Today she walked through Nantes and sprinkled around the seashells she had collected from her visit to the shore. Just to mix the world up a little bit.

Jumping walls to escape zombies?

Yesterday she was walking home from work through a beautiful dusk and got locked in a cemetery. She had to climb over a ten foot wall to escape - she completely startled an old man walking down the road and a young girl on a bicycle. And today she aches all over.

Cappucinos and Christmas Trees and Cowboy Robots

She was sitting in a crowded café, sipping a cappuccino full of sugar and cream, and experiencing the winter scene out the window. It was cold and blue, the sun had just set, and it was all crisp streetlights and pink streaked clouds. People outside rushed to the beat of the clinking spoons and friend’s conversations inside. Enjoying a coffee, discussing the news, politics, Christmas shopping, their meetings were wonderful, and not insignificant or trivial, but colorful and smart and warm. The Christmas market was set up in the open square in town – filled with huge chunks of chocolate bark, art, break dancing teenagers, scarves and hats and Santa paraphernalia for sale, a carousel, hot steaming and spiced wine with steam that filled the place with a swirling thin cloud of cinnamon, colorful bursts of flowers the magically managed to survive the winter wind, a gold spray painted man dressed up as a cowboy? Or robot? Or intergalactic sheriff? who would move for your change, kids playing in an empty fountain, toys, games, crowds, lights hanging from the trees, two stars, no snow, and a half-crescent moon.

She walked further down the tram line until she came to the place where the river started. By now it was dark, a more dense cold, and she stood on a bridge for awhile starring at a stork who was sitting on the banks of the Loire – head curled close to his chest for warmth. And they rested their together for awhile peacefully, silently laughing at the unaware people who walked across the bridges, listening to the gaps of silence between traffic and tipsy giggling. It was quite lovely. She said to goodbye to the stork, wished him well and warmth, climbed a wall, and left.

The apartment glowed from the bulbs hanging from paperclips and the calm lights of the tiny Christmas tree they bought at ikea. Not quite like home, but smelled of pine and was real and she loved the way the rest of the room looked when the lights were on. It still needed a star.

Elephants and Kerouac

She is curled up, warm, in her apartment. She is listening to the songs of Sufjan Stevens because they are great and they remind her of home. And she is reading On the Road. The heat has just turned on, the apartment has that lovely smell of fall melting into winter – old and dusty. But wonderful.

She doesn’t understand why she has been drawn into this sudden swing of Americana sentimentality –but she feels a little overwhelmed by it. Perhaps it is all the negative things she has to say about her country at the moment and her conscious has rebuked her into a small search for America, here, in France.

She wants to be like Dean Moriarty...just a little bit.

She made her roommate read Metamorphosis. She’s not quite sure why.

Last Saturday she saw an elephant. The Isle de Nantes boasts a small macabre world inspired by Jules Verne of merry-go-rounds and a four story robotic elephant that trots around the island spraying annoyed tourists with their cameras and delighted screaming children. It’s a dark juxtaposition of creatures out of an adult’s nightmare transformed into attractions for the young.

She went for a walk in the rain yesterday- just to see the city shine and glow. She saw a small reunion of several Russian men under a small canapé, shouting and singing songs of the old country.

She saw a man holding a mouse out for children to come and pet.

She saw a movie about a famous French criminal turned maniacally violent by his military service in the Algerian war.

She planted a basil plant on her window sill. It’s cold, but she hopes it will grow.

teenage dramas and monotones

It was four in the morning and she couldn’t sleep and was listening to some great new music. The week had gone really well thus far – she had learned a lot from her first full days of classes at both the high school and the middle school. Students, for the most part, were great. Working with them in groups of three or four, she learned that they represented a remarkable range of ability levels…some couldn’t form a complete complex sentence and some spoke almost fluently. It was a great variety – peppered with many different interests- from physics to literature, to World Wide Wrestling, to American teenage shows, to poems by Keats. The students were kind and courteous, but for the most part very uncomfortable with an informal relationship with their instructor. Their lives are run on stress and striving to achieve entrance into the right university. She learned some students have officially graduated and choose to stay on one or two more years to prepare their resumes for university applications…she learned just how incredibly driven and remarkably disciplined and talented these young people are – She just wondered how much fun high school was for them. There was still the air of adolescent judgment, and cliquish relationships, but without any real feeling of camaraderie. None of the monumental and wonderful moments of high school in the states were present– no pep rallies, no graduation ceremony, no all-nighter video projects, no prom, no homecoming, no wacky nerdy dress day.

And she learned they were all incredibly curious…about the elections in America (most every French person supports, without a doubt, Obama), about what Americans thought of Sarkozy (Sarkozy who….), how life was there, were any of the stereotypes…americans are all fat and stupid, they drive big cars, and everyone owns a gun, and live in a dangerous world, ….true?

She learned that the steps in her building were made in 1606.

And she learned a few things from sam - who introduced two new French figures into her life – Jacques Brel – an amazing French singer from years ago, who’s music is plain and pure passion – about dirty life and love..
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=T6rvMZnWKZc,

and Michel Coluche – (perhaps an early predecessor of Stephen Colbert )– a completely irreverent French comedian who ran for president in 1981 – but dropped out of the race because the polls showed him far in the lead (he died mysteriously five years later – in what many consider a government conspiracy).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coluche - lists some of his wonderful words of wisdom about everything from government to the poor to the church to the ignorant to the former USSR.

She learned that the French manage to envelope everything –from the little minute tasks of life to the political revolutions of an entire nation – in art. Everything is done with a conscious of beauty, with tenderness- and everything painted a pretty picture. At five o’clock streets filled with old couples walking arm and arm, businessmen carrying baguettes, kids picking up pastries, pigeons crowding the steps of churches, even the monotonous and everyday was done purposefully and was elegant.

That even government communication was a thing of poetry.

she learned that the British government read verses on the radio to communicate with the French resistance during world war II. That the first phrase of this poem - chanson d'automne - told allies that the Americans were landing in France soon.

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

Translated – something like this…
The sobbing calls/from the fall's/ fiddles' moan/through my breast/languidest/monodrone.

It just seemed a little ironic to her-that the attention to taking life slowly and deliberately, of savoring each meal, each walk, each cup of coffee, each page of the paper - the enjoyment factor - was not completely evident in high school or education in France; the time that many Americans believe is one of the most lively, fun, enjoyable periods of their lives is, here, missing something significant.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Just an aside...if for some terrible reason Obama loses and the McCain/Palin monster takes over...please sign up here to move to France!

Smoke and Rabbits

She smelled like smoke and she was eating rabbit. Her roommate Sam is friendly and a great host. He is the French cliché – he smokes all the time, he sells fancy cheese and wine to shops all along the coast and is planning to do the same in NYC next year, he doesn’t speak much English, he listens to old American hip hop and great French singers from the 60’s, he wears cool hats,he smokes continously, he paints, and he cooks – three nights ago it was Tartiflette- a traditional French meal of the mountains…onions, potatoes, cream, and some very good and very smelly cheese, and last night it was plat mijote du lapin – a special marinated rabbit dish. Dinners are late, with French pop idol in the background and some fairly interesting snippets of conversation – whatever she could muster with her French - about everything from the family’s tradition of dining together, to abortion rights in France, to favorite political activists.

This morning she forced herself out of bed early, which is difficult to do with no natural light in the room, and puttered around until early afternoon. Layering up for the chilly temperature outside, she grabbed a scarf and off - following cobblestone alleyways until she reached the river. Across a bridge dodging traffic that never ever obeys any city signs,she reached the isle de nantes- the recovering industrial section of the town. A large yellow crane still stands as testament to the once thriving ship-building industry that powered Nantes, but now wharfs and equipment are a nostalgic attraction. The city was celebrating the christening of a new boat - a huge creation - built for speed and power (in some foreign place) and completely out of place in a village where everything moved at its own slow pace and where industry was pretty much nonexistant. Still it was here, for some reason, and small windsurfers and skippers skirted around the massive sailboat floating flags that proclaimed "I'm Free" in french and english.

Across the bridge back over to town where on her two hour walk she encountered - a small street band comprised of a banjo, an accordion, a guitar, and a full size base, a flour-covered mime, a petting zoo outside of a cathedral, a traditional french marching band and dance group in the town square, a hepatitis c awareness event that released hundreds of colored balloons into the sky, and the tail end of a fashion show (its backdrop a cheap and bright carousel).

So much stimulation in such a small space- it was incredible- pockets of life and culture trying to break open into public space wherever. Hundreds of people swarmed around gazing at attraction after attraction.

She wonders if this is a normal Saturday and she is exhausted but smiling.

