On the cost of trains

 

We made the hilarious mistake of moving to Saint Minneapolis in 1991 because we heard they had a good transit system there.

Though fairly broke in our youth, we nevertheless had a car within a month or two of moving. Over the next 30 years they made many improvements there, including trams, bike routes, and dedicated buses. It is still horrible and yet I'm sure many a young innocent is being lured there even now to ride on slow trams with starry eyed idealists, psychologically troubled drug addicts, and people whose license was confiscated. 

And that's the thing really, transit is so absolutely shitty every single place in the world (yes, I have now been now to Kyoto, Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Paris, all places sited in one way or another for their excellent transit) that it gets graded on a curve instead of on its own merits. Even the most fervent urbanists and anti car activists are so skewed by a lopsided status quo that they can hardly see the merits (and demerits) of a place accurately. I understand, when everywhere is a mess of relentless toxic traffic, one wants to sing the merits of, I don't, Amsterdam. Venice? 

In the village of the blind...

And so we were, alas, maybe a little too taken in by the glorious transit of France.

We moved to France because we heard they had a good transit system!

Fool me once...

Our little town here is right on the coastal train line. What a boon! Trains race by all the time! 

And then we tried to ride one.

It doesn't stop here very often. You have to use an app to even get a ticket and, though I have mastered this process by now, I find it all wildly over formalized and inconvenient. 

And it costs a lot.

What should a train cost?

In the days when we were often going to Cannes, maybe eight miles away, we switched over from the trains to a bus that comes hourly. The bus, less pleasant I suppose, still came infrequently, hourly, but at least without being so inclined to take 3 hour breaks in its schedule, effectively stranding the unprepared. Also the bus was a quarter the cost.

A quarter the cost for a bus?

I have a pointed question to ponder, that, while a genuine question, does carry a bitter distrust about what and how a culture subsidizes things:

Why or how could a bus ever be cheaper than a train?

Abandoned apartment

 

While gingerly assembling our new attic apartment from a distance, we are still living here in Theoule Sur Mer, the charming little beach town that has ever so slowly fallen into something like a half slumber. All the lively cafes along the water have closed down completely by now, mid november, or they're open technically, but stay closed under any pretext they can come up with; rain, too windy, it's thursday, or staff bonding sessions are being held at a nice restaurant in a bigger town. And I don't fault them. It is pretty sleepy here. Not dead, mind you, people still stroll in to town all day and walk along the beach in their ones and twos. In the middle of the day maybe someone goes for a swim in the Mediterranean while their friends in sweaters take pictures of them. But that's about it. None of them are likely to be having a long lunch, or a drink overlooking the bay, unless it's super nice out, or thursday, or whatever special condition is met, at which point everyone is having drinks and lunch and it might as well be September.

Meanwhile I am watching it all from the pretty windows of our apartment building, a peach colored place with eight or nine units. And in our apartment may be much of the explanation. As I said, our building here has eight or nine units, all with lovely views of the ocean and an extraordinarily pleasent setting on something of a boardwalk leading off to road-free beaches and a (modest) nature area. And here's the kicker:

I'm pretty sure we're the only people who live here.

Seriously! I'm pretty sure we live in an apartment building of eight or nine units all alone, with every other apartment completely empty, although it is possible one old lady lives here very, very, very quietly. And another unit seems to be having a lot of mysterious work being done on it.

So, those aren't a lot of restaurant goers.

City pride

In a nod to a kind of faint veil of family privacy, here on this very public backwater of the Internet I will not say the name of the city we are moving to and leave it at that.

We are back and forth now to our new city, preparing our apartment, talking, walking, and having coffees, before catching an evening train home. And though clerkmanifesto will surely be evolving as much into a blog about this lovely city as it once was about the Roseville Library (also unnamed until very late in the game!), I wish to start with this small observation:

This city, the largest city of its region of France, is as yet smaller than where we have come from in the less famous city of Saint Minneapolis. And yet, so far, I have found it to be a bigger city than any I have ever seen in all of the United States.

