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. 

Courtesy and Condescension

I was sitting at my desk Saturday mid-afternoon after coming back from the market, and was wondering what I'd do with the rest of the day (as I do all too often these days) when the phone rang. The display showed an Austin area code, but not a number I recognized. I answered and was surprised to hear the voice of my friend Andrew, who told me that he'd come over to do some business in Spain and had brought his youngest son, Abe, with him. Andrew brags a lot on his kids when I visit him in Austin, and yet, since they're boys and there are three of them, they're always in motion and I've never really met any of them for more than a second. At any rate, Andrew had realized how close they were to Montpellier, and, in a flash, jumped in the car and was on his way here. I gave him some basic instructions, and in no time the two of them had arrived, scored a hotel room, and were ready for my tour.

I've gotten pretty good at it, integrating the parts of Montpellier's history and geography into a walk through the center city, and it's always more fun when the people you're showing around are smart and have good questions. We walked for a while, stopped for a drink, and then continued on. At one point, we came upon the Panacée, once the seat of the Medical School, which for the past several years has been undergoing transformation into some sort of contemporary arts center. I'd been there when it was still a wreck in 2006, but it was hosting the first Montpellier Biennale of Contemporary Chinese Art, which had some remarkable pieces in it. Unfortunately, it was also the last Montpellier Biennale of Contemporary Chinese Art, and not long afterwards the renovation started.

There was a good-sized crowd, and what looked like copious drinks and snacks, and from what I could tell -- the place was packed -- they've done some nice things to the interior. What little art I saw was, alas, what I've come to think of as "subsidized avant-garde," which seems like an oxymoron until you figure that someone got a grant to produce it, and while technique is very much in evidence and very slick, content is sorely missing. I made a note to come back and take a look, nonetheless.

We left, and the sun was beginning its descent. I wanted to get to the top of the Corum, the opera house/convention center with a panoramic view of the city and the surrounding countryside -- you can even see the Mediterranean -- before sunset, so we climbed Rue Bocaud towards Rue Salle d'Éveque, a narrow street with some impressive houses on one side of it, whose back yards border the Esplanade.

Now, one rule about a lot of older European cities is that the architectural action is in the courtyards and interiors, which are almost always closed to the public. Thus, at the top of the Rue Bocaud one finds the Hotel Bocaud ("hotel" meaning "grand house" in French). It's intriguing because of the sign on the front, which I've noted before while totally getting it wrong, embarrassingly enough.

The inscription reads that in 1561, Jean Bocaud, a regent of the University, became the first Montetpellierian to request a Protestant (Huguenot) burial. In terms of city history, this couldn't be more provocative, and ties in with the monument on the Esplanade to the Protestant preachers and ministers who were executed there.

More importantly that moment, a car passed us as we were walking, and the door to the Hotel Bocaud opened, providing a tantalizing peek at the interior. It quickly closed, though, as they usually do. We got to the Hotel, and I stood there translating the sign and talking about its implications as Andrew and Abe listened attentively. As I was talking an older couple appeared and opened the door. They were apparently returning from the Panacée opening, which had evidently just let out, and the man, tall and wearing a fine linen jacket and equally fine straw hat, paused for a moment, then turned to me. "Would you like to see the house?" he asked. Well, of course I did.

"This is not so interesting," he said, gesturing at the immediate building. "But the stairway is quite fine." This was through a couple of glass doors, through which my guests scrambled, cameras and iPhone at the ready, while I chatted with our host, explaining who we were.

Kind of out of focus, but notice the busts on the wall.

I didn't get as close a picture as I'd have liked, but the details were very nice. "The busts, alas, aren't famous Frenchmen," our host noted to me, "but, rather, Roman emperors." He chuckled. Bringing light into the stairwell was a window set in the ceiling.

Emperors and sunlight

Then we walked into the side yard, where people parked their cars, and he pointed out the building next door, which he referred to as the Maison Sully, but which I know as the House of International Relations, where the twinned cities have given plants for the gardens and several consuls have their offices. I was more interested in the space between us and the Esplanade. "That used to be the city ramparts, you know," he said. The city wall was apparently dismantled in several stages, and small bits of it are still up. Nobody had done any serious gardening at the Hotel de Bocaud, though, and it was all weeds of some kind, although weeds with nice white flowers.

We just stood around, enjoying the quiet and the late afternoon light. Abe discovered a kumquat tree and pulled one off. "Hey, they're really sweet, not like the ones we have in Texas!" he exclaimed, and I translated for the old man, who smiled.

Andrew snapped a couple of photos, and then we thanked our host for his graciousness. He'd even begun to try a little English so he could talk directly to the Texans.

All in all, it was an unexpected and magical detour in the routine, and I was quite glad it had happened.

* * *

Dinnertime was approaching, but Andrew wasn't very happy. He'd lost his glasses -- brand new glasses, at that, bought just before he'd left Austin. We spent some time trying to figure out where this might have happened. Andrew decided it was the café where we'd had our drinks, so off we went to find them, although it was all the way across town. He fretted all the way there and then, when we inquired, nobody had found them. Nor were they on the ground by our table. They were gone. Eventually, we made our way to Gourmet Gulch, as I call the Place de la Chapelle Neuve, where no fewer than five restaurants surrounding the square maintain tables (although the one which actually occpied the Chapelle Neuve, where the University's law school had been in the 18th century and which had been a chapel before that, had gone out of business and was being renovated into another restaurant). We had a good, leisurely meal, with a big pichet of Saint-Christol, but Andrew was inconsolable. 

After dinner, both of the Texans were exhausted, but Andrew decided that an after-dinner drink was in order. I first tried an excellent wine bar, but that wasn't acceptable. Another bar was chaotic and didn't have much in the way of libations. Then inspiration struck: we were right by Ste.-Anne, and O'Carolan's Irish bar. They'd have something, although sad to say all their tables outside were full. But that just meant room indoors, so we walked in. As we tried to look at the blackboard with the menu on it, I was approached by a young man, barely much older than Abe from the looks of him, who'd heard us speaking English. "Where are you from?" he asked me in English. I replied in French, "Moi, j'habite Montpellier, à deux pas de la Comédie," invoking the fiction so many real estate folks indulge in here that everything is "two steps from the Comédie." My friend from Seattle who had been here the previous week was told that the place she got from Airbnb was "deux pas de la Com," and it was all the way at the top of the hill, a five-minute walk. 

But he apparently didn't hear me. "Are you enjoying your stay? Are you English?" No, I told him, I live here, and I'm American. Ignoring me, he turned to the Texans, who were kind of wishing he'd step away from the blackboard so they could read it. "And what about you? Are you English?" He kept grinning, which I found unnerving. I had an inspiration and suggested we order Calvados, which may not be local, but is a perfect obscure after-dinner drink. "Calvados? I do not know, perhaps we have Calvados." Fortunately, they did, so we took our glasses into a back room (one nice thing about O'Carolans is its sprawl -- perhaps the only nice thing about it) and tried to talk above the din of a group of binge-drinking French kids. "What was that all about?" Andrew asked rhetorically. I watched one of the kids at the other table drop a shot glass full of ominously colored liquid into his beer and chug the result. I thought about the old gentleman with his linen jacket and straw hat, and then I thought about Abe, who, at 17, seemed to be the most civilized person under 40 in the whole bar. 

All photos in this post by Andrew Halbreich. Used by permission; all rights reserved.

The Mystery of the High Castle

If it should ever occur to you to visit me here in the beautiful Sud de France, and should you have the time and the money, and should various other factors work in our favor, I'd ask you to rent a car (assuming you lived in the U.S. or Canada or outside France, at any rate -- that way you get unlimited mileage instead of 250km) and I'd take you on my Languedoc's Greatest Hits tour.

That's how I spent yesterday, and, save for one snag at the end, it all went very well. And, fortunately, the person I was showing around was of a very inquiring turn of mind, so we saw and did a lot of things.

The tour always starts in Sommières, a small town, formerly walled, which has a Roman bridge from the first century AD leading into it, a castle of sorts (pretty ruined, and not open to the public) looming over it, and a couple of decent places to have lunch. Yesterday, I didn't think I was going to get across the bridge, because there was a profusion of odd waterfowl, including a pair of black, black swans, who kept giving photo opportunities. At one point, a huge mammal appeared, nearly two feet long, leisurely boogie-ing downstream in the river. It looked to me like a muskrat, but...do they have muskrats in France? Anyway, he was determined and it was odd to see his hind legs propelling him along as his nose and most of his body stayed dry.

Sommières Market Square and Beyond

I've posted lots of pix of this town, which does a brisk trade in British tourists and the sorts of things they buy, but with its lazy river, medieval superstructure, and quiet vibe, it makes a nice start to the tour.

Leaving Sommières, I head down a road that leads through wine country, and, eventually, to Pic St. Loup, a mountain visible from downtown Montpellier. It has a twin, l'Hortus, a "limestone escarpment," which makes it, technically, not a mountain. On the side facing the Pic, it has sheer limestone cliffs, in which, apparently, have been found Neanderthal dwellings. There is a winery, Domaine l'Hortus, which produces some very wonderful and affordable wines, although that could be said about the whole Pic St. Loup area. It's been "discovered" by the wine world, but there are still bargains to be had.

It's possible to climb the Pic all the way to the top, where there's allegedly a small chapel founded by the saint who gave the mountain its name. I've never done this, but the mountain is quite dramatic just from the side of the road. But it's l'Hortus which continues to fascinate me. The main reason for that is that I thought I once spotted a huge castle on it -- but only for a second and, because I was driving, only out of the corner of my eye. The place where this apparition appears is not conducive to taking one's eye off the road, though, and until yesterday I never got a good look.

Fortunately, as I said, my passenger was very interested in all kinds of things, and we found a convenient place to stop. We got out of the car, and through the trees, with the aid of my trusty zoom lens, I was able to snag a couple of pictures.

Very Mysterious

Now, this is out in the middle of nowhere. What you can tell from these two photos is that the building has buttresses and that the windows are arched. It doesn't look at all recent.

A little further along, we spotted a fine place to pull off the road and got out and found a better vantage point. Here, it was possible to get a shot of the entire ruin.

Even Mysteriouser

It may, with enough time, be possible to hike up to this thing, but I'm not sure how. (Remember, all of these pictures are at almost the maximum of my 36x zoom). Anyway, as you can maybe feel if you stare at the pictures long enough, it was nice and warm out there. I'm wondering if there's not a way to this place from the top of l'Hortus, and if it's possible to get closer to it.

Now that I've established just where it is, I notice there's a very tiny village up there called Le Fesq, and a road (D122) that may pass not far from the castle. I need a higher-resolution map than Michelin can provide, though, and even then the historical context will be missing. Who built this? Why? When? Who trashed it? It's pretty clear that the roof's been blown up.

NOTE: Later, after posting, we found it: this long essay is in French, but this is it.

At any rate, the rest of the trip -- the quiet of the tiny Romanesque church in St. Martin de Londres, the UNESCO sites of Pont du Diable and St. Guilhelm le Désert -- went well, but we arrived in St. Saturnin too late for me to buy a six-pack of the IV Pierres rosé from the Domain d'Archimbault, dammit. Making things worse, at the superb visitors center that serves Pont du Diable and St. Guilhelm, my friend got to taste the IV Pierres white, a masterpiece of a white wine, which this region isn't exactly known for. But not me. No, I was driving.

Not that I'm complaining. I saved that for the trip back into town, Friday afternoon Montpellier rush hour, which was just about as much fun as it sounds like. But we got away with €8.50 worth of gas for the whole thing, which I found remarkable.

So now I need your help. If anyone has some details on the castle/fort/thing I'd like to have them. And I'd also like more of you to come visit before I leave France, which is going to happen at some point. Great food, wine, scenery, and castles guaranteed.

As I Was Going To Saint-Gilles...

...I met a man with 40 eels. Wait, that's not right.

But I did go to Saint-Gilles yesterday, because Elijah Wald, a writer I very much respect, was in the neighborhood, and that's where he was headed. We'd been meaning to meet up while he was over here -- his wife, Sandrine, is French, and her mother, Martine, lives in Provence -- and this was when our schedules coincided. Martine was driving, and we agreed to meet at the train station in Tarascon, which I can get to on the TER, the local-train service in this region.

It all began very auspiciously: I went to the train station the day before to buy a ticket, because it was a very early (for me) train, only to discover that the ticket machines didn't take paper money and I didn't have a bunch of change. Okay, I'd get it in the morning. The line in the morning, however, wasn't moving, and I didn't want to miss the train, so I just went back downstairs to the track, figuring I'd pay on the train. The train came, we took off, and...nobody ever asked me for a ticket. Rather than feel guilty, I decided to treat this as partial payment for the €80 ticket I'd bought in March from Barcelona to Montpellier that the Spanish railroad refused to honor.

Tarascon is a place you can hardly miss if you're headed to Avignon: you cross the Rhone and see the huge castle on the river.

Tarascon Castle from Wikipedia

We found each other just fine, introductions were made, and we piled into the car and discovered that Tarascon is as hard to get out of as Montpellier is, but eventually we were on the road.

The day was supposed to involve visits to Saint-Gilles and Aigues-Mortes, and I was enthusiastic because the abbatial church in Saint-Gilles is supposed to be a UNESCO site, and I sort of collect those. I say "sort of" because I'm not like the obsessives in Japan who have books they fill with rubber-stamps they get at all the historical sites they visit, but I do realize that there's usually something of compelling interest at these places, and it's not always obvious. I enjoy figuring it out.

Saint-Gilles, however, is pretty obvious, since there's only one thing, really, in town: the church. We came at it from a funny angle, and Martine managed to puzzle a local by asking directions to it while standing with her back to it, more or less. One thing we found immediately was the choir. Or, rather, what's left of it.

The choir, sort of 

The Wars of Religion in the 1600s did lots of damage (hell, they pretty nearly destroyed Montpellier), and this remnant of the original church shows that clearly. My book here says it was a Huguenot attack in 1622 that blew this up. There are a few nice details on it, and that door leads to what's supposed to be a classic spiral staircase that architects still study. I walked around it and noted that there were some nice details.

But the real deal is the church itself. The 12th century sculptures on the entrance (which wasn't the main entrance back when it was first built) are an amusing hodge-podge of stuff -- Elijah and I spent some time trying to decode one sequence which had Jesus and the disciples coming into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Sts. Peter and Paul fishing (from an entirely earlier section of the story) and, um, some city, which may or may not have been falling apart. Medieval manga wasn't doing such a great job here.

Of course, after the Wars of Religion came the French Revolution, and what the hatred of the doomed Protestants hadn't achieved in the 17th century, the armed revolutionaries of the 18th century tried to finish off. This meant that all of the faces were shot off of Jesus and the saints, something it's unlikely the earlier crowd would have done.

If you click on that and enlarge it, you'll see that there's a Christ in Glory on the left and a Crucifixion on the right and on both of them, the faces have been terminated with extreme prejudice. Why so angry against someone you'd expect many of these people to believe is the son of God? Easy: he was the excuse for the Church, a horrendously corrupt organization that operated hand-in-hand with the French monarchy, which had basically conquered the piece of land that we see on the map of Europe today as part of the Wars of Religion. The dissidents, the Catholics who didn't totally by into the rules coming from Rome, the followers of the Swiss theologian John Calvin, all of them were keeping needed revenue from a spendthrift monarch and his BFF, the Pope. It's why Montpellier, a Protestant stronghold, was burned and a huge fort (now a high school, symbolically enough) got plopped down on what was then the city's outskirts and stocked with lots of soldiers. Then, when the Revolution came along to depose that monarchy, the outburst of violence was also aimed at the corrupt Church. Since Saint-Gilles was the fourth-largest center of pilgrimage in European Christendom, and, thus, did a thriving business in exploiting pilgrims who either came there directly or were on the Arles route to Santiago de Compostella, the Church was living large there, and the resentment was likely pretty large.

Enough of the carvings on the front of Saint-Gilles' church remain, though, that it's pretty wonderful to look at:

Inside, as you might expect, there's not much, although there's a nice, albeit undecorated, reliquary with a hunk of some saint in it. There's also a crypt, and if you buy a ticket to it, you can also go up the spiral staircase. Instead, we opted for a visits to the "Romanesque House" across the street, three! three! three! museums in one.

Which means, as you might expect, that there's not enough to actually fill a museum. There are, in one room, lots of bits of the exploded church.

Another floor celebrates the profusion of bird life in the nearby swamp, the Camargue, with a bunch of dusty taxidermy -- and a hippo skull, which means that if you're headed there, you should be very, very careful. (I'd suggest a rifle, but if there really is a European hippopotamus, it's very likely to be endangered). The top floor may have had a kitchen in it, and is dedicated to the slim possibility that Pope Clement IV (r 1265-1268), who is known to have been born in the town, may have been born in that very house! Then you go downstairs and there's another set of stairways which'll show you the equipment for winemaking, olive processing, sheep shearing and woolmaking, and other local industries.

We refreshed ourselves at a nearby café and, invigorated once again, set off for Aigues-Mortes. I was there a couple of years ago and blogged about it then, and was a bit apprehensive, because tourist season had just about begun, and it's heaving with them in the summertime. We took the scenic route, though, and went through a landscape of rice fields, still flooded, that reminded me of Louisiana but for the lack of crawfish traps. Once in Aigues-Mortes, we set about assembling a picnic lunch, which we then enjoyed in the Square St. Louis, gazing at the heroic statue of the guy who launched the First Crusade, one of European Christendom's most notable disasters. ("They did, however, discover cushions when they got to the Holy Land," Elijah reminde me). This was the only part of the trip I'd have changed: if I'd realized we were going to picnic, I would have suggested picking up the supplies in Saint-Gilles because it was less touristed, and more likely to have good cheese, sausage, and pâté. And bread: what we got was from the Baguépi chain, something to avoid if you're travelling around here, since it's one step up from Wonder Bread in baguette form. No biggie: if that's the biggest complaint, it's hardly worth mentioning.

After checking out Aigues-Mortes, we headed to Montpellier, through the Petite Camargue and its pink-water salt flats. The pink comes from billions of tiny shrimp, and finds its way into the wings of the local flamingoes, who were boycotting the place a few years back until the salt producers changed some of how they were doing business and they returned. They're not pink all over like their Florida (and front-lawn) cousins, but they're graceful and that flash of pink as they fly is pretty wonderful.

Back here, the group got my walking tour of the city (still a work in progress, but it's getting better), and then, exhausted, they piled into their car and headed back to Provence. They'd parked under the shopping mall near my house, and I went with them as far as the escalator, because I knew that I was just tired enough that if I came back here to The Slum and then tried to go shopping, I just wouldn't make it.

A great day, great folks, and I hear they'll be back. Also it appears that Elijah is working on a major book, about which, in true writerly style, he gave no clue. And now it looks like there's another Stateside visitor on the way next weekend. Guess the season has begun. Anyone else on the way?

Saint-Gilles out the window of the Romanesque House

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. 

Merry Miettes of May (With Socialism and Rabbit Turds)

As I said in my last post, it's not like nothing's been happening around here, and besides the pretty much related stuff in the last post, there's been a bunch of miscellaneous miettes-like things piling up on the desk. So, because I hate clutter (short pause for audience laughter), let's clear some of it up.

* * * 

I haven't been over to the Pavillon Populaire recently because it's been one dreary academic photo show after the other. While it's commendable that the city sees the acquisition and exhibition of a municipal collection of art photography, as well as an ongoing number of curated shows during the year as part of its cultural mission, the selections tend to be pretty uninteresting and the rationale behind them full of artspeak. 

The current show, La Volonté de Bonheur (approximately, The Desire for Happiness), however, is something else. Subtitled "Photographic testimony of the Front Populaire, 1934-1938," it documents a tumultuous period in French history, during which some fairly amazing stuff happened. One thing was a huge workers' movement, as strikes turned into general strikes, and the right-wing government was brought down and a socialist one under Léon Blum was installed. As you might expect, the horrors of socialism were inflicted upon France immediately: in 1936 alone, women were given the right to vote, workers were given a 40-hour work-week, and for the first time, everyone got paid vacations. Quelle horreur, non?

It's amazing history, but not such great art, but once you walk through the show, you'll be okay with that. You'll see such familiar names as Robert Capa, Brassaï, André Kertész, and Henri Cartier-Bresson on the poster, but you'll barely notice their presence on the walls. You'll see a lot -- a lot -- of pictures of  cute kids with their fists raised, sometimes along with proud mère and père, sometimes just marching along by themselves in demonstrations or parades. You'll see workers on strike at automotive and machine shops dancing and eating lunch while they're on strike. You'll see lots and lots of pictures of gigantic demonstrations filling the streets of Paris (as with much of French history, you'll never guess that some of it actually did happen outside that city), and I gotta say, the picture used for the poster, by Fred Stein, of the guy perched on the rooftop giving the clenched-fist while a huge crowd below is milling around waiting for a parade is pretty dramatic. 

Stein, a German who relocated to Paris in 1933 and whose work is virtually unknown these days, is the discovery of the show, mainly because he got some good shots while embedded with the Front Populaire, as the huge coalition of all of the French Left was known in these years. There's a Capa that's identifiable as a Capa, but this is reportage, not art. The one exception is Cartier-Bresson's famed 1936 series of photos of French working-class families on their first vacations. There are a couple of vitrines in the show with magazines that are approximately "how-to" guides to vacationing, and a separate series by Pierre Jamet shows daily life at an "auberge de jeunesse," or teen summer camp, and you might want to check out the slideshows of his work here if you can figure out how to get in. 

This is the kind of show you want to go to on a rainy day, because there's lots of reading to do, and, if you're not up on French history, some of it will require catching up with later via some online resources. As Hitler grew in power, the Front Populaire went from being "like a convivial village fair," as one of the captions describes the general vibe, to the usual squabbling of the Left, with the Stalinists (surprise!) not helping a lot. By the end of 1937, it was over.

EDIT: According to this page -- and Marie, who commented below, women did not get the right to vote until 1944

La Volonté de bonheur: Témoinages photographiques du Front populaire 1934-1938, until June 9 at the Pavillon Populaire, Esplanade Charles de Gaulle, open Tue-Sun 10am-1pm, 2pm-6pm. Admission free. The show will also be at L'hotel Fontfreyde, Clermont-Ferrand, from Oct. 8-Jan 4. 

* * *

Je suis désolé, mais j'en doute

* * * 

Now that it's getting warmer, street life is picking up, and there are more beggars than before. As I was doing the laundry the other day, though, there was a young couple in the laundromat who looked familiar, talking in a language I didn't understand, but which sounded familiar. Aha! It came to me: Russian. Their familiarity was explained when a third person joined them, with his dirty clothes in a knapsack, and a cardboard sign which fell out as he was getting them ready for the machine: J'AI FAIM! AIDEZ-MOI! I just knew that the three or four people I saw with these identical signs had to be  connected, and I was right. That they were Russians didn't surprise me at all. They always have a small dog of some sort, too, because they know that that softens the hearts of the old ladies they depend on for their take. And just a few days ago, a new guy joined them. Of course, he had to have his own sign, and I guess they didn't have a spare dog at the moment, but they did manage to come up with a gimmick that was even better for attracting attention: his sign read J'AI FAIM! AIDEZ MOI! VIVE LA FANCE! It worked, but it was only temporary: I saw him the other day with a new sign and a dog. 

* * * 

Ever since I got here, there's been a "tropical" store on the rue de Faubourg du Courreau, which is what St. Guilhem turns into when it crosses the Boulevard de Jeu de Paume. I always wondered how they made money, since they were in a huge space and didn't have much stock, and then they expanded next door and started selling wigs. I just noticed today that they're gone, but people who need South American stuff, frozen African fish, and, on rare occasion, fresh corn tortillas (yes!) can still find them. A much smaller (and, for me, closer) store has opened. 

La Pangée keeps long hours and seems to have most of the good stuff from the old place. They're kind of hidden, but maybe word of mouth will keep them open. There are lots of things like sweet potatoes and yam and plantains and okra, and mysterious Central and South American things I don't recognize. As I keep saying, I have nothing whatever against French food, but I also like to encourage diversity. 

La Pangée, 12, rue de Balances, 34000 Montpellier. Open Mon-Sat 9:30am-8pm, Sun 10:30am-5pm. 

* * *

Finally, some news from the suburbs. I keep passing a parked car with one of those things you don't see the first few times you notice it: a sticker for a local baseball team. Yes, baseball. (I still remember my shock at having to have it pointed out that there were a bunch of Bulgarians playing baseball when I was there: apparently it's a very popular sport in that country.) 

But yes, they're the Clapiers Rabbits. I'm not sure what this is all about, but "clapier" is a word for a rabbit hutch, although the name of the town is derived from an Occitan word, according to the official Clapiers website. And, although I can't find the word I'm looking for, I was in Clapiers a couple of years ago with a couple of French women who noticed a sign on a local bakery and started giggling. It mentioned that among the specialties you could buy there (it was Sunday and it was closed, sorry to say), were Pétouls de Clapiers, the famous candy. The word which provoked the giggles, I was told was a slang word for rabbit turds. Which, assuming they're made from chocolate, might be good. Meanwhile, best of luck to the Clapiers Rabbits for the upcoming season. 

* * *

Gotta go. I swear, I had another item here, but Mme. Merde's been screaming into her cell phone out in the hall for the past half-hour and I've lost the ability to concentrate. More news as it happens!

The Ugly, The Bad, and The Good

I've inverted old Sergio Leone's formulation for the simple reason of leaving you, dear reader, with an uplift rather than a, um, downlift at the end of this post. And I'm writing the post because I haven't written anything here for a month, and gee, you'd think nothing had happened. Of course, you'd be partially right. Still, if you have a delicate constitution, you might want to skip down to the bad.

The Ugly

One of the best things about this past summer was that the family that lives directly above me was gone.  I say "family," but I'm not quite sure what the actual structure up there is. One thing that's inescapable is that there is a woman, who is much younger than she sounds, and she has two children, a boy of perhaps eight (I'm terrible at guessing kids' ages) and a toddler who is sort of pre-verbal, or just on the cusp of talking. Who the kids' father is, I have no idea. There are two men who are sometimes there. One is young, like the woman, and dresses sort of hip-hop. The other is tall, skinny, and much older, and is prone to long spells of coughing, the kind you expect to end with the thud of a body hitting the floor and, soon, the arrival of an ambulance crew. When I see him on the stairs, he's rarely without a cigarette. But he's apparently still alive. 

The thing about this crew is that the woman, who is clearly the alpha of the group, knows only one way to keep them in some kind of order, and that's by yelling. I have to say, for someone as short and slight as she is, her voice just cuts through everything, including the doors, windows, and walls of my apartment. You have met her here as Madame Merde, in honor of her most-used word. It's like the punctuation at the end of most of her sentences, at least those declaimed at the highest decibel-count in her range. I have no idea what, if anything, she does for a living, but we do have an opera company in town, and it's occurred to me more than once that with a little training, she could project right to the back of the auditorium. 

She's got a very cavalier attitude towards the fact that she has neighbors, though. She shakes out the bedding and the rugs every morning, which hasn't been a problem lately because my windows are closed. That's not going to be the case very much longer. She smokes constantly, which means ashes. When the window here by my desk is open, it accumulates cigarette ash -- far more than it ever did back when I smoked. She's got troubles, too, ones she doesn't want the kids to hear about, so she takes her cigarettes and her cell phone and sits in the stairwell and talks and talks and smokes and smokes, and sometimes she sobs. I don't listen in, despite the fact that her already loud voice is amplified by the acoustic chamber of the stairwell, or the fact that she sometimes repeats things over and over, like the other night when whatever she was talking about involved Sète, Aix, and Montpellier, words I heard a lot. You'll notice I didn't mention her taking an ashtray out into the hall with her. Guess how I know that. 

Her boy is, of course, a problem. Well, hell, I was at that age. And although I've heard her yell it now for a couple of years, I have no idea what his name is. He seems to be a nice enough kid, sometimes kicking a football around in the street, sometimes hanging with another kid his age, but he does torment his little sister, and he went through a period of being fascinated with gravity: two of the apartments across the courtyard have broken windows from his throwing toy metal cars. 

Besides his name, the words most commonly yelled upstairs are "merde" (of course), "dépêche" (hurry up), and "arrête" (stop). He often whines back in protest, which just causes his mother to raise the decibel level some more. The other day, they really got into it. Eventually, he bolted, ran outside, and, agitated beyond his usual level, leaned over the railing of the stairway and puked his guts out. 

The stairwell in happier times

I was here, working or reading or something when this all happened, but shortly afterwards I had to go out. Unconsciously, I grabbed the railing there on the right and...it was slimy. And it burned. And I ran back into my apartment and washed my hands with soap. It had been an hour or so since this incident, and, as I discovered on my next venture out, not only had Mme. Merde not cleaned the railing, she hadn't cleaned the steps, either, where the majority of the discharge had landed. 

Nor has anyone, over a week later: this was last Tuesday, and there's a reason for my noting that. We supposedly have a cleaning service that comes in and does the public areas of the building, and I get charged €30 a month for them, but that now-dried patch remains. 

The Bad

There's a cumulative effect to this constant conflict upstairs. It's that listening to angry people all the time is wearying. I'm not the one being yelled at, yet there's an unconscious perception of the emotion that acts sort of like it would if I were. This shouldn't be a problem I have to deal with, but it's just one element in the growing dissatisfaction I have with my immediate environment. When I was on the road in March, I found myself pondering an odd question: why is it that I had no problem putting my pants on in hotel rooms, yet I occasionally lose my balance when doing it at home? I had thought I was getting unstable in my old age or something, but really: zip zip and my pants were on. So I consciously thought about this when I got back here and made a discovery which led to a set of discoveries. My bedroom is so small that I don't have room to spread my legs out enough to put on a pair of pants. Moreover, I realized the other day, I've become used to stepping over the corners of the bed to get over to the window leading to the tiny balcony, which is open during the day to let in what little sunshine gets to me, and, in nice weather, fresh air: hop, hop. To get to the closet-like thing where my socks live, I have to shut one of the panels of the window, which ordinarily blocks it. And this led to other discoveries: unconsciously pulling back one shoulder or the other as I go down the hall to the bathroom or kitchen, so as not to knock over anything or spill a cup of coffee going from the kitchen to the desk. In short, I'm too big for this apartment, I have too much stuff in it, but I'm not prone enough to claustrophobia to have noticed this. 

This is what you see from the door when you enter this place.

And this is the view from the other direction

Come November, I will have been in this place, with its insane tenants and obscene rent (which was raised at the start of the year), for five years. Five years of cooking on two electric elements jammed as close together as they can be, showering with an implement that's essentially a hose with a showerhead on it that barely reaches the top of my head and that requires the use of one of my hands at all times because it doesn't hook onto the wall, and navigating without bumping into anything. With luck, come November, though, I won't be in this apartment. 

Where I will be, though, remains a big question. There's the fantasy of renting a big, inexpensive apartment in Barcelona. In fact, an old friend from Austin put me in touch with a friend of hers who's lived there for many years and is in the process of buying a new place and divesting herself of exactly the kind of apartment I've fantasized about, and at some point I'm going to head over there to look at it, although neither of us knows when it'll be empty or when I'll have the dough to make the move. There's also the question of whether I want to learn two new languages (Catalán and Spanish, although just Spanish in a pinch) in order to make this move practicable. Whether I want to, hell: if I can is more like it. I picked up a teach-yourself-Catalán course and...am not making brilliant headway. Or, to be honest, any. 

Where I will not be, most likely, is France. Which I hate to admit, because I know the language here and there's a lot I like about the place. There's a part of me that wonders if it's not time to go back to the States, although it seems, in many ways, the most foreign of my choices. The politics scare me. The lack of a social safety net scares me: imagine my health crisis in December happening in the U.S. I would likely not live long enough to see myself get out of debt. But French society, as I have noted elsewhere on this blog, is set up in a way that's antithetical to the way I live, urging a regimentation on people that I resist almost on an organic level. 

So what's to do? I hear Portugal's nice. Stay tuned. 

The Good

As I said, the incident with the kid upstairs happened a week ago this past Tuesday. As a lot of you know, that's one of the market days, where I walk across town to the outdoor market and buy stuff to eat for the next couple of days. On this particular Tuesday, one of the vendors had plentiful wooden baskets of tiny strawberries, garriguettes, so I bought one and enjoyed them on some breakfast cereal the next morning. There was also the first reasonably-priced asparagus, some fat peas in their pods, and what may be the last spinach for a while, which became part of a northern Indian chicken, spinach, almond, and raisin curry. 

This week's, not last week's, and only what's left two days after purchase.

These twice a week trips have gotten me eating better, losing weight (and not just from the two-mile walk that a trip to the market entails), and increasing my cooking skills immensely, even on that wretched excuse for a stove in my tiny kitchen. (Another sad thing about the space-crunch in this apartment is that it's far too small for me to have anyone over for dinner, which has been part of my socializing routine for decades). They're reminders that I'm in a part of the world, which, unlike Berlin, pays close attention to the seasons and rests in surroundings capable of producing a huge variety of natural products. (Incidentally, for my friends in Berlin, I just read a book which casually noted that the ancient Prus, the ancestors of the Prussians, were pre-agricultural until the thirteenth century! Dang, no wonder they never developed a cuisine worthy of the name.)

Wherever I wind up next, I'm pretty committed to continuing this way of life. It doesn't cost a lot, and it's good for me. I'm very thankful that I discovered this, even if it took me most of my life to do so. 

And I'll be back here with another post soon, believe me. It's just that the post-trip comedown this time was hard to deal with, and, as you can see, I'm still dealing with some of the fallout.