesterday I forced myself out of bed at 6:30. The movers would be here at 8, although EP warned me that they're always late. I did some last-minute stuff, but I was amazed at how ready I was for them to come. Which they did, only a half hour late, and that because of the difficulty of getting a permit to stick their truck in the pedestrianized zone.

The crew was made up of three people: the guy who'd visited to make the estimate, a tough-built middle aged blond French guy, and a tall African guy. The blond guy set to packing books right away, the African took full boxes down and, when necessary, brought disassembled ones up. The boss dispensed sticky labels, one per box, while registering the contents on a form. When it came time to disassemble the wire bookshelves, he helped, but otherwise was a supervisor. As were EP and I, with the advantage that EP translated from time to time.

Once the office/living room was stripped of what was going, which was the main effort, the CD shelves in the hall were hauled out one by one, coated with protective paper, and taken intact to the truck. The bookshelf with the cookbooks at the end of the hall had already been taken care of. The bedroom took no time at all. I had already disassembled the bed, so they just taped the pieces together and took them. The clothes I'd been told to keep on hangers, and a couple of those nifty boxes with rods in them appeared and within seconds the clothes were loaded. It took longer to tape them up than it did to fill them. The African guy took charge of the kitchen, although not much from there was going: just my precious Allclad pans, a nice Le Creuset Dutch oven I bought myself for Christmas one year, and a few glasses that were as much souvenirs of Germany as anything. My two best wine glasses and the blender attachment for the food processor were left, because of my clumsiness, but E and J will get the glasses in return for mailing me the blender. Finally the Adolf-Hitler Eßtisch, the massive wood leaved dining table, so named because somewhere on it is a label showing its place and date (1936) of manufacture, which I understand is worth some money, but mostly is a fine piece of workmanship, and the venue of some future meals with friends in Austin.

They were gone by 1, miraculously enough. It was jarring, almost. I went over the paperwork with the boss, signed a bunch of stuff ("You must sign this one because it is pink," he remarked at one point, as rational an explanation as you'll find in the world of French bureaucracy), shook hands with the crew, thanked EP for his help, and collapsed in the desk chair just in time for Gerry to show up from Nîmes to take me to lunch. I took a quick shower, put on some clean clothes, Gerry helped me move the futon onto the floor, where I'd spend the night, and we went off to the Beehive, the English pub near St. Roch, for burgers (Gerry's wife is a strict vegetarian) and beer for him, Coke for me. Even with the caffeine in me, I was groggy from lack of sleep and release of tension, and when, after we'd parted company, I went for a last haircut from the woman who's done such a good job over the past five years, I almost dozed off a couple of times.

Finally, I came back up here and marvelled at the emptiness.

Looking into the office/living room from the front door. 

The hall, walkable without tucking in my shoulder at last!

The bedroom, its tininess not indicated by anything in this picture, which was taken from the doorway.

With all my silverware and cookware gone, I couldn't eat here, but I was also way too far gone to go out: one glass of wine and they'd have to carry me back here. I mooched around for a while, and finally went to the Monoprix on the corner and got a couple of beers, stuck them in the fridge, and then went downstairs to Hani's place (which will feature in the next post) and got a taouk platter. I told him I'd return the plate today, because I knew that just going down and back up the stairs was going to be an effort. One by one I sipped the beers (after clearing off the couch) and read a little.

I actually made it to 11, and nature helped by providing a rainstorm that kept the binge-drinking, howling, hooting students indoors. It was hard lowering myself to the floor and harder getting up, but I managed 9 1/2 hours of sleep. In a few minutes, it'll be time to start loading up the suitcase, carryon, and computer bag, after mailing some stuff to myself in the States. At noon, various people come to claim various stuff (including the office chair I'm typing in), and later I'll check into a hotel around the corner. A little more giveaway tomorrow, and that's it. The adventure has begun.

T Minus Two And One Day: Paralysis

Hang on: not so fast!

What I did for the move yesterday:

Nothing.

What I've done so far today:

Nothing.

What still needs to be done:

Not quite everything. And it's the "not quite" that gives me hope. There's a lot of stuff that I shouldn't be doing: packing the books and so on is included in the moving price, and were I to pull them all off of their shelves, I'd have nowhere to put the boxes. If I had boxes. Also, it's kind of hard to pack things I'll be needing in, say, the next seven days. Or ten days.