New cities

 

Without Internet set up yet in our new apartment, we should be back by now in our temporary small beach town home, done with lease signing and flush with the joys of our first venture overnight in the big city. But to keep the daily posting of clerkmanifesto safe I will take this opportunity to show some various pictures of Cannes, Antibes, and Theoule Sur Mer (probably) from the past weeks that have not yet made it to clerkmanifesto (at least I don't think they have):

Colors of the Cote D'Azur

 

To keep things humming along here at clerkmanifesto while we are navigating a move to another city, and while we sort of hop between two homes for awhile trying to get everything sorted, I have a few scenic shots of the local area. The general subject matter is pretty strictly accurate to my phones plain photography, but the colors might be ever so slightly exaggerated in the post processing.

Slightly...

Big city

 

A few pictures of where we are off to today:

Late night hallucinations

 

I could work up some of these images, some altered, others right out of the camera (so to speak). And maybe I would in time, but... news! 

We seem to be on the edge of finalizing a lease for an apartment.

We're moving to a big city!

These small and medium Cote D'Azur towns are lovely and charming and fun, but as people absolutely insistant on not owning a car, there is an element to them that is against the grain of that. While France is more agreeable to mass transit and... walking, that does not at all mean it is devoted to it. And it is very much a car centric and car designed world in France outside of the big cities (and even, sadly, to a degree inside them). Nevertheless a rich, eminently walkable, rich cityscape awaits us, and I can complain about cars later.

And so with our time in Theoule Sur Mer numbered I find myself doing strange things like waking in the middle of the night and taking strange, intentionally blurred photographs out the window of the lights in the darkness of the shore and ocean.

Here is my collection of experiments then:

Sunset

 

Exhausted at the end of a hopefully succesful day's apartment search on the Cote D'Azur, first we took a train, then we climbed on a bus to our not very distant, yet oddly slow to get to, temporary home. The bus traveled from day to night though it only went about eight miles.

There was no room for us to sit down, so we stood, hands welded to the nearest pole to keep us standing. It looks easier than it is. Out the window was the Mediterranean Sea, a big thing just absolutely full of water, and the sun going down cast oozing saturated colors rippling through the sky above it. It was so pretty that one lady crammed herself into a window to take pictures of it, leaning into quietly appalled French people. She didn't know what she was doing, though, and I could see on her phone that the picture would be no good. She could see it too.

I didn't take a picture of the sunset because I am sort of polite and because I know that trying to do so from a bus isn't likely to work out for anyone; the passengers, the photographer, or the sunset.

But I might have a sunset picture for you from a few days ago, when the moon was full, if I can find it.

Tres jolie

 

Somewhere between vacationing and living, here we are on the Cote D'Azur, on the south coast of France.

It is very pretty.

No, no, I mean, it is wildly, madly pretty.

I grew up in Southern California, and I was a habitue of the canyons and oceans edging my faintly apalling suburb. It was very pretty, maybe even a little famously so. And when I saw pictures of where we are now, in this past year before we came, I thought a little bit: How strange that I am going back in my retirement to a land much like that of my youth.

There are similarities. But mostly it is incredibly different here. And oddly all the ways that it is different are as if one presented some version of youthful me the opportunity to make improvements on Southern California.

And because I am the way I am, I would have made a lot of improvements.

I would add more stone, climbing dramatically and mysteriously out of the wildland and oceans, in variegated cliffs and caves. I would make it a wetter, lusher, richer environment with real streams and a thousand shades of green. I would give it history and weave beautiful old stone buildings, passages, castles, and curiosities into the environment. And I would improve the culture with better food, and a more hands on personal approach to how people could live in it, walk in it, be in it. 

All those improvements of my child's California are here, right here, out my door!

I have a new list of improvements now for here, equally dramatic, but we'll leave that for another day, because we are talking about how pretty it is!

It's really pretty.

So pretty that sometimes, in a very limited way, I have to stop and take some pictures. I keep this to a minimum, but the truth is that every glance, every walk, every stroll to my bayview apartment windows offers astonishments.

I should have a million pictures to show you of it all. But, still partly surprising to me, pictures don't work like that. They have a thousand of their own rules and limitations that the raw beauty of reality is not beholden to. So when I sit on the couch here and scroll through the 20 or 40 pictures I took back during the day, I am invariably let down.

But not for long.

Because though I am let down, I have planned for it. 

Sure, I hoped for better, but I do expect it. And I know the work to build the pictures back up to a version of the place that was.

Though recognizable, it's never the same as the real place, but no picture is. Nevertheless, this is some of how it looks to me here: