Last days in Theoule Sur Mer

 

What a little French beach town it is here in Theoule Sur Mer! And if someone had wanted to give us a neat and pretty apartment with a view of the sea I would have gladly settled in to watch old age slowly roll in here. But no one wanted to give us one of those, and it probably worked out for the best. I think we'll do better disappearing into the wilderness of a big city. The tight world of this French Village doesn't quite have all the things one might think of when they imagine living in France.

What does one think of when they imagine living in France?

Champagne bars!

Cheese shops!

Opera Houses!

Matisse Museums!

But yes, also quaint houses with flowers climbing their crumbling walls even in the Winter, and Christmas lights in the street with a village hall packed full of tiny nativity scenes from hundreds of cities across the world.

I'm just saying nowhere is going to have everything.  That is the nature of... everywhere. We picked our pile. I'm nervously looking forward to settling down.

But a couple of more days here is fine. The waves roll in. I'll try to finish eating what I have in the fridge. We go for one more lovely walk on the once confusing now familiar winding streets and paths. I take a few pictures. None of them turn out anywhere near how magic they seem when I take them, but if you want to just see a plain picture today, with nothing added or made more fancy, I can show you that, just so the leaving won't be too sad.

Theoule market

 

We finally made it to the Theoule Sur Mer market! Though we have been living here for approaching two months, we have somehow missed the village market on every single Friday it has taken place! At first ignorance kept us away, and then a comedy of errors conspired to cause us to miss the market each week, first through apartment hunting, then due to the unfortunately timed business of closing on our lease and setting up house, and then through a variety of appointments and health emergencies cropping up at just the wrong time every friday in a mysterious ill-fated clockwork. Even today, we only made it back to the market by waking early in our big city apartment, and then dashing to just in time catch the train back here. 

But finally, finally we made it!

Out in the village square, which is really more of a roundabout than a village square, but whatever, I'm not going to run down dear little Theoule Sur Mer, the market was gloriously gathered. Now keep in mind this is not a big town, and it is Winter, so it is impressive that there was anything there at all, but, the market consisted of three vendors. 

Just three, but that's more than none.

And as for patrons, well, there was us.

So I did my part as well as I could.

There was the vegetable and fruit vendor (good prices on pineapples, but not local). There was an olive man. And there was a fishmonger. As for vegetables, we have a good supply on that at our two places in town so I gave him a pass. I was sad there was no cheesemonger, but really, fish was no small thing. There is nothing in the way of fish to be got in this town so I got a nice hefty salmon steak. There were a few other fishes, notably some extremely crude cross section chunks of something that almost looked like swordfish but I don't think was. I cooked the salmon today in olive oil, salt, lemon, and chunks of garlic. It was really good! I found it fresh and enjoyed the versimilitude of the flimsy bag the fish lady threw it in. The price was only five or six euros too, which seemed a fair deal.

I also bought, with a bit less alacrity, some olives from the man who emerged from his car to serve me (perhaps keeping warm in there?). I have had shocking few opportunities to buy olives anywhere and being in Provence it seemed high time I dug in. I got little black, nicoise olives and some green garlic ones. On the whole they were fine, with a similar touch of unrefined crudeness to them not unlike the savage cuts to the fish steaks. I also got some sort of tomato... thing (a sauce? a reduction?) that I'll try tomorrow. Mostly I was just proud to have taken part in the village commerce.

Tomorrow is the Theoule Christmas Celebration of some kind. We are not sure what to expect, but we don't expect much, though the lights are nice to see already. We do expect it nevertheless to complete our Theoule experience, and we will thus be ready to close up our airbnb and move on to regular big city apartment living.

 Where we're going to live comes with two markets six days a week both within walking distance from us, one very famous, and one supposedly much better than the famous one, but it would be unfair to make comparisons to here in Theoule. It's a different charm altogether. And one I look forward to.

 

Cleaning house

 

As we come up to our final move to our charming, slightly messed up wee apartment in the big city, I have preversely decided it is the time to organize my photographs.

Every once in awhile I decide it is time to organize my photographs on my computer. It is a big job.

It is too big a job.

Here is the size of the job:

In the backyard of my parents' house in California there was a dirt hill that led down to a chainlink fence and then further down to the backyard of the neighbors below us. At ten years old or so, my friend Todd and I decided to dig, with little hand trowels, into the side of the hill to make an underground fort. We would have tunnels in there, different rooms to explore, maybe even a pool in one quiet, cool, cavernous underground chamber.

After a few weeks we had blisters and a kind of indentation in the hill.

This is the size of the job.

