bear – ingn 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
We had a plan for Monday that involved going up in the Aiguille de Midi gondola to the mid-station. We were in the act of gathering gear and putting on warm clothes, packing backpacks and locating granola bars, when we received information from the top: Not today. Too windy and cloudy up there. They may close the lift.
So. Need to pivot.
I conferred with Mark and we elected to make it a work day instead of a fun day. A certain number of our days here must be work days; Mark doesn’t quite have enough vacation otherwise, at least if we want to travel to be with family at Christmas. So there’s a lot of sense in working when the weather doesn’t cooperate.
However, this is a little sad for the kids. They were expecting a day on the mountain, and instead they must do math and other schoolwork. Literally already have their hats and hiking boots on: Sorry kids, not today. It isn’t safe enough in the weather.
This is a lesson you must learn, though, if you value life and limb, and you want to do any sort of weather-dependent activity that has objective hazards. It could be skiing, ski touring, climbing, and backcountry camping. Or it could be any sort of boating, or hiking at altitude, or road cycling. You must learn to let go of your plan when conditions change.
A lot of metaphors out here under the sky.
One of the glaciers visible from town. None of them are as large as they once were.
Pivoting from one outdoor activity to another can be hard enough. Mark and I did briefly discuss substituting a pretty, low-altitude hike. But pivoting from fun day to school day was pretty hard, even though everyone knows it frees up another day later, maybe one with better weather.
So there was a little more frustration than usual. Things seemed harder to do. One of the kids got through only about half of a day’s work before it was clear he was done. Anyway, we broke for lunch after that and tried to find a good restaurant that also had a cheeseburger and fries.
There’s a place that brews their own mead and has smashburgers and really good, American crispy tavern-style fries. I had mead called “le sang du Viking” and a tarte flambé “la végétarienne.”
Not much to report for the afternoon. Some work, some shopping, a meal of snacks and leftovers. Mark had to take a meeting till 7 pm and another at 10:30 pm, but that was long enough for a pleasant dinner and a bottle of wine. No complaints. Hope for better weather Wednesday.
Simon had a rougher time sitting with us at Mass in Saint-Michel, the little, highly decorated church in Chamonix, than he did last time. I’d asked him to pack some books for him to look at in Mass—at eleven, and a fairly voracious reader, he still relies on “church books” not to get restless. His current favorite is a beautifully illustrated stories of the saints. But he was worried about losing it and didn’t bring it, and now he is paying the price of having nothing in English to look at (or hear) but the MagnifiKid children’s missalettes I brought. Which don’t last very long.
So by the end of the 95-minute service Mark had taken him outside for some fresh air on the church steps. Even I ducked out ahead of the dismissal, because after Mass the parish was about to have a party to say goodbye to their pastor who was leaving, and a minute or two into the “announcements that precede the final blessing and dismissal” it became clear that it was really a long speech from the deacon reviewing the pastor’s good works and thanking him for his service.
If it had been just me I’d totally have stayed for the party. They had tables set up outside the front door waiting for people to pass by and pick up their treats. Only imstead of a coffee urn and a sheet cake it was wine and cheese. And after the wine and cheese on the steps they were going to have a full lunch in a different location in the parish.
I would like to tell this priest that I appreciate him. I’ve been to this town om Sundays a few times in the last 11 years, and he speaks slowly and clearly with lots of pauses. He doesn’t have the other thing that makes a homily easy to follow, a highly organized structure, but he constantly makes references to phrases from the readings, which help me keep my mental place. Anyway.
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Leo had the idea that somewhere in the Chamonix Valley there would be at least one operation selling bungee jumping, on the theory that the target audience for such a thing (people who climb, ski, mountain bike, and fly on parachute wings down from the mountain) is already here.
He was right of course, and found such an operation in nearby Saint-Gervais. Here’s the link, scroll down to see the jump team making “WE’RE GONNA GIVE YOU AN AWESOME TIME, LOTS OF SENSATIONS, IT’LL BE CRAZY” faces.
High season’s over so the only day they were taking clients during our trip was Sunday. Accordingly, a few days ago I went online and reserved a nonrefundable spot for him. He was assigned a place in the 4 pm cohort. Mark promised to drive him and deal with the staff without me having to be involved.
Mark would probably have jumped too if he could. (“But your joints,” I said.) Malheureusement for Mark (heureusement for his joints) they make you sign a paper saying you have none of the health conditions on a long list, including vision correction with a diopter ≥ 5.
The eyes have it. Mark can only watch.
I trust that Mark, not me, is the best person to send along to evaluate where the operation falls on the “professional–sketchy” spectrum. We discussed the conditions for “turning back” without a thought about losing the deposit: if Leo changed his mind and didn’t jump, or if Mark didn’t feel right about the setup and decided not to let him, or if the weather changed. This is a type of conversation we have had many times over the course of our marriage—obligatory, I think, when one of you (or both, I suppose) likes to hurl himself or herself down mountains, disappear into the wildfire-prone backcountry, etc.
I stayed in the apartment and made soup in the very-well-appointed kitchen.
Mark texted me pictures:
(“Good to know,” I replied.)
And eventually:
I probably won’t post the video of my minor child here, but I’ll describe it. It’s from far away on the viewing platform and on maximum iPhone zoom. Leo’s wearing a pale green top and has his voluminous long hair pulled back. He stands at the edge looking over; a jump team member holds the bungee slack so its weight isn’t hanging from Leo. You see him shake out his arms, a classic psyching-up move. Then you can hear an English “Three, two, one!” and the gentleman places a hand on his back and Leo sort of…rolls forward off the bridge.
He falls shoulder-blades first and disappears behind the trees. You can see the twin cords only. A full six seconds pass before the cords begin to recoil. And then he comes flying up, upside down, looking rather rag-doll-ish.
The audio features a French woman who was standing next to Mark on the viewing platform. She gasps, and says something I can’t make out. I can imagine though. Other people shriek and laugh nervously, again when he boings back into view.
I should have taught Mark how to say: That’s my boy! before he went.
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As for me, I bravely made soup:
And with the help of Google Translate and an onlinr manual in German, I figured out how to run the dishwasher on quick wash even though the dishwasher has a messed-up display and only speaks Turkish:
When Mark got back from taking our som bungee jumping and I showed him how I figured out how to operate the dishwasher, he said, essentially, “Thank goodness I have you to do this, because I could never.”
Indeed, it is nice to get to work together. Creating this CRAZY ambience! And also chicken soup.
After lunch we came around past Turin on the bypass and west toward the long Fréjus tunnel. Signs warned us that there was a backup leading up to the tunnel, which is something you just have to expect; maybe even more with Mont Blanc’s tunnel closed. It seemed to us that some sort of accident had caused the backup, because at one point an ambulance came up from behind. But even after an obstruction is cleared, it takes time to get the backup through, since cars have to go at a reduced speed and at wide intervals.
I think we sat in the traffic jam for… hm, ninety minutes? Sixty? Simon got impatient but I felt positive. Once we got to the tollbooth it was smooth sailing.
Out of it again, though, and it was mountain driving. I am permitted to drive the car here, we paid for the supplemental driver, but I think neither Mark nor I wanted me driving it in the mountains. I hate mountain driving even in good weather and in my own car, let alone this behemoth in the rain. Mark drove, and I was confident in his abilities on the well-maintained and just-wide-enough twisty roads through the gorges, but I heard some alarmed mutterings and a couple of “Yikes!” from the driver’s seat.
The gorges were, uh, gorgeous but very twisty, and Simon was carsick into a sturdy plastic grocery bag we had given him just in case. We complemented him on his fortitude and presence of mind, and drove on. Leo helped him find something to clean his face with. Part of a cardboard box, I think. Eventually we emerged into a town still decorated with flags from, I think, when the Tour de France came through.
That’s most of the remaining adventure from yesterday, I think. More adventure later today, and also some tomorrow; then perhaps work.
We have stuffed all our things into the back of the rental car, an enormous (to us) Volvo SUV that Mark is not enjoying driving, and made our way a few hours inland, from that charming just-big-enough walkup over the top of an office with a temp agency and a one-person tutoring center, to the ground floor plus walkout basement of a really charming house.
The house is so cozy but with plenty of room that it really makes me miss my college-age and grown kids. It has three bedrooms, two with double beds and one with a set of bunks, and we totally could have fit all seven of us once upon a time when children shared beds if we told them to and/or would have been happy to soend all their time on this sprawling sofa in TV room.
So far the only downside I have discovered is that there is no drip coffee maker, and so this morning I will need to go through at least six Nespresso pods all by myself.
I did find a battered French press in the cabinet, but I am skeptical as I have only the finely ground coffee that is the norm around here.
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I had laid out three different plans for the drive back, to be selected from as conditions permitted. The first we later found out would never have beem possible, because the tunnel under Mont Blanc is temporarily closed all this autumn. The second, which we used, took us along the coast into Italy, then across Piedmont to just outside Turin, then west under the Alps back to France via a different, 13-km-long tunnel called Fréjus, followed by some driving through mountain gorges. The third option was tunnel-free in just France, ended the same as the second route, but would be 90 min longer than the tunnel routes if they were to go smoothly.
I think maybe the best reason for the second one is so we could have lunch in Italy. Especially since with Mont Blanc tunnel closed, we can’t get back and forth easily to have lunch in Italy again. And even if lunch in Italy is just at a gas station grill.
Gas station sandwiches
Mark and Leo went through the cafeteria style line and got lasagna and “patatine steakhouse” while Simon and I went to the panini station. Simon, who is learning Italian as his homeschool language, told the busy man behind the counter, “Voglio un trancio di pizza,” and was perfectly understood.
(I told Mark proudly later, and he went: “Trancio! Oh, a tranche! A slice!” Indeed! Cognates are cool.)
Anyway, the man cut a generous portion of pizza from the case, enclosed it in a parchment-type paper, and set it to heating in the panini press. Then he went back to taking other orders. I wasn’t quick enough with mine, and a handful of coffee drinkers got theirs in first. I watched as he set a batch of saucers and spoons on the bar then turned to make the corresponding number of espressos, then set them up, then turned back to me and I asked for a panino frescotto from the case. He nodded and then went to fetch Simon’s pizza out of the panini press, put my sandwich in, cut the pizza in two and put it on a ceramic plate next to the lemon Fanta Simon had chosen from the fridges.
Leo and Mark were at the far other end at the restaurant tables, and people around me were eating standing at the bar. I asked the man, “Può pagare qui e mangiare allì?”while gesturing vaguely at the restaurant, and he spoke to me and I understood that the answer was yes, and in fact I could proceed to the cash register around the corner where I hadn’t noticed it, while my panino heated. I sent Simon with his plate and drink over to find Mark and went around to the cash register, where somehow, a cheerful “Scusi, signore, non so il sistema,” came out of my mouth as I presented my credit card. Even though I think maybe the right verb should have been conosco. Anyway, he answered me at length and at least part of that was something like, it’s not that hard, don’t worry about it, the only system here is that you give me money and I give you food and coffee.
I have not been studying Italian nearly as long as French, and I love the French language, but there’s something about Italian that makes it a lot more… relaxed, easy, and fun. Less energy pushing the breath out through the linguistic works. Less stress about getting it exactly right. And understanding it… I am pretty good at French aural comprehension, but Italian sometimes feels weirdly like I have a Babel fish in my ear. I couldn’t tell you word for word what was said but I get the important bits.
My sandwich was good. A boiled ham with a thick crème fraiche and an arugula pesto. Simon loved his pizza. While Mark was putting gas in the car I went back to the bar for an espresso, drank it standing up, paid in coins and went on my way. Arrivederci.
Mark, Simon, and I took the train back to Nice this morning, just to pick up a rental car.
The rental counter was easy, and we were helped by a friendly staffer named Jean-Félix (I introduced Simon, whose middle name is Felix, so they had something in common). We need a big SUV because we have rather a lot of baggage, and one thing about European cars is they don’t often have a lot of trunk space. Back when we traveled with all seven of us, we had to get a nine-seater van.
Our first challenge was getting it out of the rental company garage. You know those tight spiral ramps? I was frankly amazed someone got it in.
So Mark carefully maneuvered it into the helix and drove excruciatingly slowly down to the next level to the sound of one beep-beep-beep warning us that the right passenger door was about to scrape the inside wall and another beep-beep-beep warning is that the left headlight was about to scrape the outside wall. Mark threaded that needle all the way down. Whew! Time to drive in the center of Nice, France’s fifth-largest city!
We made it out with only one wrong turn and got on the A8 back to Menton. That part wasn’t hard at all. Highway driving is not much different from at home, and after 12 days here we knew how to get to the garage we were aiming for.
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After finishing up at the rental counter but before fetching the car, we needed to get lunch. Originally we planned to do a little sightseeing in town, but Simon was hungry now so we just went to the first open pizza-and-panini shop we found.
We ordered a pizza for Simon and paninis for us, and while Mark did phone searches to try to confirm that our rental SUV would not exceed the 1.8-meter height limit of our parking garage, I studied the placemat menu to learn about the types of pizza available here. Many were familiar from Menton or other places, but a few were novel. I posted a pic straight to IG.
If I had noticed the Alessandra I might have wanted that. Bacon, goat cheese, potatoes, onions? On a pizza? Yes please.
Instead I got a wonderfully garlic-buttered tuna tomato panini.
Anyway we decided not to sightsee and just fetched the car after that.
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We got it parked in a great spot in the garage—end of a row corner, nothing behind or in front—and over the course of the evening Mark got several suitcases into it, rolled in ones and twos across the street and down the block.
Then we went out for one last drink at a seaside bar, and listened to the roar of the waves. I looked out over the sand, lit by the spillover lights from the patios, and watched the waves break once, twice, three times, reaching foamy fingers into the air. I thought about them breaking like that over and over for hundreds of years, polishing the stones, dragging them out, tossing them up again. And here we were to watch only a few rounds then turn away.
Mark likes to tell a story from a trip to Rome he took without me, where some local he made English small-talk with warned him that he needed to stay away from “the dangerous parts of Rome.” Mark inquired what parts did he mean, and the gentleman leaned in and said, “You see, there are places here where you will pay too much for not very good food .”
I’ll just say, here in Menton we have had no dangerous experiences at all.
Most meals cost less than it would cost us to go out in our home city, and that is even if you correct for the differences regarding tax and tip and even with us drinking more alcohol (since neither has to drive) than we would at home.
Ice cream costs less. Wine costs less. Sodas for the kids maybe cost a little more. Groceries seem to cost less.
And we’ve now eaten at lots of different places, including some you might expect to be dangerous. Bistros right on the sea. Brasseries in sight of the very-photogenic stairs leading up to the basilica. Snack bars, kebab shops, pizzerias, sushi even. It’s all great.
Well, the sushi was about as good as good American sushi, so nothing mind-blowing, just familiar and yummy. And last night Mark had some swordfish that he thought was just okay, but that might just be that he isn’t as into swordfish as he thought.
Anyway. Just another nice and pleasant note.
Today we’re off to Nice early to fetch our rental car, so I have to keep this one short.
What makes a vacation? Are we on vacation every day here, or only on days (like today) when Mark isn’t working and we’re not doing school?
At first I thought it was a half-vacation. Now I think, at least for me, it’s the whole time.
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George Carlin did a bit called “A Place for My Stuff” that I’ve been thinking about (link has both video and readable transcript):
Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation,
And you gotta take some of your stuff with you…
Gotta take about two big suitcases full of stuff, when you go on vacation,
You gotta take a smaller version of your house, It′s the second version of your stuff…
Go read or watch, it’s pretty good.
Anyway, what I was thinking is that one of the things that makes a vacation—at least for me—is that you’ve voluntarily and temporarily left so much stuff behind you.
(Voluntarily and temporarily are both key. We haven’t lost our stuff in a hurricane or fire. We are not refugees. We have not renounced our worldly goods and gone to live as hermits or anchorites. We have not downsized to a retirement home. )
We have a lot of luggage, it feels like, and I won’t know until we see the weather in the mountains next week whether I seriously overpacked or packed just right (because I have a whole set of warm clothes I haven’t touched). We have about one tote bag’s worth of schoolbooks and worksheets. I brought a library book with me which I shouldn’t’ve, because someone reserved it after me and the library wanted it back yesterday. We have ice tools and climbing gear and helmets. Leo has a laptop and Simon an iPad.
But it’s still so much less than the sum of all our stuff.
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I once read somewhere a claim that men and women, in general, have different definitions of “comfort foods.” It probably doesn’t divide quite so neatly between male and female, could well be generationally outdated and has more to do with a dichotomy of personal history. The idea was that (generally speaking) men rattle off favorite comfort foods like pot roast and homemade apple pie, whereas women mention ice cream and packaged snacks.
The difference was supposed to come from what the food represents to you, especially whether it’s something you associate with labor or rest, being cared for or working to take care of others. A pot roast is maybe less comforting if generally you are the one who will have to make it. Ice cream and packaged snacks don’t demand time in the kitchen.
(Important note: This is not any kind of jab at my own husband, who makes the Thanksgiving pot roast every year. And it doesn’t quite work for me, because I find cooking relaxing. But I do grok the importance of associations to emotional content.)
So I wonder the same thing about “I left my stuff behind, so it’s a vacation.” For me I am sure that some of the rest comes from having a break from needing to care for or even think about all the stuff we have.
I am glad to have so many resources! A whole library of books; a pantry full of spices and canned goods; nearly always the right tool for the job. In fact I very much dislike being without a thing I expected to have, and I like a life of comforts and conveniences and the things that keep, or seem to keep, certain troubles at bay.
But I can’t deny that everywhere I look, when I’m at home, I see unfinished labor. This needs tidying, that needs mending, when was the last time I cleaned the…? And can I even find the things I need? And why am I tripping over this object left in the middle of the floor again? And the objects that have vague unsettlements attached… that game I bought the kids that we never play, the unfinished-book pile, the half-done project.
I should ask Mark, who has to go on quite a lot of work trips to not-particularly-exciting towns, whether not having any of his stuff with him feels freeing to him at all, like it does to me, or whether it’s more of a necessary nuisance.
We still have to sweep the floor and do the dishes in this little apartment, but there’s so little stuff in the way that it’s a pleasure.
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Having kids along with you who have particular needs for certain familiar items, sensations, and supports will color it a little bit, I suppose. Some stuff is almost non-negotiable. It’s certainly true when you have very young children, or kids with some types of medical conditions or neurodivergencies. As they grow and get better at self-regulating, at self-management of their medical needs, better at foreseeing and solving problems, better at making do—those are developmental skills—it gets easier to pare down what you carry. And we are getting there!
Still, we made room for a few things, and for some autonomy in prioritizing luggage space. For example, although I planned to buy toiletries and certain personal items over here, I told the boys to identify any familiar brand-name items they felt they needed to bring (Simon chose watermelon-flavored toothpaste, Leo his favorite hair care products—hey, I brought a couple of those too). And we made room and weight-allowance for Leo’s sleeping hammock and a metal-tube-type hammock stand that disassembles and has a carrying case. That’s pretty bulky, but sleeping well has such importance that we never questioned whether to take it along.
These extras only mean that I—who claim to love the paring-down to essentials—need to pare down a little farther. I can do that, to make travel a little less easier on those of us who need a bit more support. The “easier” will ripple out to the rest of us anyway.
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Another thing about the George Carlin bit that I like is his description of trips-within-trips and how you bring less stuff along with you each time, a subset of a subset of a subset:
Aww, no. NOW what do you pack? Right- you gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The fourth version of your house. Only the stuff you know you’re gonna need. Money, keys, comb, wallet, lighter, hanky, pen, smokes, rubber and change. Well, only the stuff you HOPE you’re gonna need.
It puts me in mind of a matrushka doll, a nested set of boxes, a concentric Venn diagram. What you have, what you might need, what you know you’re gonna need, what you really need.
(Pause, though, to acknowledge that the diagram isn’t concentric for everyone; an acknowledgement that demands a response, gratitude and humility and discomfort and charity.)
Carlin’s bit is meant to be absurd, and it is, but also: it’s a reminder that those of us who live in plenty, so much plenty that it’s a bit of a relief to get away from our possessions once in a while—we can cut back on it. And maybe in some seasons of life it makes sense to lay up a cushion against all the might-happens, but eventually a lot of us—not everyone—will need to leave some of that stuff behind for our own good or someone else’s.
Ultimately we will leave it all behind, so there’s virtue in practicing. In deciding which stuff goes in which box, or circle; in shedding things like a snakeskin, and being bigger on the inside.
Will I remember this when I get home and contemplate my overstuffed bookshelves? Maybe, maybe not. I will let you know, when it happens, whether I am happy to see them again.
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).
Headed toward lunch at the marina.
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.
A favorite Mpls pizza restaurant is Black Sheep. Here is the Franco-Italian version.
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.
Tuna, onion, olive.
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.
Licorice gelato!
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.
This is technically the southern end of the Alps running down to the sea
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 have a mission to the grocery store
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.
The mission: make quesadillas like we have at home
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.
Refried (cannellini) beans
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 succeeded in making a relatively normal kid-quesadilla
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.
The same courtyard as a couple nights ago, but a different restaurant.
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.
Antipasti for dinner. The baked cocotte is eggplant.
I didn’t do my homework before coming here, so I haven’t learned as much about Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) as I ought. He seems to be one of those artists who has his hands in everything and who knows everyone. Wikipedia calls him a “poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist, and critic,” “one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th century,” “hugely influential on the Surrealist and Dadaist movements,” “‘closest to being a Renaissance man.”
I think maybe the only thing I knew about Cocteau was a sliver of cinematic history picked up from somewhere: that he was the director of the 1946 film Beauty and the Beast. (Here’s a deep dive on that film). I could maybe have picked him out of a lineup of Early 20th-Century Iconoclastic Artists. I’ve probably seen a portrait of him; counting photos, paintings, and sketches, there are many in collections around the world.
Cocteau is particularly associated with the French Riviera, especially Menton. Here’s a brief summary of his prominent works in Menton. Here’s a small photo gallery of the interior of the “Fishermen’s Chapel” of St. Peter, in Villefranche-sur-mer, that he completely redesigned in 1956-57; Googling for more photos will be rewarding.
There are two museums devoted to Cocteau’s works in Menton. The first, which I visited yesterday, is the Bastion, and it is indeed a former bastion on the seawall. Cocteau was given leave to redesign the space and display his works in it, and it opened in 1966. It’s a tiny, cozy space with windows onto the Mediterranean horizon, set into little niches that they share with the art.
Cocteau’s mosaic of natural stones in the entry hall
The exhibits rotate every year. Right now, a lot of mythological-inspired pottery, some drawings on paper in various media, and a marvelous tapestry of Odysseus lashed to the mast.
The other museum, celebrated for its design by French architect Rudy Ricciotti, looks gorgeous from the outside on its perch 50 meters from the sea. It was designed to be the definitive repository of Cocteau’s oeuvre. Sadly, it has been closed since a storm surge in 2018 flooded the basement (in which were stored numerous works) and part of the ground floor with seawater.
Cocteau is in the news now (link is in French) because the heirs of Severin Wunderman, the American collector who gave 2,000 Cocteau works to Menton to be placed in the museum on permanent display, are threatening legal action to claw the works back because the city has not upheld its obligation to display them.
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The last meal we ate at home before leaving the U.S. for a month was a mess of tacos from the taco place a couple blocks away. I knew there would be no tacos al pastor, on tiny masa corn tortillas, buried in cilantro and decorated with charred spring onions, in France.
But France does have les tacos! Only they look like this:
This taco is from Kebab Berlinois, which Leo has been visiting regularly since we got here. Previously he got les wraps. (I described eating some leftover wrap in a previous post.) As far as we can tell, the difference between le wrap and le taco is that le wrap contains pieces of cheese and is not grilled, but le taco contains cheese sauce and is grilled.
Both contain “kebab meat,” which is halal and sort of is like gyro meat shaved very, very thin; onions; a salade of vinegary purple cabbage; and frites for crunchiness.
Leo ordered ce taco without the cabbage. Sadly, he did not like it as much as the wrap because there was such an abundance of cheese sauce.
We were at Kebab Berlinois feeding the children combo meals (Simon had a cheeseburger) with the intention of taking the kids back to the apartment and then going out ourselves for a nice dinner. McDonald’s is close by to the kebab shop, so Leo headed over there to grab something quick to replace it, leaving Simon to work on his cheeseburger and leaving Mark and me alone with 95 percent of le taco.
We took turns tasting it.
Okay. It is definitely a weird taco. But. The Frenchified taco (by way of, we assume, Turkey and Germany), as our college-senior son would say, slaps. I honestly wish I could bring it home.
After we got the kids back, we did go out on the town, but only for a glass of wine. So I missed one French dinner that I might have had. But le taco is its own experience, and I expect someday years from now, late at night, I will wake up hungry and think: One of those kebab taco things would really hit the spot right now.
Facebook took a few days to figure out it should be pushing me the Menton municipal page, which is too bad because I found out on the day after it happened that there had been a little wreath-laying ceremony, with a color guard and US/UK flags and national anthems, commemorating the 81st anniversary of the Allies’ liberation of Menton. That would have been cool!
But the honor guard was formed from the crew of a French naval vessel called Le Pluton which docked in the harbor for the occasion, and they were open to the public and giving tours. So when we went out for afternoon gelato we wandered to the harbor and joined the tour.
Our guide talked very fast and I followed him pretty well but I couldn’t translate much and listen at the same time. Fortunately, a naval vessel is, as Mark put it, a “context-rich enviroment,” and most of the things that Simon wanted to know, Mark could guess or tell him based on prior knowledge and I could confirm from what I could pick up. Like: “That, son, is a hyperbaric chamber.” Moments later I heard hyperbare and subsequently what was obviously an explanation of the bends.
I threw random facts back at them as I sifted them from the patter. Ship launched in 1985. Supports “plongeur-démineurs”—divers who defuse explosives? Some of these folks.
So, that was pretty cool. Zodiacs on the deck, the kitchen, the bridge, the naval map spread out of the whole eastern French Riviera.
I don’t much like messing about in boats, but there is something I love about getting to see the inside of a working vessel when it is safely docked. The way all its parts fit compactly together like a puzzle, the abundant signage, the clever little racks and attachments that keep things where you left them, the low ceilings that cause sub-five-footers like me zero trouble, the way space is not wasted…
…the way the enviroment is so context-rich, I guess.
But also the way the humans who occupy the space leave their mark behind: a scribbled note tucked into the corner of a display board, a jumbled messy-desk visible through a hatch, and a joke Mark photographed: a three-ring binder among a stack of operation manuals whose cover had been replaced with a French version of “Machinery for Dummies.”
See it?
I think if I were a small child I would come away wanting to go to sea, because I would imagine having a tiny cozy capsule of a bunk, and cooking in a fairy-sized kitchen, and having a lot of specialized tools.
I am not a small child, however, and I know better! But it’s still fairly entertaining to crawl all around and spider up the impossibly steep stairs, looking at everything. The best might be the view of the harbor from the window, though.
Okay, first off, I didn’t take any pictures of the interior of the church. I have put up photos I have taken of church interiors while traveling before, but whenever I am in a place that is a certified tourist spot, the sort where regulars might have a distracting problem of people taking pictures during worship services all the time, I don’t want to add to it. So here’s a photo of the handout with a variety of hymn lyrics.
We went at 11 am to the church building physically closest to our apartment, not the picturesque basilica at the top of the hill.
This is not where we went to Mass
Based on the bulletin and the website, it seems that all the Catholic churches in town plus some from a neighboring town are encompassed by one parish called Notre Dame des Rencontres.
The church in the neighborhood—if I walk by later on the way to the store I’ll take an exterior shot—was a good deal smaller but roomy and with a fairly full house. There was a kind of fine net suspended about 9-10 feet high above the heads of us pewsitters, obscuring the ceiling; as it already had caught a few small chunks of ceiling material (plaster, I am guessing) we surmise that is its purpose. The pews were wooden movable benches without kneelers and our 11yo had to be cautioned not to accidentally scoot ours around by, e.g., flopping into the pew too hard at sitting time.
The stained glass windows illustrated parables and events in the life of Christ and were bright and almost new-looking, with short explanatory panels (e.g., Christ the shepherd finding the lost sheep was labeled something like Jésus cherche le pecheur).
On that morning they had a baptism, of a wiggly (I guess) 9-10-month old baby named Lya. Something I hadn’t seen before: the introductory par of the baptismal rite took place outside the church on the steps, so everyone in the pews waiting for the start of Mass turned around and looked back out the front door as les parents and la marraine et le parrain stated their readiness.
Thanks, iBreviary
Then they were welcomed across the threshold of the parish church and the procession began. I liked it, it sort of made the fact that the rite has us kind of do this twice make more physical sense.
More observations: casual summertime dress on everyone, including the baptismal party, dad and godfather looking fairly dashing in sunglasses while standing outside on the steps. It’s hot here and brightly sunny, and numerous people in the only slightly cooler church fanned themselves with folding fans—not bulletins, they came prepared.
I wore this—linen shirt over black A-line tank dress—and I was too hot.
I kept up okay with the mass parts thanks to a worship aid that has the responses and Credo and things in French, and with the readings thanks to iBreviary’s French-language option on my phone. But I am afraid I couldn’t catch the homily at all, a combination of sitting too far back to really watch the speakers’ lips and reverb from the microphone, plis of course the speed of ordinary speech. The most I could grasp was context: now he’s talking about the first reading, now he’s talking about the Gospel.
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About that Gospel. In the English translation we hear at Mass Jesus says:
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
And in the French translation that French people hear:
« Si quelqu’un vient à moi sans me préférer à son père, sa mère, sa femme, ses enfants, ses frères et sœurs, et même à sa propre vie, il ne peut pas être mon disciple. »
That is: “If someone comes to me without preferring me to his father, his mother, his wife, his children, his brothers and sisters, and even to his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
Now, we’ve all heard exegesis that essentially says that what we hear in our English Gospel doesn’t actually mean “hate” and it really means “must be ready to choose Jesus over those other attachments” or whatever, no? It would be absurd if “hate” really meant “hate” here the way modern English speakers use the term so the strong language must be for emphasis, etc.? Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that French Mass-goers have that already built in.
(This has been one of your humble blogger’s tangents on the topic of Catholic English Speakers Get A Different Gospel And It Might Be King James’s Fault.)
(Brought to you by the same folks who brought you: “What Does ‘The Meek’ Really Mean, I Mean Really? And Why Is It les débonnaires in French?”)
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Anyway, I was sorry I could not really follow the homily, especially because the priest made several apparently funny jokes. But I had pretty windows to look at and a handful of bulletins and worship aids to examine.
Oh one more interesting thing. They had the usual thing where if people aren’t receiving communion for whatever reason, they come up with their arms crossed to receive a blessing. I saw this about three people ahead of me in the other communion line, and the person dropped to a knee on the hard floor for the blessing and then the priest blessed her by making the sign of the cross and them touching the base of the ciborium to the top of her head. Like he set it on her head for a second. I’ve never seen that one before.
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Simon was hot and hungry when Mass got out—the baptism made it long—so we stopped at the grocery store on the way back for a snack. Then lunch in the apartment, then I returned to the grocery store for real shopping for dinner. No local specialties or counsel about wine pairings, since all the little shops, fruiterers and wines and fish markets, are closed on Sunday. But times have changed and the big grocery store chains will sell me potatoes and Spanish lemons and Barents Sea vacuum-packed fish filets and fat Peruvian blueberries just like the ones we buy at home.
The lunch in Italy made me sleepy, so I took a long nap while Mark went to the beach with Simon. After he got back and showered, we scrounged some food for the kids and left them in the apartment with their computers so we could look for a nice dinner together.
If you’re keeping track, you might have noticed that there were exactly two things I did on Saturday:
Go out to get lunch
Go out to get dinner
Anyway, we left the apartment and started walking east.
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Menton is a town stretched out along a curved bay nestled against the very end of the Alps coming down to the sea.
The old town is toward the east, and that’s where the winding streets and the picturesque stairs and the high concentration of restaurants are. We thought we’d like to stay at that end, but the best apartment for us we found on the west end, on a wide boulevard that comes straight down from the train station. No matter: it is a 15-minute walk to the old town. All along the seaside is a string of stony beaches and bars and gelaterias; or you can sidestep one block inland and walk along a street that’s a mix of touristy shops and ordinary shops like pharmacies and hardware stores and sporting goods stores.
We went into the old town and found a place that wasn’t particularly Italian surrounded by Italian restaurants, tucked in a little plaza with a tree growing in the middle, strung with lights.
View from my seat
I’ll just highlight the food here. Scallop carpaccio with chunks of citrus
Duck breast in port wine reduction
Seared rare tuna with piquillo puree and fennel slaw
More tomorrow, I hope, especially if I can get out to a café for a pastry as soon as the shops open.
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