Love, peace and foïe grease!

So here we are friends, 29 days down, 100 to go. That’s 4 weeks, 14 to go.  That may seem like a lot for you, but for me time is flyin’. 

Since we last left our heroine, things were not exactly magnificent, but they have taken a turn for the better.  Valentine’s Day came soon after my last post, and Justin sent me the most beautiful bouquet of roses.  And he sent them to school – always a good choice, because everyone asks what the flowers are for and who they’re from and how come their boyfriend doesn’t love them as much as mine loves me maybe that’s because…. Okay.  So, that totally made my week.  I did a little self care - meditative coffee drinking and waiter ogling – and I caved and bought myself some new perfume.  Female self-care is a strange thing.  I would’ve just gotten a haircut but explaining “just a trim” in French sounded like more unnecessary stress.  And, they say the sense of smell is one of the strongest (especially when women are hormonal), so I went to a perfume store and smelled everything until I found something that reminded me a little bit of everyone I miss.  It’s like sweet, warm incense at first and then it mellows.  It makes me think of head shops like The Melting Pot in Reno and Happy Hut in Oregon and Whole Foods and cinnamon rolls.

In general, it was a hectic week of first quizzes and essays and last minute administrative organization for vacation.  I got an A- on one quiz and a C- on another…. Delightful.  But I have all week to get my homework done and get ready for the rest of the semester.  I signed up for my community service – helping immigrant middle school students with their English homework.  And I plan to spend my vacation painting, reading, and visiting museums.

This weekend, I went to Monaco and la Gaude with my host family (I got the weekend trips backwards – Carcassone and the Spanish border is next weekend).  We stayed with Martine’s brother and sister in law in la Gaude, visited St. Paul de Vance, Vance, Monaco, and Diano Marina in Italy.  It was absolutely magnificent!  First, a petite family history:

Martine and her two brothers were born in Paris, their father worked for IBM, and he got a big bonus to move to southern France and work at their new solution center.  So when she was 9 years old, in 1961, her family moved to Vance.  She grew up there and eventually moved to nearby Nice to work and so on – met Didier, got married, lived by the ocean, then had Sandrine (the oldest), moved to Aix and some years later had Anne.  Her brother and sister-in-law both work for IBM and live on the hill that used to belong to Marcel Pagnol (big deal French writer from Provence).  They each have two children from previous marriages, but I only met the youngest, Margot, who’s 17 and looks like a really pretty Kerri Ballard (for those who knew her).  Martine’s father died about a year ago, and her mom moved to San Rafael, right next to the youngest brother.

Didier’s parents were from Nice, but his father went to school for architecture in Paris.  While he was in Paris, (Didier’s father, that is) he found out he had tuberculosis, so they told him to move to the mountains for his health.  He did correspondence from the Alps while he finished his studies, and it was in the Alps that little Didier was born.  He grew up in a tiny Alp town and then moved to Nice where he met Martine and got married and blah blah blah.  Marine teased him for being a peasant, and said that it was her Parisian roots that excused her from the southern accent that permeates Didier’s speech.  It didn’t sound that snobby but the cultural undertones were there.  Please note that France was not always a democracy and nobility still has its effects.  This is a culture of dignity – that is to say, status, respect, and image.  So the fact that Martine’s father was the director of IBM at their big solution center and Didier’s family came from the Alps actually does matter.  I find it to be a beautiful love story…

SO… back to our epic journey: St.Paul de Vance, like most little towns in the east hills of Southern France, is situated on the top of a hill with a church in the middle with complete disregard for accessibility.  Welcome to the land before the time of cars.  It’s a neat bit of history.  However, this little town has been taken over by artists and postcard stores, so it’s a touristy maze of art galleries (some good, some useless).  Vance, where Martine grew up, is a nice town, and feels like a kid-friendly town.  We did the history-of-Martine tour, had a hot chocolate in the café where she used to go when she ditched school (reminiscent of Mom’s stories about patty melts, coffee and cigarettes except with cigarette’s and menthe-à-l’eau).  There was a tree in the middle of a little plaza and Martine explained to me that it was planted when Henry IV came through town, as commemoration.  As we walked and she talked, she lit up a cigarette with what seemed like a bit of sneeking around and a smile, then she explained that when she was young, women couldn’t smoke in the streets – in bars, sure, but not in the streets – only prostitutes smoked in the streets.  It’s funny, she seems generally reserved and calm, but when we went to visit her brother and see a bit of her history she just lit up and her personality came through.  She reminds me a lot of my mom – she listens to the Eagles, smoked pot at the Tina Turner concert, works in social services, only gives her opinion when asked, and has her little bag of cosmetic tools that remind me of the “mass quantities” box of my childhood. 

As we moved onward to Monaco, I found that the Côte d’Azur is like the Beverly Hills of France.  Think of Paris as New York, Marseille as San Francisco, and Nice as Los Angeles with Cannes, St. Tropez, and Monaco as Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills/Bel Air respectively. Just to show how bad my geography is, I thought that Monte Carlo was a big city in Italy, full of casinos, when in fact it’s a tiny island facing Monaco, which is neither France nor Italy.  It’s special.  It has a Prince.   It used to have a Princess named Grace Kelly (born Patricia).  I saw her tomb.  They really like her there.  Generally speaking, it’s an expensive tourist town.  And Monte Carlo is only accessible by boat and helicopter.

