Rain on the roof

 

The rain is coming down tonight and I hear it on the roof. We are way up in the eaves of an old multi storied building and I like it this way. Cozy. The city seems quiet tonight, though I know it really never is, and counter to what seems normal to me, plenty of people are walking around out there. It is always a relative measure. On the promenade along the beach today, in the gray and the drizzle, it was what I probably would have considered thronging almost anywhere back in the USA. 

Here? 

It was so quiet! 

Look at all the (wet) chairs to sit in over the ocean! Hardly anyone is even swimming! And this group of 40 high school students isn't even in anybody's way.

And so I find it a good night to work on some pictures. These days, as you have seen, I am making them more like drawings or paintings, with etched in layers, causing me to be completely unable to keep up with working on the many pictures I take most days. 

These ones are from Italy still, Ventimiglia, mostly the old town over the river:

The Seussian scale

 

The twisting, vertical little towns around here, most with a medieval origin, but some forming the core of much grown cities, are somewhere a little bit better than amazing. And though European old towns have almost a postcard meaninglessness to them, too picturesque to suprise anyone, in person they are always a kind of visceral thrill, more like encountering a National Park than they are urban tourism. 

Given enough time, people and their works are just natural phenomenon like anything else. And after all the murders and opression dies down, the kings dead and all their children and vassels, our wonders rival the Grand Canyons and Half Domes. When the dust settles we don't compete with god, we're simply made of the same stuff.

Too much? 

No, really, some of these streets I walk feel every bit like the slot canyons of the American Southwest, and the wonder I feel is... awe.

So I've decided I need a rating system!

 Living in France now, encountering old city after old city, my head spinning, I needed to find some way to order them in myself. It is not judgement so much as a way for me to measure what is most important to me in the hundreds and hundreds of years old cities that I feel so lucky to live in and near.

And so I have developed the Seussian Scale to rate these thrilling old cities abounding here.

What is "The Seussian Scale"? It is a measure of the narrow intricate windings of old pre automobile stone villages and cities. It gives points for staircases, tunneling passages, and complicated bridges, routes, and overpasses. Rewarding steepness, complicated handmade construction interacting with outlandish natural features the Seussian Scale is a measure, from one to ten, of just how well a city would fit into a book by Dr. Seuss.

And I am just back from my highest scoring city yet! Achieving a whopping NINE on the Seussian Scale, Ventimiglia in Italy, built on the steepest cliffs over a river and the sea, cutting through tunnels and wandering over its tiny little passageways since, I don't know, the 900s?, was a marvel of Seussian complexity.

My pictures struggle to do it justice, but I have done my best.

Uh-oh

 

We popped over to Italy yesterday morning.

I wasn't thinking much of it. The idea itself was novel; that one could get on a train and go to a whole different country with an entirely different language and culture and come home at our leisure like we were going to a suburban mall for an afternoon. And yes, there was the largest market in Italy on Fridays in this Italian border town of Ventimiglia, but I know what those markets are like with their 90% women's fashion and assorted dubious "fell of the back of the truck" items. So while I was interested, my expectations were modest.

But after half an hour in the Riviera river city of Ventimiglia we were painfully wondering: Did we move to the wrong place?

Fortunately the answer to that is no. The density and grand beauty of our city, with its New York City intensity and density genetically spliced into a Cote D'Azur vacation beach town, is too perfect for us on a day to day level to dismiss like that. But oh Ventimiglia!

Do you know what France is like here? It is like Italy with a light washing and a coat of varnish. I think after almost four months in this country it was a bit of a relief to see a place with its guard down, having a little fun with it. 

Also the people are kind of nicer.

But crucially I just loved that city with a glorious river running through the center of it and spilling onto its wide open beaches. I love a river delta, with swans and glowing horizons. The modern town was good and not all that modern, though busy and active. The market was as I anticipated except in its magnitude. It was gigantic. The food market, a separate entity, was great too, and it felt real and rich with some actual local products and bargains, including curoiously massive piles of artichokes. The coffee, our one abiding reason for dreaming of the place, was a letdown, though there was much to choose from and perhaps we would have found our spots with better luck. And then across the river, steeply climbing the cliff, was the old town, scrappy, ancient, perhaps a bit too sleepy and without enough shops, it was nevertheless the most wonderful old town I have seen, with its endlessly winding and climbing paths too small for cars, and with its countless bridges and tunnels climbing up and through the rock.

I am working on the many pictures I took of this place, feeling that the out of the camera ones, while satisfying, deserve deeper layers of work and finishing to bring out my feelings on Ventimiglia. There will be more to show and talk about in the days to come. Also I am aware there is a thrill to the new and in the triumphs of risk in travel that is modified with familiarity.

But for now I will just say:

I got a chunk of good Parmesean the size of a cinder block.

How to go to Italy

 

It used to be a lot more complicated to go to Italy.

You had to get time off of work, buy airplane tickets for 700 dollars, take a taxi or a tram or a car to the airport hours early. Then you had to fly overnight and go through customs and, voila, you're in Italy, which is pretty neat, but complicated.

Today it's a bit different.

We get up. I write this post. We have breakfast. We take a short walk to the train station where we get on the train with 20 euro round trip tickets. And then in an hour we're in Italy.

Easy peasy.

What's in Italy today? 

Ventimiglia, which the Internet claims is definitely worth visiting. 

On Fridays in Ventimiglia they have the largest market in Italy! You know how I love a good Louis Vuitton knock off.

I don't love a Louis Vuitton knock off?

Well, let's just say we'll look into that today.

Mainly we need an Italian coffee. Everything else is a footnote.

Three cultures

 

Having spent some time living in three cultures in the past year, The USA, Japan, and France, it is natural for me to compare some of their differences. And today I would like to talk about the detail of children getting out of school.

This particular comparison comes to mind because lately, by some fluke, we always seem to be coming home down a small street in front of a school just before it lets out. I think it is an elementary school. And when it is time to let the kids out masses of parents gather on the sidewalks in front of the heavily gated school entrance. While I do find cars in France to be an annoying addition to this city, the vast majority of people really are walking to do everything not because it is some virtuous act, but because it is far and away the easier and more reasonable and pleasant way to do most things in this city. And so it is with picking up children from school in France. I didn't see a single car waiting out front of the school to pick anybody up. It was all parents, and sometimes the smaller not yet school aged children, waiting for the big kids to get out of school.

In my former country, the USA, we would walk by a school occasionally as it let out and it invariably involved a mad and dangerous tangle of cars and buses. The less said about that one the better.

And as for Japan? That I found most fascinating of all, although strangely it was closer to what I experience going to elementary school myself as a child. In Japan the children just walked home by themselves, together or alone, although it went even farther than that. Small children, some not yet even school age, would take buses and subways and move responsibly about the city of Kyoto completely on their own. One might see a five year old walking alone down a crowded urban street, entirely capable, on some mysterious mission of his or her own.

So, three cultures, three different approaches. And which one do I prefer?

I prefer not having children.

We did see a really cute cat though yesterday.

Rain on the Cote D'Azur

 

It rains here.

I read somewhere that there is more rain here than in England, but it is better rain. So the English all came here in the Winters in the 1800's and now it's a Unesco Heritage Site as a Winter Destination. 

This is one of my favorite things about this city and you will hear more about it in the future, but other cities around the world become historical wonders and beauties and thus Unesco Sites and popular tourist attractions and destinations.

This city is a Unesco Site for being a tourist attraction and destination!

Anyway, it rained all last night and all day today, so we didn't even leave the house until three, which we call fifteen o'clock here in France. Get used to it. I hope to soon. We walked to a kind of natural food store where I bought a bottle of organic prosecco just cause I felt like it was the prudent thing to do. And I got potatoes and very wee avocados too since we were far too late for the markets. The streets were thriving, because the streets are always thriving here because this is a Unesco Heritage Site as a Winter Destination. And, it's winter. We walked in something like a driving drizzle to the beach with heavy bags and then we sat there.

This is good enough for anything, sitting on the promenade. But it was a wild treat today as the beach was gone! In all our months here we had yet to see an ocean wild and high enough to come all the way up to the beach wall. The crashing waves were thrilling.

When we had enough of that we had coffees in a tented street cafe on a pedestrian street between here and the ocean.

Then we went and bought cheese.

It was enough for me. I hope it was enough for you.

Exciting French bureaucracy

 

I had been dreading it because it is the sort of thing I dread a lot, not because it has a difficult reputation. And that is the French Visa OFII medical examination required certificate process.

Yes, I know you are on the edge of your seat, but don't worry. I am going to tell you all about it today!

For background, we applied for a one year visitor's visa. This is the basic visa for people who have enough money to live on according to the French standard of living for a year. It is the easiest visa to get and they will generally let people in on it without much fuss. For a fairly hefty fee one makes an appointment with some difficulty in one of a few cities in the U.S.  Then one gathers a mighty dossier of documents involving finances, identity, proof of insurance coverage for the year in France, and sworn promises not to work in France and brings all this stuff in person to a meeting in another (usually) U.S.city. You have to do this meeting in person, we did it in Boston, but you don't really do anything much at the meeting except hand over all the paperwork, oh, and your passport. Then, some unspecified time later they send you back your passport with, hopefully, a brand new awesome French one year Visa page. It has an identity picture and everything. It is very official looking.

We got ours super fast, like in a week.

Then, at the appointed time, you go to France.

There are other steps involved in completely dismantling your entire life and posessions and everything, but that is neither the purview nor interest of the Nation of France.

Once you get to France you have three months to validate your visa. This, thankfully, is done online. It is pretty important, we understood, to have a permanent address to do this with, so we waited until we had our apartment rented.

After this they send you notice of a meeting you have to go to at Ofii, the French office of immigration and integration. It is the one closest to where your address is.

This meeting was mainly a medical exam to make sure we don't have tuberculosis or something.

Spoiler alert: I've been to this meeting and have the required official medical certificate and, well, I don't really know what it was for exactly. But no one in my family appears to have TB so, cool.

Here's how it played out:

We took the tram to a particularly ugly part of the city. Then we walked to a kind of multi building adiministrative government compound that is completely secured and required a full security entry. After the entry we were met by a security person and checked on a list. Then with a few other people we were taken inside a large institutional building very nearby. We were shown to seats. We sat there. Other people were shown to seats. Many employees came and went.

There were a lot of employees!

After something like 12 or 75 minutes our names were called by the security man. We were gathered by a wall with a few other people. We stood there for awhile. Then we were led down a hall and given a line to stand in. It was a line going into an office.

Eventually our turn came in the office and a nice lady at a reception desk looked at our passports. We were sent to a narrow hall to sit in. There were four other people in our hall and two offices. We got a clipboard with some questions about mental health to fill out.

We were called into the Doctor (I think) together. We handed over the paper and maybe our passports? We answered some questions about vaccines, surgeries, hospital stays, height and weight, what medicines we take, and our glasses. The literature about this meeting suggested we could ask a few small questions and it would be okay. It was okay, but all our questions were answered with "That's not Ofii", pretty much.

Oh, by the way, while there was a bit of French in this, it was basically done in English.

We were sent out into the hall to wait for the nurse.

We were called into the nurse who was a lot like the Doctor only a bit less warm and friendly, so, not at all warm and friendly, but not really mean. There might have been questions there. I forget. Then we were given our health certificates and were told not to lose them because we will never ever get replacements and we'll absolutely need them for our visa renewals.

Then we were sent out into the morning, where we headed back to the tram which we took all the way to the port.

And we were very happy it was over.

Then it rained a lot out.

Here are some pictures I took of the ocean:

The history of the city in fiction

 

I don't like these kinds of stories:

Tomorrow we report very early in the morning for a required medical exam that was set in motion at the point we validated our French visas. I refuse to go into much detail about it except to say it is compulsory, brief, simple, and nothing to worry about. 

And I dread it. 

I have dreaded it from the moment it was scheduled back some time in December. 

I like these kind of stories:

I was reading to my darling wife, as we do each night. Our current book is an Agatha Christie mystery chosen not least because it involves the Blue Train, the train that back in the Agatha Christie days went overnight to the Cote D'Azur. It is one of the novels featuring Hercule Poirot. He shows up a bit late in the procedings. Then everyone gets off the train. And then there's a scene...

...that takes place a five minute walk from where we were sitting reading.

The bridge that was

 

If you will be so kind as to consult yesterday's post, I lightly explored the bridges (or lack thereof) in my city. In so doing I came across a very old photo of the river, the Paillon, that once ran down through the center of my city and is now completely covered over by a long park. I happen to have some recent images of my own of the Promenade du Paillon where, in a clear reference to the water below, a shallow fountain extends widely across a section of this park just outside of the vieux vielle:

But what about that original image of all the washer women by the river? 

That is the raison d'etre of today's post! Back in the 1800's it was a river without much water. But I guess there was enough for women to wash clothes in it. It was also prone to flash floods from the water coming out of the hills rather suddenly in storms.

I have remained (relatively) faithful to my historical source image while giving it a great deal of layers and textures in the way I have been working lately. And so as I showed two pictures yesterday of a contemporarily used bridge here rendered in this style, I have today one of this more appealing bridge from a little further back in time, in similar guise, that is no longer with us:

The bridge

 

In such a rich and fabulous historical city such as the one I am living in I might imagine there would be some amazing bridge somewhere. Most of these great European cities have a few of these lying around the place. But no. This is not a river town. It's an ocean town. And you can't put a bridge over the ocean. Where would it go? 

Although, come to think of it, there is a lot of this city I have yet to see. And there are a couple of rivers around here. The Paillon runs through a long stretch of city I think, but under a park the whole way. I have only ever seen it where it emerges from under the Promenade to meet the Sea. I do like standing down on the beach looking up into the mysterious tunnels from whence it issues, but the water does not move much unless it rains a lot. In the olden days people joked about how the river was the driest part of Nice! But in strong rains it did flood and they started covering it over 150 years ago or so.

There is also a nice looking more proper river called The Delta Var (I think), but it's out by the airport, and by the Ikea, and by the soccer stadium on the far end of town we have only rarely gone to. Maybe the train's bridge over that river is a nice one, but having always been on the train I didn't get much of a look at it.

Speaking of the train, it mostly runs above the city so there's a few bridges involved there. Down the street from here it travels over the main tram and shopping street and we regularly walk under it to go to the Liberation neighborhood that features our most gigantic daily market. The underpass of this bridge is illuminated in something like blacklights, blue ultra violet lighting? Which always fascinates me. The whole area is such a hodge podge of a place, with towering freeways far above, and old industrial train track construction among orange trees, and shiny glass hotels among all the Belle Epoque beauties of the city.. 

It is this that I have pictures of for you today, two carefully built up ones to show off our fanciest, or most humble bridge at its best. 

As I find more bridges I'll let you know.

The horrors of France

 

So far it has been a pretty rosy account of our moving to France. And though my eeyorish pessimism and discontent is capable of working its way through like malevolent rain on even the sunniest day, I do feel as if the balance sheet of my post library transatlantic memoirs here are safely on the "I enjoy the cheese, patisserie, and champagne" side of the ledger.

Which of course immediately concerns me. 

The French certainly know that without a little salt, the food is bland. And so today we salt the story. We tell you one thing, one insane thing that a person like me, having lived an entire life in the USA, simply cannot wrap my head around. One thing that I can look at right now with abject horror and total bewilderment.

But don't worry, in my mission to advance your understanding of cultural differences, and to tell the tale of where some places go so wildly right while others go so wildly wrong, I am not going to reheat the same old grousing you've heard a thousand times before, even from me! Yes, people pee everywhere. Yes the city is still riddled ridiculously with cars that serve no purpose. Yes, the stores lack a variety of midranged priced sparkling wines. Yes, people do not clean up after their dogs. And yes, people say goodbye one too many times and it is contageous.

Fine. All of those are rough to take. But one knows the score and one forges on. 

This though, this is outrageous:

Some of the wall plugs here only have one plug.

I rest my case for the day.

My decaying city

 

This lovely city I am now living in is in pretty good shape. But it is a large place, old and of tall buildings, richly colorful, and ornate. The sea nips at its toes. People and dogs pee everywhere. The sun beats down. Rain falls. And it never gets a minute of rest.

So decay haunts it.

The lushest and most perfectly preserved facade of some eight story building may, if you can just peep around the side, have a wall of concrete that looks like something untouched from the mezozoic era. Fastidiously maintained buildings may house apartments untouched for generations, with crumbling shutters hanging from its windows. The city doesn't look rundown because there is so incredibly much everywhere in fantastic condition, or new things, or old structures aged like fine wines with deep, impossible colors. Nevertheless you are never really out of site of something boarded up, falling apart, or wrapped in reparative scaffolding. The work of keeping all this stuff standing in good fettle is relentless, and a moment's inattention (geologically, or maybe historically) is enough to send anything here crumbling to the sidewalk.

I love it so much!

Exciting new photograph of a wall

 

No, it's not clickbait.

When I promise a new photograph of a wall, that is just what I am going to provide!

Exciting?

How could it not be.

Here we are in France, having a kind of hometending day, you know, to tend home, which is a small attic apartment. I mostly spent the day making this photograph. I've been looking for a more complex expression of my pictures and this one might be the way forward.

On the other hand, spending hours on a single picture might not be what I had in mind for retirement.

Later we'll still be going out to walk to the beach, after a bit of tea we brought from Japan. Maybe we'll buy a cheese too when we go out. Who knows, but I bet you can't buy a cheese in your country!

Oh, right. I guess you can.

So that's...    good.

Here's a picture of a wall: