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France
We had a case of sticker shock when it came to France compared to the Czech Republic. Beer went from one dollar to three and the price of wine and food doubled. We sat in a beautiful small square one morning and three coffees later we left eight dollars lighter. But we did find a nice restaurant and had a delicious meal for 211 Francs including wine. I told the waiter/perhaps owner that we had a budget of 200 francs and he designed the meal for us. Dawn was horrified by this tactic, but when the menu is full of things you don’t understand and the pricing is confusing, sometimes I decide to rely on the mercy of strangers. He warmed up to us in spite of my tactics and especially when Dawn recognized that the red we were drinking tasted like a white which we had ordered. It turned out that in Alsace they take the Pinot Noir, a red grape that is used to make red wine in other parts of the world and use it as if it were a white grape, that is, they don’t used the skins (I think). The Cathedral, which we had not realized is one of the great French Gothic Cathedrals, stunned us when we went in. I am not nearly the poet to describe a Gothic Cathedral, but let me say that walking into one is like being taken as a lover.
We are in Strasbourg on our way to Paris. But we had another day on our rail pass and since we wanted to see some other part of France we decided to visit Dijon. We also thought we might get into the countryside a little. In keeping with our travel methods we have not made any reservations for Paris , and we needed time to take care of that detail. In Prague, using American Online we had gotten the names of about six hotels in Paris that seemed to be what we wanted. Each hotel had a page with a description and with three or four comments from people who had been there. We also had a couple of recommendations from people we knew. We found out that the time we wanted to be in Paris would be at the end of the French Easter vacation, so we were worried that there would be no room. In fact, the two places that were recommended were full but two from the Internet had space, so we ended up making reservations at two hotels, the first would be for two nights at the Gobelins in 5th arrondissement and then we would move to the 4th to the Hotel de Nice in the Marais. We also hooked up with a Servas host, so we planned to stay with him for the last weekend, leaving the last night in Paris still unreserved. It was going to be a problem anyway because our flight left at 7 AM meaning we should be there by 5 AM, therefore . . .Boy, that is early!
Our introduction to Dijon was a couple of cheese sandwiches slathered with Dijon that we ate in a sunny park. The stuff is definitely spicier than what they export to the United States. We did eat all of our meal but it took a lot longer than usual. We thought that they gave us some other kind of mustard, but we found that this is what they serve in restaurants. We finished off the rest of the day and the rest of our Eurorail pass by taking the train down to Beaune and doing a little wine tasting and buying. An energetic town full of places for degustation.
One of the things that I think about when I have nothing better to do is the question, “What carries culture?” I have a pretty good idea about what attitudes I have received from my parents, but what is left from their parents, and their parents before them? And how do a couple’s separate identities combine to be passed on to their children. And finally, and more to the point, how much of the villages of 16th century Austria and 11th century Switzerland that my fathers family comes from is still left in me? How does America filter in? Has the Massive Educational system of the last hundred years change the equation? I feel that our sense of self determination is probably illusional. If scientists had access to time machines these influences could be traced with some accuracy. History, because of its creativity component is not usable for this study.
Where I am desperately trying to make all this lead to is a Roman era catacomb under a Gothic church in Dijon. Unmercifully cold with the bones of a first century martyr at one end and a double circle of squat columns at the other, what does this dark cell have to do with Jesus before, or the Gothic Cathedrals that followed or most importantly with the young altar boy that was woken up by his mother at 6 AM to serve at 6:30 Mass at Saints Simon and Jude parish in 20th century America.
In other words, how far back can personal go. I have always assumed that I was born into a world of hard reality about which I was taught much of what had been discovered about it. There was the world of the past which we studied, most of what had no relevance to our lives, (life in Medieval castles, for instance), The world of today, of progress, and the world of the future, of which nobody spoke. Nobody seemed to care about a time when we would all be dead. I see it differently now. Our minds are a jumbled pile of all the brilliance and foolishness of all that has gone before us. Everything we see and every sentence of language that we hear binds us inexorably to the past.
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Paris
Dawn:Ah, Paris! It felt like going home. I realize that this was my sixth visit to Paris, the first having been in
1959 with my parents and brother. Mais cette fois, Paris s’est si bien habillee! I have never seen the city so beautiful. Spring arrived there at least three weeks before coming to Boston. All the tulips, daffodils, iris, lilacs and fruit trees were blooming. The trees and lawns were all green in the Jardins du Luxembourg and the Jardin des Tuileries. On our last weekend there, we finally stayed with some Servas hosts, in a suburb of Paris. In spite of Herve’s collection of tarantulas, snakes, and exotic insects, he and his wife Michelle and son Tomas were warm and welcoming and fun to be with. They took us to visit Giverny, the house and gardens where Monet lived and painted for the last years of his life. It’s amazing to walk around the lily pond, look back at the Japanese bridge and realize that you’ve seen all of this before, only you’ve seen it through Monet’s eyes, through his amazing ability to paint light, to have us see not only color and form but also atmosphere. We had just gone ( again, for me) to the Musee d’Orsay to see the wonderful impressionist collection there so it was particularly timely to visit his gardens. And what gardens they are! I have never seen such density of plantings. There must have been a million spring bulbs in bloom. There were beds, for sure, and a planned gradation of color and form to each one. However, the garden did not appear formal, not in the English sense anyway. It was refreshing for us to look at the impressionist work which seemed to be so much about painting, about color and light, about the medium itself, after all the heavy religious art we had been seeing for weeks.
I was very relieved to see my Algerian poet friend, Malek. He and I had met at the artists’ colony at La Napoule in 1989. He had been suffering a terrible depression since his younger brother had been assassinated by the radical conservatives in Algeria, about two and a half years ago. His brother was THE man of the theatre in Algeria, and it’s the intellectuals that have been targeted by this violent group. Malek managed to put together a book of writings about his brother which will be published in Paris in the fall. He has also started a foundation to support theatre and social consciousness. However, he has been working so hard as an editor and supervisor in a well-known Paris publishing house, that he has no time for his own writing which he is burning to do right now. He’s hoping there will be enough money in his compulsory retirement account (like social security) that he can retire in a year or two. He will be sixty in November. That way, he can devote himself to writing and to working for this foundation. It did my heart good to see him smile and hear him laugh again since my only contact with him since the assassination had been by letter or telephone. He is a man of great intellect and talent and deep feeling.
Malek speaks only French and Arabic so when the three of us had dinner together, of course the translating fell to me. I’m not sure I would always understand Malek’s ideas even if he were speaking English, and I know I don’t understand Stephen’s thoughts half the time in spite of our common language and years together. So picture me, dear reader, sitting between these two highly opinionated men, both of whom I adore in different ways, trying to interpret to each other their thoughts about history, xenophobia, art and literature! As the evening went on, my tongue became more and more tied, my English waned and my French nearly died. Somewhere around 11:00 PM, knowing that we had to be up at 4:00 am to get to the airport, Malek looked at me and said, “Mais tu es fatiguee, cherie!” Yes, I was tired, exhausted really, but engaged, happy, thinking, stimulated.
If only I could bring along a few more of the people I love, I could live in Paris with no problem. .. except I would have to find a way to make a living. Perhaps it’s my mother’s legacy; whenever I sit in the Jardin des Tuileries, I picture her playing there as a young child or listening to her “Nou Nou” (her French governess) entertaining a large group of children with her stories and tall tales. In fact, just having spent a week with my mother in Connecticut and confronting the strangeness of an aging mind with its inevitable memory losses and repetitions, I had the pleasure of speaking French with her again. It was as if her brain’s synapses jumped back to her being five when French was the only language she knew, and of course the language that rolls off her tongue is perfectly accented WWI Parisian French.
It has been luckily rare for me to encounter the stereotypical obnoxious Parisian snob. In fact, most people I’ve ever encountered in France (bureaucrats notably excepted) have been friendly and generous, such as the young man in the train station at Strasbourg who offered me a “coup de main” getting my bag down the stairs. However, on the evening that we decided to go to “Chez Marianne”, a restaurant highly recommended in “Let’s Go” and the “Pariscope” as being reasonably priced and different, we encountered the attitude. The first night we tried to get in, it was just too busy, they said the wait would be an hour, so we tried the next night. We arrived at 8:45 and were told to leave our names, that we could be seated at 9:30. While others in line were being handed complimentary Kirs to drink, we were told to take a walk and come back in 45 minutes. When we returned at the appointed hour, the line was shorter, but people kept coming in and seemed to get seated before we did. At about 9:45 I said something to the young, rather bitchy host, and she said, “I told you to come back at 10:00.” I said, “Mais non, vous avez dit 9:30.” At least we were then presented with the complimentary apperitif . Eventually we got seated “in the second room” which meant going out on the sidewalk and entering another part of the restaurant through a different door. It was probably after 10:00.
The food was great, many little portions of middle eastern and eastern European specialities, the service was fast and lively, and the price was right, especially for the Marais which is now one of the trendiest districts in Paris. So at the end of the evening, I took the trouble to go back through the other door, wend my way through the line that was still waiting to tell the ice lady that “Il vaut la peine d’attendre.” (It’s worth the wait.) Well, I have never seen such a personality transformation. She smiled and said, “Oh, comme c’est gentil de dire cela. Tiens, (using the familiar form now!) cette carte, et la prochaine fois tu ne dois pas attendre.” (“Oh, how nice it is for you to say that. Here, take this card, and the next time you will not have to wait.”) On the card was a picture of this young lady herself in sort of eastern European traditional garb, so I guess she was Marianne. It was astonishing to me how one nice word from a formerly disgruntled foreign customer could change her attitude entirely. The previous night when we had inquired there, there had been another host, and he immediately lapsed into English when I spoke to him which always upsets me, when my mediocre French is so obviously put down. So this little episode with Marianne was a small linguistic, interpersonal triumph for me.
We had a rather hilarious linguistic moment in the kitchen of our Servas hosts, talking with their teenage son about “surfing.” I asked Tomas what sports he liked to do. His reply was futbol (soccer) and surfing. So I immediately launched into a discussion of my attempts to surf in Costa Rica, even physically demonstrating the technique for jumping up to one’s feet from a prone position. He said he learned on the flat but that it was really easier to do it where it was steep. I said that I, too, had only gone in the whitewater, not out in the big waves yet but that the experts said it was actually easier in the steeper waves. He asked me if I learned with “batons” (poles), and I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.
I said, “Where did you put the poles? In the water or on the board?” At this point, Stephen, Michelle, Tomas, and I simultaneously burst out laughing, having realized that he was talking about snowboarding and I was talking about ocean surfing! He had been wondering why I had to get up from a prone position on the board; finally this absurd conversation made some sense. Ah, the subtleties of language.
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