Let’s talk a little about jet lag, sleep, time zones, and energy. Also what we see and hear around us. In between, some irrelevant pictures from yesterday (and a brief video).
We are seven hours ahead of home in Minneapolis. We got here via a very brief layover at JFK. Thus the “overnight” flight skipped six hours of time while simultaneously lasting about six hours. I don’t think any of us did more than doze, so the effect felt more like one really long day, not one really short night.
One thing I was really careful to prepare for is medication. One of our kids is on a highly dialed-in medication regime involving five prescriptions and three OTC supplements, taken at four clock-times during the day. Normally I fill weekly dosing boxes every Sunday night and he is responsible for taking them on time, but it’s generally pretty important they be on time.
I carefully made a spreadsheet before we left and separately counted the hours between each of the different doses, and filled them into tiny ziplocks numbered 0-5 (the zeroth bag was for the last dose at home about an hour before our Uber came). Then doled them out: on the first plane, in New York, two separate times on the long plane, in the Nice airport. The once-a-days wound up coming at intervals of 21 hours twice. The one that could be six hours apart was not disrupted at all. The melatonin and the one that is a sleep aid were deployed strategically to match the new time zone. It worked! No noticeable I-missed-my-meds effect.
I hardly remember how we slept the first day or two, just that the first day we tried to stay up all the way till about 8 p.m. I felt mostly normal by day 3. But we haven’t had the same sleep schedule as at home.
One of my college kids takes a medication that requires a dose at bedtime, around 10:30 pm, and a dose four hours later. For a long time I have served as a backup alarm for that second dose. At home we do it with an Amazon Echo Dot at my bedside that the college kid can set and un-set alarms on remotely with the Alexa app. It’s a good system.
Here, dose 1 is around 5:30 a.m. I get a text. Later I make sure I got the second text for dose 2; if not, I call. Anyway, that 5:30 am text wakes me fully up for a little while. I get on my phone and catch the last hour of U.S. social media before everyone goes to sleep. Then I get sleepy again, put down my phone, and doze off till 7:30 or 8:30.
Mark sleeps in later than I do. His colleagues, with whom he occasionally has to meet, are working (in our perspective) from about 3:30 pm till midnight. So it literally does not matter when he gets up in the morning. He normally works from breakfast to lunch, then we take a long lunch, then he has meetings until 6 or 7 or 8. Not every day though, some are vacation days.
I’ve also been starting late so I can blog. I am out of practice, it takes longer than it once did.
I needed an afternoon nap a couple of times. And yesterday Leo got a little lost after lunch—he walked to an interesting cemetery to look at very old tombstones, but Google Maps had trouble getting him out because it interpreted all the short ways out as Not For Pedestrians and sent him on foot wayyyy uphill first—and by the time he got back he was hot, thirsty, frustrated, and sore. So we sent him to rest instead of afternoon school. But since he missed only his French lesson, I figure we broke even.
After school is when I get a little time to myself. The boys mostly want to use screens, though Leo ventures out alone sometimes, so sometimes I stay and sometimes I go out. I am enjoying walking around and people-watching. I exit the apartment around the time schools let out here, so there are many children with backpacks being escorted home by a parent or grandparent (not a few are being given ice cream cones) and many uniformed teenagers standing in clusters on the street talking animatedly.
This is clearly a vacation town, and the streets of the vacation-town part (the part that has an abundance of gelato shops as well as souvenir shops and citrus-themed boutiques) are thronged with shoppers. We hear lots of Italian and lots of English: Americans, different British accents, and a couple times Australia or NZ. More rarely, something Slavic-sounding, and even more rarely than that an East Asian language.
But obviously, regular people live here too. There’s a middle school right around the corner. It’s also got a campus of one of les grands écoles, Sciences-Po, and they just started for the fall. And on Saturday there was a street fair of all the clubs and organizations and things in town: soccer clubs and parishes and gyms and the like.
Dress here is largely vacation casual. We made the kids pack better shoes and collared shirts, but I needn’t have bothered: even Sunday mass was shorts and sleeveless tops on most people, and they were not all tourists because that included the parents and godparents of the baby being baptized. It’s hot here and people dress for it.
You do see the whole range if you look: elegant older women with scarves and stylish not-too-high heels, a few men who might have stepped off a menswear blog, through that magical French effortlessly-put-together look, down to just-off-the-beach (but covered). I don’t see leggings-as-pants or exercise clothes on anyone not actually out for a run or on a bike. I don’t see anyone dressing consciously to stand out: hardly any brightly colored hair, no one in torn clothes or avant-garde or Goth looks. There are people in evident poverty, some begging, most minding their own business seated on a step here or against the wall there, perhaps smoking, perhaps enjoying the cool of the building’s shade, perhaps thinking or people watching like me.
I see a lot of maxi skirts in a light billowy fabric, and oddly, some in a slinky, satin-shiny, stretchy fabric as well (it looks too warm for this weather). There are a lot of men wearing casual short-sleeve shirts that appear to be crocheted: some like polos, some buttoned. Crocheted dresses on women too, sometimes a tight opaque “weave,” sometimes with a pattern of open and not-so open eyelets, sometimes very open but layered over something that peeks through. So keep your eye out, perhaps that’s next year’s look in the states.
Overall, we get the impression that this is a vacation town for, you know, not the Monaco elite, but regular people. In a country where regular people, by law, are allotted at least five weeks’ vacation, I would hope there is room somewhere along the Riviera some of the time. I don’t beach enough to think of what American beachfront vacation town it would be analogous to. Maybe there is no good comparison.
Watching, tasting, listening.
bearing blog 