Fire breathers, violinists, and mountaineers

She almost fell asleep listening to the faint sound of a choir in the empty St. Nicholas Cathedral. She just let her mind be still and let the building, and the color and the light, and the smell of incense just pass right through her. The sound of traffic outside was a constant reminder of reality –but she savored a few more minutes of being in this magnificent building that was much more important than she could ever know. After being in this city for the past week she had realized something - that people are the same. Not a person - persons are different, very different from one another, but people are the same. This town has the rich women in high heels who struggle to cross cobbled stone streets, it has the smart and cool students who are themselves and believe in good things, it has different people who talk to themselves as they stumble along, it has drunks who struggle in vain to enter restaurants, it has old ladies who go and sit inside churches - eyes closed in prayer for future generations, it has the poor who beg on the corner showing off missing limbs, it has eccentrics who feed birds from their own mouths, it has maniacal men who blow fire in the middle of crowded bar streets, it has beautiful old men who sit beside shopping centers with their violins playing somewhere over the rainbow, it has the twenty-something nomads who sleep on doorsteps with their dogs. People had warned, had joked, that you must be prepared for the coldness of the French, the impolite, stuck up attitude of their culture. She had not seen it anywhere. She had met many different persons- who all held a unique place on the spectrum; but the people here were the people of her hometown and her college town and other places across the world (sans or variations of firebreathers and birdfeeders). And that was very comforting. That though it looked very new – it wasn’t, not really.
And she had been passing the rainy nights reading – this time –three cups of tea. About a mountaineer who commits his life to building schools in Pakistan, a genuinely amazing person who leaves his everything, his life of climbing and exploring for a single idea and single passion and who changes everything for small pockets of people. And …well, reading that begged the question, being here, living here, given this opportunity.........what is the purpose of an adventure and what was the purpose of this one?

secret details

It is the love in the detail that makes a place sincere and historic. Walking around the town for the past few days she finally had time to turn her eyes slightly upward and notice the detail. The facades of the buildings were beautiful – wrought iron balconies, window boxes overflowing with small red flowers, tall black intricate lamp posts leaving pools of glowing light – Of course the cathedrals and chateaus were awe-inspiring but the slight statue of the Virgin tucked into the wall of a small apartment building on the third floor, if you could take the time to see it, and take the time to watch it, was equally as beautiful. Nantes is a town of secret art and she was having so much fun wandering the streets on the hunt for the large lion faces carved into the walkways outside restaurants, or the bodies of saints or the macabre faces of the green men that peppered parking lots, hallways, walkways, always hidden from plain sight and only visible to those who knew they were there or were of the mind to look for them and appreciate them. On the way out to have a coffee with friends or off to work or to the store they caught you by surprise if you were lucky and turned your day around. Running into a masterpiece during a mundane errand – that was the most magical part.
She had found an apartment and spent the past few days lugging her luggage across the cobblestone streets – through the fair and the chateau and past the cathedral, down the street from the best bakery in town and around the corner from the art store (where students queued constantly to prep for classes) - down a shadowy alleyway right in the middle of town – through a big red door and up two flights of ancient stone steps - her apartment – small and perfect – genuine French colocataire (roommate) artist and everything. Dull stucco walls were covered with colored scarves, an old dj turntable acted as a bookshelf, paints and brushes out, clothes hung up, Obama put on the wall.

la grande roue

Imagine looking at the world through a pop-up book. Looking down at an aerial view of something a little surreal and fictional, an image of something else – soft and vividly colored, stretching farther and farther and farther. Her day ended looking at that picture. Swaying and terrified atop la grande roue – the great wheel – the centre of the cheap gaudy fair that had juxtaposed itself on the lawn of the old chateau - she took in a panorama of her city. There were the rows of cottages inhabited by duddy old men and very young couples and some of the teachers she had met earlier-the young ones especially sweet and kind and eager to speak English or Spanish or Italian or anything but French. The chateau and cathedral of course directly below, lit up just enough that their outlines glowed against the sky. The restaurants, bars, cafes, shops, cobblestoned streets – those same streets, she learned while precariously hanging above the world, that were dismantled by students during the revolution to provide trajectories to counter police attacks– the man on the corner breathing fire and asking for money, the man on the corner playing the guitar in a top hat asking for money, and the man on the corner without arms asking for money. And she saw the school and her room (a mess of clothes and books and a baguette she had for dinner) where she had accidentally locked herself in for twenty or so minutes until she was rescued by her roommate, and the night guard watching his news, reading his paper, and preparing himself to draw her into another long and delightful conversation about poverty in China, and his stamp collection, and the problems of today’s generation, and the oncoming world war three, and a rare five euro coin he found which is worth a lot but which doesn’t make him rich, and the beautiful chateaus of France and how France had castles long before England and much more that she didn’t fully understand. And even though she is now in her bed, off the wheel down on earth it still feels like she is looking at an image, something mysterious and a bit unreal and dreamy.

doors and windows

I want to keep my memories in a safe place. This is written with the assumption that few will read it. It is a small little window into my small little world where I can keep my small little thoughts and my grand schemes and the things I see…and so it goes. And so it goes.

She sobbed kissing her mother goodbye for the last time, fixing solidly the faces of her grandparents as they spoke their final words at the Chilli’s at the airport over soppy quesadillas. Onto the AirIndia 747 which unsurprisingly smelled of Indian food. She spoke to a nice Taiwanese Man from Ohio who worked on the computers for a pastry company who looked like he had no interest whatsoever in pastries who was visiting Paris for a week of vacation. Her movie screen didn’t work. She took one large anti-anxiety pill and passed out in a knotted position.

She awoke every hour or so of the six hour flight and began reading The Perks of being a Wallflower which isn’t necessarily about the great aspects of being a wallflower; It is about choosing between participation and observation. It is the story of a boy who survives high school (and the author doesn’t belittle the drama of teenage angst but makes it real and depressing and serious) and learns about how to interact in a truthful way with the people he loves. Which is really hard to do. She hadn’t quite finished it yet-but she knows what she is going to get out of this book. She needs to choose between participating and observing, she needs to put the camera down and step into the image.

A landing at Charles de Gaulle followed by several tram rides and many many stairs which were a major inconvenience for her very heavy suitcase – 31 kilos of the necessities of life. She even managed to knock a few large men over trying to balance all her luggage. Evil glares. Emerging out of the Jaures station she caught her breath – cursed the French for their lack of handicap accessibility. And the first thing she saw – the first thing she tragically saw- was a McDonalds. Fantastic. After wandering around a busy intersection for half an hour she finally found her hostel – The Peace and Love Hostel – (no comment). A Johnny Depp character from New York greeted her, room key, rules and regulations, up one floor to your right. Again fighting with the suitcase into the room and out again.

She hopped a tram to the center of the city – into Paris- the real Paris- the history and the art and the romance. And there was Notre Dame – no fanfare no big signs – just sitting there among the streets. Dark and a towering gray that blended into the murky sky overhead. Outside it was dark and dull – inside the light glowed everywhere. Candles. Insence. Twenty or so separate chapels dedicated to an assortment of saints each depicting a different story with a different medium of art- sculpture, mosaic, painting, furniture, engravings, etc. And even though clouds created an impermeable sky, the rose windows shown as if the sun was hiding right behind them. But all eyes were drawn to the middle of the cathedral. Everything merged to one point where Christ lay in Mary’s arms. And you know when artists and authors talk about things being beautifully sad – this statue, somehow, held all the sadness in the world, and it was very beautiful.

Outside again, old men fed crumbs to the pigeons that created rings of crap around the monument. She took a table at a café across the street. Had a chocolate crepe and a coffee. And she felt like the world slowed a little and she was stretched thin and was infinite for a moment and for some reason that made her feel very lonely.

Back to the hostel. It was cold. She read some more. Sent out some emails. Slept. Woke up to the sounds of horrible American pop music playing in the bar downstairs. Slept some more. Woke again to the most dreaded sound a hostel dweller can hear- the gags of a roommate as he prepares himself to void all the alcohol he has just consumed. Truly thank God…he made it to the bathroom.

She woke in the morning, elbowed her way to the bathroom, pulled the suitcase down the spiral staircase. And off again to the tram. To another tram. To the Gare Montparrasse where sitting on the floor waiting for her train she read some more of her book and watched the people merging and coming apart again. Met some fellow assistants on the train. They chatted about normal stuff. She fell asleep which was really a shame because the scenery seemed to get prettier as they progressed. In few moments of consciousness she caught farms, cows, yellow corn stalks, train tracks.

At the station she was picked up by a very nice man with a ridiculously wonderful mustache. The kind you can only find on old British men who smoke cigars and love literature and have big comfy green chairs in their personal libraries. He took her to the school and gave her a quick tour. Le Lycee Clemenceau is really a small castle. Over 200 years old. It is intricate and quite beautiful with several open foyers and small gardens. Down a block is a castle – really drawbridge and everything, further down the way there is a giant and beautiful stone cathedral, a garden, and all the small winding cobblestone streets filled with all the small stores and restaurants and bars and cafes that you would expect of a French space.

She met another assistant whom she is rooming with at the Lycee until they each find their own place. She is an incredibly sweet girl and they wandered the streets for awhile, having a quick dinner and coffee with some French friends the girl knew. Back to the school. An hour long conversation with the night guard about American politics, the economy, the iron man race, his stamp collection, the color of our eyes, finding a home, Texas and California, the Grand Canyon – and it is late and her French is not that good so she can’t remember much more. And now she is ready for bed, and she thinks she is ready for all this and she thinks she is happy about all this. And she misses you very much.