Night One-Hundred and Twenty-Eight

mountain of gold

January 21st marked two special occasions: the first day we all got to say “President Obama”, and the first anniversary of my first date with the man who will be my husband by this time next year. It seemed like a good moment to climb something and take a look around, so Carmen and I found the highest point in the immediate vicinity – Mont d’or – and we went up it.

We didn’t really know the route, but we knew where to start and we figured if we just kept going up, eventually we’d get there.

And we did. It was a perfect, sunny day. The path up the mountain goes through olive orchards…







…and when you get to the top, there are two sides of a tower – the remnants of the dungeon of the palace of Count William I of Provence…





…and an unbelievable view of the countryside and the Luberon mountain range.



We took the wrong path to get back down and found ourselves on the backside of the mountain in the middle of a bunch of farms.



This, for some reason, made me feel completely giddy, but Carmen was less amused, having twisted her ankle, so I wandered way out into a field to ask a farmer which was the way back to Manosque. He gave me the most French directions ever (which is to say that he took about 15 minutes to say “take this road here and walk that way”) and I thanked him and walked away thinking about how scared I would have been to have had that same conversation a few months ago when I first arrived here.

Mais oui, comme tout, ça change.

Nights Sixty-One through Seventy-Four

on beauty

The first time I tried to write this post, it was nights sixty-one through seventy. The second time it went through seventy-three. Now I have lived another day, and I’m sitting here at the end of it searching for a some theme, some thread, some…connecting fiber, if you will, to coalesce the past two weeks into a coherent post. And, you want to know what’s nice? When you set yourself to that task, and the answer that comes back is beauty.

First of all, I stole my title from Zadie Smith’s gorgeous novel, which has kept me excellent company over most of the time that this post covers, and that I can’t recommend highly enough. So there’s beauty number one.

B of all (hi honey!), I spent an exceptionally lovely Thanksgiving week in Florida with my betrothed and his (soon, happily, to be my) wonderful family. Beauty number two.





Then, at the end of the week, I got to put on a pretty dress and hold on to my handsome man and be showered with love and luck and wishes for our happiness. This is a pretty extraordinary fashion in which to be welcomed into someone’s family, but, from what I’ve observed, a fairly ordinary expression of the enormous grace and generosity of my future parents-in-law. Sara and Mort, thank you.


Marc Dahl took this photo. You can see more of Marc’s work here: modi5.com/matt_and_holly

Then there was some ugliness with an airline and a 4 day-long return trip to France, but I’ll skip over that except to say that the Meilleur Ouestern at the Marseille Airport has an excellent staff and a very serviceable bathtub that may have actually saved my life that night.

If you have to spend four days in airports and on airplanes and in buses and hotel rooms, I recommend coming home to something like this:



It will make you feel a lot better. We’re up to number 4 now.

Number five is being invited over to dinner chez Sandra and Remy, eating delicious pizza (well, the tops of delicious pizza for me) and drinking Beaujolais (c’est le moment), trying (and mostly failing) to play a trivia game based on French pop-culture, but starting to feel like we have some actual, real, live French friends.



Number six is today, when The Fig, The Pineapple, and I went to Marseille with yet another of our new French friends. (Getting French friends is like dominoes. Once you trick one of them into falling over…) We cued an hour and a half to get tickets to Aida (Verdi is like Sting here. Wait! God I’m old. I meant to say Hannah Montana. Hannah Montana!), failed to get tickets, but ended up spending a delightful afternoon walking along the water.


This is me, searching for rocks



Then we went to Vierge de la Garde (or Notre Dame de la Garde – Our Lady of the Watch, the guardian of seafarers) which I believe to be the most beautiful church I have been inside in my lifetime.







And that’s number seven.

I almost forgot one. Last night we watched the Miss France pageant, which claims to concern itself with beauty. It did give us the gift of seeing a bunch of girls dressed like knit toilet-paper cozies dance with a horse in a pool, so there’s that.



Miss Pays de Loire was robbed.

Nights Eleven and Twelve

The Nightlife

I am the oldest person on earth…okay, maybe not on earth, but certainly on this planet. Everybody – EVERYBODY – I’ve met so far in the assistantship program is fresh out of college, which, really, is the sensible way to do something like run off to France for 7 months, when you’re in transition anyway and you have no clue what to do with your life.

