The ocean, again and again

 

It is time to look at pictures of the ocean.

"But I don't wanna look at pictures of the ocean!"

Yes, sorry, I understand, but I live on the Cote d'azur. You get pictures of water, specifically of the glorious Mediterranean Sea. When I lived in Saint Minneapolis it was detailed pictures of the local hidden falls creek and the Mississippi River.

It's just how it goes.

Clerkmanifesto without pictures of water:  

Twenty million readers, book deals, movie rights, and enough money to buy bottles of champagne without having an existential budget crisis.

Clerkmanifesto with pictures of water: 

You and seven other readers, one of whom is possibly having a mental breakdown. A life's work as its own reward.

But we all have our muses.

I have chosen to follow mine.

Cheese

 

I did champagne yesterday, though there's always more to say about that.

So what about the cheese?

Oooh la la.

We live just around the corner from the best fromagerie in the city. It is a pretty and neat shop with an austere proprieter. I think he possibly does not have a sense of humor. He also speaks English, which is a nice reminder that being able to communicate is not a panacea for the challenges of life in the city.

Don't reach into any of the cases!

Wait politely!

One thing at a time!

Sometimes there are other people working in the small shop, cutting things, setting things up. They are nice and friendly looking minions, but I don't think they help people. Only the master helps people. He wraps your cheese carefully. He uses a lot of tape when he does. 

It is his one weakness; slightly too much tape.

Even with communication technically possible, choosing cheese can be pretty challenging. Oh, not for your more known and universal goudas and comtes and ossau iratys, though even the choice of one of those engenders an eye-test-like series of choices:

"Older or younger?"

"Stonger or smoother?"

I don't know. You're the one who knows every single thing about cheese! You tell me what to get and I'll get it. 

But cheese is hard to talk about. Look at me struggle now.

And then when you get into the singular display cheeses, the 15 styles of individual goat cheeses in various shapes and forms and colors, well, it is hopeless. So you just pick one.

That one! The nine euro one!

I like it because it doesn't have alot of mold on it. And it has a pretty... shape.

Then come the questions:

"The pale one, or the light caramel one?"

"Would you like a firmer or softer one?"

What's the difference?

Well, the firmer one is still willing to sit there quietly. The softer one is starting to inch its way towards the exit.

I take the firmer.

It is wrapped up really well!

Very secure.

Later we eat our prize goat cheese with some amazing lemon bergamont marmelade my darling wife made. The cheese has woken up now and is inching its way off the plate. Don't let this bother you. It is the best cheese you have ever tasted!

"This is the best cheese I have ever tasted" has already been said a fair few times in our little attic apartment. We might have to choose a new phrase for it.

How about:

Oooh la la?

Champagne every day

 

I know what you're thinking:

"I bet he drinks champagne every day!"

So true.

Oh, you want to know the truth?

Okay, but remember, you asked for this.

Or I pretended you asked for it.

Whatever.

The truth is: 

In France they keep all the sparkling wines behind the counter!

Like, it's too valuable and wonderful to trust the public with.

And champagne is tres cher.

Very expensive!

Ooh la la.

People say "Ooh la la" all the time here!

You wanted the truth.

And the truth is that the cheapest champagne starts at at least 20 euros. So I rarely drink it. But I do drink all kinds of proseccos and sparkling Rose's and so on. Some of these can get pretty cheap, and probably fairly disgusting, but they still keep them behind the counter!

Ninety euro bottle of bordeaux? Help yourself off the shelf Monsieur. Seven euro bottle of Cremant?

Oh no!

Ooh la la! We are afraid you will lose control!

And I might!

I drink a lot of sparking wines. And if they're not quite doing it for me?

I just add ice, aperol, and sparkling water, the humble Italian delight: An Aperol Spritz.

Thank god Itlay is always just around the corner here, ready to bail us out.

Notre Dame

 

Down the street from here is the Notre Dame, or officially The Basilique Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption. It's a nice looking church. I like coming up on it from the park in its backyard, seeing its chancel and apse among its palm trees, through which at the right time its stained glass looks like hidden jewels. Plus, it's right across from the Darty, which is a handy huge appliance store where we got our printer and our record player and a few other things.

It's not the greatest church here by any means. It's only about 150 years old. The local dignitaries built it right around the time this area became part of France (yes, this could have been Italy!), and they tried to make it look super French to sort of get with the program. So, you know, it looks like the Notre Dame in Paris, a "neo gothic" style which was the style everyone felt screamed France back then. 

I still haven't been inside the church. I don't think it's open a lot.

So I probably wouldn't be talking about it except last night we were shopping for things in a couple of art stores near there and, looking down one street towards the central street it is on, it was illuminated. And, oh my, it was beautiful!

So even though down the street we were on there was a bunch of construction, I took a bunch of pictures of it.

