Beau Coquelicot

(14 March 2011)

Omar was probably 5 feet, give or take an inch. His arms were like elongated rocks, rough, not river-worn. He used them to pull us up over their real-life counterparts, little nasty guys that skidded beneath our shoes as we climbed toward a waterfall in Morocco’s Ourika Valley. Not much of a valley—a scrubby, sun-burned crack of earth in the Atlas Mountains, but a strangely beautiful crack, caulked by the bluest sky.

Jenny and I were wearing skirts. Not a smart choice for a day-hike— but then again, we were supposed to be strolling by the sea in the old Portuguese port-town of Essouira, snapping pictures of windows and walls, munching seafood. Not climbing to a waterfall in the Atlases after an hour-long shared cab-ride that we’d been duped into paying too much for. Story of the day. Our morning cabbie had talked us into taking a different bus to Essouira, then dumped us at a station of already-booked tour buses, taking off before we realized we were stranded. When we asked the ticket seller for the fourth time if it was really possible, could there really be no more buses to Essouira that morning, and he assured us for the fourth time that yes, possible it really was, we patched together a back-up plan and found ourselves in another cab an hour later, rolling down a straight slab of highway through random pockets of unfinished urban development, the occasional shanty-town, the odd estate whose tree-tops overran their garden walls.

Soon the road began to wind, and as we gained elevation, tourism revealed itself. Thin men and their camels, awaiting paying riders. Hut after hut of shining dishware and jewelry, tapestries flapping like over-sized Tibetan prayer flags in the breeze. Riverside cafes boasted signs for fresh tagines and cous-cous, but their chairs remained peopleless, and I wondered who it was that stopped here at these empty shops and restaurants. Who bought these lamps and earrings and rugs?

 

At Setti-Fatma, the farthest point in the Ourika that a car can go, Jenny and I got out and there was Omar, waiting for us. Well, waiting for anyone. We still weren’t sure what we were going to do in Setti-Fatma; in Morocco, not knowing usually means getting talked into doing something else. Omar smiled at us with his crooked teeth and said he would take us to see the waterfall and we said okay, sure, why not? He first took us down to the river to drink a coffee—the river a thin band of water flowing over prehistoric egg-like rocks—and then we were on our way up, into the mountains, passing water-bottle sculpture gardens and the occasional alabaster trinket vendor along the way. I’d worn what Jenny likes to call my Shit-Kickers—my sturdy leather boots—but Jenny herself was rocking saddle shoes, and the terrain was not treating them kindly. Every time she slipped or skidded I thought, Oh God, What did we get ourselves into, but Omar was always there, all five solid feet of him, and those five feet pulled and protected Jenny a long way.

 

Do you have children? I asked Omar as we puffed along. He told me he had four, three boys and a girl under the age of 12. We were speaking in French, and I took advantage of our time together to ask him some of the questions I’d been racking up since arriving in Marrakech: At what age do school-children begin to learn French? Is it common to go to university? What are some of the major differences between Berber culture and Arab culture? How has Setti-Fatma changed since you were a boy?

Omar must have a strong constitution because he was patient with me, answering every question with as much care as he could muster while still lending an instinctual hand to Jenny whenever she needed it. When we arrived at the waterfall, he melted into the landscape as we ran our hands under the water and took pictures, only to magically reappear the moment we were ready to move on.

 

Omar took us back by a different route, along the terraces the villagers use to cultivate figs and apples and almonds in the summer and autumn months. From up there we had a view of Setti-Fatma, a village that Omar explained had been completely built up and expanded upon since the ‘70s, when the influx of tourists really began. The color of its buildings remained true to the terrain—so much so that from this distance they were barely discernable against their mountain backdrop—but the architecture itself seemed far more modern than some of the other Berber villages we’d passed en route to the Ourika Valley. When we finally descended and crossed the river back into the village, Jenny and I began to swap looks, wondering when Omar’s tour would conclude so that we could find some food. But he seemed unwilling to give us up.

This is the town’s hamam, Omar said, indicating a patchwork of bricks that supposedly served as the village bathhouse. This is a typical house—the animals are kept here, down below, and the family lives upstairs. These are bags of grain. This is the mosque. This is a carpet shop—here, let’s go inside.

Omar ushered us into a rough earthen building absolutely packed with tapestries—every surface was covered in them, and even while I was protesting our entrance I knew the situation wouldn’t end well. I’d been told by several people before traveling that once you enter a Moroccan carpet shop, once you let the vendor begin to unravel his wares and describe their production, you’re absolutely done for, you’re nothing but significantly rude if you walk out without buying. But Omar had disappeared and Jenny and I found ourselves pulled in with the tide of magic carpets. Before I knew it, I was in the middle of the strangest bargain of my life, placing money I didn’t have on a blue and yellow tapestry I didn’t needed. But it was beautiful. And the salesman so persuasive. And I felt so anxious about being rude. And it was my birthday in another week. I would treasure it, I told myself, forever and ever. And so I spent 30 euros on a tapestry I’ve now draped across a chair in my bedroom in La Ciotat, that I look at every day and shake my head at and think, why on earth did I buy you, tapestry? I left a sweater in Spain for you so that Ryanair would let me bring you on my flight home.

Jenny and I left the rug shop with Omar leading the way, me cradling my brown paper-swathed tapestry like a baby. Hide it in your bag, Omar counseled me, and I did as I was told. Omar seemed on the verge of taking us some distance to some other site, and Jenny and I, our stomachs growling, exchanged a few looks before we finally asked him to stop. You’ve been so great, we told him. But I think we’d like to finish now and find something to eat.

Okay, as you like, Omar nodded. Jenny and I took a moment to collect our cash. Before the hike, we’d agreed with Omar to pay him 100 dirham—about 10 euros—and now we handed him 150, thinking he deserved the 50 extra, that he’d been so good to us. He smiled and said thank-you and then took off down the street, eventually disappearing into the cluster of people and houses, not to be seen—by our eyes at least—again.

