Pecking Orders

Since we have been trying to travel as much as possible while living over here in France for this amazing year, people often ask us which locale has been our favorite. This question almost invariably yields an enthusiastic description from yours truly of wherever we have most recently visited. Because, with the exception of the Spanish cities to which we have traveled, it seems that wherever we go instantly achieves the (albeit fleeting) status of being our "favorite" place.

It is a fairweather attitude, I realize.

And again, I know there are a lot of people who take issue with my "anti-Spain stance". Thus, I feel compelled to reiterate that I am not averse to Spain, but I just have not loved it the way I have loved so many of the other places we have seen and experienced. Maybe the next time I set foot on Spanish soil, I will feel otherwise. I am definitely open to loving Spain. After all, I do wholeheartedly enjoy flemenco, sangria, and tapas, so some of the groundwork has been laid for a positive future to be had between us. Time will tell.

But anyway, my dance card is regularly well-filled with my latest favorite places. The very top slot is forever changing (I know--fickle, fickle, fickle me), but that seems a rather good problem to have. And "good problem" seems a rather oxymoronic thing to say, but that is neither here nor there.

Given what I have just shared about my transient affinities, the following admission is probably rather obvious--but after returning from the Loire Valley a couple of weeks ago, the region quickly usurped the number one position on my list (a spot that had been occupied by Normandy for the past couple of months). The visit left me positively swooning about the beauty of the area; the chateaux, the countryside, the amazing troglodyte-cave hotel at which we stayed.

So when friends of ours who were here last week asked what my favorite place was, I immediately gushed and gooed over our most recent travel destination: the Loire Valley. It was fresh in my mind from the visit there the week prior. By the way, I am not oblivious to the rather transparent fact that "freshness" plays a role in my assigning of these (mythical) medals. Freshness is not a bad way to rate things, and if you disagree, I invite you to consider this idea the next time you stop by your refrigerator for a snack. Moreover, however, the Loire is deserving of a high rating since it is an embodiment of landscape perfection.

After my effusive verbal emoting over the Loire, I admitted that I changed my mind quite a bit about the ultimate European destination. And thus...

The next day we took the TGV three hours south-west of Paris, with those very friends who posed the "Where is your favorite place?" question, to the coastal city of La Rochelle. From La Rochelle, we hopped on an hour bus ride and were dropped off on Ile de Re, in the tiny village of St. Martin de Re.

You can imagine what happened next. Yup. Ile de Re is now number one on my list.

The village surrounds an impossibly picturesque harbor which is filled with boats of all sizes, and lined by adorable cottage-like houses, crawling with green vines which are interspersed with large blooming roses in a variety of colors. The town is truly that town that you see on the pages of a glossy travel magazine and think; "I want to visit that quaint European sea-side village!" Yet you never actually seem to be able to locate a town like that when you actually are traveling. Well, the search is over: we found it people. Il de Re is where it is at.

So we began or venture by eating mussels in a delicious creamy-butter sauce, accompanied by vibrantly-hued salads made with gorgeously fresh produce. We ate as we sat overlooking the harbor, sipping wine, and chatting. The locals sitting at the table behind us were sharing an afternoon bottle of port, having a laugh over several different tales, and intermittently pausing from their social hour to conduct some business (one of them was the purveyor of the bicycle shop, conveniently located five feet behind the resto, and he performed some light maintenance in between sips of port and drags from his Frenchie cig). Post lunch, we poked around the village boutiques, loading up on the famous regional salt and purveying the various bird-themed paraphernalia for sale in the shops. (BTW, the oiseau mystery is yet to be solved. To this untrained eye, there were not more, or more interesting, birds on Ile de Re than there seem to be anywhere else, but they did have some lovely items for sale if birds are your home-decorating thing). Just to complete this nirvana of a sojourn: we rented bikes (with baskets), and peddled past fields of wild red poppies and bored-looking bovines to wind up at what must be one of the most gorgeous beaches ever. Starfish wriggled in the tidal pools, the water was a brilliant green-blue, and the sand was soft as can be.

Ile de Re was just so relaxing. It was friendly, it was small, it boasted beautiful views, yummy food, and donkeys who wore blue and white trousers.

