Chez Nous

Most of the houses here are enclosed by walls.  The island is basically an overgrown sandbar, so for centuries people built low stone barriers to protect their gardens and fruit trees.  The local limestone is not overly abundant; walls of 3-4 feet are sufficient to keep the wind from menacing most vegetables, and the ivory-colored stone reflects the overly robust blaze of the summer sun.

As properties more recently transformed from farmhouses to vacation homes, the walls changed to smoothed concrete and grew taller -- typically 6-8 feet high.  This creates, for me, an unpleasantly contradictory atmosphere: the houses crowd close together, yet are isolated.  There's not much waving-hello-to-your-neighbor or commenting on the flowers because everyone is holed up in their little compound.  (To be fair, everyone is chatty at the markets and cafes, and there's lots of public land and beach.)  The villages feel both hyper-dense and deserted.

Occasionally there's a house with a wire fence, and the effect is almost park like, breathing green and openness and life into the neighborhood.  Even rarer are houses at the village limit, abutting farm fields or forest.  Happily, we found the trifecta: a house at the end of the road, that faces the trees of a bird preserve on one side and fields on the other, with no walls.

After a great deal of paperwork and planning (mostly Jean-François) and packing and fretting (mostly me), we move in this weekend.  I will resist the temptation to immediately begin unpacking the clothes and kitchen things and 37 boxes of books, and instead make a little fire in the little fireplace(!) and clink glasses with my delightful companion.

the coastal trail to La Flotte, our new town

little runny birds who run-run-run in front of the waves

normal activities around the corner from the university

coral?

all the winter the coast can handle 

Hearing Voices

The perfect level of background chatter, in a café or train, is like water flowing in a small creek.  A busy bar or house party full of people pressed together is the crashing calamity of whitewater, a waterfall that drowns out.  A class of recent émigrés stumbling over a dictation pulses and crescendos like a pond of spring peepers, the volume inching upward, punctuated by random monosyllabic yelps.  Chatting with a new acquaintance is as though tuning in and out of reception and static as the weather report warns of rough seas...then foundering on unavoidable rocks.  A thoughtful person with precise enunciation is like sipping a generously poured cocktail.  A word of amorous affection -- an ice cube melting on your tongue.

Sometimes I dream in French, but even in the dream I feel something's not quite right, or I'm just making things up.  Occasionally, a word of French pops into my mind, unbidden, in the omnipresent stream of internal monologue, like, "Ok, now I'll stir the soup; the potatoes are looking bien cuit, so it's almost done."

Then there's the awkwardness of what to do with words like "croissant" and "Paris" when I'm speaking in English: just say them normal, or with a ridiculous accent ("KWA-saw," "pah-REE")?  Or what to do about "librairie" and "collège"?  Say them without the accent and they become "library" instead of the word for bookstore, and "college" as in university, rather than the word for junior high.

The silver lining of my nascent comprehension is that I don't have to overhear banal conversations.  Unconcerned with eavesdropping or unignorable cellphone calls, I can retreat deeply into reading in public, and later resurface with the bewildered thought, "Why is everybody speaking in French?"

end of semester celebratory class lunch

good horizontal lines

barge + Pantheon

Warm November Rain

With the exception of one overnight frost and two furious days of 60+ mph winds, November just kept truckin' along with what I think of as early autumn weather and vibe.  Everyone is in jackets and scarves, but a sunny afternoon easily hits 70F.  Outdoor cafe seating is full, there are still flowers growing, and I just walked by a dude splashing around in the ocean without a wetsuit.

After satisfactorily passing my midterms, I stuck my neck out and went on my first new-friend date.  Catherine is French and lived with her American husband in San Francisco for twenty years.  She arrived speaking no English and remembers well her confusion and fatigue, and thus sympathizes with me.  We met at her studio for lunch and she showed me her current projects including collages and manipulating different kinds of leather to encase objects -- bones, driftwood, rocks.

Every November, La Rochelle hosts an international adventure film festival, a superabundance of independent documentaries about all kinds of outdoor pursuits.  My favorite was about a surf club in Liberia that functions as a community center and local economic engine, and organizes group therapy for former child soldiers.  Q&A with the directors after each film was fun because they're all basically ski bums who channel their drive to seek good powder into a passion for storytelling.

The other amazing thing about November was my reacquaintance with roast chicken.  Here, even the humble bargain legs in styrofoam at the supermarket are perfect: they have not been saturated with saline and are therefore dry; they don't piss a bunch of flavorless liquid into the pan, so you can roast your veggies together with the chicken and get caramelized nuggets of root vegetable.  This almost makes up for the three times and counting I've visited the government office to try to obtain a social security number.

cute by day

sexy by night

in the pink

Wherefore hast thou forsaken me, O Winter?

plant stars

Because I guess we're culture gluttons, or I'm a bit parched after years in the wilderness, we stuffed two days in Paris full of museums, theater, and Lebanese food.  And I got to pet Marta's cute new cat.

cozy theater

Be My Guest

"When life gives you lemons/proof of the endemic misunderstanding of economics, racism, sexism, and nihilism of one's society, make lemonade/feverishly binge watch a distracting fantasy."  And so it came to pass that I finally watched Emily in Paris.  It's just as preposterous as I had imagined, but man, it's nice to see some hot men in beautiful places and watch a relentless woman make it in a new town through force of will and a boatload of serendipity.  It's in this vein of confectionery escapism that I now write to you, friends, hoping to provide a short break from quotidian and existential disappointments.

But I didn't watch Emily in Paris alone -- I was with my delightful friend Sam.  Sam is my first visitor(!), connecting the seasonal world to my own new adventure living in France.  She and I worked together a few summers ago in Alaska and bonded over long talks in the sauna, hiking and kayaking, and our increasing distaste for the multi-colored-exclamation-point-smattered-corporate-speak e-mails (and the in-person equivalent) that one boss saw fit to spam us with.  But I digress; Sam arrived in France ready to indulge in generous amounts of dairy, seafood, dessert, and bicycling.  We scoured the bakeries of La Rochelle for the best croissant, had a seaside cheese picnic, slathered our baguettes with butter, and cycled over the bridge and through the woods and beside the low cliffs that give way to oyster aquaculture and coastal marshland.  

To best utilize our time exploring the city, Sam arranged a home-exchange apartment for us in the very center of La Rochelle.  For a few days I was once again a city dweller in a chic neighborhood, tripping down the cobblestones and wending through colorful markets, flowing with the ebb and flood tides of people as the midday and evening crowds filled and emptied the charismatic streets.

This fishing hut would be the perfect writing shack.

grapes are dun 

The morning after the election Sam and I were a bit down and took a ride on a carousel, which cheered us up and also provided a cheesy metaphor for our uneasy sense of finding ourselves, after pointless circling, back again where we were not so long ago...

The aquarium, on the other hand, was fucking great.

Come visit, we'll get a drink at the harbor!

October-fest

To better contextualize the grammar, French class has included the study of such subjects as encouraging sustainable consumerism, Senegalese street food, contemporary slang for arguing with your landlord, and a group of pranksters who scaled a cathedral dressed as Spiderman.  We learn related vocabulary to bolster this conversational framework, and alternate between chatting in groups, listening to short interviews, and writing.  On Mondays, I also have a Civilization class -- basically, general important facts about France, like its borders and mountain ranges, and how it co-opted the Renaissance from Italy.  On Fridays, I have History, in which we focus on the local contrarianism that makes La Rochelle special.  (The ascendant medieval merchant class aligned with Protestantism to disrupt entrenched Catholic and feudal hierarchies; today, they host the annual Socialist Party shindig.)

As if all that weren't simultaneously stimulating and fatiguing enough, a deluge of extracurricular activity -- primarily, house-hunting -- has flooded our domestic riverbed.  Prospective buyers, agents, notaries, architects, builders, square footage, sketches, plans, clumsily articulated hopes and dreams, lengths, distances, money...!  A few highlights from the saga: 1) being shown a house with a burst pipe(?) actively dripping the length of the living room; 2) discovering that the water meter of our current house was never registered and no bills were issued for seven years; 3) successfully negotiating the seller's vintage leather bar seats into our purchase.

Happily, it seemed as though La Rochelle was cheering us on through the morass of uncertainty.  Friends invited us for pleasant diversions, the annual jazz festival was solid, and a historic boat parade wowed the city with a fireworks extravaganza.  And we uncorked some champagne to celebrate one year together.

our French professor encourages us to use a wide variety of learning and memorization tools

from disco to Tchaikovsky to the theme from Jurassic Park, with colored lights and dudes waving sparklers on jet-skis, it was a multimedia production

a benefit of the bike commute

fall colors

Treasure Island

Ile de Ré is essentially the French Martha's Vineyard.  There are a handful of charming villages with classic central places (a café, a bakery, a few small shops).  Much of the land remains agricultural, mostly given over to grapes.  The coast is at once both beautiful and fierce -- the long sandy beaches are punctuated by limestone cliffs and various rocky layers of seabed that emerge at low tide, and the winds and currents can generate formidable square wave patterns.  

A smallish year-round population of retirees, local business owners, and laborers includes many families with deep island roots, still selling oysters and harvesting sea salt.  There are $5 million second homes down the street from family campgrounds with ball courts; there are luxury boutiques with grotesquely expensive purses close to deteriorating Nazi lookout bunkers.  During summer everywhere is at max capacity, with roughly 200,000 tourists that cannot get enough of the artisanal ice cream and/or riding bikes incredibly slowly down the middle of the road.

It is a low-lying, windswept, and (despite the tourists) rather quiet place.  In addition to the abundant shellfish, an early attraction was the natural predisposition for salt harvesting.  There are great swaths of tidal marsh where shallow pools gradually evaporate at low tide.  While today it's merely tasty and full of minerals, salt in the Middle Ages was scarce and in high demand, and with a bit of engineering, humans maximized the yield.  Thus did La Rochelle become France's biggest port, and its citizens leveraged significant political and religious autonomy.  Salt from the island is still a coveted commodity, sold across France for about 20 times the usual price.

There is a scenic bike path that winds through the salt marshes near Loix, in the farthest corner of the island.  The cool autumn evenings and waning daylight have tinged the leaves.  We cycled past yellowing vineyards, entered the muted gray silt and sere-blond grasses of the marsh, dotted with white seagulls and the occasional balletic egret.  Rich, red-purple glasswort(?) bearded the pond-grid.  And "flowers" of salt imperceptibly crystallized, molecule by molecule, drawn from the sea by the sun and wind. 

salt marsh

The berms of clay-soil divide the water, and gravity carries it into increasingly salty solution 

A lot of the bunker graffiti promotes "Save the Big Fat Whales"

crazy guy, crazy sunset

low tide sunset is rough on the toes but easy on the eyes

Rochelle, Rochelle

One of our conversation starters the first day of school last week was, "When did you arrive in La Rochelle?"  The eight Ukrainians that make up half the class all arrived in 2022; the three American undergrads all arrived a week ago; two Afghan nurses have been here a semester already; the nice Brazilian guy got here in summer.  Even though I technically arrived in March, it is only very recently that I've stayed for two consecutive weeks.  Jean-François and I have taken a grand total of one long walk in the city.  So in many ways, I still feel like a new arrival.

I am piecing the place together with my bicycle commute: 8 miles traversing two cute villages, a longish bridge almost invariably howling with wind, the industrial exurbs of the commercial harbor and airport, and finally the charming and tourist-choked 17th-century cobblestone streets of the city center and old harbor, the far side on which the university sits.  Sweaty and bedraggled, I eat some cheese, stare at sailboats for a few minutes, and try to remember what one of my favorite-sounding words -- presque -- means.  ("Almost.")

The core of the old city is actually pretty compact, but the several basins and channels it clusters around imbue a sense of expansiveness, extending the amount of "coastline" and open space.  It's difficult to believe only about 75,000 people live here; there are countless festivals and cultural events, a big aquarium, Jacques Cousteau's old boat, and seemingly more bakeries than I could ever visit.  At least right now while the weather is nice, the sidewalk and quayside bars and restaurants are vibrant, the medieval towers guarding the harbor entrance tranquilly sun themselves, and a contented student awaits her companion for an aperitif as the sun fades toward the equinox.

Clairey's first day of school

my lunch spot

the prettiest part of the commute

downtown