So many people

 

It was fine when I stayed put in Minnesota for the most part. The world seemed large, but Minnesota sort of spoke to the rest of the world. It acted as a microcosm. And even the travel we took from there hearkened back to that place as a kind of knowable reference point. Minnesota was an analogy.

Then we tore up all the flimsy roots and flung ourselves off once again into the wide world. And there are so many people. Japan was crammed, absolutely crammed, and not afraid to go out and show it. It's not much different here. People are everywhere!

You will not understand how many people there are and neither will I. Yesterday I was talking about all the people taking pictures of the beach here. Everyday ten thousand new people come here and they take a picture of the beach.

I ask you:

Where do all these pictures go?

I follow ten stories, a hundred stories every day, I have a thousand, and I write just one. But do you know how many stories there are?

534,565,109,336,298,004,288,776,364,987,303,219,997,136,399,001,002,697,142,314,688,887,410,014,879,523,659,823,226,444,112,970,003,660,985,321,658,017.

And those are just the good ones.

The moment

 

There's a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty where the super cool and awesome photographer played by Sean Penn, perched high in the Himalayas to photograph rare snow leopards, explains how when he finally has the shot, sometimes he just lets it go. That occasionally he just wants to let the moment be, or something like that.

I am not the world reknown and beloved fictional pulitzer prize winning wildlife photographer played by Sean Penn. I am just another guy with a camera phone out on the beach. There are thousands and thousands of pictures taken just on this beach in this city every single day! 

Nevertheless, I think of this little moment sometimes.

I see the most beautiful ocean yet again, the water a strange shade of lurid turquoise every so slightly different than it has ever been before. The Paillon River, usually a trickle or even a stagnant pond, is running richly out from underneath the very center of the city, a lovely aqua green against the rocks and into the sea, while the sea's high waves roll hypnotically up the river. Larger than usual waves smash into a rare break of rocks at the river mouth and a pure white lather of ocean hurls into the sky.

I think 

"That would make a nice picture."

And then, with my wife, I just stand there.

French apartment

 

There are so many things I haven't had a chance to discuss about our move to France, and since hundreds of thousands of people follow clerkmanifesto now looking for tips on their own future relocation to Europe, I feel a certain responsibility to cover some of those things that got lost in the heady rush of our arrival in this country.

That's why today I am going to discuss... The French Apartment.

You see, I live in one.

I am writing to you from one right now, tucked in a dormer window of a studio apartment that likes to put on airs of being a one bedroom but really really isn't one. 

The rain is pleasantly falling outside in an otherwise quiet night. 

Here, let me get up, turn around, take a random picture through my window, and report back:

 Well, whatever. It is now an hour later and that's my picture... drawing thing, through the partially reflecting dormer window, and that's France. You wanna move here, go for it. They do many things sensibly and with great style here in France, though they lack a bit of whimsy, and for the first ten or eleven years that you stumble around here still trying to learn French be prepared that you will often feel like Mr. Bean.

Well, maybe not you.

Anyway, one thing we read a lot about before we came is how very difficult it is to rent a French apartment.

It sort of is, but I don't want to go much into that now, especially after I already used up all my time I have for this post on making a four layered picture/drawing of me reflected in my window.

What I really want to talk about is what I didn't understand when I obsessively researched French apartments from an anticipatory vantage point in Minnesota.

The prices for renting French apartments are not too terrible considering how the cost of all houses and apartments in France is nearly as bad as those in the United States. And yes, though there are 67 million people in France, there are only about 10 apartments available for rent at any given time in the entire country.

 But the most shocking thing even in that is that there aren't any bargains.

I just didn't figure on there not being bargains.

Let me put it this way:

Say you're at a restaurant, and though the lobster seems nice, you don't have 85 dollars for it. So you're like, well, what are these no frills ham sandwiches going for then? 

65 dollars. They are going for 65 dollars.

That explanation maybe didn't work.

Let me try it like this

 If you can't save a bunch of money, or get an amazing apartment, by living in some wildly out of the way place, with few shops or services available, or by living in an ugly apartment block wasteland that France is full of in their own weird version of suburbs, why wouldn't you just live, well, somewhere like we do now?

I don't know.

But I am glad we got the one apartment they had available in this city 350,000 people.

Offline love

 

Before we moved to this city but after we had visited and were planning to move... somewhere around here, we watched a Japanese dating show that took place in this very city. It was called "Offline Love" and shown on Netflix. It featured a group of Japanese young single people none of whom knew each other. They were sent wandering out into this city and given a base. The base was a cafe/restaurant that had been closed down, rented out for the duration of the show, which was maybe a week and a half or so? They turned in their phones and were given a mailbox where they would receive messages from the show, and could send and receive them to and from each other. Also there was always some nice food at the cafe for them, and tables to sit at. Mostly though it showed them wandering this city with a sort of bespoke guidebook, sometimes alone and sometimes together, and there were some specific area related trips or dates as well.

The "point" of the show was to see how much fate could bring them together, though there were also some events and dates that would contrive to bring couples together in particular ways.

I'm not sure when this show was made, maybe a couple of years ago. We have eaten at the cafe, which is on a very charming square down the street from here. In fact there really aren't that many days we don't walk by that particular cafe. The show must have been popular back in its home country. I always like to look in at the people sitting at the restaurant just to make sure there is at least one Japanese couple or group having a drink or food there.