It wasn’t until a few hours later, full of tagine and tea, that I realized what I’d done. It felt so righteous at the time, paying Omar those 50 extra dirham for his services. You go to a country poorer than your own and you assume any amount you pay is generous enough—you can’t imagine what it’s like to be as poor as the people you’ve traveled all this way to see, and so you do yourself a favor and you don’t imagine it, you just give cheaply and assume it’s more than enough.

But I paid twice as much for that rug as I did that man. That man who kept my friend from slipping down a mountain and told me all he could about his country. My rug slips from its chair and tells me only that I am a fool.

(13 March 2011)

I left Jane’s apartment in Badajoz at 7 am to catch the bus to Portugual, a ride that was both terrifying and beautiful. Terrifying in the speed of my transport—flying around bends at hair-raising speeds in 12 tons of metal doesn’t exactly lull one to sleep—but beautiful because, well, who would find green pastures and rocky hills and lazing horses and whitewashed walls anything but?

I was barely a week into 17 days of travel that have, for the moment at least, changed some plans for the upcoming months as well as augmenting my already pretty euphoric attitude toward travel. Starting in Seville with a friend of my cousin and then, surprise! (no really, it was a surprise), my cousin; ending in Madrid with three amazing Spanish friends-of-a-friend-of-said-cousin. Portugal and Morocco in between. I’ve fallen in love with too many places and people to count right now. But I’ll start with Lisbon, which was, as the French say, a complete coup de foudre. Love—true love, at first sight.

 

I’d spent a full weekend— walking-full, orange tree-full, flamenco-full, wine-full, and, dare I say it, pork­-full (don’t judge me, fellow pescatarians) with a new friend and my favorite Spanish-speaking relative (not counting, um, my brother?) and now I was on my own for a few days. It felt good to board that bus alone, to change buses in Elvas, Portugal with a Bom dia (Good day) and an obrigada (thank you) in place of a gracias, to arrive in a city where the language was otherwise unknown to me and the roofs were the color of sienna and the roads were still lined by tilted, boot-scuffing stones. To be somewhere with a pastry shop on literally every street corner and river-views at so many different points in an impossibly hilly city. I dropped my stuff at my hostel and then took off to wander with Jane’s beaut of a digital camera, thinking to myself, yes, this is what it is to travel alone. I am the observer and not the observed. I can see details in the most discreet places.  I am here for myself.

And then I met Martin and Dirk.

 

It was at a viewpoint overlooking the city, a terrace with stone benches and cracking blue tiles, steel-grated windows carved into alabaster walls. I was clicking away with Jane’s camera, lost in my little world, when a voice asked me to take a picture of him and his friend. After fulfilling my duties as photographer extraordinaire, I sat and talked with the two friends for awhile, Germans with impeccable English who right away I could see embodied that ideal of bromance—affectionate quips at each other’s expense, finishing each other’s sentences with lewd remarks—that other men only dream of. They were adorable. They launched easily into their own life narratives and wanted to know mine. When they asked if I wanted to tag along to visit the city with them, I didn’t hesitate to say yes, though I did first check to make sure they weren’t serial killers. (By asking, of course.)

The rest, as they say, was history. I spent the next two days with Martin and Dirk, wandering Lisbon’s winding streets, eating octopus, visiting ruins and overlooks and the riverfront, dancing to techno until 4 am, paying close attention as Martin gave me a lesson on Jane’s camera, helping Dirk (futilely) to spot statues of Columbus (I tried my best to insist on Spain’s role in that scenario, but he wasn’t too interested in facts). We talked about all we could in two days—our families, our views of marriage and divorce, our ideas of travel and work and living responsibly versus living well. We bought cheap beer and drank it by the river in the sun…then in the shadow of a statue as it fell…then on the steps of something ancient as it set…. And when we said good-bye from the back of a taxi as the sun began to rise over Lisbon’s rouge roofs on the morning of our third day together, I felt the tug of something I was about to lose, and have since lost—stranger-friendship, that brief important connection that doesn’t endure, because it can’t. Martin and Dirk went back to Germany and I went back to Spain to hang out with Jane who, luckily, I’ll never have to say good-bye to in that way. Because good-byes suck. But thanks to Martin’s photographic genius, I at least have some great pictures of our time together.

(30 January 2011)

This is the scene: three boys are standing on a sidewalk. One of them farts. The smell is deadly, the others turn away and gag and one even falls to the ground, unconscious. A fourth boy walks by, assesses the scene, hands the boy that just farted a pill. He swallows it. A few moments later, he farts again, only this time it’s met with smiles and nods of approval. “Strawberry!” says one boy, grinning. “That smells great!”

Here is another: two girls, twirling their hair, staring at the sky, are confronted by a third. “Excuse me,” she says, pointing to one of the hair twirlers. “Hello! Helloooo!” The girl has no clue she is being addressed. Finally, the lead girl grabs her by the arm and pulls her over to a whiteboard, where the phrase “2 + 2 = __ “ has been written. The hair-twirler is handed a marker and fills in the empty line with “7.” The lead girl shakes her head.

Enter girl two, on whom the same experiment is repeated. She writes “22.” The lead girl then takes out two packs of gum, one with the words “Brain Gum,” written on it, the other a generic brand. The first girl is handed the regular gum, the second, Brain Gum. They chew. They are presented with a new set of math problems. The first girl twirls her hair and looks at the sky. The second girl picks up a marker, faces the white board, and voilà! 2 + 3 = 5! Brain Gum really works!

There’s the pen that prevents you from making spelling mistakes while writing. The black-and-white cookie that fights racism, one delicious bite at a time. The deodorant that makes women fall in love with you. The girl you can rent to spend an evening with if you’re lonely.

Er, okay, so maybe not all the products were kosher…

I’ll go ahead and attribute the conception of this assignment to the hit series Mad Men, a show that I’ve been watching religiously the past several weeks since receiving seasons 1 through 3 on DVD for Christmas. If you’re unclear, the above scenarios were not, contrary to their genius, spots during primetime television. Rather, they were the invention of my eighth and ninth grade students, whom I required to select/invent a product and then to write a television commercial for it.

I’m not usually a proponent of television. Not that I’m against it—I think it has its merits, and people who whine about it turning children brain-dead have obviously never stopped to ponder the existential wisdom of Kipper the Dog.  I just think children need to play outside and with each other more often than with a TV set, and that the same goes for grown-ups, too. However, in the case of Mad Men, I have ignored many people and landscapes this past month in order to dedicate my time to the offices of Sterling Cooper (Draper Price—am I giving too much away?). I feel no remorse.

Have you seen the show? It’s amazing. First of all, there’s the dialogue, and not just the dialogue, but each character’s individual way of speaking. Vocabulary and cadences and expressions that are obviously meticulously researched and reminiscent of the epoch make me nostalgic for time spent with my grandmother Mamie when I was a kid, when I found myself enchanted by her funny expressions that my own parents never used, like, “What a hoot!” for when something was particularly funny, or, referring to something cool as “the bees knees.” (Or maybe she said “the cat’s pajamas.” Or maybe I’m making all of this up.) Expressions like this are thrown around constantly on Mad Men, and god only knows there must be a box somewhere in AMC’s offices overflowing with archaic axioms. So there’s that, and then there’s the amazingly affective dichotomy that exists in characters between their public and private personas, a split that the show’s creators present delicately and yet to such great effect that you find yourself grieving for the people you are simultaneously judging. Because there is so much to judge. Copious amounts of infidelity. And sadistic self-interestedness. And alcohol. And hurt and ignored children. And it so frequently occurs with a strained smile and dollar signs in the transgressor’s eyes. This is Madison Avenue in the 1960s, after all, and whoever you are on the inside has no place in a world where the only thing that matters is the buying and selling of products that have shaped (and manipulated, and made fatter) every generation since.

I didn’t try to explain any of this to my students. Instead, I gave them 30 minutes to create and present an advertisement for the product of their choosing (in English, of course). For fuel, I showed them an Orbit Gum advertisement and that commercial for Old Spice with the man on a horse—a commercial which found itself implicated in all the backlash against the misogyny of the 2010 Superbowl, but which I can’t help but find anything but hilarious. (Maybe if I actually watched football I’d care more about this issue.) And you can see that the results were incredibly entertaining. Even the one for “Clara: Woman of the Night,” which I had to publicly reprimand, despite my private self’s approval of its pluck. 

Yes, my dear men and women of Mad Men, the public-private dilemma extends far into the future. 

(19 January 2011)

Recently, over an 11 pm dinner, Sandy fell into talking about her family in Chile. We had gone to free swim at the local pool that evening, and in a rare moment found ourselves hungry and awake at the same time. (Sandy often eats dinner at midnight, when I’m already in bed.) “Once a year,” she told me in Spafranglish, our preferred form of communication, “my entire family gathers together for a day and we rent this woman’s house, a friend of my grandmother, where there’s a pool. We rent a bus and everyone comes in from Santiago and we spend the whole day by the pool, swimming and talking and eating. It’s my favorite day.” Sandy smiled fondly at the memory and I smiled back, thinking of Megunticook Lake and my cousins and lazy afternoons filled with lobster and blueberry muffins.

“That sounds great,” I said. “It’s nice to have a day every year to spend just with family. How many cousins do you have?”

“Mmm…forty?”

I almost choked on a carrot. “Uh, what?” I said, not even trying to be polite. “How can you have forty cousins? You must mean second cousins and third cousins and all that, right?”

“No.” Sandy did a mental tally again. “No, that’s right, on my father’s side there are about forty cousins.”

“That’s just your father’s side?” I asked, bewildered. I’d stopped eating, and was aware that I was looking at Sandy as if I’d never seen her before. Which maybe I hadn’t. How could I have lived with this girl for four months and not have known she had 40 cousins on one side of her family tree.

I almost hesitated to ask my next question. “And on your mother’s side?”

“Close to thirty.”

Sandy’s father, I came to learn, was one of eleven children and her mother one of nine, each of them, in their own family lives, having three to five children themselves. Sandy herself is one of three—a more familiar number in the American family gamut, certainly, and one I could more easily wrap my head around. But the notion of having seventy first cousins still left me flabbergasted. These days, I have enough trouble keeping in touch with thirteen.

I’m not in complete ignorance that the amount of children people have in America these days—with terrible soul-crushing exceptions such as Nineteen Kids and Counting of course—is not necessarily practiced world over. That’s why props go to people like my friend Eva, who is trying her damnedest to promote sex education in the Dominican Republic, in the name of loftier goals such as manageable public health practices and population control. In Sandy’s grandmother’s generation, I imagine, such education did not exist, nor did access to said means of population control.

“It’s typical that the women of my grandmother’s generation had nine or eleven children,” Sandy informed me. She was clearly amused by my bemusement. “But now, no, it’s not so typical to have that many children.”

From what I can gather, filtering everything through the lens of my American understanding of social class (an imprecise measurement for international class standards if ever there was one), Sandy is from a solidly middle class Santiago family—not well-off, but certainly comfortable, educated, and much better traveled than a great deal of her fellow citizens. I think I normally miss out on the class and cultural differences that exist between us because our lives here are so similar. We arrived with the same amount of stuff. We earn the same amount of money. We buy the same groceries. We’re both struggling to make a place for ourselves in a culture not our own, conversing every day in a foreign language that we wish we could throw out the window whenever we’re trying to express something particularly deep and important but ultimately cannot. But the differences between us still exist, certainly, and if we were to compare things like our college tuitions, the salaries of certain jobs in our home countries, the houses we grew up in or true wardrobe girth, we would surely find staggering differences, with me, and America, in the lead on all counts.

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here, really. If I was more educated or possessed more sophisticated sociological knowledge I could probably make some significant statement about the connection between generational and social class differences and sexual education and population control. But I think mostly what it comes down to is me being shocked about something that for Sandy is and always has been quite normal. The sprawling family structure, a thing none too unusual in Chile.

The joke, Sandy tells me, is that in her grandmother’s time they didn’t have television. They had sex.

(11 January 2011)

“So you’re one of those Australians who takes 6 months off from life to travel, right?” I asked Reese, a jolly blond whose rice bubbled on the stove next to my pasta. I’d met many of his kind in Asia, the youthful Aussie who has spent a year working and saving—or else appealing to mum and dad—in order to see the world…often from behind the tab of a beer can.

“I guess you could call me one of those,” he said, a sly grin crossing his face. “But I think I’ll be extending my travels a little longer than a year. I’m planning to be on the road for 2 and a half.”

I stirred my pasta and considered him, his easy smile, his sunburned cheeks. La Ciotat had been stuck under a rain cloud since my return from Christmas in New England, but in Nice, only two hours east, the sun was out in full force and felt good as cashmere against the skin. When I lived in Seattle, I spent a lot of time arguing with Californians about the banality of consistently good weather, insisting upon the value of changing seasons, insisting that the cold and the snow was as great as the sun and the heat. But in La Ciotat, where I’d imagined a mild, light-jacketed winter, I’d begun to grow bitter behind the down of my second-hand parka and wondered if my West Coast friends might be right.  Nice, where I’d come to spend the weekend with fellow teaching assistants Sandy and Nicoletta, was a welcome respite.

 

We were staying at the Villa Saint Exupéry, named for the creator of the beloved Little Prince, a Niçoise villa settled high on a hill overlooking Nice proper, purportedly France’s number 1 hostel. It was certainly a traveler’s community—except when speaking with Sandy and Nicoletta, I didn’t hear a word of French, and the staff, a mix of Australians, Americans, a Pole, a Welshman, and an Algerian, all spoke English to each other. Wanting to live cheaply, Sandy and I had brought food to make at the hostel, which offers its large kitchen to guests for lunch and dinner and gives a complimentary breakfast.

“I’m hitchhiking for the most part,” Reese was in the midst of telling me. He spooned some rice onto a plate, the rest into a plastic container that had a piece of tape with the word “Reese” on it. “It’s free, and it’s not so difficult, actually, you’d be surprised. The most I’ve waited for a ride is a little over an hour. It doesn’t seem to matter that I don’t speak any language besides English!”

“Oh yeah?” I said, trying to sound interested, finding it difficult to muster the enthusiasm. I wanted to chalk it up to hunger, but really, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Reese seemed nice and eager to chat, but I was having trouble processing the environment of young travelers in which I found myself ensconced. A boy carrying a squealing girl on his back ran in and out of the kitchen. A group of Australians in the dining area had started a drinking game and were laughing loudly at themselves, at each other. In the corner a Korean man sat quietly, taking in his surroundings with big, somber eyes. I felt old, like it would have been too much effort to join in the general joviality, and I was reminded of college, and how I wasn’t in it anymore.

I drained my pasta into a colander.

“Well…I’ve got a beer waiting for me out there,” Reese said. “You should come join when you’re done eating. We’ll probably go out drinking tonight.”

I nodded and divided the pasta into three portions, then joined Nicoletta and Sandy in the dining area to eat. We were all quiet, despite our noisy surroundings.

“Where’s your friend?” Nicoletta asked me, indicating Reese. I shrugged. “I didn’t like him,” she said. “I don’t like people like him.”

“Why not?” I asked, annoyed. “You don’t even know him. You didn’t even talk to him!” I knew I was getting more worked up than was necessary—Nicoletta was just echoing thoughts I wasn’t honest enough to let myself think. I always held myself to a higher standard while traveling, having long ago marked the idea of travel as synonymous with being open to every encountered person and thing.  If I was to start judging my fellow travelers for their drunken, superficial, cultureless antics, what was I letting myself be judged for in return?

Several hours later, I found myself at a bar in downtown Nice listening to a French grunge band with Sandy and Nicoletta and a 19 year-old Australian boy we’d met back at the hostel. We stayed out until 3 o’clock, returned to the hostel, snuck into the closed kitchen for glasses of water, stayed up talking for another hour. The lights were all off at the Saint Exupéry. There was no one else awake. We were the final revelers. When I finally climbed onto the top bunk of my 12-person mixed-dorm, I noticed that the person on the bunk below mine was Reese, the roving Australian. Sleeping soundly.

Three hours later, Sandy, Nicoletta and I woke for breakfast then got into Nicoletta’s car and drove to Monaco. I barely registered the extravagant villas, the fur-clad, diamond-crusted 20-somethings with their 70 year-old boyfriends. I was too tired. I’d stayed up too late being the traveler I wanted to criticize.

(Harbor, Monte Carlo)

(6 January 2011)

At the train station in Marseille, Emmanuel, a Spanish friend, resembled some sort of hippie vagabond beneath the weight of my large beige backpack. He said it himself, with a grin: “I am a true hippie now,” and he looked the part, with his curly hair poking out beneath a Moroccan cap and a sweater made of hemp. His dog, Ita, stood beside him on the platform and they waved me off—Emmanuel with his hand, Ita with her tail—as I boarded my train to Paris. I had a flight to Boston in two days. I was going home for Christmas.

Normally, the train from Marseille to Paris takes three hours. This snowy night, I was there in 5, and it was after one in the morning by the time I stepped gingerly onto the ice and snow in front of Diogo’s building. Diogo, my Swiss-Portuguese mathematician friend from NYU, lives in an old convent that has been converted into studios for artists and scholars, a whole city block of arcades and plastered-over wooden beams filled with thinkers young and old. Diogo was kindly letting me crash in his apartment for the weekend while, ever the gentleman, he stayed with a neighbor. He greeted me with a hug and let me into the apartment, where I promptly crashed as he exited with promises of Sunday brunch.

