Leaving home to come home

 

As we leave Theoule Sur Mer this morning it is raining, which is the first time it has done that in the whole time we've been in france. I'd be very excited about this, and seeing the hill streams come to life, if we weren't walking a fair bit to a village train station in it.

According to plans, we should be arriving back in our temporary home from our prospective home today (maybe there will be some more information on this tomorrow). It's also possible we'll be extending our trip a tiny bit in nearby (to Sete) Montpelllier if things go well, but in the spirit of returning to charming Theoule Sur Mer I thought I'd share some pictures of me from a walk along the sea here.

Recent history

 

While traveling to investigate long term apartment options here in France I am taking the opportunity to annotate some of my photographs from the past month and a half. You may have seen some of these as I posted many pictures on the fly while we stayed in Japan, but a second look won't hurt us if that's what happens, and a little context for the pictures may give them some new life.

For a few old trees in Japan they would build these elaborate support structures of wood and mostly bamboo, maybe all bamboo? that all reminded me of tree houses. 

I really liked them. 

This is one of those trees along the river of the famous tea growing region of Uji, technically part of Kyoto but also part of another world, which happens a lot in Kyoto.

On the subject of trees, this is one of my ink drawing versions of a tree, I think from a park near where we lived in Kyoto. The Kyoto trees, while more minimal in number, were some of the best trees I've ever seen and I was shocked and delighted to find that they were like bonsai trees, only full sized.

I hope that makes sense.

This picture is in Tokyo. Very Tokyo. And it looks gritty, but it was also probably taken from high up in a very shiny chain clothing store's window. We lived in a quiet, wonderful house on a river in a park like setting, and we probably never travelled more than a few miles from our house in our whole week in Tokyo.

This a very altered picture of the garden of a small museum that had a show of ceramics that was enormously popular with my people. For some reason it makes me remember how hot it was back then in Kyoto. This is the lovely Arashiyama area, famous for its bamboo groves.

That's me! Reflected in a building front in Kyoto, around the corner from where we lived. I was probably hanging out in front of the grocery store seconds from our little house. We shopped at that store a lot, and it played two kinds of music, either interesting jazz or batshit crazy, mildly grating, weird Japanese pop that I doubt was actually popular.

Unsettled

 

No sooner was I back to my computer and to happily writing and photographing the world as I came to it, when a sudden trip has whisked us off across France in search of an apartment to live in. This means that I am back to posting with my phone, on the road. I don't mind this per se, but it works very poorly. Knowing this has caused me to hedge my bets and once again post a few things to tide me over until I return.

Fortunately I have two months of material!

I did post a large number of my pictures along the way of our travels, but often without much context or organization. I don't really even know what pictures I've already showed you, but I think it would be better if I didn't worry about that. Instead I am going to go into my rather large pile of highly edited and constructed pictures and pick some random ones out that catch my eye. You may or may not have seen any of these, but for a little travelogue fun I will try to add a few notes here to give these pictures a little more context for you.

This first picture is extremely doctored.

If there was any bona fide tourist location in our very humble and delightful Kyoto neighborhood it would be the Daitoku-ji Temple, which was really a kind of huge park of Zen Temples near our house. While one could walk through the area, only certain of the many famous temples were visitable, and those for a fee, all of which we paid. Most of these pictures are from this area today. This first one was taken of a closed and locked up building, and taken through a crack in the doors. I lightened it to visibility. After that I added in a stream and a cat. Then I made it into a ink painting scroll. But it was a lovely area and this fairly well captures the fancy of looking into that closed and mysterious world.

This also is from the same temple complex, along a long walled path at the southern entrance that we rarely used. I was fascinated by Japanese manhole covers, but my one minute method of photography did not let me do a survey of them (anyway, tokyo's were the best I have ever seen and I adored them!). Honestly this was not the best part of the temple complex, but I was not entirely able to resist its grand symmetries.

This is still in the same temple complex where a bamboo grove grew behind a bamboo fence (and also behind one of its impressive border walls). There is a very famous a tourist mobbed area of bamboo forest in the city's west (Arashiyami, a neighborhood we loved but never went back to). But I was pretty enamored of this grove (not tourist mobbed!) and have some nice pictures too of crows on a wall in front of it.

But this is just a tree, and a fence, and then the bamboo.

This is from a world heritage temple sight in Uji, which is a famous green tea and tourist area of Kyoto- like a city of it's own, but its also kind of a part of Kyoto. This is from the Byodoin Temple. It was pretty! It was a Phoenix Temple, with phoenixes on the roofs. We were mainly interested in the tea in Uji though and drank a lot of it. And to our surprise the best tea was in the tea room of this temple complex! 

Oh the tea was something else! Gyokuro for the win! I did not much care about tea until I tasted gyokuro! It is savory. It is... oh... it...

There were no deer.

Cafe Zino was to the south of the Daitoku-ji Temple complex, and maybe a bit west? An old man made excellent coffee there and played jazz albums of which he must have had a thousand. The Jazz was all popular commercial jazz of the 40's and 50's, most of it now largely forgotten by the world. The whole thing was strange, calm, amazing, and perfectly normal for Kyoto. So I made him a poster.

On the road again

 

As my darling wife and I are on the road again, this time on a brief sojourn across France in search of home, leaving me with the complicated job of posting from my phone, I thought I'd show some older pictures here that I haven't yet gotten around to showing. These are of the alps, flying out of Switzerland, a sight that made me long a little for mountains. They seem simultaneously inexhaustible and explorable. 

I used AI to clean these up a little as they were taken out of an airplane window, but I didn't add in any elephants or anything like that.

In a small beach town in France

 

I like it alot here in Theoule Sur Mer. It's a bit like one of those French Villages I always read about in Peter Mayle's books, with all the curious French residents and mystifying town activities and rituals, but on the beach and with a steady stream of visitors. I don't know how much the place will shut down as the season closes, and dread it a little because we rely on the few useful shops and boulangeries around here. Yes, there are two boulangeries here, but no cheese shops. The town had a festival this weekend and we went a few times. It was for art and wine, but the art was just a bit of idle window dressing. It was absolutely for wine. I was too shy to buy any, and have an awful lot of cognac at home anyway. The crowds all looked like villagers of old acquaintance, but what do I know? They could easily be a collection of international retirees.

Curiously enough we are leaving Theoule Sur Mer, but just for a few days as we are off to Sete, a few train rides and five hours travel along the coast, to look at an apartment and the possibility of living there. It is confusing enough to not be sure if we are retired here or if we're on a vacation, but to be leaving vacation for a vacation-like trip makes it doubly so confusing.

I'm a bit settled in here, and so have mixed feelings about leaving, as necessary and intriguing as it is. And we'll be back soon enough with at least a month and half to go here. In this homey spririt I offer you some pictures of me knocking about our apartment, with an assortment of fictional cats. I hope you'll enjoy them as I'll be back to the unwieldy posting from my phone for at least a few days after this.