There always is.

A French mall on the Cote D' Azur

 

Today we went to the mall, a mall so big they call it

The Mall of France!

Not really.

But it was a big mall, full of people on a Sunday, and we took a train to it, walked across crowded roads, and went into the first gaping entrance we found. And it was a mall, like all the malls ever anywhere.

Albeit with a few more pastries,

And a beach.

The sea again and again

 

I take a lot of pictures of the sea here. Some of them might be good, some not. But they're just the sea. They don't really say "France", or tell you about where I'm living, or illustrate the strangeness of a life here that's so different than the life that came before. It's the hardest thing to tell about because it's the most the same. You have the same thing wherever you are. It doesn't have to be the sea.

You have a sky and a moon and a tree or a cactus, a river, rain falling from the sky, or snow, and they're all as good as it gets.

I love this city, it is different and beautiful and usually so interesting. The cheese is good and the buildings are amazing. The streets are lively and full. There's music and history and pastry and the days go by very fast here.

But the sea, crashing into the rocks and the tiny stones of the shore, turns out to be the best part.

Squaring our accounts

 

Having a rather detailed account to write about our trip to Grasse, the perfume capital of THE WORLD, where I created my own scent, I figured I had better clear out my rich backlog of complex photographs, or, um, drawings, or sort of both, that I've been working on. So I opened up my file where I am working day and night on these images, and I found...

Three.

Three?

So be it.

This is behind me right now, and over some rooftops, though the seagull has moved on to other things

This is a view through to the Ferris Wheel as one emerges out of the old town of our city toward the city center currently feverish with Carnival preparations.

This is from the ornate back wall of the chancel in the Russian Orthodox Church on the other side of the train tracks from us, notable not only for its lovely Church, but even more importantly for its fluffy bunnies that live on its grounds.

Off to Grasse

 

As my city feverishly prepares for Mardi Gras, in less than a week, we are off on a day trip to Grasse, the perfume capital of the world.

So I hope you like perfume.

Due to some family interest sparked by an event on a Japanese dating show that took place in our city, we will be mixing our own personal scents in the city of Grasse. And though Grasse was able to be glimpsed in the distant hills from the windows of our Theoule Sur Mer apartment, it is, after four months here, the first place we are visiting not directly on the coastline.

It's old.

It grows a lot of flowers.

And, well, I don't want to bore you with too many details.

But after we go there I may do that anyway.

Or maybe it will just be a single picture.

Or perhaps the first ever blog post you can smell.

Postcard at the library

 

In 2022 I sent a postcard from this city to the library I worked at. It was a vintage image of a surrealistic scene of The Reserve, which is a restaurant and an outcropping of rock just past the port area of this city. In the old black and white photograph there was an old sailboat perched on this table of rock in the ocean, with a little bridge to it. It was very much a real scene. Now, and when I sent the postcard, the boat is gone and it is only a fancy restaurant with a fantastical setting floating on an island of rock. 

After my trip someone taped the postcard to the computer area we use when we're in charge of the automated check in machine.

The postcard was still taped up there when I left the library after 31 years working there.

I don't know how many of the traces of me have been removed from that library, or have faded away. I don't know if someone bothered to toss a four year old postcard away yet.

I looked at that postcard a lot, working on the machine late at night. Now I live here and sometimes we walk by the place from that image. I've taken quite a few photographs of it and here is one, in my current style. This was taken from a similar, hopefully almost identical vantage point that the postcard picture was taken from, with maybe a hundred years between them.

The public music of France

Maybe it is not right to smear all of France with this brush. I really can only speak to the far south down here on the Mediterranean Sea. But I would like to talk about the music that is played in public places.

 And I realise this in itself is a reductionist analysis. We are out in the public a lot here in france, in cafes and restaurants, malls and convnience stores, bars and tiny shops. We are in public buildings, supermarches, and hardware stores. And like in any other city there is a lot of music playing. I hear pop music, French music, jazz, and more pop music. But still, like it was in Japan, there is one kind of music that stands out for how commonly it is played and for how out of porportion it is to the standard kind of music played in cities.

Before I tell you what it is, I want to explain it a tiny bit more by way of labored analogy. 

Say you went to visit Vancouver, and in the shopping centers and cafes and shops and restaurants you heard all the mix of music you might expect to hear, but you also hear, to your utter surprise, old, authentic, ragtime music. You hear it so much it defines the music of the town. Why ragtime music? It stops even being weird. You notice it, but it doesn't even surprise you after awhile. You just understand that Vancouver has something going with Ragtime.

Vancouver doesn't have anything going with Ragtime that I know of.

Neither does Provence and the Riviera.

But the thing that the music here has, that is just like that fictional ragtime in fictional Vancouver is...

Cover songs of hits of the 70's, 80's, and 90's. 

We have been in dozens, maybe hundreds of places here in France that play nothing but covers of hit songs from 30 to 50 years ago. They do not play the originals of these songs. Or, they play them so rarely that when they do I think "This cover is playing it really close to the original!"

Some of the covers are good. Some are... okay. It's mildly entertaining. And all of it seems like a pretty strange relationship to popular music.

I have no idea what's behind it.

 

But so it is on the Cote D' Azur.

Japan had something similar, though better. And perhaps I'll tell you about that in the next day or two.

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.