Today we were at the Museum of Photography in the old city, and both of us were immensely struck by the show, long exposure black and white photographs by Michael Kenna. I liked how careful and beautiful each of the photos were, and I started thinking, as I periodically do, how it would be nice to just show one careful photo here instead of a chain of them.

Well, not today. 

I always love that idea of one really perfect picture, but my photos kind of ramble about things, going this way and that, and tell their sometimes small stories in little pieces. Kind of like my prose really.

So here's Notre Dame, at night, coming closer:

Vegetables

 

Prices fluctuate wildly and for nearly everything across the shops and markets of this city. Sometimes it is surely related to the quality of the item, sometimes it might just have to do with where or even when one buys it. Oranges, growing all over this city, might come from Spain or Italy or that French island floating out somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. They might look spectacular or be rotting before my eyes. They can cost something like a euro a pound or four euros a pound. I have gotten great ones and awful ones at any price range.

Today we went to a store that called itself a Halles, like a market hall, but I think it is just a solid single owner large vegetable market with very good prices. It is conveniently located not far from the sea and very close to a frankly brilliant Italian style coffee counter that is all the rage right now with my family. Finding inexpensive stuff like this market, which happened in its own way in the very inexpensive Japan, brings me back to the past somehow. Like, reasonable prices are strangely nostalgic. In the US I think we have been through several waves of largely fake, monopoly driven inflation. I believe that has maybe happened with some things here, but others are untouched. 

I got the untouched stuff today.

Here is my shopping items that went into my large sac and was heavy and uncomfortable as we walked around the city and even went to the Photography Museum:

three beautiful red peppers

two very unusually colored heirloom looking carrots

three generic yellow potatos, medium large

three generic onions, medium

A few cute baby artichokes

five mushrooms

a head of garlic

a smaller eggplant of the expensive kind because they had interesting cheaper ones but they were too gigantic! Like, melon sized!

three vine strands full of ripe cherry tomatoes that look pretty nice

A fennel bulb

Total price: Ten Euros and two cents.

My favorite part is they had the machine where you pay in cash at the checkout instead of handing money back and forth. I love those.

It's a good haul. I try to eat a lot of vegetables to allow for all the cheese, champagne, and pastry.

The cheese is still pretty expensive.

This is a close-up of one of the carrots after I ate most of it:

 

Stoned

 

It is a rare day, good or bad, in this city, where I do not, at least a few times, feel high on drugs.

There is no way to take in all the time how pretty so many things are here in France when we are walking around. There's too much of it. Plus, I live here. I dodge dogshit every day. We stumble down the same streets over and over. We try to avoid communication disasters when we're just buying dishsoap. We still don't understand how cream works here. There seems to be eleven kinds of cream, but I'm not sure any are the sort to put in coffee. And they include long collections of words on the containers like "Fraiche" and "Fluide" and "entier" and "Fleurette" and so on, each somewhat understandable, but grouped together in constantly novel and never repeated ways. We walk endlessly, things opening and closing around us at any given time. Sometimes we cross the city to go somewhere only to find them shuttered like they never existed. Things don't always work out.

And then we'll see the light on a three century old building, or the water of the Mediterranean, or a seagull will fly by before us in slow motion, slow motion! and I could swear I am so high that Hunter S. Thompson would be taken aback. Cannons explode. Opera singing pours from a building onto the beach. 

Holy shit. 

And then we go get a coffee.

The town square

 

Though I have been in many cities across the western world, and seen a few town squares, I don't think I ever really understood them. But this one, in my new city, is starting to fall into place. Everything goes through it; the trams, some cars (alas), the connection of the old city to the park to the beach and to the main pedestrianized street. And it is huge and grand and maybe a bit much. This is because it is made for the big moments of the city. And that's probably where I missed understanding in the past.

It helped that when we moved here this giant plaza was the epicenter of the Christmas Market, which extended from either side of it into a kind of long park that runs diagonally from the ocean deep into the city. Then it seemed full, with amusement park rides and seasonal dioramas, decorations and food and vin chaud stalls all around. Now that Christmas is over the central plaza is a bit oversized again, but in a month comes Carnival, one of the biggest in the world, and surely every bit of it will be pressed into service again.

And though I make a few digs at how big it is, it really is lovely. We're through there most days, usually en route to the ocean or to the old city, or looking for the quickest way home. It has weird matching giant seated figure statues high up on poles, a very large fountain, a ferris wheel, and it is surrounded by all the lovely buildings in the rich signiature colors of that part of the city. The statues and the water in the fountain were particularly standing out to me around sunset a couple nights ago, so I took a few pictures. 

I did not add cats.

What it looks like here, with cats!

 

A couple of days ago here I set forth a small series of photographs from my travels around town just as they came out of the camera. My point was that in all our explorations of this lovely Belle Epoque city, I usually manage a few pictures that look okay just as they are.

But I do like to make them look better.

So here, from that same collection, are the pictures as they are after going through a few layers of work.

Oh, and I put a cat in each of them.