We were in Marseille for two days last week for orientation, and I noticed that there was a lot of talk amongst the assistants about nightlife, proximity to which seems to be the chief factor in determining a town’s value, as in “Where are you placed?” “Manosque” “What is there to do there?” They don’t mean hiking in the French countryside or sitting on your balcony reading. They mean drinking—drinking and dancing. I’m exaggerating a little bit of course. I know that there are other assistants who, like me, are more than happy to spend their evenings quietly. Plus, I like to drink and dance as much as the next Alabama sorority girl. It’s just not really what I came to France for, so I’m less disappointed than some that Manosque has the nightlife equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner: it’s centered around food, and everyone falls asleep early. There are a few nice-looking restaurants in town, though we won’t be able to afford to eat in any of them until our first paycheques come at the end of October. So, we ate last night in one of the not-so-nice looking ones, a crêperie near our house that specializes in extremely salty chicken and cold red wine. But it’s cheap, and charming in a generic ketchup and faux wood-beam roof sort of way.

Before dinner we went to see Mamma Mia!, the film version of the stage version of ABBA’s Greatest Hits album, with Meryl Streep. We thought that it would be in English with French subtitles, but it was dubbed (except for the songs). We were a little disappointed, as we were both looking forward to giving our brains a break from French (Carmen’s English is very good), but the movie is so broad and campy that it was pretty easy to follow. Also, it cracked me up that every time a song started, Colin Firth went from sounding like Gerard Depardieu to Donovan.

The movie theatre, Le Lido, is adorable, with big cushy red seats that look like they were transported out of a 60s Hollywood producer’s screening room.



When I tried to order a medium Coke, the concessions guy looked at me like I was an alien and said (incredulously and in English) “What language are you speaking?” This is the only problem with living with a bunch of foreigners—we have quickly developed our own language that makes perfect sense to us—a mixture of French, English, Italian, German and Spanish—but none to anyone else. The other night one of us said something like “Puedo dire ça please?”

But we love our little polyglot boarding house, and I think that we all feel like we hit the roommate jackpot. Hopefully we’ll still feel that way in seven months.

Here’s Carmen last night. We are equally addicted to our cameras.



And here are a couple of one of the two main doors into the old village—this is about a block from La Dortoir (our dorm).





The students return tomorrow so our internet access is going to become limited and I might not be able to blog again until next weekend. Have a lovely week.

Nights One Through Ten

Le Début

I have, actually, been blogging. The problem is, there’s no internet in the internat (the internat is the high school dorm in which I am living. It’s not as bad as it sounds). And, upon rereading my earlier writings, I find that they already feel dated and irrelevant. “Do the French not know that they’re staring, or do they just not care?” Duh. It’s clearly the latter.

Also, I’m losing my English (I was helping another American assistant fill out a form and I said “Here goes your name, here goes your phone number.” What?) So, I’m going to scrap the writing for today and just put some up some pictures. Please enjoy.



This is the lovely, warm home of my father’s cousin Philippe and his wife Sylvie, who were kind enough to take me in on my second night in France and check in on me to make sure that I made it safely to Manosque, my new home. The most harrowing moment of the journey was when Sylvie dropped me off at the bus station (and, when I say “bus station,” I mean the side of the road in the middle of nowhere) in Meyrargues to catch the bus to Manosque. There I was, with my 70-pound suitcase, absolutely certain that the bus was never going to come and I was going to have to go to work in an olive orchard (which, y’know…worse fates). As Sylvie drove away, she leaned out the window and said “You may have to wave to get the bus to stop!” Uh huh. But, I needn’t have worried. I waved, it stopped, and I made it here:



Don’t worry. This is the before picture. Here’s the after picture:



Okay, let’s call this the in-progress picture. It’s a little spare, but it’s a roof and a bed, and the view from the balcony…



…is decent:



Here is the view looking down into the courtyard of the Lycée (high school) where we’re living:



And here, of course, are the teenagers. I can’t escape:



Okay, so I arrived. This is Friday. Linda, the German, was the first of my roommates to show up. She brought her parents, who stayed with us in la dortoir for nights, bless their souls. On Sunday we were joined by sweet Julianna, the Columbian. On Tuesday we got Carmen, the Italian, and we were complete. (There is, apparently, a British assistant who will be staying with us from time to time but living in Aix, about 40 minutes from here, and commuting).

This past Thursday and Friday we were required in Marseille for orientation. We spent most of our time running from appointment to appointment (we non-EU people had to get chest x-rays to prove that we aren’t tubercular), but I did manage to take a few pictures.





The American assistants were invited over for dinner at the home of the U.S. Consulate General in Marseille.



I didn’t get a good shot of her house, but here’s one from her balcony that shows the house next to her’s:



So, y’know. Nice neighborhood.

And here’s me in Marseille:



I look very serious, but I was just concentrating on the camera.

I realize that I haven’t posted many pictures of Manosque, my home town. I’ve been trying to avoid running around town with my camera out looking like a tourist, but here are a couple of pictures I’ve managed to take, with many more to come, I’m sure:





Okay, that's a start, right? More to come...