Still, it's interesting. I have about 100 files on my desktop full of various collections of pictures, some sort of specific, but many called something like "July" to denote all the pictures I worked on during some July. I don't know which July, one of them. They come around every 12 months or so. I actually have a similar folder to that now that I call "France Working", but I've been working a lot, so I had to make a new file called "France Working 2". They're both crammed with pictures, some finished, some not, some never to be.

I went through my first file, and that wasn't too bad because it was the file I made from the last time I decided to oragnize all my files. My goal was to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have much of both! These in this first file were already separated and so, presumably, just good, finished pictures.

Me and past me have different opinions! So I separated out the good pictures. And then I moved onto the next folder. This was called "Sources Fall".

There was a lot of neat stuff in there! 

And there was a lot of interesting things I could do with some of these pictures. Like, remember Clerkmanifestoland? I had an image of a little shop tent there that just needed a few corrections. 

Half an hour later, check this out:

The original was nice, but this is much better.

Also, it helped me realize something.

I am never going to be able to dig an underground pool.

Cheese

 

We are coming to the last week of our time in this beach apartment in Theoule Sur Mer. Tomorrow we go to the big city where our real, long term apartment is, for one last overnight prep visit. Then next week we'll close up this wonderful, ramshackle, and slightly abandoned place on the beach for our final move.

I'm a little sad. 

I may have been dragging my feet a little too.

It's not that I'm not excited to begin this new, leisured life in a gloriously beautiful city in the south of France, but this wild transition through Japan and into an uncertain future where anything is possible now becomes... life, anchored in what we chose, in our retiree budget, and in all the months and years going by. Possibility becomes reality. 

I am ready though. As much as I love it here in Theoule it certainly has its limits with its two particular grocery stores, one a chain, and one fancy, and its two closed for the season bakeries. And my inclination to burrow into my little home projects of photo editing, videogames, and general dissolution has begun to fully assert itself in these cold, wild days full of rain and storms. A life settled in the big city may curiously allow for more of the traveller's lifestyle of exploration and adventure that we moved here for. 

And also, it's about time I lived around the corner from a cheese shop.

Documenting my surroundings

 

As ever here on clerkmanifesto I am documenting my surroundings, in one way or another.

Because my surroundings are currently The South of France, lately, you are probably often saying: "Well that's pretty."

Yes, I should probably make a point of going outside more.

Colors of the south of France

 

I have been doing a lot of experimentation with colors, especially here in my photographs of the Cote D'Azur, and though I have liked some of them a lot, I am usually left frustrated with the erratic nature of the AI editors and the sometimes infuriating communication process in trying to get anything like what I want.

I use AI so much in my picture editing I almost forgot I have photoshop.

And I sort of vaguely know how to use it!

So off I went to my Photoshop and...

I only sort of know how to use it. But it's a start:

Yearbook photos

 

I have been working on these yearbook pages and they go just as I planned, until I look more closely and realise that there are just a few small problems that I can't seem to fix. So while I have nine or ten of these, full of interesting details, there's always some weak point that leaves me unsatisfied.

So I give up.

But I do kind of like this one Minnesota homage:

Interesting and other stories

 

Two condensations

 

Age appropriate

 

Yesterday I said I would be letting the dioramas speak for themselves, but I do want to step in to note this significant arcana change:  I have aged up my cartoon character to a level rather more commensurate with, well, me, retired in the South of France. I think my character might have even gone a little past my age sometimes, but that's okay, I can grow into him, and he seems about right today.

Stories in boxes

 

We had hoped to have a restful interlude in our old Theoule Sur Mer apartment, watching the Winter on the water for several days, but some family health issues combined with the constant details of establishing ourselves in France and preparing our apartment are keeping us too relentlessly on the move. It's not great, but things are moving along in the right direction, and there are still moments everyday in these lovely places that feel like extraordinary hallucinations.

In my downtime I keep a constant stream of story boxes on the boil, a process that has about eight or nine steps to it, and at the end of an inbetween day like today leaves me with ten new ones finished. We'll be back to the city tomorrow and then maybe home here the next day after that, so I'll be running diorama stories here for the next few posts without much explanation since they tell their stories just as well on their own.

That said, we'll start with a little housekeeping, these being some earlier less articulate experimental versions from the past few days that haven't had their moment in the sun:

Three more souvenirs

 

And again

I am currently in one of those phases where I am making things faster than I can name them, organize them, or, certainly, present them here. But while I could offer up dozens of pictures today, which may be its own kind of fun, I like them too much at this early stage for that. I am reluctant to cast away their preciousness to me. So I'd prefer to offer just a couple of new images today and let myself find my way through all this work over the next days. These days are complicated anyway by another transition trip to our new apartment to get our Internet in and hopefully get some way along with making our kitchen equipped.

I will then let these two pictures tell their own stories: