We’re in the Swing of School

School bus to International Bilingual School of Provence, picking up kids near Aix city center.

With day #15 about to start, it feels like a relief to have some school days now behind us. Every day is still brand new, and I pick up both kids after having been obsessively thinking about them making their way all day long. Upon pick-up at 5:30, they range from giddy to grumpy, not very predictably. They get on the school bus at 8 and off it again at 5:30. We’ve gotten much better at catching the bus, and can even get back in the door by 5:55 now — down from 7pm when we first began navigating rush hour traffic. Taking the school bus is fun and easy, and the bus is very nice

Setting the Scene: The school is out in the countryside, occupying a sloping hillside of open farmland and small forest. The classrooms are in rows of modular classroom units (think California-style), anchored by a large stucco refitted farmhouse that contains the administration, la cantine (with hair-net ladies and gangly chef-hatted Chef who steps out into the dining room to observe the youth eating), and some laboratory and computer spaces. Off the back of the main house, espaliered trees form a dense leafy ceiling over a large outside terrace where all meals and social time occurs. Only in the dead of winter apparently, do the students use indoor spaces or awning covered areas. Their coats are hung on hooks outside.

There’s a pool!  But, as the Dean has explained, they do not allow swimming in the fall months because with the new school year starting, the students are too “agitated” to benefit from swimming. Student agitation is a theme of concern apparently, as we were also “reassured” that the middle graders do not have a prom because it is too likely that such an event would cause their hormones to become overly-agitated. Instead the dances are for 6th, 7th, 8th, 11th and 12th graders-interesting approach to middle-adolescence. We’re still getting over that making-out during recess and smoking once off the school bus back in the city are fully integrated student activities, not found to be overly agitating.

The day is long and very structured. 60-minute classes one after the other. They have a 15 minute break in the morning and afternoon, and an hour for lunch. A mid-morning snack is baguettes and cheese, lunch is basically dinner.

Dmitri is lucky to have three two-hour sports sections each week, but by 9th grade that is reduced to two hours of sports all week long. This is probably the biggest hurdle we are figuring out for Jack. Athletics do not happen at school in high school, and are tucked in around the edges at his age apparently. We recently found out that youth swimming starts at 9pm! This evening I am taking Jack to a pick-up soccer game for 9th graders, organized by some like-minded families, and later this week he’s going to try out the town track and field youth team. They are called the “Les Cadets” (The Cadets!) and a friendly young coach named Pierre is waiting to meet Jack. We’re just staying open-minded about maximum newness-track and field included!

Dmitri’s grade has 44 kids in it and they are all being immersed in a bilingual program. A few are already at ease with both French and English, but several speak neither.  Dmitri let us know that a Russian girl in is class only speaks with her hands over her face, which makes it a bit hard to understand her. So I think we are doing okay so far. The school strives to meet many different cultural and academic student needs and I guess we’ll see how effective they are at it. In the signed rules, the school reviews its mission of intercultural tolerance demonstrated by respectful dress, language and behavior. Respectful dress includes “no exuberant hair colors, piercings, or language on clothing, and no underwear showing at any time”. By 9th grade the kids are divided into French-language or English-language tracks out of necessity. Jack’s friend Ivan, a boarder from Russia, is learning both, and hanging in there apparently. Reportedly by Dmitri and Jack, most classes are actually taught in some degree of what we’ll call, Frenglish, and many teachers are, of course, not native English speakers. Dmitri’s teacher for his class “Maternelle-Langue English” teacher is British, so I guess that counts! So far so good with the British English! Oh, and by the way, never say “chouette” or “super” in French! It’s like saying you are from “San Fran” or “the big apple”.  In other words, dorky!

Both kids have a dizzying array of subjects. Forget integrated learning or a reduced transition time philosophy.  Dmitri has, seriously, 11 subjects, including Chemistry AND Physics AND Biology. Go figure. He also has History and Geography, Math, English, French, X-tra French (separate class!), Art, and Gym. I feel like I need a nap! Thank goodness for the “Cahier des Texte- the very French invention in that keeps everything organized in a required special book.

Jack takes English, French, X-tra French, History, Geography, Economics, Physics, Math, Biology, Art, and “a tiny bit of sports”. So far the teachers are well-liked, range from young to “old”, and are “nice-strict” or just plain nice. The “Vie Scolaire” is an office where the mysterious but well-liked, Mr. Gorini, can fix any problem apparently-from a headache to having a big book that contains all the homework assignments for every single teacher! So you can always figure out how to remedy a problem with Mr. Gorini, although I am not sure he speaks English, so we’ll see. We do know already however, that he can bandage up double skinned knees pretty nicely.

Now we dive into week #3 and see where that takes us!

La Rentree or “How to Freak Out About School Supplies”

Just a fraction of the school supplies on our list or rentree shopping.

School Supplies: Full disclosure is that the Kiryk family has been unknowingly living in a school-supply vacuum for the past decade. At school in Cambridge, our kids put on clean clothes and show up in their classrooms on day #1; that’s it. Many American parents are faced with school supply lists from both public and private schools, but that’s how Shady Hill does it. Little did we know what alternate universe was in France.  In fact, school supplies are such a big deal that it gets attention on the local news, and is referred to in conversation constantly in August. Concerned checking in as to how one is coping is the norm. Upon arrival at our cottage in Aix, we were not asked about electricity or our new digs, but about how “la rentree” was going for us etrangers! References are made as to how extreme the stress-levels of parents (read: mothers) must be about the “RENTREE” (“rahn-trey”: re-entrance to school). They even have a name for it!

The List: The French have got it “goin’ on” when it comes to school supplies. The list online looked quaint and reasonable to the uninitiated when we saw it online from in July. Little did we know that it translated into the biggest forest-stripping mountain of paper products and redundant notebooks, plus math tools, and uber-specific writing implements. Dmitri, who’s 11, is now the proud owner of approximately 1092 sheets of A4 graph paper (Yes, the French actually do write on technical graph paper, which Dmitri now calmly explains is for precise penmanship and for ease of underlining the teacher’s name), separate packets of “drawing” and colored construction paper, and he owns a plastic protractor plus metal compass in a little box. His ruler and red pen are just for underlining the teacher’s name.  So far, Jack’s school supplies weigh in at 22.5 pounds, including a few textbooks (ed note: that’s true).

The best invention we’ve come across is a very specific homework planner, “Le Cahier des Textes”. Previously unknown, the French globally dominate Executive Function science — for those for whom this means anything. It’s a brilliant design, never before seen in America, and every French kid must have one. Required! We’re learning how to optimize its use, but suffice it to say that any ambivalence about a homework planner is in our distant past. Maybe we’ll start an import business to EF-challenged America.

Socialism at its best: So, here’s the real thing:  all of these supply requirements are basically identical for every school-child in France — public, private, parochial. That’s right, every kid buys just about the same list. Who knew? So, when unsure how to proceed and just about losing our minds after the first trip to the school supply store, I had a revelation. If I go without children, unobtrusively stand behind any mom (pick cashmere sweater and loafers or burka — you’ll be good either way) in the Carrefour (Target meets Costco), and watch what they buy, I can just yank the same stuff off the shelves and I will get it right. It worked.  And, if you forget your red pen, your seat-mate will absolutely have one!

More EF Tips for America: The “Carnet de Liaison”. This is a 5×7 soft-covered school-issued notebook, required to be covered at home in regulation plastic (yes, you buy that too). It contains the student’s daily schedule, the rules of the school-which we all had to sign and have available at all times, followed by many pages of the “communication format”.  When a teacher or parent wants to communicate, we record a note to each other.  The student then will present the book to the designated adult, who will read it and respond. Total transparency! No secret -teacher emails from a fretting parent, no avoidance (sig required), and no tardiness either! If late to class, the book gets signed and must be presented at home. While our boys were a bit intimidated at first by the concept of carrying around their Carnet de Liaison, they now don’t think twice. Oh, and so far, no “communiques” in either, Phew!

Les Sports

The olympic-size swimming pool at La Stade Carcasson, Aix’s public sports facility. You can see the community synchronized swimming team with legs in the air. Yes, they have a synchronized swimming team.

It may come as no surprise that it requires a doctor’s note to play a sport in France. This goes for adults as well as kids. You want to join a soccer team? You’ll need a note. Track club? Note. Enter a 10k fun-run? Note. Triathlon? Whoa — don’t get ahead of yourself there! Something like that obviously requires its own set of forms specific to the event. Like a stamped form from a specially trained triathlon doctor.

So last week, I took Jack for an appointment with Dr. Crespu, a friendly and reportedly English-speaking physician on the Cours-Mirabeau (Aix’s lovely boulevard). The building was nice and the waiting room basic, just a row of plastic chairs in a hallway — more school corridor than ‘room.’ We arrived at two minutes to nine for a nine o’clock appointment, and Dr. Crespu arrived moments later.

She was friendly and happy to help us out, although not hugely comfortable speaking English. I tried French. We ran into trouble with certain words and phrases: track, pick-up games, ultimate frisbee. But we managed to communicate well-enough, and she understood that Jack wanted to do some sports, so she undertook a basic physical examination. Height, weight, blood pressure, breathing rate. Seems like that was about it. She wanted to know if Jack had had any problems with his foot. Or knee? It was hard to tell, because in this case our language had broken down a bit, until I remembered the word la cheville (ankle). No, she mainly just wanted to know if he’d had any problems in the whole leg region. I said no and she led us to her desk.

I should explain that this office was not like an American style doctor’s office. Actually, I’m not sure American doctors really have offices — they see patients in little examination-rooms, do a small amount of paperwork there in the room with you, and then run off to see the next patient in the next little examination room. If they have offices, they’re hidden away, or in the doctor’s home.

In this case, the examination room was built into Dr. Crespu’s office. It had a door, so you could close it off, but it was very much integrated into the space — like a walk-in closet. It had the things a typical examination room has, only maybe not quite as much stuff as you’d find at my doctor’s examination rooms in Cambridge. I think it simply contained a scale, an exam table, and a cabinet or two. In the other part of the office, the main part, she had a big, plain wooden desk, a single bookshelf with medical books, a couple of chairs, and a sculpture with various health-oriented symbols and images.

We sat down in front of the desk and she pulled out several forms, each one for a different sport. See, it isn’t like one form can really cover what needs to be said in this case. You couldn’t just say, “Jack is fit and able to participate in athletic sports.” (Although don’t ask me why). So we brainstormed about what activities he might want to do and what would be necessary medical-authorization-wise. We got soccer, running, swimming, rock-climbing, and maybe tennis.

Then it was my turn. Same deal: brief examination, a few questions about my legs and my breathing, brainstorm about what sports I might want to do. I said running (note); biking (note); swimming (note); triathlon (no note possible, see above); this biking underwater thing they do in gyms here, I’m not sure what it’s called. I tried to describe it as the thing I’d seen in les afiches pour AquaLoft (the posters for a local gym that you see all around town). She’d seen them, too. She crossed off swimming and wrote, aqua-sport, giving me a sly smile as if to say, see, we can beat the system if we try — a word like that, you ought to be able to both swim and do underwater-bike-exercise.

We were done. An hour had passed, Jack and I had about 9 or 10 doctor’s notes between the two of us, so I said thank-you and asked if I should pay at the reception desk which we’d passed on the way in. No, I should pay here. Forty-six euros (a little more than sixty bucks). I paid her in cash, handing her a 50. She didn’t have a cash register, but she had a drawer with change in it — she handed back a few coins. One hour, ten forms — I suppose it was a pretty good deal.

On Discovering That My Top Five Goals For The Year Are Actually Six and Are In A Slightly Different Order Than I’d Thought

A cool fountain in one of the many courtyards of Aix.

Okay, 6 goals in order from last to first:

Number 6, Parler le Français. I had thought that learning French might be at or near the top of my list — and it is something I’d like to do. The problem is that it gets out-competed by other goals because of how time consuming it is. I’m in France, sure, so improving my French is as simple as speaking to the shop-keeper or bus driver. But that only gets you so far. I’m not about to go live with someone else’s family to immerse myself in the language, and I’m not ready to commit to three hours a day of classwork at the local language school, which seems to be a thing here. Sign me up for a one-and-a-half-hour class once per week and minimal homework, and I’ll try my best. Might this goal work it’s way higher as the year proceeds? Time will tell.

Number 5, Become a Better Cook. I knew I wanted to work on my domestic skills once we arrived here, and sure enough, this seems like a good thing to pursue. There’s plenty of good food and I have the necessary time to a) think about what I’d like to make b) shop and c) cook. Tonight: Chicken Marsala as presented by Chris Kimball, America’s Test Kitchen dot com.

Goal Number 4: Travel to New and Exciting Places. Absolutely. Still a big point for this year. We’re off to a good start so far, and I anticipate a continuation of the trend. Today we made plans for visiting some of the classic Roman ruins in our area of France — one of the best preserved Roman temples is only about an hour from here and a colosseum from around the year zero is not only still in decent shape but is still used. Same purpose, too, more or less (bull fighting). We’ll be going to Florence around Christmas. The kids have a school break in October, so… Spain? I doubt this goal will shift downward.

Number 3, Get Fit and Stay Fit. Sounds so trite! And boring. Also: do you need to travel halfway around the world to go for a run? No. But this year is a chance to break routines and create new ones and, while my exercise routine wasn’t terrible, it was a bit tired. I want to make sure I enter the next period of life (I won’t name it, just describe it as that period of life where one sees one’s kids grow into teenagers, etc, etc) in strong health. From our home in Aix, I can go on the most fantastic runs for whatever distances I’d like — and the routes are hard, so even a brief run is great workout. And I find I enjoy running so much more when the scenery is spectacular. I haven’t purchased a road bike yet or joined a gym with a pool. I thought I would do both, but I’m not sure it will be necessary. Improving my fitness: Goal Number 3.

Number 2, Advance My Career. Seems out of place in a blog by someone who’s taking a sabbatical of sorts, moving away from offices and colleagues, ducking out of the daily grind, but in my own idiosyncratic way it makes a lot of sense. Again, by breaking routines, I get a chance to focus on developing expertise and skills I might not have time for at home. For example, programming skills. Expertise related to the nexus of design and development and user experience. By experiencing the distance that I’ve imposed on myself — not only physical  but  mental distance — I get to benefit from, hopefully, a certain kind of clarity. I spend a lot of time at work thinking about how to make technologies easy for people to use. When you’re immersed in those technologies, it can be difficult to separate the intuitive from the learned. Blah blah blah. Getting a little jargony.

Anyway, I’m spending more time working remotely than I thought I might and I’m enjoying it. One rather straightforward reason: it’s a solid, known thing that grounds me at a time when it’s easy to feel ungrounded. But even if I didn’t have the grounding relationship of a remote job in Boston, developing my abilities related to design/dev/user experience is something I value highly for the year. I certainly want to return to the U.S. ready to jump back into things. And I want to take advantage of the extra time I have to learn things well and do things well. All of the aforementioned: Goal Number 2.

And number 1, the Top Goal for the Year: Spend Time With My Family. This was always a big motivator for the year, and it still is. Our kids are getting older, still kids but more independent and mature every season. This year is an incredible chance to be together and do things together in a way we’d never get to experience at home. One good thing about having this as goal number 1: I’m pretty sure we’ll succeed. Why? One thing I could have predicted about this year is that we wouldn’t know anybody — so far, an accurate prediction — so our main social outlet will be with one another. This isn’t a static situation, obviously. Jack and Dmitri are already meeting people —  Jack spent a couple of hours Friday afternoon hanging out in Aix with three new friends from school; we’re going to host a classmate of Dmitri’s tomorrow afternoon along with his mom and dad, so right there we’re expanding our social circle by about 150%.

But even as the boys social circles and ours continue to expand, we’ll be spending more time together than we did in Cambridge. We’ll be taking more weekend trips (see goal number 4 above). We’ll be having more new experiences together, which tends to foster closeness. We’ll be eating more delicious meals together, per goal number 5 (actually, that’s probably not true. We eat delicious meals together at home as well; that’s just how we roll). What I can say is that over the past few weeks, the whole summer really, we’ve had lots of good, quality family time together, and I’m planning to keep it going. Goal Number 1: Time with family.

A Potentially Rambling Post About How It Feels To Be An Expatriot In France (After Two Weeks Or So)

Or, a rumination on my favorite and least favorite things about living in Aix — so far.

Incredible vertical garden over one of the main entryways to Aix. Those are all regular plants, bushes, flowers, carefully tended so they’ll grow on a wall.

Favorite things

Biking around town. We bought bikes last week at Decathlon, a department store for sports where we found Alex, a friendly, English-speaking guy who sold us basic-model bikes for getting up and down our winding lane and around the streets of Aix. Phebe, Jack and Dmitri got nifty mountain-bike hybrids and I got a sort of nerdy city bike — not a fixy, not a Danish 3-speed, just a plain vanilla bike with handlebar basket and bell, a comfortable gel seat, and a super low granny gear for going up the final stretch of Chemin de Gravesonne (our windy lane). Alex seemed a little bemused when we asked to ride the bicycles outside — it seemed like most customers contented themselves with riding around inside the store. Or did he just have a bemused expression because of our attempts at French? Hard to tell.

Anyway, riding around town is lots of fun. Despite the hill at the beginning and end of the journey, most of the old part of Aix is flat, the streets and alleyways are full of pedestrians but accommodating of bicycles, and even the automobiles seem deferential to bicyclists. The town isn’t really so big, so it’s easy to get from one side to the other, much easier on a bike than in a car because you aren’t as constrained by one-way streets, red lights, pedestrian-ways, or buses/municipal-trucks/delivery lorries blocking the way. It’s pretty typical for some large vehicle to block the way, any time of day, any place, so that can get frustrating in a car. It’s liberating to be on a bike.

Going for a run. I’m writing another post in which I talk about running, so maybe I don’t need to say more here. But leaving our house and discovering seemingly endless trails in the huge nearby green space (I don’t know its name; it may be a national park — will try to find out soon) has been a source of great happiness. I saw wild boar up there last week.

The Book and Bar British Bookstore/Cafe. Do I really think this is a favorite thing? Sort of. It’s a relief to have a place where speaking English feels fine. Not that it doesn’t feel fine anywhere, but it feels expected and encouraged in this place. They have a decent selection of English language books, coffee and pastries. It feels like an oasis at times.

Working with NPR on a new approach to delivering content online that will work for all screen sizes (desktops, tablets, mobile phones). It’s engaging and fun — although hard and at times stressful because of our imperfect internet service. I wouldn’t have imagined this would rate as a high point, but it does.

Watching Breaking Bad. Can’t use Netscape in France for legal not technical reasons. But I can buy and download episodes of the latest season via the iTunes store. Slow internet had made me fear this wouldn’t be possible, but so far we’ve been able to download large files at night pretty successfully.

Laughing with kids. Lots of silliness at various times and lots of laughter. Phebe joins in, too, but there’s a certain type of humor she calls ‘boy humor’ that seems to get me, Jack, and Dmitri really going. Seems like that sort of humor has relieved the stress of the changes we’re experiencing on many occasions.

Brief connections with people. Obviously, we don’t know many people here in Aix — actually, no one. So it’s nice to have little interactions in English where you get to exchange some good will. This can be in a retail shop, and sometimes it is. But it’s better when the exchange isn’t mediated by commerce. While waiting at the bus stop the other day for Jack and Dmitri to return from school, we met a couple from San Diego who are here with their twin girls doing essentially what we’re doing. They were friendly and eager to talk, as were we, and I suspect we’ll get together with them again.

Least Favorite Things

Driving around town. Driving in France isn’t bad, and exploring the surrounding countryside is great, but getting around town, going on errands, finding our way to the parking garages (even though the garages themselves are nice) — all that is exhausting. It’s trafficky and unpredictable. You might find yourself waiting forever to make it through a stop light that normally seems fine, or taking a turn that brings you in exactly the opposite direction from what you’d wanted. Just the basic pain of learning one’s way around a new place, really, but truly a pain. On Thursday, I took the kids to the school bus stop, and we were one minute late because of one of these unpredictable slowdowns. We missed the bus and I had to take them the rest of the way myself. After living for ten years within a short walk of the boys’ school, it’s a hard adjustment to make.

Periodic internet-death at home. Enough said, really. Sort of a sore point. Sometimes it works pretty well, like now, and each day we get more familiar with what we can and cannot expect and how to deal with it. There’s a cafe with wifi that I’ve found; our phones have 3G; we can download large files at night. Still.

Think about how I’m not learning French. I should give myself a break with this, because it’s only been a couple of weeks, but it causes me angst just the same. Here we are in France, we’ve rented a home, we’ve just opened a bank account — I should be getting around in French. I imagine that I’ll join some kind of class before too long, and perhaps I’ll do other things as well. We’re going to a community festival tomorrow where locals sign up for various clubs, sports teams, volunteer activities, and civic groups, and it’s possible that I could join a club where I’ll have to get by in French. If that happens, watch out. I’ll be speaking French! But for now I’m only doing le minimum.

And All Of This Means…

Looking at what I’ve written, it’s surprising that the things I mark as favorite are largely non-exotic things. Watching a familiar TV show, laughing with my kids, working with work. Kind of weird. But maybe not entirely shocking. I’ll have to think about it. I would have imagined that my favorite things would be something like: visiting the Roman ruins at [name the charming Provencal village]; seeing a French film in a French cinema; shopping for the perfect locally grown olives at the farmers’ market; eating delectable croissants at the nearby boulangerie.

Many of these imagined favorite things are as desirable in reality as in my imagination, they just aren’t that easy to achieve so don’t rate as favorites. For example, I can’t really do much with the guy who sells olives except say the equivalent of “that one, I try that one.” It will be great to see Roman ruins, but we’ve had too many other things we’ve had to do, so… soon enough. I’m not sure about the croissants. You can only eat so many is the problem, and I’ve been trying to be temperate. So this list stands for now. Check back later…

Some Basic, Un-Nuanced Observations About Life In Provence

Lots of narrow lanes in Provence. Great for bicycles!

1. They don’t really have internet cafes like we have in the U.S.

They don’t really have internet cafes like we have in the U.S. and certainly nothing like the sort of out-of-office/cafe-as-office experiences you find in San Francisco. They have things that call themselves internet cafes, dim little places with 5 or 4  (or 3)  old PCs and a printer, charging by the minute, uncomfortable tables and chairs.  It’s sort of hard to tell why they’re still in business, frankly. I’ve rarely seen anyone in them; I went to one once. Once.

There are also actual cafes, places that serve espresso and croissants, and some of these also have wifi. But it’s not the norm. One of these places is called Coffee to Go (that’s it’s name, not cafe-á-emporter), a small, well-lit place in the old town. Internet seemed fast, but it would be hard to sit there for more than 20 or 30 minutes because the stools are high and there aren’t any footrests. It’s small and intimate — a good thing basically, but it makes it hard to burrow, anonymously, into your work.

On the other hand, I had a very pleasant conversation (in English) with the young proprietor. He’s very friendly and passionate about coffee — he told me one of the goals of his shop is to educate French people about how to make a really good cup. He surprised me by arguing that French people don’t know about good coffee. I won’t get into debating French coffee just now, but I think it’s fair to say that if you’re really serious about your java you’ll probably want to visit Portland (not Maine) before Provence.

Like most English-speakers in Aix, we’ve discovered the Book and Bar, a charming independent bookstore/cafe for British people (plenty of English-language books and scones). It’s down a quiet, narrow lane near the center of town, and is somewhat of a retreat for France-weary travelers who just want to sit in a comfy chair and flip through the latest Margaret Atwood novel. The perfect place to plop down with a laptop and catch up on email while spending money on biscuits and tea. Or it would be, because they don’t have any wifi.

We heard that the main public library had internet and was popular with students as a place to chill and do some work, so I went there yesterday. It’s a neat place, built out of former factory buildings that surround a courtyard. The exterior feels welcoming (it was sunny and there’s a cafe, not part of the library), and the interior is airy and modern. The hallways are wide and have street names on the walls — because they’re actually former streets that were integrated into the library, or so it seems. There are various large and quiet rooms with reasonably comfortable tables and chairs, and there is internet!!! But only accessibly through the library-owned computers, which you can only use if you have a library card and even then for only a limited amount of time. I spent a few hours there working and will definitely go back because it’s pleasant and civic and nice to be surrounded by people in town.

Finally, there is at least one cafe that nearly achieves the Holy Grail of internet cafe experience. I’m almost hesitant to reveal the name because I don’t want to mess with a good thing, but here it is: Café Store Papilles by Laurane (that’s what it says on the storefront). They have a pleasant outdoor cafe seating area on the avenue and a pleasant indoor seating area as well, but best of all is the lounge-room in the back. With cushioned sofas and chairs, tables, power outlets (one anyway), quiet and a bathroom, it’s just about perfect. My only concern is that, having been their twice now, I’m the only one who seems to use it as a workstation. Is this a problem? It might be — so far the folks who work there have been perfectly pleasant (I’ve ordered coffee and croissant, so it’s not like I’m freeloading). But I’m not sure whether it’s cool to start hanging out there several times a week…

2. Parking Garages Rock, Provence-Style

Let’s think about the typical parking garage experience, American-style. You enter a low-ceilinged labyrinth of one-way lanes, blind corners, off-limits areas, and dim light. You don’t know where the empty spaces are to be found, but you know you’re in a race to get there first. Or maybe it isn’t really quite so dramatic, but I’m not far off. You drive vigorously but aimlessly, now turning up to a new level, now finding yourself stuck at a dead end. There are pedestrians as well — people getting out of their cars, little children popping out from behind mini-vans. It’s not a great experience, but, as far as I can tell, it’s pretty near universal.

Welcome to France — at least Aix-en-Provence — where the parking garages have got it right. Before you even enter the garage, before you even decide which garage to use, you’re given up-to-the-moment information about how many free spots remain. There are LCD billboards beside several of the main entrances to the city with what at first might seem cryptic information: Parc Rondelle — 241; Parc Rambot  — 98; Parc Billetierre — 54. These are the names of different garages and the number of spots in each. That’s the number of empty — available — spots.

Is this ridiculously uninteresting? We probably have this in New York, or Boston, for all I know, since I don’t generally drive and  park in the city. But I’m pretty sure we don’t do the following. In the French garages I’ve known, you’ll find little LCD signs at every intersection indicating the number of available spots to the right or left. Rather than taking a wild guess and turning, say, left, you know up front that there aren’t any spaces to the left but, say, 4 to the right. Further, there’s a little LCD light above each and every parking space. If the spot is taken, it’s red. If empty, green. As soon as you see a green light, aim for it. This seems almost dopishly simple, but it makes parking closer to painless. And they’ve done some other neat things, too. Like: all the little lights only face one direction — the direction of oncoming traffic — so if you don’t see red and green lights, you know you’re going the wrong way. Not generally a hard thing to figure out, but when you’re struggling with an unfamiliar language, every little cue helps.

Green light says spot is empty; red means it’s taken.

 3. They Still Smoke in France

Yup. But they use these electronic gizmos that vaporize the nicotine and look like sharpee markers. It looks like people are walking around sucking on pens. You buy them at specialty stores like the ones in picture below. 

Running in Aix, Tower Run

We can see a tower on a ridge to our east, apparently from the 1600s. Turns out you can run there on quiet country lanes and dirt paths!

Start by running down unnamed dirt lane from house.

Turn up Chemin de Repentance

Road ends, dirt path into Foret de Keyrie

View from path of Mt St Victoire

I need to find out what this tower is all about. No signage or anything…

Entrée, Part 1

We’ve now spent our first week in what will be our home for the next year. It’s on a quiet dirt lane that winds up a hill just outside of Aix-en-Provence. We have a small view through trees to the south, where we see a ridge of rocky hills, and we another partial view of a nearby hill to the east where we see a stone tower, apparently from the 17th century. It’s comfortable and very lovely.

That said, the first week has been hard, much harder than I expected, owing to the very simple fact of being an outsider. You’d think that after a month of traveling in Switzerland and South Africa, we’d have the outsider thing down, but there’s a big difference with having the mindset of a tourist and the mindset of a resident. Aix is supposed to be our home now, so I guess Phebe and I had a naïve and unarticulated expectation that things would be easier.

Everything is harder when you’re in an unfamiliar country. Sure, it’s sunny and warm here and there are daily markets with beautiful produce, cheese, and meats; the bread is incredible; there are dozens of nearby vineyards selling inexpensive, world class wine; we’re less than an hour from Mediterranean beaches. But a million small and not-so-small challenges are exhausting to navigate.

For example, could we get some French-roast coffee here in France? I’m sure we can, but we haven’t figured out how. Things like buying a bus ticket, finding brown rice, knowing where to get dry goods, parking, finding public restrooms, figuring out the system of shopping carts, dealing with a foreign language, dealing with foreign phone carriers, trying to set up a bank account, trying to put the right kind of gasoline in our car — it all wears you down a bit.

One small example of something very minor that ends up taking unexpected energy: to release the shopping cart from its chain, you must insert a coin part-way. It isn’t so much a deposit or payment as a clever use of the coin as a sort of key. Took us five minutes to figure out, anyway.

The internet is unreliable and slow.

Due to an oversight (ours), the leased car was delivered to Monpelier not Marseilles. We had to drive an hour and 40 minutes away to pick it up using a different car we had to rent just for the occasion.

You can’t get a cell phone contract without a French bank account. You can’t get a French bank account without proof of French residency. You can’t get proof of French residency without one of several things that it turns out we can’t get. This may not ultimately be that big of a deal (we can still use pay-as-you-go plans), but it nevertheless occupied a day and a half of awkward, half-English/half-French efforts.

So, it’s not all easy. But we’re handling it pretty well — trying to go with the flow, trying not to expect that we can accomplish more in a day than is realistic.

In our nearest supermarket, this is the largest cart available. Learning the ropes.