And some of the stuff I've needed to do has come to pass: I got a quote from the mover, along with an official letter of what they will and will not do for that money. It's about as much as I thought it would be, although I'm now trying to trim it down just a bit by deciding not to take some stuff I thought I'd take. And I have to put together a letter with some questions in it for him.

Another thing I've done is to photograph my CDs. Which, given that they're wedged into an area not quite big enough to hold me, has been a pain.

Don't worry: there's an in-focus version of this

Some, like the ones above, I photographed by lowering the camera by its strap. The lack of space in this house is absolutely amazing. But bit by bit, and with the help of my couch, I've gotten most of them, although there are more yet to shoot. I only get a couple of hours when the light is right for this: for the sunny South of France, this is one dark apartment -- and fall is upon us, too, which means less bright light.

There, that's better!

Another thing I've done is to engage the services of the amazing EP. EP was a high school kid who somehow met Chuck and Judi, who ran the English Corner Shop a couple of years ago. An Apple computer genius (not from the genius bar: he disdains them because "they are not real geniuses"), he helped them with all their technology problems and then, when it came time to move, he proved himself omnicompetent there, as well. At one point, he bought all my dead computers, fixed them at home, and made a pretty penny. Now that Chuck and Judi are happily settled in Ecuador, they suggested I contact EP, who's between school and college, and he came over the other day, looked around, and had a bunch of good ideas. Another thing he has is a mother who works at Brico Depôt, which may or may not be the same company as Home Depot, but sells moving boxes for the things I want to pack myself, like all this crap on my (physical) desktop. And although they're cheap enough, she gets a discount.

So I'm not entirely procrastinating, although the place looks more or less like it did when I typed my last post. I've also made arrangements: I've booked two nights at a hotel for my last two nights in town. The movers will, I hope, come on the 18th. On the 19th, the charity will come take everything that's left. On the 20th, well, I'm free, because it's a Sunday and you can't do anything on Sunday in France. I just hope I can get into a decent restaurant for my last meal in Montpellier. On the 21st, I've got another Senior Super-Saver First Class train ticket to Paris, a hotel not far from the station, a ticket to the Centre Georges Pompidou for the Roy Lichstenstein show I've wanted to see so badly (fitting that a year that started with Philip Glass comes to an end with Lichstenstein), dinner with a friend from the Well at a Cameroonian restaurant, and, the next morning, a short walk back to the train station where the Air France bus to Charles deGaulle will deposit me at my terminal.

(Oh, about that ticket: SNCF, the national railway, totally rebuilt the Montpellier station, and it's a lot nicer place. For the most part. I was expecting an easy job when it came to picking up the ticket I'd bought online, and walked into the huge room labelled "Billeterie" with my receipt only to be met by a bunch of computer terminals, inexplicable screens on the wall, and a small area in the middle with humans in it. I wandered around confused, tried to get the ticket via my credit card from a machine which refused it because, like all American cards, it has no chip, and finally located a woman who was handing out tickets with numbers which, when they came up on one of the screens, gets customers to a human. It took forever. In the old place, there was a bank of SNCF people at a counter and you stood in line. The lines were frightful. They also moved with incredible speed. Yesterday was the longest wait for a ticket I've experienced here. Let's hear it for technology!)

I've also begun to think about Austin, perusing a clever personalized web page of rentals a realtor friend has made for me, as well as cheating on her with another realtor and, of course, Craigslist. I've indulged in some fantasy furniture shopping and found at least one couch that looked right. I'm utterly baffled about the music situation, though: I hope someone sells what I used to call "stereos," ie, amplifiers into which I can plug a CD player and the turntable that's been sitting in storage for the past 20 years (now that I've given all my vinyl to my archive at the University of Texas), and maybe a movie playback unit of some sort. I've got the same excellent speakers (University Seniors) my dad bought me when I went away to college in storage, too. Oh, and there's also health-care...

Enough! Two weeks is plenty to deal with this, and I'm still here. I went to the market this morning and the fall bounty is beginning to come in, with the last of the summer (I scored a melon and three peaches, but I doubt that'll be possible much longer, let alone the tomatoes, which looked kind of scraggly) hanging in. We had some very dramatic thunderstorms last night -- orange alert! -- and this morning the air was so clear as I walked to the market that I realized I could probably read the date on a dime being held by a guy on top of Pic St. Loup, with good enough lenses. Of course, I also realized that it'll be a long time before I'm back there, or able to go find that castle on l'Hortus. There's a lot of sadness on the horizon, I can see, when it really kicks in that I'm not here any more.

One day at a time, like the alcoholics say. Be here now, like ol' Dick Alpert says. Better get some lunch, like my stomach says. Wonder if those pears I got on Tuesday are ripe yet?

The Move: T Minus 4 Weeks

Well, it's done. The die is cast. The journey begins with a single step. Um, probably other cliches I could come up with, but, to spare you, dear readers, will not.

Thanks to a friend with a zillion air miles, I'm flying from Paris to Cincinnnati on October 22, a mere 30 days away. After that, on my own dollar, I'm catching a plane to Minneapolis, and then another one to Austin. I'll arrive at 8:01pm, the gods of flight and weather willing, looking like something fried. Which, after at least 18 hours, I will be. A friend will meet me and help me rent a car: after 20 years in Europe, where credit cards don't exist, I have no credit. Of course, I didn't have any when I left 20 years ago, either.

I will then drive to the house of some friends who'll let me stay there until I find my own place, take my car-renting friend to dinner, return, and become one with the bed.

But before I go there, I have to get out of here. And that will be a monumental pain. Fortuntely, I knew this before I started. Not that I've started.

First, there's this problem:

No, it's in focus in real life.

This shows most of the living room/office/library. Pretty much everything in this picture will have to be packed and shipped, although I'm in the process of culling the books. Being in a situation where the books you acquire depends on a very random supply of books being offered results in some fairly silly acquisitions, easy to discard if you're moving somewhere where you can browse a real bookstore and come away with something you really do want to read. And that huge quanitity of CDs?

Almost 90º turn from previous photo. Notice that the shelves go all the way down the hall to the bathroom. 

Being salable in a way that English-language books aren't, they've been culled rather seriously, but there are still loads left.

But that's just about it. There will be some pots and pans: I dragged my Allclad stuff from Texas and I'll drag it back. Along the way I acquired a couple of Henckel knives and a Le Creuset Dutch oven, and they'll make the trip. Obviously, none of my food, nor my refrigerator, washer (broken by the oafs who moved me from Germany, and hasn't worked since), stereo, computer printer, lamps, and stuff like that'll be coming. There'll be clothes, although those, too, will be purged. The table in the above picture is an antique given me in very partial payment of a huge debt, and when I had enough space to use it, I did. That'll be coming. The desk, the shelving (except the metal shelving, which comes apart), the kitchen table, the couch, the coffee table, the chairs, all tossed. Or, rather, they go to a charity here called Emmaus that takes anything you want to give them.

So having made these decisions, a quest was entered into for a mover. Not as easy to find as you'd think, but they do exist. (It seems to me that moving to Berlin 20 years ago was tons easier in terms of finding someone to do it). I found two movers. They both asked me what the load would be and I told them. One gave me a quote. It was, well, okay. The other calculated the cubic meterage and came up with an estimate. It seemed to me that 8-10 cubic meters was too much, and he then asked me how much I did have. And I was stuck.

Now, the way this works is that these movers come to your house, pack your stuff, and take it to a warehouse where they will eventually fill a shipping container. Then they put the container on a ship, the ship goes to the U.S., they clear customs on your stuff, put it on a truck, and deliver it to your new home, unpack it, and take away the shipping waste. So the cubic-meter guy got in touch with his movers in Marseille, and next Thursday a "surveyor" will come and make a very practiced estimate and give me some tips on what I can and cannot expect them to take. Based on the previous estimate, I think this'll be affordable.

So this is my week to be unsentimental and start tossing stuff. I, uh, haven't made much headway in this. But I will! I will!

Meanwhile, I sit here and look at porn. Well, not real porn, of course. There are two real estate agents in Austin I've been in touch with (three, actually, but haven't heard from the third), and one sends me automatically-generated listings of places in my price range and preference, and I go there, click through the pictures of interiors, imagine putting my office in this room, cooking on a stove -- a gas stove, no less -- in this kitchen (and wondering what it'd be like to own a dishwasher, a thing I've never felt much need for, and cook in a microwave, which some of these kitchens have built-in; my guess is I never will use one of those). Imagine having enough space to where you wouldn't reflexively tuck in one shoulder as you passed down the hall or walked into a room!

And I think about the car I'm going to have to buy, the amount of money I'll spend in Ikea replacing my plates and desk and shelving and other stuff, the amount I'll spend at various stores getting cooking stores like flour and salt and toovar dal and olive oil. I realize that the entire mediascape has changed, and the thought of "getting a telephone" and "getting cable" and "getting Internet access" are all the same thing (I think) and wondering if I really want a television and realizing that there are all these movie-streaming services now so that "renting a movie" is a passé concept. I don't know how NetFlix works because my computer throws a French cookie and I get a screen saying it's not available in my country "yet."

And then I hit Craigslist and look at the things that people who are leaving Austin, the way I'm leaving Montpellier, are trying to divest themselves of. This might be possible. Well, hell, it better be. I may get a nice place to live, but I don't want to sleep on the floor.

And in five weeks, every one of these issues except the house will, one way or another, be solved. I begin to understand why people start to drink heavily in these sorts of situations. Unfortunately, I can't afford to do that at the moment.

The current location

So what now? Fantasy real estate? Craigslist autos? Fantasize about Mexican food? Okay: get some lunch. That, I can do. Now.

The new place? I'm pretty sure you can't see it from here. And where the hell did all those tall buildings come from?

The Announcement

Some of you have known this for a while, others have learned of it recently, and I suspect for most of you this is the first time you've heard it, but if everything goes as planned, I'll be moving back to the States, Austin initially, toward the end of October.

This isn't necessarily something I wanted to do, as those of you who read my 20th anniversary post about a month ago must realize, but despite understandable ambivalence, I feel pretty good about it. I'd had it in my mind to move to Barcelona for some time, but between the horrible experience I had there this spring with the state railroad (which, true, had nothing to do with the city itself) and my last visit, where I looked at an apartment and had a very palpable sense of not wanting to live, not only in that apartment, but also in the city, it just didn't seem like a good idea. One thing I noticed was that I seemed incapable of integrating a new language in my old brain, and that I'd have to learn two (Spanish and Catalan, although you can get by with just Spanish) in order to live there.

When I got back to Montpellier from that, the sense of having to do something just got stronger and stronger. Mme Merde and family were on vacation, but domestic violence flared both downstairs and in a nearby apartment where the drunken couple kept pitching things out of the window, including, one memorable afternoon, the tall, rage-filled guy who sat, sobbing into a cell-phone to what I assume was a suicide hotline, for about an hour, trying to figure out whether to push himself off the windowsill into the alley below. And now Mme Merde is back and the shrieking at the kids is once again part of the mix, as is the kids' crying.

This is no way to live, yet if I wanted to get a new apartment, I'd be out of luck. I'd have to put a year's rent in escrow, pay three months' "security" to the property management firm that fronts for the actual owner (and just accept that I'd never see it back), and possibly a month's rent as a bribe. Then they'd probably turn me down because I'm over the French retirement age, plus I work for myself (unheard of in most of Europe, but most especially in France), and, finally, because I'm an American. You can't trust Americans. There's a reason all the Americans I know who live in France full-time are married to French people (or other EU nationalities) and the rest have left. Essentially, they don't want us here except as free-spending tourists.

Okay, fine. There's also the fact that it's almost impossible for someone like me to get a residence permit without maintaining a bank balance of about $100,000, and I'm not quite sure where I'd get that, or, if I had it, that letting it sit in the bank to appease the French authorities would be the best use of it. I'd also have to live here legally for five years before I'd have access to the social services I'd have been paying for with my taxes all along. True, I had access to the hospital system when I had my little adventure last December, but with full access to the system I wouldn't have had to pay nearly as much as I did for that, even though it was, according to my sister, who teaches nursing, about 1/6 of what I would have paid for the same services in the States.

And in a way, that experience, too, has fuelled my decision to leave. My doctor told me right after I got out of the hospital that there was an emergency social service I could use to pay the bill, or most of it. She had no idea what it was, though. I finally found it, a couple of months later, but by then it was too late to apply for aid. Now, this points out another thing that's been eating at me: I don't know anyone here, and it's been nearly five years. In Berlin, I would have had German friends who would have known right away what to do: oh, yes, you just go to this agency and blah blah blah. I had friends who were (and are) social workers. I bet my doctor would have known, come to think of it.

So after five years here, I still don't have a social circle, and that's probably the central factor in my discontent. In Berlin, although the membership changed over 15 years, there were always people to hang out with, to have over for dinner (which I can't do here because this apartment's too damn small), to have a beer with, to go places with. They were involved with the art world, the music scene, kept track of new restaurants (especially ethnic ones) opening up, they were in the media, and hell, some of them even had Real Jobs.

Right now I have a crucial problem that I could have gotten solved in Berlin: I need to estimate the volume, in cubic meters, of what I want shipped. Just as some people are color-blind or tone-deaf, I'm space-challenged. That's one reason I wound up in an apartment that was way too small for me. It looked fine empty. In Berlin, someone I knew could look at all this junk, say how much of it there was, and I could tell the movers and get a quote.

I'll figure that out over the next month, and I'll certainly be adding to this blog, both from here and from my new digs in the foreign country I was born in. I'll be registering the hopes and the regrets I'll be encountering along the way.

But I'll tell you one regret I won't have: an end to translation. No, not language translation. That kind of takes care of itself after a while, and I was pretty good in French before I got here. But one thing I won't have to do in the States is currency conversion. If I have $500 and that thing over there costs $300, I can buy it. If I have $500 in the bank and that thing costs €300, um... I will no longer have to check the exchange rate every morning, and for that I'm thankful. I also won't have to translate temperatures and lengths: I've gotten a pretty good feel for kilometers over the years, but those smaller units, well, not so much. (You can tell: I'm still thinking of those boxes I'll have to pack and how many cubic meters they'll be.)

So stick around. This is going to get more interesting, I bet.

Bastille Day Miettes

I guess I should feel guilty about this, but every year on Bastille Day there is, just a few hundred feet from my head, a fine military ceremony out on the Comédie and yet, four Bastille Days on, I have yet to go check it out. I think it has something to do with the fact that it starts at about 9:30, and I'm almost never out of bed by then. They started sound-checking the speaker's podium about 8:30 today, after which I rolled over and went back to sleep. That meant that the next sounds I heard were the band playing the Marseillaise. After which, of course, this being France, there were speeches. Pertinent, however, to that semi-cynical comment is the fact that, unless the news I've been reading out of the United States recently is being craftily written by some shady outfit with the express intention of trying to drive me nuts, my fellow citizens could do worse than spend some time thinking about just what liberty, equality, and fraternity actually mean.

* * *

And so the days have turned hot. Hotter here in the city, where the limestone absorbs the sun when it shines on it and then radiates it back for hours after the sun has gone elsewhere. The up-side of this, of course, is that there is a bounty of edibles at last. The recent rains have meant that a lot of the tomatoes have cracks in them and have to be carved carefully (and soon), and they're also getting picked too quickly (I've had a couple that were just plain unripe), but at least they're here. I've already made a pasta sauce out of eggplant and have a South Indian dish on the calendar, and lunch most days is cherries -- and a peach if one is ripe. I haven't done a post-market shot in a while, so here's what wound up in the kitchen yesterday. 

Two of those tomatoes have gone to their reward (or is it mine?), and ditto a handful of the cherries and a couple of potatoes. Gotta clear the decks for Tuesday, after all. 

* * *

The apartment next door to me, recently occupied by that Moroccan engineering student who was trying to study for his exams despite the noise made by Mme. Merde, is empty, and has been for several weeks. However, Mme. Merde and her expanded family (a woman who looks a lot like her and I think is her sister, and several other people including an old man who coughs so badly I expect him to keel over after a fit) went off on vacation the other day, and since then, people from the property management company have been showing the apartment like crazy. After all, extortionately priced and inconveniently tiny as it is, it loses even more appeal if a madwoman is sitting in the hallway chainsmoking and yelling into a telephone. 

No worries that the chaos has abated, though. At the end of the courtyard, which is the hollow space created by buildings on four streets on which my apartment looks out, there is a battling couple whom you may remember from the episode some weeks ago when the guy, a skinny drunk with a gravelly voice, launched his meal out the window of his apartment on the third floor of his building like a flying saucer. Not very long ago he threw some more stuff out there, including a package of ham, which landed on the roof of the little cottage that somehow is part of this courtyard area. In this cottage lives an old couple, who can be seen taking their evening meal at a tile-topped table next to their one-story cottage most evenings in the summer. I was a bit concerned that the wife might not be there this year, since she's terrifyingly thin, but no, they were out there last night. 

The battles this couple in the third-floor apartment fight have been good for my vocabulary, however. Last week, the man, enraged, did something -- I have no idea what, since I was here at my desk -- that made enough of a noise that the floor in my apartment shook. The old man from the cottage then came out and started shouting at the guy: "CONNARD!!" he yelled, in a voice that totally belied his age. "DÉBILE!!!" Words that, for some reason, Mr. Isaacson utterly neglected to teach us at Eastchester High School. He yelled them several times as I ran for my dictionary. Last night, they were at it again. Like I said, this guy has a weird voice and his part of the conversation sounded like "Gnarr gnagna gnarrrgh gaah gahhhh." Her contributions were yelling "Dégage!" and "Va t'en!!" In fact, those were pretty much her only contributions, given her audible drunkenness. That being the case, I'd translate those two  responses as "Leggo" and "Geddout." 

Eventually, I'm afraid, one of them is going to fall out the window, since they choose to hold their epic battles there. He's already tried to commit suicide and been talked in by a suicide counsellor, or at least that's what it looked like, but he was back out there a week or so later. They were at it again before 10am this morning, whilhe the band played patriotic music. Me, I'd like out of here so I don't have to endure any more of this, but that's extremely unlikely at the moment. 

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that a Martian landing in the courtyard during prime time would likely think that "merde" is like the Japanese "wa," not a word so much as a vocable indicating structure of a sentence. That's how often people scream it at each other here. 

* * * 

And while I'm complaining, in all the bitching about this place that I've done, it occurred to me as I showered this morning, I've never mentioned, well, the shower. It's not really a shower. I have this kind of wand with a mostly stopped-up shower head on it, and I have to use one hand to direct the spray. I'd much rather just stand under a shower, but the hose on this damn thing isn't long enough. I realized, though, that I could demonstrate this on the blog, so I just went into the bathroom and shot this as a demonstration. 

As you can see, it doesn't even reach the top of my head (proportion is a bit off in this shot), and as you can also see, the bathroom is tiny: that's the sink with the washcloth and towel that are usually on the shower rod (attached to the ceiling by string) on the bathroom sink. 

* * * 

Finally, one complaint that a lot of non-French people have about France is that the idea of entrepreneurship doesn't exist here, the Frenchness of the word notwithstanding. France taxes single-person, self-run businesses so badly that unless you're already rich, it makes no sense to open one. But there are some who try, and you have to wish them well, even when they're comptletely ridiculous. 

For instance, there's a small street I take on my way home from the market on days when it's way too hot to ramble, and there are two stores on this street that make me wonder how they survive. One is a medieval re-enactors' store that sells armor, weapons (dull but accurate-looking swords, shields), and other appurtenances, including bottles of mead. Just down the street is a newcomer whose business plan I'd love to see. It sells cupcakes, bottled ice tea, skateboards, shirts, books and, on appointment, you can get a tattoo there. 

The safest way to make money by yourself or with a couple of partners remains food, though, and a couple of weeks ago as I was walking with a visitor up the hill, a guy handing out flyers handed me one for his new business, Art Burger. Yes, an all-hamburger place. The guy was eager to try out his English and told us that this place -- when it opened, since it wasn't yet open -- would be the best in town. "We're down in the Beaux Arts district -- do you know it?" I did indeed: that's where the studio I use to record my Fresh Air pieces is. I thanked him and he went on to hand out the rest of his flyers. I got it home and noticed something interesting. No, not the wide variety of what looked to be pretty good burgers. No, it was the fact that in a six-page folder, there was no address. Beaux Arts isn't a huge place, but it does cover some ground. 

Coincidentally, I was down there a day later, with this same friend, and, as we walked down a main street, she pointed out that we were in front of Art Burger. Just as she mentioned it, the smell hit me. It smelled good. Seriously good. And, it being where it is, it'd be a snap to find again. But why they went to the bother of printing up hundreds of these brochures in full color and handing them out and omitting the address makes no sense at all. There was a young woman out front and I mentioned that I was glad I'd found the place and, picking up one of the brochures, I pointed out to her that the address wasn't on it. "What does that matter?" she said. "You're here, so you've found it!" 

Anyway, I'll be down there sometime soon to check them out, and if you're curious, they have a website. I just hope that, with the acumen on the business side they've already shown, they'll still be open when I get around to going there. 

Sax and Violence and Other Month-End Miettes

I didn't see the flying saucer when it came into our courtyard, but boy, did I hear it land. So did a lot of other people. 

I should explain, for those who are just getting here, that I live in the back of my building, and its back faces the back of another house, on another street, and, looking out my bathroom window, which is at a 90º angle to the rest of my windows, I can see the backs of other buildings, which front on the Place de la Comédie. There are three streets represented in this panorama. Directly across from me, the building I see the most of, the building with the weird military decorations I noted in one of my first blog posts, now contains some new tenants: a youngish couple with appalling taste who've staked off their perimeter with large ceramic urns containing olive trees, into whose soil they've stuck large, gaudy ceramic plates now share the lowest floor with the violin-makers. Just upstairs from them is a young couple I've heard speaking Spanish. A set of parents are visiting, and the other day the Spanish was explained as I watched Ma and Pa drinking out of classic yerba maté cups. Next door to them, above the youngish couple, used to be the Alliance Francaise, where well-fed young Americans learned French at top-dollar prices. Now it's occupied by a family consisting of a middle-aged man, his slighly younger wife, and their teenage daughter, who sort of practices the piano daily. I've been intrigued by what looks like a large oil painting in the room closest to me, and the other day I finally saw it and was very surprised: it's an oil portrait of an American Indian in full regalia. This is not the thing one expects from a French family, and I surmise that the doorbell on the building labelled SMITH may ring in their flat. 

At any rate, we all studiously ignore each other, for the most part. I have no idea who lives in the other part of the courtyard, the one out the bathroom window on the Comédie, except there are the offices of a local newspaper, La Gazette, in one building, and more offices in the one next door, with apartments on the two top floors.  I usually never see any of the inhabitants, although Gazette employees come out onto the back balconies to smoke, and there's an apartment in the building next door that sometimes blasts out horrible French rockbilly at ear-splitting volume. The people there, if their laundry, which they dry out their window, is any indication, all wear black. And that apartment is where the flying saucer came from.

There'd been a lot of yelling, a man and a woman really getting into it, and at one point there was a gutteral noise followed by a crash. 

The saucer, no longer flying

The guy had apparently thrown his meal out the window, where it landed with the noise we all heard. The neighborhood cats gingerly crept up on it, and started eating. Moments later there was a gutteral "Augggggh!" and a much, much louder crash. A large cardboard box had been heaved out the window and had landed on the tile roof you can see in the corner of the above shot, a roof that's on an odd little house in which lives a very old couple. They have a skylight, which the box had just missed. It would certainly have gone through it had it hit it right. Cloth and broken glass was spilling out of it. The battle continued. Mr. Smith came to the window and leaned out. I went to the bathroom and looked. The sounds of people hitting each other could be heard. It was real cold hanging out the bathroom window, though, so I closed it. Even if I'd witnessed a murder, the layout of these houses is so confusing that I have no idea where the front door to this building might be, so it was no use calling the cops.  A friend suggested that by closing the window I'd spared myself the sounds of make-up sex, but frankly neither party sounded sober enough to attempt it. 

The next day, the battle continued. This time I saw the guy, in a t-shirt, come to the window, gently brush one of the plants on the window-ledge aside, and empty another cardboard box into the alley between his apartment and the old folks' house. There was definitely no make-up sex happening this time, and the sound of blows continued for a while, the woman pleading, the man growling, a pot being hurled, hitting flesh, and falling to the floor. I haven't seen any signs of activity for the past couple of days, so I guess someone's in the hospital or in jail. Or both. 

Ah, but the violence wasn't over. I've mentioned my upstairs neighbor, Mme Merde, often enough. How she sits in the hallway, chain smoking and yelling into a phone and at her children, and how it reverberates throughout the house. Well, yesterday someone had had enough: the guy in the apartment next to mine, whom I'd never met. He knocked on my door, and asked if this was disturbing me, too. He'd apparently also talked to the Africans downstairs, and they weren't happy, either. But neither of us knew what to do. He's particularly worried because he's got a month before finals -- a student -- and he can't concentrate. I can't concentrate, either, when I need to. And everything reached a crescendo later in the afternoon. 

Some poor kid is trying to learn the tenor saxophone. This kid is not very good. That's the way it is when you start out. Having attempted the instrument myself as a youth, I have to say that progress is being made, because when the instrument fired up yesterday, actual scales were being played, pretty much error-free. Several of them were played, ascending and descending, and that's when Mme Merde reached the end of her tether. She stood at the window and started screaming stuff and I learned a whole lot of new words in French that I hope I'm never stupid enough to use against someone. She stood and hollered until the saxophonist gave up -- a good four or five minutes. Well, not "good," exactly. 