In the morning I awoke to a winter wonderland, the likes of which I’d never experienced during my two years in Paris. The garden behind the convent was shivering with snow, and while a snow-covered Parisian garden is something I’d normally be happy to look at for hours, I greeted the sight with dread. This was not good, I thought, recalling the December of 2006 when, because of weather, I was stranded in Paris and barely made it back to America in time for Christmas Eve with my family. This white stuff had the potential to ruin my travel plans.

It was already ruining it for so many others in London. I learned this later that morning, over brunch with Diogo and close family friends of his who were visiting from Switzerland. We were seated around a bleached wooden table in the kitchen of Eliane, a French comédienne who was once very famous in the ‘70s and ‘80s and is still considered one of the foremost progenitors of French feminist comedy. Her table was laden with every delicious thing I like to fantasize about for my future unapologetically bourgeois life: flaky brioche and crusty baguette; a dozen small jars of honey and jam; a tray of yogurt of various flavors and thicknesses; a plate of cheese, steaming pots of tea and coffee, patterned teacups the size of bowls. A cup of sugar cubes, brown and white, to be lifted with a silver spoon. To my left sat two handsome Swiss men; to my right, three more. I took a moment to marvel at where I was and how I’d gotten there, then let my anxiety resume.

“So you think that I’ll have trouble getting out tomorrow?” I asked one of the handsome Swiss men beside me. “Only if you’re flying through London,” he replied. “No one there is going anywhere.”

Of course, the first leg of my trip was Paris to London, and when I awoke the next morning to the convent’s winter wonderland, touched up during the night by a new flurry of snow, I knew the prognosis wasn’t good. At Eliane’s, the internet told me my flights were canceled. The man I spoke to about rescheduling told me there wasn’t another flight available for three more days. If the snow stopped falling, that would still get me home in time for Christmas. But I’m a big baby, and the thought of missing time with family and friends, of imposing further upon Diogo’s generosity, was upsetting. I wallowed and called my daddy to whine and then wallowed some more.

 

I’m laughing at myself now, (or maybe it’s more of a cringe), because the extra 30 hours I spent in Paris were probably some of the best I’ve ever had there—I just didn’t know it at the time. I wallowed, but I was also treated to lunch by my new Swiss friends, saw Diogo play Fado (Portuguese guitar) at a Portuguese restaurant, finished my Christmas shopping, ate a long hearty dinner of soup and pot au feu and bread and cheese at Eliane’s, and drank beer with what is presumably the most good-looking group of European men I’ll ever encounter while they taught me nuances of the French verbs “to like,” “to like like,” and “to love.”

And thanks to a certain AAdvantage Customer, it was only a day later, rather than three, that I was able to board an airplane to Boston via Madrid, one of the lucky ones to escape the north of Europe in time for Christmas. What did I learn? That self-pity’s such a waste of time. Provided you’re surrounded by attractive people and cheese.

(1 December 2010)

I might have spent Thanksgiving 2010 eating Moroccan food and nut cake at the home of retired friends Hugues and Danielle, but I haven’t strayed so far from my roots as to avoid the holiday altogether. Instead I’ve been sharing it verbally and visually—if not gustatorily—with my students, who couldn’t care less about fringe religious zealots fleeing their English homeland to practice in “freedom” a remarkably repressive, misogynistic, and rather boring way of life. Photographs of mashed potatoes and stuffing and gravy and turkey and pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce hardly make them blink (why on earth do you think I’d ever care about cranberry sauce? their bitter angsty faces seem to say). And while the Native Americans arouse some interest (Oh, you mean INDIANS, the cowboy shooters? Sure boys, sure) mostly it’s just another round of Hey Here’s My Culture Isn’t It Swell?

And then along came The Addams Family. To save, like the Grinch before them, another cherished holiday. Turns out French schoolchildren love the Addams family movies. You know, the ones with Angelica Huston and Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci when she still had some skin on her bones. And lucky for me, YouTube was able to provide me with this video clip. It may not be the most politically correct portrait of a certain group of people, nor does it in any way historically replicate that first dinner party the Pilgrims and the Native Americans enjoyed (er, tolerated?) centuries ago, but I find that it sparks good conversation, and at least gets the kids laughing.  And after discussing the departure of this Thanksgiving representation from the lovely little bedtime story I shared at the beginning of class (in which the Native Americans save the Pilgrims from hardship and everlasting love and friendship are born), I proceed to show this clip, also courtesy of YouTube. 

Depressed? So were my students, but the conversation that has ensued from the juxtaposition of these two video clips has been wonderfully round and surprising. I think I don’t often give my students the benefit of the doubt; I assume that they’re only capable of thinking in black and white, in one dimension instead of two or three. But this was a completely new vision of America for them, and rather than immediately seek blame for the current status of America’s indigenous populations, rather than find fault with America’s greed and political corruption and over-commercialization (chief among their favorite criticisms) they wanted to know what is currently being done to help Native Americans, and why things can’t be better. Answers I didn’t have, to be sure.

Despite all of the hypocrisy of its origins, I think Thanksgiving is the best American holiday, one that just needs a little bit of pushing in another, more socially conscious direction. The mass extermination of turkeys is creepy, definitely, but the lack of pressure to spend copious amounts of money on crap, like a certain December holiday demands, is refreshing, and the idea of sharing a meal with loved ones, the idea of welcoming others into your home and taking a minute to be grateful for all that you have—that’s beautiful under all circumstances. And so, a week late, but far from home and missing my family and traditions…Happy Thanksgiving. And, like one of my students said, “Americans absolutely cannot forget about the cowboys. I mean… the Indians.”

(24 November 2010)

Anyone who knows me well knows that I LOVE bicycles. Can’t get enough of them. Have ridden them all over America and the world. Subscribe to all the best bike blogs and own all the latest/greatest gear and know how to change my own bike tires and pump my own bike gas like a pro.

NOT. (Come on, guys. Like I’d ever pump my own bike gas.) No, anyone who knows me well, or even just a little bit (I think I narcissistically recount the tale of how a bike broke both my wrists within the first 40 minutes of meeting someone) knows that me and bikes go together like Jenny and Forrest Gump. Who do not, contrary to Forrest’s claim, go together like peas and carrots, because peas and carrots actually complement each other quite nicely, while Jenny is a selfish destructive sadist who inflicts copious amounts of pyschological pain on sweet, well-meaning Gump.

In case you’re missing the analogy, Jenny would be the bicycle here. And I, Forrest, am doing my best to show my love, riding her (my bicycle—get your minds out of the gutter) tenderly and with care. I’ve even named her Velove, which is a pretty cute name if you ask me (I know, you didn’t), velo being the French word for bicycle and love being the English word for amour. Get it? It’s not too complicated. But planting my feet firmly on Velove’s pedals and gaining enough momentum to cross a convoluted 4-lane street before the giant white truck barreling around the corner mows me down definitely is, and if sometimes I’m that girl who walks her bike across the street at a crosswalk then that’s okay, my pride’s intact, I live.

About 10 years have passed since my last relationship with a bicycle, so Velove and I are taking things slowly, and some days I don’t ride her at all. I have always had a much more stable relationship with my feet, and so even though it takes longer, there are days I choose to walk to school, which gives me time to listen to music, go over my lesson plan in my head, to take in the…uh…houses…. Yes, life goes by much faster on a bicycle, but I see now something I’ve been loathe to understand for years, that there is something in it, that head-rush of the hill-descent, when the world is a blur on both sides and the pavement it streaming under you like some sort of dark water and the cool air feels like new life against your cheeks. In these moments, when I manage to shake off the vision of my body broken and battered on the pavement, I reach that magic, nothing-but-the-present place, and am inexplicably at peace.

And then there are the times when La Ciotat’s surging winds hit me like a brick wall as I huff uphill, late for work, when I literally can’t move, and my thighs are on fire, and I hate the world, and I know it’s not exactly the bike’s fault, but I can’t help it, I wish Velove ill. Because if personal history has taught me anything, it’s that bikes provide a much more effective platform for blame than, say, the cousin who tried to teach you to ride with no hands, cousins being capable of speech and thus the power to suggest that it’s actually you who is responsible for bad accidents, not objects. And while this sort of argument stinks strongly of Guns don’t kill people… I appreciate that bikes, no matter how violently they try to buck you from their uncomfortable weirdly-shaped seats, will never tell you you’re at fault. 

(16 November 2010)

 

Being far from home(s), from people I know well, who know me back, whose couches I can put my bare feet on and whose refrigerators I can open without feeling rude, makes me nostalgic, definitely, but also makes me conscious of the unspoken rules of French propriety that in America I don’t constantly have to think about. Like. For example. A dinner party. If you make dinner for people, someone might bring something, a dessert, a bottle of wine, but you are the host, you cook, you serve, you clean up, you take help from no one. Adversely, if you are invited, you are expected to do nothing but eat and drink, and even offering to help do the dishes is considered strange.  Of course, I love doing nothing, and so being invited to someone else’s house for dinner is a relaxing and indulgent treat. But after hours of making formal conversation with people I don’t know very well, I miss making dinners with home-friends, where no formalities exist, where we start washing each other’s dishes without asking and help ourselves to glasses of water and wine without waiting to be served.

With the other teaching assistants it’s not so formal—whether this has to do with all of us being peers, being used to each other now, or being non-French (except the halfsie Lucien) I’m not sure, but I feel comfortable enough now to help myself to a glass of water at Nicoletta’s apartment or to start doing the dishes after a bread-and-Nutella binge at Lucien’s. Jon, the other American, has no qualms about asking me to cut vegetables or clear the table, and unlike with the others it’s been this way between us since the beginning, something I think is the result of our mutual Americanism. I never considered that Americans were so informal, but now several sources have confirmed for me that we are, and I’m beginning to see it. We’re not rude…we’re casual. I usually hate making generalizations, but in an experience like this I can’t help it, they’re all over the place, and though individuals remain individuals, groups of people united by region, language, diet, etc. definitely share traits that can be summarized. I found myself complaining one night to a Frenchie named Xavier, who spent two years living on the Texas-Mexico border (I know, right?) that I was still struggling to address people older and wiser than me with the formal “vous” form, which takes more time for my brain to conjugate than with the informal “tu.”

“I can’t tell,” I complained, “who is deserving of a ‘vous’ and who is deserving of a ‘tu.’ The teachers at my school are all older than me but we work together, so I feel like they should be tus. Everyone older than me tus me, but who can I tell who to tu back, and who to vous? I know that normally you’re invited by the person you’re vous-ing to tu them, but so far nobody that I know here in La Ciotat who I vous has invited me to tu them. WTF?”

“Ah, you are Americans are so fucking casual all the time!” Xavier exclaimed, his profanity ringing in with a slight Texas twang. “Don’t get me wrong, I like this, but you have to realize that in most other cultures there is a social distinction that exists between people, and that formalities are still greatly valued.”

I thought about this, my first instinct being that I wanted to roll my eyes at and flaunt the social formality—we’re all the same! No one’s better than me and I’m better than no one! But then I considered Xavier’s stance, the value of social formality, and realized that what I was missing wasn’t informality with strangers—because in America formality with strangers certainly exists, even if we don’t thou each other these days—what I was missing was the familiarity of friends.

Last week I found myself in Marseille to retrieve my long-stay visa from the Office of Immigration. Afterward, I wandered around the city, glad to be out of La Ciotat for a few hours, and settled into a café called Cup of Tea for a cup of, well, coffee. I’d spent a week in La Ciotat English-less, no Skype calls, no English conversations with Jon (the assistants all speak French when we’re together), only the baby talk I engage in with my students (Do. You. Like. Cats???). I didn’t realize how badly I was craving an English conversation until I heard the man at the table next to me addressing the waitress with a thick accent.

“American?” I asked him.

“No,” he said smiling, clearly relieved to return to his native tongue. “English.”

I never fancied myself (“fancied” is a word my new British friend used quite a lot that day; so is “quite”) a person who goes to foreign countries to seek the comfort of their homeland, but the Brit and I spoke for three hours, with an ease I didn’t realize I’d been missing. Whether it was a personality click or a language click or both I think we both found, for a few hours, something we’d been similarly lacking in the South of France: informality. Lingering on a street corner, saying our good-byes, I thought it funny that we’d spent three hours getting to know each other and would probably never see each other again—he was headed back to London in a week, I was headed to La Ciotat. But strangers, I decided, as we bised good-bye, can sometimes be as comforting as friends.

Sometimes.

(10 November 2010)

I’ve fallen in love with a family here, la famille Monin, and though I try not be creepy about my growing obsession for their cozy little house, sweet-tempered children and delicious home cooking, I can’t help but give myself away every time they invite me to do something with them. My enthusiasm for their company manifests itself in effusive head-nodding and many wee wees when they make a proposition: babysitting 2 year-old Luisant, called Lu-Lu, tutoring 8 year-old Chloé in English, going for a walk to discover La Ciotat’s hidden cache of graffiti art, or, as happened last week, attending a degustation hosted by Philippe at his friend’s bookshop.

Philippe is a professor at Lycée de la Méditerranée’s professional school, a certified sommelier who now guides young people in the art of serving slash cooking slash running a restaurant. He has by far been the teacher most welcoming to me since my arrival, and also the one most enthusiastic about the work I’m doing with his students. For most of the others teachers here, I’m a handy tool that helps reduce their great work load, but for Philippe, whose students, at 15, are already on a professional track they intend to pursue for the duration of their working lives, I’m the difference between higher and lower wages for these future servers/chefs/sommeliers/hotel managers. (In their world, English can only be an asset to them.) After my Wednesday morning lesson with Philippe’s class, Philippe buys me a coffee for 50 centimes from a funny little machine in the Teacher’s lounge and teaches me about wine. Two weeks ago it was Soil and Cépage—grape variety. Last week, it was How to Drink Nine Glasses of Wine on an Empty Stomach and Still Teach Three Classes the Next Morning. 

 Philippe and his wife Lawrence had invited me to a wine tasting that Philippe was hosting after-hours at a bookshop in La Ciotat. The bookshop is owned by a friend of Philippe’s, a tall (finally! Another tall female in La Ciotat!) slim woman with the neck of a swan, a shaved head, and a wardrobe only of black. I have passed this charming bookshop many times before, and when I walked into it last Thursday with Philippe and Lawrence, I spent the first ten minutes antisocially reading children’s books in the corner. Once all the guests had arrived, however, Philippe began to pay me special attention, taking his role as my wine mentor seriously. “First we swirl the wine around the glass,” Philippe said, starting me off with a glass of white Bordeaux. “We assess the color, the clarity, and the legs—this one’s good. They’re stiff.” He looked at his glass with great care and I followed suit, trying my best to discern stiff legs. “Then we sniff,” (Philippe sniffed loudly), “Then we suck through our teeth, then we taste and swallow.”  I did what he said, ransacking my brain for vocabulary when he asked me what I tasted. Did I find it fragrant? Floral? Citrus?

“Uh…I taste…something citrus?” I said. Philippe nodded encouragingly.

“And…lightly…floral…?” Philippe smiled with great pride. I’d passed. 

“Yes! There is something of grapefruit in this, and the floral you’re smelling, that’s muguets!” 

We spent the next few minutes trying (and failing) to determine what muguets were in English. (Thanks to Wikipedia, I can now tell you that they’re Lilies of the Valley. As if I ever would have come up with that after tasting the Bordeaux). From there, Philippe filled and refilled my glass with: a second Bordeaux, two Rieslings, a Chardonnay, a Chenin Blanc, and a Montepulciano. I had been told that we were going to dinner after the degustation, but by my third glass I found myself grabbing fistfuls of cashews just to put something in my stomach; by my sixth glass, at which point I noticed the more subdued members of the party chatting wildly away at one another, I begged Philippe to stop pouring.

“Feeling tipsy?” he asked me, grinning. “I certainly am!”

Finally the group was mobilized, and we headed out of the bookshop and into town. Lawrence was called home by the babysitter, but Philippe and his friends insisted that I stay, and I was so desperate for dinner that I agreed. We arrived at a restaurant in the Old Port, across from the boatyard. Philippe and his friend’s seemed to know the patron, who immediately sent over another bottle of wine. Oh great, I thought, looking eagerly at the chalkboard menu, mentally making my selection. More wine.

A half hour passed, then another. No one ordered any food. I was squished into a corner between the swan-necked owner of the bookshop and a handsome gay chainsmoker who speaking to me in rapid, nearly impeccable English. Were they not ordering food? I inquired. They looked at me like I was nuts.

“The kitchen is closed, Mademoiselle!” my chainsmoking friend exclaimed, and the whole table chuckled, as if it were ridiculous that I should be thinking of food when there were two more bottles of wine on the table waiting to be consumed. I checked my cell phone for the time and was shocked to see that it was nearly midnight. We’d arrived at the bookshop at seven.

I shot Philippe a meaningful look from across the table and he came over to me. “Okay, I have a decision to make,” he said, not the least bit sober. “I can be a good husband and go home now to my wife, or I can stay out for only one more bottle with my very very good friends.”

I told him I was in desperate need of food.

“Okay, we stay ten minutes,” he said to me in English, and ordered another bottle of wine.

  

The next morning, in the Teacher’s lounge, trying to walk off a pounding headache, I ran into Sophie, another English teacher. “Did you go out last night?” she asked, laughing. “You look tired—but not as tired as Muriel!” She pointed to a fellow teacher, hunched into a chair. “Muriel is quite hungover this morning.”

At that moment Philippe walked in, nodded at me, and made a beeline for the coffee machine. He looked far worse than Muriel. Next time, I thought to myself, gathering my things to go to class, Next time we’re having a purely theoretical wine lesson.

(30 October 2010)

Sometimes, when the timing feels right, I like to pose little challenges to myself to prove that I’m not scared of things I’m actually really scared of. This does not include riding bicycles in big, busy, traffic-heavy cities—no, I don’t know when I’ll be up for that challenge, but as my wrists still crack painfully when I lift heavy objects even 10 years after an accident that a bicycle (not me, of course not me!) was responsible for, the answer to that might be never. The kind of challenges I prefer are ones that I can actually envision ending positively, and not with my insides being squished all over a sidewalk beneath the tires of some rogue taxicab. More like: moving jobless across the country to sleep on a friend’s spare mattress, just to see what happens; or, trying not to cry while climbing a sheer cliff-face in the Grand Canyon with a bunch of hard-core hikers who have brought 6-packs of Bud for hydration, just to save face; or, taking a job as a nanny with the most heinous of Upper East Side families, just to see if I can manage keep my ethical wits about me (barely!). Or…standing in a room packed full of strangers in one of the most internationally recognized bookshops in the world just to see if I’m capable of reading a not-very-good poem I wrote three years ago without throwing up. 

The latter took place last night in the expatriate literary Mecca of Shakespeare & Company, an English-language bookshop located on Paris’s left bank, directly across the Seine from Notre Dame. This is a bookshop I know well: I spent many afternoons here during my two years at AUP flipping through books and trying to soak in the prestige of a place so old and wordy. I had known since the beginning of October that I would be coming to Paris to visit Friend Sasha and Friend Diogo during the Toussaint school vacation. I did not know that I would be subjecting myself to public speaking. Jenny, a fellow Teaching Assistant based in Avignon, had shared with me via Facebook that she would be in Paris at the same time and that she was planning to read something at an Open Mic at Shakespeare & Co. At first I received the information neutrally. Cool, I thought, I’ll go see Jenny read and cheer her on. And then the little challenge bug in my brain started crawling around and hissing, You should read something too…

Barring a few critically-acclaimed moments of childhood fame (an ugly stepsister in Cinderella in 5^th grade; the Baroness von Schrader in Briscoe Middle School’s 2001 production of The Sound of Music), I’m not a huge fan of public performance/speaking. The handful of presentations I had to give in college always left me breathless and shaky; my first few days working register at Think Coffee in New York and Trader Joe’s in Seattle felt like theater auditions. But I think that standing in rooms full of 15 and 16 year-olds the past few weeks has upped my nerve count, and I was excited at the idea of joining the great tradition of readers and writers at a bookshop I loved so much. I wrote Jenny back and asked her for details about the reading, then e-mailed someone named Adam to sign up.

Friday night rolled around, and after a few days of wandering aimlessly through Paris eating falafel and crêpes, I found that I wasn’t actually as up for the challenge as I’d hoped. Sure, I’d spent the morning hunting down the apartment of a friend-of-a-friend in the Latin Quarter in order to cadge his printer and print the poem, but walking with Jenny to Shakespeare & Co. at 7:30 on Friday night, I fought the urge to rip up the poem and throw it in a trash can.

We stopped for a beer.

We went inside. The upstairs room was packed, literally nowhere to sit, barely room to stand. We signed in, chatted with a few other readers, then listened to Adam gather the attention of the crowd.  There are two judges tonight, he told us. They will choose a winner based on the best performance, he said. The performers are here to entertain you! he exclaimed. You have the right to heckle them only if they exceed their five minutes! he grinned.

Uh… Performer? I definitely wasn’t about to perform anything for anybody. I was about to read some emo wordplay that didn’t actually come off too well in speech and was really meant to be read on paper.

I might have walked out if it wouldn’t have caused such a scene. I waited for my name to be called. Three very strong performers—a musician and two poets—went on. I was fourth. I stumbled over to the mic, stuck my eyes to the paper, moved my lips, and didn’t look up until it was over 50 seconds later. Sure, people clapped at the end, but all I could do was run from the room and try to breath and wait for my heart to stop pounding.

The soaring, powerful, self-assured feeling I had anticipated in committing to the Open Mic never arrived. I definitely didn’t win Best Performer. But I didn’t throw up, and if that’s where the success lies for now, I’ll take it.

(25 October 2010)

Going somewhere I’ve never been before feels religious to me. What I imagine religion feels like for the religious. I don’t really know what it’s like to visit a church week after week and read and read again a text that supplies answers to questions I might not have otherwise had, but when I’m in a place that I’ve never before seen in person, there is a recurring feeling—elation, self-possession, comfort and contentment and an openness to whatever that comes from a trust placed in the present—that I imagine must be similar to something the devout feel standing in the house of their god(s). I suppose that’s the draw of religion, this feeling. I know I’m addicted to it. 

This weekend, Lucien’s considerable Franco-German-Croatian charm lent him a car, and we five Teaching Assistants piled into it to see a good deal of this very pretty very ancient land. Saturday we started in Saintes Maries de la Mer, a coastal town located in La Camargue, an area of France known for its flamingos and wild horses. We wandered, had lunch, stalked flamingos and drove around the Nature Preserve before continuing on to Arles, the town made famous by Vincent Van Gogh.  Sunday was less nature and more history. Les Baux, a medieval castle town, and Salon-de-Provence, the hometown of Nostradamus. Here is some imagery to bring you to where I was.

View of La Ciotat, Routes des Cretes

Pretty Mediterranean, Routes des Cretes

Seaside, Saintes Maries de la Mer

Marsh and Flamingos, Saintes Maries de la Mer

The French Lucky and Lucy 

Lagoon, La Camargue

Fountain, Arles

Église, Arles

Espace van Gogh, Arles

Arles by night

Arena, Arles

Cookies, Les Baux

Lucien on the bluff, Les Baux

Dream House, Unspecified Countryside

Rooftops, Village of Les Baux