bearing blog

bear – ing n 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].

Cocteau/Taco.

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.

This picture comes from this link

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.

Sep 9, 2025

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Miscellany.

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.

Sep 8, 2025

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Sunday Mass report.

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.

Sep 8, 2025

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Dinner date.
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:
1. Go out to get lunch
2. 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.
Sep 7, 2025

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Lunch in Italy.

Here’s what we did yesterday though: lunch in Italy. We’re only two train stops from Ventimiglia.

Leo was tired and sore from lots of walking, so he stayed home. Simon and Mark and I went, and wandered purposefully until we found a restaurant that was already open at 11:30 and had both pasta and pizza.

Began with fries for Simon and a carpaccio of three fish. It was supposed to be tuna, smoked salmon, and swordfish, but they gave us a thinly sliced terrine of octopus instead of swordfish. I had to practice liking the tentacles. But the fish was good.

Trofie alla genovese for me: pesto, potatoes, haricots. Also two glasses of chilled white wine.

A trouty sort of fish for Mark. Perfectly chargrilled.

Simon filled up on fries so Mark ate some of his pizza and then we got a box.

After this Simon was completely exhausted so we got back on the train and returned to the apartment without even getting gelato.

Sep 7, 2025

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Still me, but in France.

There’s this SNL skit in which Adam Sandler plays a tour guide for “Romano Tours.” (If you are in the US, google it, because I am forbidden by the National Broadcasting Corporation to see any clips from here.) But I did find a transcript! **

People love us. But, every so often, a customer leaves a review that they were disappointed or didn’t have as much fun as they thought. So here at Romano tours, we always remind our customers, if you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay? Do you understand? That makes sense? Our tours will take you to the most beautiful places on Earth. [Cut to video clip of Amalfi coast] Hike to cliffs off the Amalfi coast. Fish with the nets in Sorrento. [Cut to video clip of a woman yoga posturing] Do this, I don’t know.

[Cut to Joe] But remember, you’re still going to be you on vacation. If you are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before. Just in a new place. Does that make sense? There’s a lot a vacation can do. Help you unwind. See some different looking squirrels. But it cannot fix deeper issues like how you behave in group settings or your general baseline mood. That’s a job for incremental lifestyle changes sustained over time.

[‘Can’ and ‘Cannot’ chart appears in the screen]

I want to be very clear about what we can do for you. We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. We can take you to the Italian Rivera. We cannot make you feel comfortable in a bathing suit. We can provide the zip line. We cannot give you the ability to say Whee and mean it. You’re not your sister.

Ahem.

So, one of the things we wanted to do with this trip was have it not be a month of pure vacation. Mark is working remotely for much of it anyway, and we are doing school, so in one sense we wanted to just move our regular life and relationships to a prettier setting.

Since I couldn’t bring my house, which functions as a permanent three-dimensional to-do list that I wake up in every morning, I am free of a lot of ordinary “work stressors” here. But other than that I am still me and we are still us.

I still need a block of alone time every day. So far I have gotten this mostly when Mark takes Simon and Leo to the beach to frolic in the waves. I have stayed in the apartment each time: napping, doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen while listening to podcasts. Or I have gone grocery shopping in town, happy to not have help even though it means I have to carry it all back.

And then. There are a lot of activities we could be doing out there, or I could. I could take the train to Nice for an afternoon and see one of several art exhibits, or walk along the Promenade des Anglais. I really thought I was going to do that before I got here. I thought we would take a shuttle up into the hills and make the boys take an educational tour of a citrus grove, picnic included. Doesn’t it sound fun? And we fully intended to go to Monaco for the day, see the aquarium in the oceanographic museum and maybe the big royal automobile collection.

But just as most days in Minnesota I do not go to the art museums in my own hometown nor drive into the countryside to tour excellent Wisconsin dairy farms, here I just kind of want to sit down and relax into a routine. Eat, shop, cook, wander around, buy gelato, take a nap when I am tired, do schoolwork with the kids in the weekday morning, swap the dishwasher, go to the wine store and ask what I should pair with the dinner I plan to make.

Look. I had this idea that I would embrace French petit déjeuner: coffee and a little bread and marmalade, maybe a cup of really good yogurt; or every few days I would go out to a café and get a pastry and a cappuccino. And I have done those things!

Early morning countertop. The green coffee bag is the caffeine one here.

But do you want to know what I had for breakfast this morning? While my drip coffee was brewing I opened the fridge and found the leftover second half of a fat spicy meat wrap that Leo bought himself at the Kebab Berlinois around the corner. It is reminiscent of a Chipotle burrito only with thinly shaved, mildly spiced gyro-like meat and an oniony purple-cabbage slaw, and I think some tahini with the faintest perfume of a capsicum variety. Cold and ever do slightly soggy from twelve hours in the fridge.

What ho! A leftover hoagie!

And just as I would have at home, that is what I had for breakfast, right out of the wrapper.

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Church in an hour. And hey—today is Bl. Carlo and Bl. Pier Giorgio’s big day! We love BPG around here and consequently we are going to be stumbling through our dinnertime litany for the next few weeks.

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** Sorry the excerpt is so long. Still learning the WordPress mobile app. The quote block won’t let me abridge it.

Sep 7, 2025

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Yesterday’s travelogue.

It was a workday:

In fact, we hardly left the apartment yesterday before evening. Mark hadn’t had any pastries at all yet, so he went for an almond-filled and a coffee in the morning, and then fired up the old laptop and got to work.

Leo had had a poor night of sleep, so after some consultation we sent him back to his hammock with an extra blanket against the beautifully frigid air conditioner and turned out the lights.

I worked closely with Simon for a few hours, completing a day’s worth of history reading, English mechanics practice, and science workbook. Then I went for a little walk outside to see if I could find out why they were shutting down the street and putting up a long row of tented booths, each with two folding chairs and a table on it.

First I discovered what they do with your motorcycle when you park it where it says No Parking Today.

Then I went into the tourist office nearby, sniffed a couple of candles scented with the region’s special agricultural product (lemons), picked up a city tourist map, and asked “Qu’est-ce que se passe dehors avec toutes les tentes?”

The answer is that it was a municipal activity fair, and all the local sports clubs and dance schools would have brochures and a place to sign up, and there would be performances and the like. Sensible, on the first Saturday of the school year, So, nothing for us, but it might be interesting to see.

I returned and with Mark ate a lunch of leftovers. We woke Leo and made him eat something. Then school again: I read aloud to both boys then set Simon on math while I worked with Leo on geometric constructions and French review.

About five pm I took the boys to find a cheeseburger and fries, then took them back; and they stayed in the apartment while Mark and I ventured out.

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There had been a little burst of anxiety from the direction of the children at the French-fry stand: one spilled his drink on the other, the other got upset. I worried they’d need to text us for intervention while we were out. Accordingly it took me a long time of strolling through the town looking for a bar to sit at, and then changing our minds and looking for a restaurant, before I could quite release myself from feeling high-strung. Mark soothed me, pointing out that the worst that would happen would be that I would sit at a seaside bar with a drink while he would jog two minutes back to the apartment to solve any problems. Perspective restored, I accepted this outcome and chose a restaurant. And I immediately ordered a spritz Hugo for medicinal purposes.

I don’t do a lot of needing a stiff drink and the Hugo isn’t exactly stiff but after downing it I did feel I could breathe more deeply. And order food.

moules frites

Mark had a cut of beef with roast potatoes. It looked pretty good but I concentrated on my mussels. I think it was good that it gave me something to occupy my hands. They are the unshelled pistachios of the sea.

Et j’aurai besoin d’une verre de vin blanc avec cela. The waiter offered me Sauvignon Blanc or Côte de Provence and I picked the latter.

Okay, I’m calming down. The sea, the sky, the food, the wine.

I thought I would want to do more, take the train to Nice, visit a lemon orchard, see an art exhibit. All I want to do is lie around, walk around, eat, shop, cook. Get gelato. Do it all again.

Sep 6, 2025

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Some linguistic diversion.

Yesterday I said I’d say more about this sign:

Yesterday at the market.

I took a picture of this sign because it’s an example in the wild of a change in the everyday rules of French grammar since I learned them in high school.

You know, probably, that French is a gendered language, and a binary one: it has no neuter gender (unlike German or Latin) and it has no neuter pronoun for objects (unlike English). Every noun has a specified gender, masculine or feminine, with which you must use the agreeing articles and adjectives. Sometimes, say with nouns naming animals or a person’s job, there are masculine and feminine forms distinctly pronounced and spelled. Even if the two noun forms are identical, because of the articles and adjectives and perhaps because of sheer mental habit, you wouldn’t say “oh, that word isn’t gendered,” the way English speakers would say “pilot” is not gendered, nor “flight attendant,” but “steward/stewardess” is. You would say, “oh, the masculine form is the same as the feminine form.”

(Obviously there are a lot of little details that complicate this grammar and make it frustrating or fun, depending on how you feel about languages, like the fact that une personne is feminine even if the person in mind is a dude, and the creation—spontaneous or systematic, I am not sure—in recent decades of distinct feminine forms of professional nouns like avocate (lawyer, with an e) that didn’t exist before. I don’t want this post to take forever so I better stop. I’ve been reading this really interesting book (French edition) that gets into some of these. Anyway.)

So one of the rules we had back in the late 80s and early 90s was that if you were referring to a group of people, only if the group was entirely made up of girls and women could you use the feminine pronoun (elles) for them nor could you use a feminine noun referring to their class (such as employées). As soon as an evidently male person joins, the group receives the stamp of masculinity: ils sont tous employés, one e, in their class, their adjective or participle, in their they pronoun.

That’s what we learned, and any French placement test was guaranteed to include a question designed to catch if you remembered this fact, probably by having a question about three teachers or something who all have female-presenting names or who are pictured wearing dresses. Because the all-feminine group functions almost like an exception.

But something that I haven’t learned from a rule book but that I have been noticing here and there for years as I occasionally read French news articles or listen to French podcasts (not as often as I wish I had, it’s too much concentration needed while driving): increasingly, describing mixed groups of people by doubling nouns and pronouns.

And here is an example I saw in the wild: not clients (meaning customers-in-general, using the standard masculine form) but clientes et clients (meaning female customers and male customers).

Even on a small chalkboard with not a lot of extra space!

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I freely admit the following is an amateur take and welcome correctiom from experts….

This is not what English speakers have done as our language has moved (starting from before I was born) to adopt changes perceived by many as more inclusive and modern. In some cases we’ve done the opposite.

Here’s one way we do it in English. You take a word like chairman or fireman that sort of embodied the assumption that the role was almost entirely filled by men. Occasionally you might see chairwoman but we have largely moved to gender-neutral terms, some of them crafted for the purpose: chairperson, firefighter, postal carrier, flight attendant, Congressional representative, etc. And I still see these new words sometimes being coined: instead of the feminine-gendered seamstress you now sometimes see sewist, which I think I only saw for the first time a couple of years ago (replacing some wordier, less precise options like textile artist). I wonder about which words get the -person treatment and which don’t. I don’t see an obvious pattern. Some sound clunky to me and some don’t.

Another thing we have done in English is the exact opposite of the French evolution. Where one word came in masculine and feminine forms (e.g., actor and actress) some style standards are to eliminate the feminine form (everybody’s an actor). Oddly enough sometimes this has been followed by a second substitution (waiter/waitress to waiter to server) —maybe because the first change didn’t stick?

At any rate, we are definitely not saying actors and actresses every time we discuss Hollywood. You don’t see that double construction except in a few formulaic and possibly fading expressions (Ladies and gentlemen) and when you need to emphasize something (boys and girls perform similarly on this test).

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I think this is very interesting, nonjudgmentally, and perhaps a glimpse into the interior workings of French as compared to English. It seems to me that there are two linguistic (that is to say, mechanical, not sociopolitical) features of French relative to English that may explain some of the different approaches.

First, English is habitually pithy. English takes fewer words to say things than French does: compare the thickness of your favorite translated novel in trade paperback version to that of the original. I suspect that lengthier phrases just do not sound as lengthy in French whereas they make English speakers itch. Doubling the length of a noun phrase may just fit more comfortably and seem more natural.

The other is that English speakers, having most of our nouns be genderless, including many nouns for people and professions, can easily come to view our handful of gendered people-nouns as exceptions to the rule. English mostly does not have gender. The normal nouns for people are objectively genderless even if the class is male- or female-dominated and thus connotes one or the other: teacher, nurse, lawyer, electrician, engineer, laborer, garment worker; and also customer, boss, consumer, traveler, student, patient, retiree, and many more. The nouns that expressly segregate the genders for no functional reason (like waiter/waitress) are unusual. For language learners they represent a list that “just has to be memorized.” Reducing these doubles to the less-marked counterpart—always the masculine, that’s where the sociopolitical analysis creeps in—is linguistically simple. It makes English grammar more uniform, not less.

One of my goals in French learning is to grasp better and to get more current on how these rules are evolving, because they are not evolving in a way that is predictably parallel to how English is evolving. I don’t, for example, have much knowledge at all of how expressions that in English we call “nonbinary” are coming to exist (or not) in colloquial French, with its structure that’s far more inherently binary than English (itself far more inherently binary than some other languages that I have never studied). I need to do more reading.

Okay, that’s the end of my writing time. More travelogue later!

Sep 6, 2025

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Day off (again).

Wednesday we worked, Thursday we didn’t. (Friday we’ll work again).

Leo had heard me mention that I had picked up ingredients for pasta all’amatriciana, all of which keep, for an emergency dinner. He wanted it sooner, he said. Could I make it tonight? Okay, I said, I’ll just buy salad stuff today.

Off to the municipal market!

Entrance to le marché des Halles

More on this sign later.

I observed the produce vendor for a few minutes and then took my little basket and selected a salad-sized lettuce, a carrot, three tiny cucumbers, an onion, a yellow tomato, two plums and a peach, a nectarine, and a melon. A few minutes in line and then my turn at the scale. Each item was weighed then put into little waxy-paper sacks, the tomato with the plums and the peach with the nectarines. I noticed that the berries were in tubs in a fridge behind the counter, to be asked for and not handled; so was a big tub of already-torn mixed salad greens to be doled out on request.

Produce basket

I wandered around the hall looking for perhaps a jar of mustard or some olives, remembering the pretty little marinated olives from the wine bar last night. I did find an olive counter but it didn’t take credit cards unless I paid enough for half a kilo. I found a sushi bar where you could buy little boxes of fresh sushi, like the grocery store ones at home, but made in front of you. I found a wine bar where people were drinking prosecco in flutes, across from the Italian meat vendor with his mortadella and salame. I found a vendor with a giant bin of potatoes and a smaller bin of sweet potatoes.

Potatoes next time, I decided. Fish and potatoes, with capers and lemon.

There was a grocery next door where I found mustard—I just got the store brand, trusting it would be pungent and adequate for salad dressing—and instead of olives, a jar of tapenade. I’d already bought a baguette when I went out for pastry and espresso earlier.

Meanwhile, Mark had taken Simon to the toy store. Simon is, at eleven, rather a collector and connoisseur of stuffed animals, and he had been promised one small “stuffie” from each of the two towns of our trip. He chose a soft brown rabbit with quilt scraps for a tail.

+ + +

We had had a minor electrical problem the evening before—the power had tripped, Mark had located and reset the breaker, but much later in the evening when the apartment got hot, we realized that the air conditioner hadn’t come back on. I composed a text to the property manager, in which I learned lots of new French words like the ones for “circuit breaker” and “to flip a switch” and “compressor.” She came over and showed me the controls and adjusted them. In fact we had a whole conversation about the split-system air conditioner operation, which of the two units outside might connect to which one inside, and how to determine if each was working, a comversation which Mark could only watch helplessly. Anyway, despite her telling me that the a/c wasn’t something she knew much about and saying she would contact the owner to send someone to look at it, whatever she did to the controls got it working again. It has been pleasantly chilly ever since.

+ + +

Leo had been planning our lunch all this time. He announced we were going to have sushi at a specific seaside restaurant to the west.

We walked through the city, taking notes about nearby pastry shops and wine bars, and especially a counter-service place that advertised tacos, “sandwishes,” bbq and tex-mex. “I’ve had so much Americanized Italian and Chinese food,” Leo said, “I want to try Frenchified American food!” But we pressed on to sushi.

I told Leo how to say “Nous sommes quatre” and sent him in to get a table. Simon was a little sulky—sushi’s not his favorite—so we promised him that if he didn’t manage to eat enough we’d find something else for him afterwards. He perked up, especially when we discovered they had those Japanese Ramune sodas on the menu, the kind sealed with a glass marble inside, and in his favorite flavor (fraise).

We studied the menu for about thirty seconds before Leo decided that we had to get the BIG SUSHI BOAT and it being immediately clear that this would simplify the ordering process, we agreed.

Le bateau de sushi pour 3 personnes

Simom liked the dragon figurehead, reached out and rotated it to face him. It was all very much like what we would have at home, and very good. Legitimately the best mackerel sashimi I’d ever had. Also rice and skewered meatballs and chicken and miso and cabbage salad.

The one unusual exception: cheese. One of the skewers was marinated beef wrapped around a mild white cheese, mozzarella-esque, and grilled till the cheese was all melted. It was yummy but not something I’d seen in a sushi restaurant before. Also, this restaurant sold salmon avocado poke bowls—with chunks of soft, washed-rind cheese wheel on top.

“Frenchified Japanese food has French cheese in it,” Leo observed.

Anyway, Simon was happy about the chicken meatballs and rice, so he also was fed and happy when we left.

+ + +

Mark took the boys to buy an inflatable ring toy (jouet flottant) which they filled for him with a compresseur (see, new vocab!) and then to the beach. I stayed in the apartment for some quiet alone time, and ran a couple loads of laundry, and texted with MJ to hear how the second week of college was going.

+ + +

Mark and I started dinner with some limoncello from one of the many lemon-products boutiques, and the tapenade and a little cheese, while my sauce gently cooked on the stovetop. When we ran out of limoncello we opened the Côtes de Provence I had been recommended at the wine store, and I made the vinaigrette for the salad with mustard and a spoonful of lavender honey, and plated it all up. The apartment dishes are these ridiculously large squares, but they actually work pretty well for plating.

We sat around and drank wine, then ran the dishwasher, then went out for ice cream and a walk in the very comfortable evening.

Sep 5, 2025

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2 comments on Day off (again).
La rentrée.

Also known as “back to school.”

Don’t they look studious?

Mark planned on a full eight-hour workday Wednesday. We work when Mark works, I told the kids. “The way we’ll think about it,” I said to Leo as we were walking uphill trying to get some sunshine, “is that each day has three parts. Morning, afternoon, evening. On days that Dad works he’ll work for two of those parts. And we will too.”

We won’t work for eight solid hours of course, homeschooling simply doesn’t take that long, especially when you have expressly planned to only work half time. It did mean that on Wednesday, for example, Leo did geometry in the morning (while Mark paged through some mandatory training modules) and French in the afternoon (while Mark zoomed into morning meetings).

Our apartment bedroom has a nice little table which I yielded entirely to Mark for a desk.

Mark at work.

I started the day (after a lot of coffee) reading aloud from the novel we’re in the middle of, on my Kindle. That’s how we wake up and get ourselves im the mood, so to speak.

Simon can do his Beast Academy math workbook pages independently, so I set him on that and sat down with Leo to go over the first couple lessons in the Geometry book. Leo’s the first one I’ve used Art of Problem Solving with, so I want to pay attention to the approach, but the first lessons in any geometry book are highly predictable: this is why we need to learn a lot of specialized vocabulary and notation; this is a point, a line, a plane; this is a locus.

Not too stressful there, and when Leo finished the exercises in the first two short lessons, I released him for the morning. He went out to walk around. (Phys ed! Geography!) I turned to Simon and read aloud to him from a history book—we are just starting the Civil War volume of Joy Hakim’s ten-volume History of US, to which Simon is quite attentive and so it works well as a cozy sort of way of entering systematically into U.S. history in elementary school. I believe I can access my Prime Video library here, so we might put on Ken Burns later this month.

After that I made Simon start his new science module, expressly chosen for the trip because it consists of one workbook and almost no experiments (basically, a human anatomy worktext). These are exactly the same reasons why Simon is not exactly enamored of it. Oh well, can’t pack the chemistry lab in the suitcase.

Mark took a long lunch break and we met Leo at a creperie. The kids got sweet ones, Mark got le Savoyarde which means lots of cheese and ham, I got l’Azûrienne which meant tapenade, tomatoes, and chèvre.

L’Azûrienne. Nutella in the background

Mark still feels a little off from the jet lag but I am definitely getting my appetite back.

Leo had walked all the way to the other, more fashionable end of town, past the marina and the sand beach. He showed us lots of pictures of winding narrow stairs and pedestrian ways, hemmed in with pastel walls and dotted with flowers. He wanted to walk more later. (And we did!)

But first back to the apartment for 1) a nap and 2) French-from-a-textbook. I’m afraid the beginning of French II is a little boring as it starts with some review material, such as quizzes on numbers and time-telling, to find out where practice is needed. So that part wasn’t very fun. Especially since the wholly necessary nap pushed the schoolwork to later in the day than Leo is accustomed to doing it at home. But Mark was working till 6 pm… and, like I said, we work when Mark works.

We ended the day by leaving Leo in charge for a bit while Mark and I went out for a drink, and then I fetched pizzas.

Leo wasn’t in a pizza mood, so he ventured out separately to Kebab Berlinois and brought back some kind of wrap? in a Chipotle-quality flour tortilla, which is to say a better tortilla than I expected. The effect was of thinly sliced, mild gyro-type meat, with lettuce and a lot of onions. He thought it was a little bland and regretted bot asking for spicy sauce; I had a few bites and it was one of those things that tastes better and better as you go. If I had had one of these right when I got off the plane it would have totally hit the spot.

Anyway, yesterday being a workday made it less fun, but it was pretty good for a workday if you ask me.

The olives were free with drinks

Sep 4, 2025

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What I ate yesterday.

The first full day after having slept, we designated as a rest and orientation day. The only really important task was to make sure everyone could maintain blood sugar, body temperature, levels of serotonin, and personal hygiene.

1. 5 a.m. I popped awake with one thought: obtain and demolish the half-sandwich Mark had stowed in the fridge. I obeyed and then slept four more hours.

2. 9:30 a.m. Kids awake already, so I am deprived of obligatory two hours drinking coffee in silence. Cognitive issues, also lack of coffee, led to struggle with the drip coffeemaker. Gave up and used off-brand Nespresso pod to make bad espresso while Mark figured it out.

3. 11 a.m. I head out with a shopping list of toiletries. First I find a bakery-café that will still sell me a Formule Petit-Déj, and I eat an apple chausson. It comes in a wicker basket and I get pastry flakes all over my black dress. The double espresso is better than aparment Nespresso. I write yesterday’s blog post and put up a picture.

4. 1 p.m. We all go out to lunch immediately after I return from the store with shaving cream and shampoo and deodorant and paper towels and better coffee. I am flustered and tired and my brain is not working, and I misunderstand my family’s intention to walk around looking for a place, and I march up and ask for a table at the first restaurant we hit when we get to the beach. Before we know it we are seated at the seaside and Leo is explaining to me that the plan was to walk around choosing one, whereas I had gotten the impression that (a) everyone needed to eat sooner and (b) they had already preselected this particular restaurant by internet search. Oops!

Fortunately the sea breeze is lovely, the umbrellas are perfectly shady, and the restaurant has pizza which both boys demolish eagerly, as well as really good frites.

Leo using a knife and fork on pizza.

Simon, happy.

The boys say the pizza tastes like the English muffin pizzas I made using tomato paste, when they were little.

I have the salad with goat cheese toasts and proscuitto and honey. Mark, duck breast and fries. I say I can’t possibly eat it all because my appetite is all screwed up but I slowly and gradually plow through it. And I force myself to drink lots and lots of water, which I know I need after the travel day.

Hungrier than I thought

4. 4 p.m. Mark returns from the beach with children and I return from shopping again with vegetables and limoncello. (After lunch and a nap I had paged through Provençal recipes and settled on a “light vegetable soup”). We open the limoncello before it is quite cold enough and drink some, then we have glasses of leftover red wine. Then Mark takes Leo shopping for a wallet and I begin chopping vegetables.

Vegetables, parmesan, herbs, a jar of French-made pesto with walnuts.

The onions, leek, celery, carrots, zucchini, potato, and green beans are all finally in little tiny dice when I discover that I can’t figure out how to operate the electric cooktop. We poke at it for a while, discuss whether it is induction or infrared, search fruitlessly for a manual, google without the help of the model number, drink more wine, break a wine glass and clean it up, and finally Mark finds a YouTube video and learns how to defeat the cooktop’s child lock. I am delighted to open a cabinet and find a food processor, which my recipe requires but I had resolved to do without.

Meanwhile, Simon makes himself a sandwich of rosette de Lyon on “Harry’s Extra Moelleux Pain de Mie Nature” and is very pleased with it. And Leo goes into town and comes back with apricot preserves and is very pleased with them.

Salami and sliced white bread for Simon

5. 7 p.m. I have sautéed lardons of smoked bacon in olive oil, followed by the hard vegetables and then the soft vegetables, then added water and a potato (1/4 of it in a chunk and 3/4 of it in small dice) and a parmesan rind and thyme and bay leaf and pepper and salt. I have simmered, then added two ripe whole tomatoes, and then retrieved them and peeled them before puréeing them with the soft potato chunk and a bit of brothy vegetables and added them back to the soup. I have removed the parmesan rind and bay leaves and added white beans, red wine vinegar, and half a jar of pesto.

Soupe au pistou.

We eat it with chilled Macon-Villages white wine, marinated olives, a bowl of blueberries and a bowl of greengage plums, a package of jambon de Bayonne, and chunks of baguette spread with ordinary French grocery store butter, which is to say it is amazing butter.

Somehow without having to work hard at it we manage to sit at the table for almost two hours leisurely enjoying our food and wine. I have to go lie down on the couch for a while though, while Mark and Leo do the dishes.

6. 9 p.m. We go out in search of gelato (look, we are right on the border, all the glace is Italian-style, I’m calling it gelato). I fail to take any pictures, but trust me, we found it. Leo orders the ice cream except for mine. Mark declares his cone (one scoop of chocolate, one of coconut) the best so far. I have a serviceable but melty scoop of banane. Simon has a lemon sorbetto that tastes exactly like a tart lemon drop, which he declares perfect; Leo has that plus coconut. We walk back along the roaring stony beach, put the cooled soup away, and that ends our rest day. We have indeed been fed.

Sep 3, 2025

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Arrivés.

Yesterday is a bit of a blur. I mean Sunday and yesterday—blurred together, all into one.

None of us slept much on the plane. I watched Interstellar on and off, interspersed with crossword puzzles. Arrival and passport control at Nice-Côte d’Azur went smoothly, all our luggage came too. Ten minutes’ confusion about how to buy tickets for the tram to the train station, no problem buying train tickets to Menton, no problem walking to and letting ourselves into the AirBnb.

A marriage note!

I’ll get used to it, I always do, but as soon as the plane lands outside the English-speaking world (cue dolly zoom) a certain set of roles suddenly reverses. Normally, when we are traveling with the kids, by unspoken agreement and long habit, I manage children and Mark deals with car rental counters, ticket-buying, lost luggage offices, hotel maintenance complaints, etc. Generally, having conversations with the hostile bureaucracy of commerce.

But we are in France, and I speak French well enough, and now all of that is my job! And I know it is my job but every single time when I first hear him say “Stand over here and wait with me, your mom’s going to go buy the train tickets” I am suddenly gobsmacked.

I mean, I can buy the tickets, it’s not a problem, but the switch takes time to reset in my brain.

+ + +

We rested, went out to get pastries, came back, I went grocery shopping for milk and cereal and jambon serrano and cheese and baguette and wine and fruit and yogurt. We rested, then hauled the kids up and outside to catch afternoon sun, bribing them with ice cream. I distributed medication doses carefully at predetermined times in accordance with a spreadsheet I had made before leaving. We went back, ate the dinner, drank the wine, went out for more ice cream. Back again, melatonin for all, and finally the long sleep.

We assigned Leo to order ice cream with his one year of high school French. I stayed outside and waited on a bench so I wouldn’t be tempted to jump in and rescue him. He did fine. He’s pleasantly surprised at how well he can understand things.

OK, my chausson de pommes and double espresso are gone now. I need to go buy a month’s worth of shampoo and shaving cream. Catch you later.

Sep 2, 2025

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1 comment on Arrivés.