The Snow

 

It snowed today here, well, near here, way up in the Mountains, which to my delight we can see. For us down on the coast, the day was full of heavy drizzles and driven light rains with temperatures in the very upper teens (readers from the USA, here is a helpful conversion guide for you. I invented it myself! Double your Celsius number and then subtract 10 percent. Then add 32 (the ice number!). Et voila! You have the big F. So, 19 degrees Celsius, doubled, is 38, minus, say, 4 (no need to get too fancy), 34, plus 32: 66!). This rain was a trial for us as we were off on a apartment visit that involved wandering outside for hours. But the ocean in the storm was mad with color, and incredible, and when the storm broke apart in the late afternoon the sky was dramatic and even gave us some rainbow.

Once we were safe at home I got a picture or two, which, converted to my current style of choice, the diorama, gives a feel for it. Because its name shows up below, Mandelieu la Napoule is the next town up from here on the way to Cannes, a bit bigger and sits on the sea, in below these mountains in our view.

We speak French!

 

The rhetoric, at least as I encountered it all my life, is that the French are horrible and cruel about people speaking their language, or trying to. 

They are, but they are everything else as well: kind, patient, irritated, confused, and really nice about it. They vary. And if I had to give an overall accounting, despite some bitter experiences with that famous French disdain, they are like people everywhere else we've travelled: touched and complimentary about our speaking their language, in this case, the awesome and mysterious French one.

And though one is supposed to hold tourists in general contempt in order to feel better about being a tourist (I'm an Emigre, dammit!), all these English speaking tourists flocking to the Cote D' Azur and speaking English like it's a divine right have set the stage for our flailing, toddler level, utterly confused French to look like graciousness itself to the beleaguered local inhabitants.

Going in I was inclined to think that many tourists have better French than we do, but I suspect now it is only the tiniest percentage that do. A couple days ago in a beach restaurant (that we can see from the window of where we're currently living), we got a slightly absurd compliment from the waiter we were chatting with that brought it all home.

"How did you come to learn French!" The waiter marvelled. "It is very unusual for Americans to know French." 

It should be noted this was spoken in English.

Although it is possible someone else has paid us this compliment in French in the past, but it would have blown by us by as we only understand maybe a quarter of what anyone says to us, and then only when it is slow, has a lot of context, and is being said the second time around.

Wednesdays

 

Today was Wednesday. 

I used to work on Wednesdays. I don't know why that occurred to me just now. Perhaps because I don't know what I do on Wednesdays at this point in my life. Take pictures and edit them? Watch it rain? Travel? The truth is that we haven't really settled into anything here yet, and the search for an apartment gets us out the door when sheer, avid interest doesn't.

On Wednesdays here everything closes, including both the bakeries, which I sort of knew, but forgot. So I had to spend an entire day without a baguette. It is one of those French things that this tiny village of few stores also has 20 restaurants and the two boulangeries. Both of which close on Wednesday, and both of which are closing at the end of this month until the New Year. I am not looking forward to this. One might think: Why doesn't one close for two months now and the other close for two months after the first one opens again?

I wouldn't advise thinking this.

It'll just slow you down.

The sea

 

I spent my birthday on the sea.

This is because my lovely wife and I are living... get this: on the sea!

Which is kind of neat.

We woke up in Cannes on my birthday in a glass penthouse on the roof of a hotel in a bizarrely affordable room that costs ten times as much during the film festival. Then we took a helicopter back to our long term airbnb.

Did I say helicopter?

I meant bus. But whatever, they both work.

Instead of my usual method of one minute of photography at a time, my birthday indulgence allowed for me to take eight million photographs.

A lot of these are of the sea, because, you know, it's right here.

I'm working on all these pictures and am a little overwhelmed by them, but today I started working with diorama versions of my pictures and am experiencing my usual "new thing" enthusiasm where I feel all geniusy and like I now need to take all 11,000 pictures from the past two months of traveling and convert them into this style. 

It'll pass.

But in the meantime I'd like to show you my most recent images in this style:

Marseille

 

On our slow way back to our temporary home, we had to change trains in Marseille. We had done this on the way out to Sète, but on the trip back we had some extra time, so we were able to wander outside the train station without many expectations.

It turned out to be an absolutely spectacular scene outside the less spectacular and extremely busy train station. I took about a minute’s worth of photographs of the commanding views over the giant city. Then we had some bad coffee, and we were on our way.

Adventure

 

Today, which happens to be my birthday, should also see us back in our little village town on the ocean at Théoule sur Mer. I’m curious to see if it feels any more closed down now at the end of the season, or how much it will start to close down as we head into November and even the start of December. We should still be there through that time as we continue to search for a place to live.

I’m more or less dictating this from our last morning in the Venice of the Languedoc, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to include any new photographs below. But I wanted to make sure, while I had the chance and a little time this morning, to get a post in so I’m not scrambling to do it later, on the day we return to Théoule sur Mer, on my birthday. So though I am reporting here before leaving Sete, we’ll see where we are and perhaps have more reflections on this search tomorrow.

And did we find a place to live on this trip? It’s hard to say.

Traveling like this is all the adventure it was cracked up to be, though I’m not sure adventure is exactly what we think it is when we’re not having one. It has very high highs and very low lows. And, at least for us, it seems to crash between them pretty violently.

We found places we loved on this trip. And I think if an apartment that we can actually rent will accommodate us, we could end up living here for a very long time indeed. But it is equally possible that we will never be back here again.

Which is a split in the fabric of reality that shocks me a little to consider. But perhaps that’s the way things go when one tries to build a new life in a new place.

Still going home

We are surprisingly still on the road, which is a strange concept because we are on the road from being on the road, looking for our home across France. Today we are leaving the town where we’ve spent most of the past week. We extended our stay here a little in our eagerness to find a place to live, and now we’re headed back to the Côte d’Azur, but not to go home. Only to go to Cannes, to take a better look at that city, which we loved as well, though it is very different in many ways from where we are now.

So I am once again reporting, more unevenly, from the road, though as faithfully as ever. I have a few more postcards, so to speak, in the pictures below, though I’m not sure how different they are from yesterday. Maybe one of them captures the sea view from the neighborhood we relocated to on this trip.

Expect slightly sketchy posts for another couple of days. We’ll be in what functions as our temporary home in Théoule sur Mer soon, and I’ll be working on my computer once again.

Nomads

We are still on the road looking for a home. We seem to be getting down to what and where we want but whether pretty France can accommodate us remains an open question. This means that I am poking out this message faithfully on my phone and will now share a random assortment of photos in various styles, some raw and some finished, of where we’ve been. This will likely be the plan until we get back home in a couple of days.