This woman needs help. We, the tenants of this building, and, I suppose, the Smiths and the Argentines and everyone else except maybe Mr. Hurler, are subjected to her yelling and weeping day after day. Yesterday, as I was talking to my neighbor, she came up the stairs carrying a plastic bag with two Heineckens in it. This may be a clue: it was about 2pm, but I heard a bunch of glass noises coming from up there later. 

Thanks to Montpellier Marie, I have some phone numbers and some social agencies who might be able to help. I'll talk to my neighbor -- I'm hopeless on the phone in any foreign language, even if I can speak it tolerably well face-to-face -- and maybe he can call and get something done. As it is, I'm not even sure what her name is, but there are only six apartments in this building, and the Africans and my neighbor and I are three of them. The best solution, of course, is to move, but until my agent sells my book, that's not going to happen. 

Envy me my exotic lifestyle, people! 

* * * 

It was good to see the eyes of the world turned to Montpellier the other day when France's first legal gay marriage happened here. The BBC had a particularly good report, and the video of locals giving their (often boneheaded, but remember that this is a very provincial place) opinions also has some nice establishing shots of the Comédie and the fountain of the Three Graces, as well as the River Lez. The first young woman in the video is standing in front of a real estate office very close to my house. I didn't go near the media circus, myself, but there was the requisite bomb-threat, which, after that right-wing writer who opposed gay marriage killed himself in Notre Dame in Paris, had to be taken seriously. 

Of course, Montpellier is known as a very gay-friendly city, and tomorrow is Gay and Lesbian Pride Day (yes, that's the official title, and yes, it's in English), which will bring between 100,000 and 200,000 people to the city. Many of them will drink to excess and there will be a big sound system blaring the kind of disco music I'd like to believe my gay friends would never tolerate. It will shut down by 12:45 at night, the police will help the drunks get to wherever they're going to, and the street cleaners will do their acrobatics on the tiles. The next thing you know, it'll be Sunday morning. 

* * *

Annals of Bad Business Ideas (or maybe not): I was pretty happy when a laundromat with brand new machines opened around the corner, and I noticed some months ago that a large machine had been hauled in and set up. It had temperature controls, but I couldn't figure out what it was. It sat there and sat there, and then, one day, the secret was revealed: it was a dog shower. Really. You insert Fido, set the controls, pay your money, and he gets cleaned automatically. I've had two dogs, and lord knows I'd have liked an automatic dog-cleaner, but if I'd tried this thing on either one of them, they probably would have stopped talking to me. On the other hand, since I wanted to write it up for this post, I went down to take a picture of it and found some guy washing his dog in it. A smaller dog than I ever had, and in the picture, he's going through the dry cycle. Anyone else think this is bizarre?

I then proceeded to the mall around the corner, which is struggling to find tenants and has just lost a huge video game store, to find a new shop open, with a, let us say, peculiar name. 

I can't imagine anyone admitting they shopped in a place with a name like that, but, well, this is France. 

* * * 

Finally, a tip on food. Every January, Berlin thrills to Grüner Woche, Green Week, when food companies from around the world come to display their wares and try to convince Berlin stores and restaurants to carry and use them. Berliners walk around, terrified of the unfamiliar stuff, and jam the hall that promotes German food by state. Meanwhile, us foreigners shop like crazy: I was once given a double handful of jalapeno peppers by a Mexican guy who was just happy that I recognized them: certainly nobody was buying any. I used to go with a couple of friends who owned a restaurant, and one of our great discoveries was Tunisian olive oil. I have since learned that a lot of the priciest Tuscan cold-pressed extra-virgin stuff is mostly Tunisian, thanks to a legal loophole, and the stuff we bought was not only the best olive oil I've ever had, but it was also cheap. Tunisia had a very strict Socialist government, so branding the stuff was out of the question: it was either "Tunisian olive oil" or nothing. So it was nearly impossible to find in the 51 weeks of the year that weren't green. 

Fast forward to last week, when it was Whit Monday and the guy where I usually buy my local olive oil was closed. The supermarket wasn't and they had recently discontinued peanut oil (which I use for Chinese cooking, among other things) to put in a new line of olive oil to add to their other lines of olive oil. Terra de Lyssa, it was called. I picked up a small can of it and was shocked when I got home to read that it was top-shelf Tunisian oil. I guess it must've been the Arab Spring: these people are marketing the hell out of this stuff, and I see from their website that it's available in the States (at HEBs all over Austin, for one). It's just as good as I remembered, too.