The Pistachio

We live in a home that’s called La Pistache, which means the pistachio, and which led us to believe it might be green (or red) but it’s neither. I believe it’s named pistachio in honor of the local Provençal confection called nougat de montélimar, a chewy candy made with roasted pistachios and almonds. I’m not a big fan of this stuff, but I also didn’t get off on the right foot with it, so to speak.

Nougat de montélimar

On our first day in Aix, I went to the outdoor market and got suckered into sampling a piece — and letting my kids sample pieces — from a very assertive vender. I felt I should at least buy a little slice, so I indicated that I wanted une tranche petite, a small slice, and she handed back a modest chunk for 25 euros. It left a bitter taste (the price, that is — around $33), so although we kept it in our pantry for a few days, I never took another bite. And then we threw it out.

Back to La Pistache. If you search in google maps for “La Pistache, Chemin de Gravesonne, Aix-en-Provence,” you will find it labeled with a little red balloon. Actually, it’s possible that this only happens for me, since I’ve searched for it before and clicked on street view and so on. Could be an example of the so-called filter bubble.  Either way, you will find the correct location, and there ought to be a little window in the upper left showing street view and photos. The street view seems wrong — I think they were driving the google vehicle up someone else’s driveway — but the house photos are correct.

Google map of La Pistache

You can see on the map that La Pistache is at the top of a little squiggly line and surrounded by mostly empty green. This is very true. Getting to our house, as the Dodyks (Phebe’s parents) can now attest, is a minor adventure. The lane is narrow, hardly wider than our Renault Kangoo, which thankfully has mirrors that flip in against the side of the car whether pushed from the front or the back. It has several hairpin turns that come one after another with no straightaway and no pause, all while going up a steep, somewhat slippery, gravel road. One of these days we’ll encounter someone on their way down while we’re on our way up, and that will be an exciting moment. It sounds a bit beastly, and it sort of is, but it isn’t like you’re going to skid off a cliff or anything. The biggest risks are scraping the side of the vehicle on a branch or stalling out.Behind and all around the house are woods. It’s all very green right now, early October, with hardly any sign of leaves changing color, although many of the leaves will change color — or at least they’ll become brown and fall off. This area is Mediterranean, not tropical, and it will look wintry in December, or so I’ve been told. Phebe told me that (she visited last winter).

Wild boars, or sanglier. We’ve seen them with babies few times on walks or runs, although this photo is from the internet.

Despite all the woodsiness, the house doesn’t have a lot of property. All those woods are privately owned, and most property is fenced off (you have to walk up the road 20 minutes or so to get to the public green space). La Pistache is fenced off as well, although minimally and mainly to keep out the wild boars who might otherwise damage the landscaping. Our landlords instructed us to close our gate every night for this reason. We do as they ask, although I’ve noticed that we have a separate entrance, stairs that come up from the lane, and this stairway has no gate.

I should clarify that although the house doesn’t have a ton of property, it has enough. Being on a hill, the property is placed on a couple of terraces. On the lower terrace, there’s a gated, gravel parking area big enough for two or three cars. The upper terrace is where the house sits, surround by a simple but lovely garden (there’s plenty of rosemary), a patio for table and chairs for outdoor dining, and a smaller second patio with a smaller second table for two. It’s very charming and feels very Provençal.

Dmitri, looking out of his window — note the shutters!

The house itself is stucco and features the wooden shutters that are so typical of this part of France. And unlike shutters in America, these shutters get used every day. You open them in the morning, first thing, and you close them at night. This could be sort of tiresome, if looked at the wrong way, because you do need to open the window on a chilly morning and lean outside, carefully, in order to fasten the latches so that they won’t swing closed again. But there’s a right way to look at it, which I read about in one of our getting-to-know-Provence books. Every morning begins with a ritual of greeting the day, literally opening your house to the outside. It can’t be rushed. Every evening ends with a closing up of the hearth and home. It’s stopping to smell the flowers. It’s enjoying the little things — being conscious of the passing of time. You get the picture.

Inside, we have tile floors and a large single room that includes most of the first floor. There’s a dining table, which the kids also use for studying, a living-room area, and, around the corner, a small study. No doors, so it’s all very open and interconnected. There’s a separate room behind the office area which is closed off by a door, and contains the laundry, the water heater, and a small water closet.

The kitchen is on the other side of the house. It’s a galley style kitchen, separated from the open-room living space. It’s big enough for two or three people to be in there working, barely — better for two, or one; it’s not really a hang-out spot. There’s a refrigerator, small by American standards but perfectly adequate, a pantry, a sink, dishwasher, toaster, microwave — in short, it has all the amenities and functions well. There are also two windows which we often open, one of them looks straight up at the old Tour de Cesar, visible through a perfect window in the trees.

Upstairs, we have three bedrooms and two bathrooms, so ample space for the four of us. The boys have the more glorious bedrooms, glorious because of the big French windows with great views out to the south. On a warm day, windows open, a breeze comes in (bugs too, sometimes, because there aren’t any screens — but they tend to buzz out again), and it’s lovely. Phebe and I have a very pleasant room as well, it’s just not quite as airy and light-filled as the boys’. It has its own bathroom, though, and a bureau and some closet space, so: practical matters.

And I think that’s about it. There’s one other part of the exterior, near the back corner of the house, where we hang our laundry to dry; there’s a little alley behind the house where you can look over the fence at the neighbor’s property, which seems to be just woods; and there’s our neighbor’s house — actually, our landlords’. They let us use their swimming pool, which is great on warm days, although I suspect we’ll be wandering over there less and less as the season progresses.

Look for more pictures of our house coming soon — I’ll post them as soon as I take them!

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.

Letter From A South African Safari

With at least 400 private game reserves, national parks, and public/private conservation areas, South Africa has a lot of options when it comes to going on safari. Try searching TripAdvisor for South African safari lodges and you’ll find hundreds, every one with an oddly similar web site displaying pictures of lions, giraffes, luxurious swimming pools, and rugged land rovers. There are tent-based eco-lodges that offer walking safaris (ages 16 and up), air-conditioned bus safaris through national parks, mountain lodges, forest lodges, desert lodges, and lodges in areas with mysterious and appealing names, places like ‘the wild coast’ and ‘the savannah bush veld.’ Deciding where to go is dizzying.

And then there is Kruger, South Africa’s largest national park. Containing all of Africa’s most famous animals (well, not all — no gorillas, for example) and comprising 2 million hectares of land, it’s roughly the size of Wales. Yes, Wales is the example I was given by a ranger (if that doesn’t give you a palpable feeling for its size, perhaps nothing will). This is where we decided to go.

However, after a brief bit of research fairly late in the game, we discovered that saying you want to go to Kruger doesn’t necessarily get you much closer to a plan. There are dozens of lodges around Kruger, many in private game reserves and many enclosed by fences. What to make of this? They all claimed to be big and to feature the Big Five, but how big is big? And what are the Big Five? Fortunately, after some moments of doubt, we signed up for a safari adventure with the well-reviewed but ungainly-sounding And Beyond.

And Beyond (the rangers pronounce it as one word, roughly like Ambien) turned out to be a very well-run operation. Shortly before leaving the U.S., we received a mysterious package postmarked from South Africa that contained a variety of safari-lodge shwag, including a leather-bound journal for taking field notes, a pair of 4x mini-binoculars suitable for identifying small birds, two cds of African music for the kids, and leather satchels for packing it all in. Good customer relationship management.

And Beyond runs a dozen or so eco-lodges around Africa, and we went to two of them over the course of seven days (Monday to Monday). This turns out to be kind of a lot of time to go on a safari — more, anyway, than most people spend with And Beyond. But it allowed us time to watch animals without being rushed, to visit a nearby village, and to see three fairly different climatic zones .

We travelled by plane, an intimate — not elegant — 10-passenger prop-plane that was also delivering a group of orthodox Jewish folks to a different spot (one of the men offered to recite the Tefilat HaDerech, the traveller’s prayer, along with anyone who wanted to join him). Driving was an option, but it would have taken six hours or more to get there from Johannesburg; something like 30 hours from Cape Town.

Flat, scrubby Ngala airstrip.

The flight delivered us to a solitary airstrip, no buildings, no other planes, just a troop of warthogs shnuffling around the edges, a few impala, and our guides, Rhett and Norman, waiting in a green converted land rover. The terrain was flat, scrubby, dotted with thickets of low trees and bisected by the seasonal Timbavati River, at this time of year a ribbon of sand that looked almost like a dirt road. There were open meadows here and there, golden brown with dry grasses, and there was the odd flat-topped tree looking strange and exotic. Mainly, however, the landscape looked featureless, a little bland. This was Ngala Private Game Reserve.

Ngala is big, I guess, depending on how you look at it. It’s about the size of San Francisco, to give an example that’s meaningful for Americans — Bayview to the Embarcadero, over to Golden Gate Park, down to the border with Daly City (I figured this out on my own with help from Google). Remarkably, about ten years ago, the wildlife managers at Ngala got together with wildlife managers at Kruger National Park as well as a few other private reserves, and agreed to take down the fences that had previously kept each park’s animals separate and enclosed. So it would be fair to say that the Kruger area is like the size of Wales plus San Francisco. That increase in habitat, coupled with other things like a system of artificial water holes, has helped wildlife — for example, the elephant population has almost doubled.

When you stay at Ngala, you get to drive all around the reserve on a network of dirt roads — but not into Kruger or the neighboring reserves. You might see five lions chasing a buffalo, but if they run across the boundary you just watch them go. On the other hand, within the confines of Ngala, you’re allowed to drive anywhere, even off-road, even if this means crushing bushes and small trees. (To be fair, the safari lodge adheres to standards set by an ecological auditor. They only go off-road for Big Five animals; they log all off-road excursions).

A rough idea of driving off-road in pursuit of a lion.

This raises a dilemma. Is it cool to go driving over streambeds, bushes, and small trees so that you can get all up in a buffalo’s face? (Buffalo: Big Five no. 3). Is it cool to pursue a female cheetah (Big Five no. 4), even if it means tailing her — literally tailing her, just 20 feet away — in a 1-ton land rover over field and stream for 45 minutes (we did both of these things)? For someone raised on the minimum impact ethic espoused by NOLS, the answer is clearly no. Absolutely no. Within the context of North American wilderness, it’s just so wrong that it’s a joke to even contemplate.

On the other hand, the safari business depends on getting clients up close with wildlife, and that business seems pretty good for South Africa. The And Beyond lodge at Ngala employs close to a hundred people from the nearby Shangaan community. One of the guides, a black man from Pretoria (not a local village), told us that each one of these workers from the community supported an average of 9 other people. Seems a little hard to believe, but after visiting one of the nearby villages, I’d say it’s probably accurate.

Also, the safari business seems like a force for good in terms of protecting wildlife. It gives conservation efforts a compelling voice in the government because it has real economic muscle. And the safari industry has its own interest in protecting wildlife independent of government efforts. The situation with rhinos is pretty fascinating.

The Sorry Fate of Rhinoceros

There’s a huge demand for rhino horns, mainly from Southeast Asia, which are believed to cure all sorts of ailments. South Africa’s government remonstrated with China, and we heard that it actually helped, a little. But supposedly the wife of Vietnam’s president says she beat cancer with a rhino horn treatment and despite Chinese steps, overall demand hasn’t declined at all. A single horn fetches hundreds of thousands of US dollars.

There were something like 900 rhinos poached last year in Africa out of a total worldwide population of just a few thousand, so there’s a certain desperation among the people who care about them. You see reminders of this everywhere, even off the reserve. Driving along the highway through a Zulu settlement, we saw what looked like a military cemetery, all white crosses. It turned out that each one marked a rhino killed this year.

Safari lodges can’t negotiate with Vietnam, but they can afford to police the reserves, employing anti-poaching teams that use aerial monitoring, hidden cameras, and frequent patrols. And they can do “wildlife management” as well: improving habitat by fostering native plants, ensuring adequate water, even preventing habitat loss through outright land purchases. Despite overall losses, the area we were in has seen rhinos do fairly well thanks to these efforts. The Phinda reserve has enough of a population that it’s begun donating mating pairs to Botswana to help that country’s conservation projects.

Tragedy: Anti-poaching often means shooting poachers on-site. These poachers are mainly very poor people from Mozambique who do the dirty work for little money so that others — we heard conspiratorial comments about South African politicians, but it may simply be regular-old criminals — profit. Apparently, they work in teams of water carriers and trackers who support a single gunman. The anti-poachers will shoot the gunman and then arrest the others, assuming they give themselves up. It was hard to get a clear picture on how this works, but it sounds like a sort of stand-your-ground ethic prevails: if you shoot someone you suspect of poaching, the police won’t really follow up.

The Phinda reservation had a clever idea, a harm-reduction type of approach. They removed horns from a group of rhinos, which isn’t great for the animals but isn’t terrible either. Poachers killed them anyway. Turns out that the poachers had their own clever idea: eliminate the hornless rhinos so as not to waste time tracking them again. Fool me once. The anti-poachers are trying a new tactic — they’re injecting toxins into the horns that won’t hurt the rhinos but will poison end consumers. Nice. Thanks for sharing.

Let me talk about something else.

The Safari Experience

Pointing out warthogs on the Ngala lodge grounds.

The lodges we visited were basically a collection of huts and communal buildings — like camp! — surrounded by high electric fencing that would keep out elephants but allow free access for other animals. For example, lions. We didn’t see lions on lodge property, thankfully, but we saw warthogs, wildebeest, and baboons. To manage associated risks, the lodges tell you not to go anywhere after dark without an escort, security guards who lead the way with a flashlight and slingshot. How effective are the slingshots, I have no idea, but there haven’t been any lion-related deaths since a woman was killed in the early nineties (before the use of slingshot-weilding escorts).

You’re also instructed to secure doors and windows with baboon-proof latches. One day Phebe and I got sloppy with our precautions and left a window open. Upon returning an hour or two later, we discovered that baboons had climbed in, unzipped our packs, opened our drawers, tossed clothing everywhere, rifled through our toilet kits, even emptied our trash basket onto the bathroom floor. Worse, they discovered our pharmaceutical supply. Antibiotics, malaria meds, altitude meds, all were scattered or missing. I found my wallet outside in the dust. Fortunately, the only medications we really needed were untouched. All’s well that ends well. (If you haven’t seen pictures).

Anyway, every morning began with an early wake-up at 5:30. We met for a quick coffee or hot chocolate (it was cold most mornings) and talked about the day. At 6:00, we walked to the land rover, and set off with our guides.

The Modern Safari Guide

I’ve been calling them guides, but they actually had specific roles. Norman was a tracker. Responsible for leading us to the animals we wanted to see, he was expert at identifying seemingly anything in seemingly fractions of a second. He’d sit on the front of the vehicle — literally, a custom seat bolted to the front of the hood —where he could keep an eye out for footprints or anything else. While driving at 25 mph he’d regularly signal us to stop and back-up, where he’d point out zebra tracks or some such craziness. How are zebra tracks distinct from the tracks of wildebeest or kudu or impala or one of like 10 other species of hooved creatures that live around there, especially when going 25 miles per hour? He was good. He was also genial, great with the kids. We liked him a lot.

Rhett was a ranger, a position that combined the roles of personal-concierge, backcountry guide, and professional driver. The rangers had to keep guests entertained and informed on three-hour game drives; attend to their various needs and desires (drinks, snacks, arranging special trips); and know their way around the San Francisco-sized park like a cab driver knows their city —except without road signs and in many cases without roads. We were very impressed with Rhett. He was only 23.

All of the rangers we encountered were young white men, although we heard about a woman who worked at one of the lodges. A lot of them started just after graduating college, and the few we spoke with had aspirations of going on to other things after two or three years. Certainly, a lot of them intended to work in related fields, like wildlife conservation or safari lodge management. Rhett thought he might like to be a brand and marketing director for And Beyond.

The trackers were all black, largely hired from the nearby Shangaan or Zulu villages, and they were older, maybe in their 30s or 40s. It was hard to get to know Norman as well as Rhett. Rhett was very much incorporated into our overall guest experience — he joined us for certain meals, interfaced with the lodge manager on our behalf — and of course we spoke with him throughout the drives. Norman, sitting on the front of the rover, was absorbed in looking for signs and wasn’t very involved in our conversation, unless we asked Rhett a wildlife question he couldn’t answer (Norman could usually help).

In our view, the two roles provided equal value, but And Beyond accorded the rangers higher esteem — and probably wages. The And Beyond guidebook in our room suggested tipping rangers 20 rand per day and trackers 15. At Ngala at least, they also live in different housing areas; rangers get private bathrooms.

The Game Drive

Moving on… These two guys, Rhett and Norman, asked us what we wanted to see and drove us around accordingly. If we wanted to see a lion, they went where they knew lions were likely to be. How’d they know? There were seven or eight other land rovers, all cruising around and staying in radio contact, sharing info about what was where, so they’d know that lions had last been seen over in one sector or another. Once there, Norman could usually find tracks or signs that would lead us to the animals.

I mentioned the Big Five, earlier, so I should explain what that means. The Big Five are the five species that hunters of old — I believe this means specifically Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway — considered most dangerous. These were the lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant, and rhinoceros. Seeing the Big Five is a big deal for all of the safari companies because it’s what a lot of the guests are paying for.

At And Beyond, you sense how big of a deal it is in the way rangers handle the safari drives before you’ve seen all five compared with after. Before, they seem perfectly friendly and easy-going, just a little excitable. Like, if they hear word of a Big Five available for sighting, they drop everything and get the car going, even if you’re in the middle of a conversation or perfectly happy to be gazing at a gazelle. Sometimes they drive a little fast, given that someone is sitting on the hood, no seatbelt, bouncing over washerboard roads.

Cute little fellow.

Once we saw all five, however, things relaxed a bit. We had longer conversations while watching those gazelles (actually, there weren’t any gazelles; just impala and the like). We spent some quality time with a leopard family and their kill. We searched out non-Big-Five animals that were nonetheless appealing, animals like zebra, hippo, hyenas, giraffe. It was amazing how much we saw. I have to confess, I didn’t even really know that all of these species lived in the same place. I mean, I’ve seen the Lion King on Broadway, but I guess I thought Disney had taken more liberties than they really did.

It was hard not to wonder at the authenticity of it all. Were these animals really just living their lives in a wild state of nature? There were so many of them, so many big, distinct, unusual animals living close to one another, it was hard not to wonder. Is Kruger/Ngala wild like the Paleocene or is it controlled, like a zoo?

But of course it isn’t so simple. Five hundred years ago, you would have found people living here as well as wildlife. The Zulu have been tending cattle for a thousand years in this area. The animals are living in a state of nature, but it’s an artificial nature by the very fact of it’s being separate from humans. That, and the presence of big, green land rovers cruising past their stomping grounds on a daily basis. I don’t know why I get hung up on this, but I do.

In the end, I decided that it really was authentic and wild. The wildlife is living in its natural habitat; the animals are taking care of themselves. And it’s very moving to see them. One day, we saw a group of elephants eating leaves from a mopane (mo-pah-nee) tree. One female was using her tusk and trunk together, squeezing them around a branch to strip off the leaves in big bunches, and we all watched her, transfixed. What difference did it make whether I thought she was living a more or less authentically wild experience? It was awesome, and I’m glad I was there to see it.

P.S. If that’s not enough information for you, be sure to check out some of the photos on hellocroissant Esp, this cheetah story and this leopard story or check out the following post…

Photos from Safari

Cheetah family

Cheetah cub

Warthog in burrow

Welcome to Europe

We’ve been on the road since mid-July, taking full advantage of our transition time between Cambridge and Aix, so I haven’t written in a while (I intend to pick up again in earnest once we arrive at our house in Provence). In the meantime, we spent a week in Maine not far from Acadia National Park, a week in Yvoire, France, and a week in Wengen, Switzerland.

I don’t really have too much to say about Maine, other than that it’s great and you should go there, especially if you can stay in a coastal village or canoe along a north-country river.

Yvoire was sunny, charming, and fun, a walled medieval village on the shore of Lake Geneva. It was the perfect welcome to Europe. I don’t think I’ll say more about it here for now, although feel free to see some of our pictures here.

Two notable features about Yvoire: its castle is still inhabited by the Baron d’Yvoire’s family and it’s a winner of the grand prix de fleurs en France.

Actually, here’s one observation about getting to and from Yvoire that surprised us and would probably surprise other border-security conscious Americans: going between France and Switzerland is like going between Massachusetts and Vermont. No border security, no guards, no nothing, just a shuttered checkpoint that looked like it was slated for removal. I know, I know, this is the E.U. and not really at all comparable to the U.S. and its neighbors, but hold on — Switzerland is not in the E.U., so… I’d say that maybe Switzerland is more relaxed than the U.S. but that is definitely not the case (this is a place where the trains run on time, remember). It’s a mystery.

Ed. note: Mystery solved via wikipedia. Since 2009, Switzerland has been part of the Schengen Treaty. Not the most famous treaty for Americans, but important because it involves removing checks at border crossings between member countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain… the list goes on).

Onto our week in Wengen, a mountain town in Switzerland. I’ll say something about that because I think I have something to say about mountain towns. For an Easterner, I’ve spent a lot of time in mountain towns — in New Mexico, Colorado, California, Washington, a little Arizona… does North Conway, New Hampshire count? Following are a few things that stood out.

Trains Go Everywhere.

Train between Wengen and Kleine Scheidegg

Just a few weeks ago, we were in Maine and visited the top of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park. On a clear day, which it was, you get the most amazing views of islands, forest, and sea. It’s worth the trip. But bear in mind that, Acadia being like other parks in America, car access is a priority, and you wind your way to the top of the mountain in a slow-moving line of cars and motorcycles. At the top, probably 20 percent of the available space has been set aside for parking lots. If only Acadia could emulate Switzerland, where rail lines extend even to remote valleys and mountainsides. Within a few hours, you can go from downtown Geneva to Wengen, a village of alpine farmhouses, ski chalets and old wooden hotels. And no cars! So pleasant. Another train will take you all the way through the mountain to a saddle high above the Jungfrau glacier. Thank you trains!

Trail signs mark distance in time rather than miles (or kilometers, whatever).

Whereas in the U.S. you would encounter a trailhead sign saying, Such-and-Such Peak: 6.7 miles, in Switzerland the equivalent would simply say 6 hours or even, possibly, 6 hours 25 minutes. Sort of charming, but I give this method a thumbs down. First, you can’t help but wonder how the trail-marker makers arrived at a given number. Was it based on the estimation of one opinionated Swiss mountain man? Was it based on a statistically significant random sample of hikers? Was it just a gut feeling? This matters because you need to trust that the number is meaningful. Moreover, you can’t help but compare your own time to the time on the sign. Am I doing better? Worse? If I take a ten minute break, will that throw off the count? Why am I thinking about this nonsense, anyway, when I’d rather just go for a hike? Just tell me how long the trail is and let me be the judge of how long I should take based on the difficulty of the terrain.

Restaurants and bars in the middle of nowhere

Wine soaked bread topped with cheese, bacon, roasted potatoes, and an egg. Served at a hikers’ hut.

On Saturday, we took advantage of a cool, sunny day to hike the celebrated route from Schynega Platte to First. A narrow gauge train delivered us to a ridge overlooking the Interlaken Lakes, and from there we hiked on a trail through alpine meadows, over talus slopes, and along dangerously steep mountainsides. After about 3 hours (who knows how many miles — see above), we arrived at a high pass, all rock and snow, cold wind, imposing summits to the right and left. And there, situated right in this narrow pass, was a restaurant. We’d brought a picnic, but still. If we’d been in the mood, we could have paused for fondue and rösti and beer. How did they get it all up there? There wasn’t a road, there wasn’t a gondola… Helicopter? Anyway, as long as you aren’t hoping to get out into true wilderness (if you are, probably don’t choose Switzerland), finding a restaurant in the middle of a long hike is pretty great. Thumbs up!

Quality maps not readily available

Wengen is a lovely Alpine village that draws throngs of outdoors enthusiasts, hikers, mountaineers. So I was surprised that the best available maps — at the outdoor store, the information center, the bookshop — were little more than illustrated ski guides, the kind that show a pretty illustration of a mountain with thick lines indicating various trails. On the surface, these seemed adequate. They displayed a variety of numbered trails, each number corresponding to a brief description on the flip side of the map. But the numbers didn’t correspond to trail signs in the real world. That is, if you decided to hike Trail 36 to Alpiglen, you could go to the spot where the map indicated Trail 36 seemed to begin, but all you’d see would be signs pointing to various places other than Alpiglen. Or there might be two or three signs, all of them pointing in different directions and all claiming to lead to Alpiglen. No mention of #36 to be found. (Shaking fist in air) Switzerland! Suggestion: if a trail is numbered on the map, have it numbered on the trail. Otherwise, just use the trail name. Otherwise, get the Swiss version of the U.S. Geological Survey to create topo maps with contour lines of the Jungfrau region and sell those maps in local stores.

Dogs

I think dogs are great, so thumbs up to Switzerland for being so accommodating. You see them on trails, in gondolas, sitting beside restaurant tables. Although… we did see one couple hiking with four annoying little yappers who chased marmots and disturbed the alpine flora, so they aren’t always so great. But we also saw an older couple with a big, friendly St. Bernard all wet from the trail who sat down on the floor of the restaurant where we were all eating lunch. Nobody minded. As the signs on the doggy-bag dispensers in Wengen say, “Bravo.”

Plenty more pictures of our time in Wengen here. Also, checkout our photo tumblr.