We went just a teeny bit in to Italy for lunch on Saturday.  There’s this restaurant that Martine and Didier know, called Macaroni, where the pasta is so incredibly delicious it’s almost a crime that the prices are so low.  It’s a very neat, tidy, and stylish restaurant where even the most simple tomato sauce is made with tomatoes bought fresh that morning, the portions would feed an army or one of my brothers, and 41 euros feeds three people including wine.  Welcome to Italy. 

The dinner at Jean-Marc and Catherine’s (Martine’s brother and sister-in-law’s) was absolutely transcendent!  Catherine decided that she had to stick to traditional French cuisine where possible for the sake of my education.  We had Cassis and champagne as an aperitif Friday night (we went out for pasta), Saturday night it was a honey, lime, and rum cocktail from the French islands around Madagascar, a fresh foïe gras (cooked, but not in a pâté) and potato appetizer with a balsamic drizzle, a French version of Moussaka (think Greek lasagna – pasta + eggplant), and a warm pineapple tart served with red wine to make you cry from joy.  Lunch on Sunday was an aperitif of Cointreau, cassis, pear juice, and champagne (sounds weird, tastes delicious), a baked filet of some white fish with a light sprinkle of cayenne, aside a risotto of white rice with coconut milk, lime juice, basil, and Parmesan cheese, some white wine, salad, cheese, and a digestif of a glorious Calvados (apple brandy from Normandy).  We ate rather well. 

Sunday afternoon, we all went for a walk in Saint Jeanet, a tiny town nearby that has not a single trace of tourism.  Everyone sort of gathers downtown on Sundays to chat with the neighbors, gossip, get out of the house for a bit, and it’s municipal election season, so the candidates go down to the town square or the market and chat people up.  Then we went for a tour of the IBM solution center (aka massive IBM complex).  There was absolutely no one there (as it was Sunday), and Jean-Marc just popped by security and pick up the master key to show us around.  Talk about amazing… They have a customer-oriented wing where they reproduce environments in which their technology could be used.  Imagine you are creating a product to sell.  They have everything – the virtual conference room, the design center, the factory, the production line, the tracking system, the warehouse stock managing, the smart refrigerator that keep an inventory, a meal plan, a shopping list, and recipes, and can track what’s on sale at your favorite grocery store, the check out station, the restaurant station, the all-in-one doctor’s office, the… you get the idea.  It’s all super high tech.  And yet, their laptops are still ugly.  Come on people… apple will continue to walk all over you until you learn that people are aesthetic creatures, which is why advertising exists.  As we drove back to the house (a whole 3km away) Catherine read us all our horoscopes in French and asked me about Justin.  We talked about Justin, my grandparents, my parents, my hopes, dreams and aspirations….

Then I realized that Martine and Didier had never taken a foreign exchange student to visit their family.  And they’ve had a lot of students.  We had a brief conversation the night before, during the cocktail hour, where Catherine was pleasantly surprised that I smoked.  “I swear, she’s more French than American,” Martine said.

“You got lucky,” Catherine said.

“I know, she not a vegetarian and she likes meat, she smokes, she doesn’t drink too much, she appreciates everything, and she not bouncing around with energy.”

            At the time I was aghast with pride and surprise, but now I really felt good.  I had been adopted.  It wasn’t just “what are you studying” it was “who are you and what do you care about.”  And I was invited back. 

What makes me most happy – what transports me to the sky with joy – is when I find myself sitting around a coffee table with drinks and chips and cigarettes and a fantastic conversation about politics, music, books, and food, where I forget that it’s another language and I feel like I’m home with familiar faces.  This is why I wanted to study abroad. 

At the same time, it is exhausting.  Those moments of euphoria are few and far between and the rest of the time I feel like I’m at summer camp in winter without a coat.  All I want is something familiar, or to curl up in my sleeping bag in my tent and wait it out.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m nowhere near giving up, but it takes a lot of effort to keep going.

A cultural/personal note: In the country of image, when a child dresses themselves for the first time and it’s the most atrocious combination on the planet, the parent says something to the effect of “What are you wearing?  You plan to go where in that?  Okay…if you want to be embarrassed.”  It’s not intended to be insulting or mean but guiding.  The mentality is that they are raising a member of society that is expected to follow the highly codified behavioral patterns.  In the U.S. when a child does the same thing the reaction is more like “Wow, all by yourself, I’m so proud… you’re so grown up!” The mentality is more focused on the potential of the individual – individual identity, individual potential, individual standards.  I find that the expectation and the push to reach potential in an individualist society is a thousand times harder, and a thousand times more rewarding.  I have much more freedom to be creative with my identity, my choices, my career.  At the same time, I am always expected to reach some invisible “potential.”  I get a sense of “good enough for government work” in France that allows for repose and that thing called “free-time.”  While that’s really tempting, I find it conflicting with my sense of “settling.”  There’s gotta be a balance somewhere.  I intend to find it.

Until the next time, I can be reached by e-mail, phone, or post.

Love, peace and foïe grease!