Here we are on the Cote D'Azur and it is amazing. The moon is shimmering off the bay of Cannes out our windows right now, and I can hear the waves breaking on the shore in the chilly, but never freezing, night.
But we want to live here, and in this pursuit the seams start to show in the fabric of the magic of this place.
There are many stunning and enchanting places here in France, but it turns out there are even more people who want to live in and visit those places. And since nowhere near to everyone who wants to can, people live nearby the amazing places. One might think these nearby places would be nearly as amazing, but they aren't. Things take a sometimes hard drop off from the amazing places. The amazing places are the European wonderlands anyone might love. But the other part of France nextdoor is rather more American than we might have hoped, with its relentless car infrastructure, weird sprawl, and separation of vital and interesting shopping areas from the places people live.
It always confused me how, even in the USA, there could be areas of great population density, clusters of apartment buildings and packed in housing, that existed in areas with few shops or services. Occasionally we would run into these mystifying areas in Europe too, only briefly as we were on vacation, and perhaps I too easily dismissed them. Maybe I thought that was simply the way a city had to be. And though Europe had more of the wonderful, rich places of beauty, pedestrianization, and unique business and design that everyone wanted to be in, it was still true that places like Nice and Rome have neighborhood streets of thousands of people, in not inexpensive apartments eight stories high, hosting nothing along their long avenues but a couple boarded up businesses and a hairdresser or two.
There are always the hairdressers.
And then we went to Japan.
And it just wasn't like that.
And I miss Japan.
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