I know, I had you at "donkeys who wore trousers." Obviously, it is my new favorite place.

However, let's not sign anything with a sharpie yet. We leave on Tuesday for a two-plus week trip through Italy, and that dance-card pecking order will no doubt shuffle 8-13 times in the coming weeks. Pasta and gelato and wine, oh my...

Special Secret Accent Classes

Last week, some of our great friends from New York City were visiting us. Now let me tell you something about folks from the Big Apple: they are difficult to impress. This opinion is not to say that our friends themselves are difficult because they are not in the slightest. Nor do I mean to imply through my subjective claim that they ever vocalized any sort of, even marginal, un-impressed state during their visit. They all seemed to love Paris--two had never been here while the other two had been here but had mysteriously walked away from prior visits without feeling wholly taken with this place. Thus, true to my hyper-obsessed with Paris persona, I pushed it on them. Mission accomplished (or so they said--they might have just feared that admitting anything less than adulation would result in another trek following their butter-obsessed leader as she elbowed a path through busy St. Germain to go to the "best bakery ever" only to find out it was closed).

Our friends were ideal visitors in the all-around sense; they spoke some French, they had done extensive research about what they wanted to see and where they wanted to eat, they used the metro with ease, and they showed us new components of this magical city that is forever surprising us. Best of all, they were not shy about having wine with lunch. Who has two thumbs and likes this crowd?

But another thing they did was to make me feel like an idiot.

Of course, the impartation of that emotion was definitely inadvertent. Hello! I did say they were my friends. And it was probably unsuspected too (as in, they might be reading this entry now and thinking, "What the fudgsicle is Maggie talking about?") They just seemed to easily fit into the scene here without encountering any of the SNAFUs and major life obstacles I seem to encounter on a minute-by-minute basis. Three of them had French language skills they had acquired through high school and a few college courses. None were French majors, nor had they even uttered a word in French in the past decade or so--to my knowledge at least (maybe they have been busy conjugating French verbs at work while the rest of their office obsessivley checks Facebook and/or have been joining French chat rooms for years now. But neither came up in conversation, so I have to assume that there was no practicing of the langue francais any time in recent history). Yet, they were confidently dropping (relevant and sensical) phrases, producing gutteral "R"s like it was no one's business, and correctly identifying verb tenses as though it was as natural a thing to be doing as eating a sandwich at noon.

For someone who took French all through college, who lived here as a 21-year-old, and who has struggled through Alliance Francaise classes and sessions with a lovely (if halitosis-afflicted) French tutor, this ease with conversing made me feel tres bete.

Also, as waiters smiled and courted us, people everywhere practically fell over themselves with friendliness, and we sailed through life in France with nary a SNAFU, I was wondering if my friends either thought that I was: A. An overreactive, prevaricator who actually leads a terrifically banal life in super-friendly Paris and thus makes up endless allegations of scowling bakers, menacing waiters, and perpetually paradoxical conditions. Or B. They pitied my idiocy at having so much difficulty acclimatizing to this place. After all, people here make it so darn easy!

Well whatever, I have had issues, and I have no idea if it is me, Parisians, the grey winter, the fact that butter prices increased this past winter, or the "issue" that I insist on wearing my gym clothes to and fro the gym (rather than showing up in full dressy-wear, only to immediately strip it off and sweat for an hour and then subsequently spend TWO more hours in the locker room remaking myself. Heaven forbid people on the street see me in workout clothes. For shame!)

Maybe living in NYC makes you impervious to the struggles inherent with urban living in general. Or maybe people in NYC are so closed off and unfriendly that people in Paris seem just downright loquacious and amenable. Or maybe there were special French accent classes given at schools across New England, and my school cut them in order to have money to build "essential" new squash courts.

Or maybe I just have some especially well-traveled friends who make it work.

I suppose all I really know, the crucial "takeaway" of this important piece of prose here, is as follows: even after 9 months of living here, my accent still bites. And that, my friends, is definitely not impressive.

Or maybe it is impressive, in an inverse sort of way.

In any case, it was awesome to see that saavy band of NYC'ers (if a bit humbling). And we did a bit of traveling too. More on that in the next entry...

Paradoxes Aplenty

My dear friend just gave me this great book that talks a lot about the paradoxes that exist in Paris. It makes me laugh out loud because many "simple" things here have baffled me to the nth degree due to the myriad inexplicable contradictions occurring within interactions and situations that "should" be rather straightforward (see prior entries about setting up a bank account for a small example). It is nice and validating to know that others are also subject to these haphazard "rules". And, as it happens, laughing at the unspoken arbitrariness of Parisian life is considerably more enjoyable than being publicly shamed to tears by the people who enforce them.

So, along those lines, I was walking through the park near my apartment the other afternoon and I saw something unusual occurring. There were approximately 100 kids in the park, which is about 75 more than there was room for given that the park in its entirety is about the size of a zoo cage (I realize how un-bizarre it is that I would come up with that particular analogy. My mind just naturally seems to view children as being indiscernible from zoo animals). This overstuffing of miniature humans running around like caged animals was not the strange haps, as it were. Rather, what gave me pause was the fact that the vast majority of these tykes were toting large red balloons as they galloped, skipped and threw themselves around in fits of "I-don't-yet-understand-how-dark-and-stormy-the-world-is" glee .

Now, I have to say that it troubles me that a park which does not allow dogs or picnics would allow young kids to run around with balls of stretched-to-capacity plastic. Once they pop--and pop they will given their over-filled nature working in conjunction with the sticks, playground apparati, and other child-park paraphernalia lying about--they will induce inevitable crying jags for various possessors of these "fun toys." Not to mention the fact that who wants to sit in a park and be unceremoniously jarred to attention by the unexpected popping of a balloon right near you? Not to mention that no one likes the sound of popping balloons period. Not to mention the plastic debris which will litter the ground in post-popping bird-strangling manner.

Or I could mention all of that.

So the whole enterprise confused me. Until I happened to notice a small green sign that was posted right on the chain link entrance gate to the park. The sign stated one thing: that balloons were interdit (forbidden).

It seems important to note here that the French word for "balloon" can actually also be the same word for "ball". Thus, you may interested to know that amongst the balloon-less children, there were countless balls of different sizes and shapes being tossed around and kicked in the direction of innocent readers heads.


So that is why they all have balloons and balls; because there is a sign expressly saying that they are not allowed. Hence, they are likely waiting for some American or other brave foreigner to report the alleged breach of justice to the park police and be publicly shamed to tears (again) about the fact that balloons are allowed on Saturdays. Or on Tuesdays. Or between 12 and 1 every other Wednesday. Or some other arbitray rule that is not posted on the sign, or anywhere at all for that matter. I swear they just do this stuff to make anyone on the "outs" feel like a moron.

Not that I would EVER report such a thing. I have cried enough, thank you very much.

And, by way of solidifying my need to mind my own business and thus retain any final shred of self-dignity I have remaining after 9 months in Paris, I am reminded of a time I walked through that very park a couple of months ago. I said "Bonjour" to the militant gentleman who mans the park security booth, and then looked at the only five people in the park at the time. They were sitting and smoking in a circle on the lawn, directly in front of the man's booth. Incidentally, they were socializing right next to a sign that stated that sitting on the lawn was interdit from mid-October to mid-April. It was March. I glanced back at the man as if to say: "Hey, we have RULE-BREAKERS over here!" I assumed he might be pleased to possibly make some people cry. Nope. Instead he glared at me, likely because I did not add a "Monsieur" to the "Bonjour", and/or because he detected my non-French accent. Obviously, he allowed the law-breakers to carry-on without interruption.

I mean what good is a sign stating what to do, if you are actually expected to do it? By way of wrapping this piece up, I would say that I could meet you in that park next weekend, with a dog, a picnic, and a bunch of balloons, and we could have a grand old time. But the problem is that if we ever did that, we would likely be kicked out right away--and maybe banned from that particular patch of grass forever. Why or how this retribution could be justified given the observations I have just shared, I cannot say in any way that makes any sort of sense. But trust me on this one.