Le retour

Back in the USA...

Well, our little adventure has come to an end.  It was a fantastic time.  We loved everything (well almost everything) and everyone (really!).  We had fair warning from other expats that re-entry would not be easy.  They were right.  It's not that we didn't miss some things about the U.S.  Certainly we missed our family and friends enormously.  But living in France was really an adventure.  Every day.  We were always the strangers in a strange land.  A British friend (living in France) told me years ago that there is also an extra grace that goes with being an expat.  Yes, it is challenging to do just about anything but the French are so understanding when you screw up and literally amazed that you tried.  

We made many good friends in France.  Again, something about the fact that we were more vulnerable helped.  We really sought out new friends and were grateful for their attention.   And how fun to meet people who often see things quite different.  It is so enlightening (and often humbling) to hear the observations of the U.S. (and Americans) from folks in another country.  Most people are cautious with this information and it takes awhile for them to trust you enough to really say what  is on their minds.  The French are great people. Friendly, generous, and fun.  I am missing them terribly.

Of course the countryside is a slice of paradise.  The south of France (or "Midi" as the french refer to the region we were staying) has so much natural beauty: the sea, mountains, vineyards, olive trees.  It has also has excellent roads and trails to appreciate them.  Cycling and hiking will never be the same.  It's timely that we returned when Le Tour de France was in progress.  It transported me to watch every day.  And the weather…oh, the weather.  Almost always sunny, cool nights with the windows open and a breeze blowing over our heads.  What a way to sleep.  I really don't know how I will bear the coming Minnesota weather.

The french are, of course, famous for their cuisine and wine.  The wine was, as advertised, amazing.  Five euros can buy an awesome bottle (not always though…I found that only 1 out of 4 tries yielded a good wine).  The beer is awful.  It has been wonderful to get great beer again in Wisconsin and Minnesota.  When I was younger I was always embarrassed about American beer.  Schlitz, Miller, Old Milwaukee: those beers were so inferior to European beer.  Now, however, U.S. microbrewing has brought beer to a new level.  My newest fantasy is opening a bar in France:  Jimmy's Microbrews. 

There is so much more to say about France, the French, and our experiences but I can't hope to sum it up now.  Stay tuned for more posts with photos and advice on having one of these adventures yourself.

For each post in this blog I've struggled to find the right photo(s).  For this post I could not imagine anything that would represent all of my feelings so I chose a photo of Jane and I in front of our apartment on our last night in Aix.  My heart breaks just to look at it.  

Au revoir à tous.  On va retourner!

That will be blah, blah, blah euros please

When we first arrived in France I realized my comprehension of french numbers was quite weak.  I'd never appreciated how important it is to have a great grasp of numbers.  Numbers are SO integrated into our consciousness.  Translation is just not possible if you want to survive in a francophone country.

I used a few apps on my iPad and the web to improve my comprehension but I was a little frustrated with the lack of good tools for this particular language problem. So....I wrote these tools.  Hopefully these will help other folks learn their numbers.

French Number Practice Tools

Montpellier

I love this town. 2 hours west of Aix. 10 minutes from the mediterranean. Twice the size of Aix. University town. Very large and pretty old town, all pedestrian-only. Safe. Friendly. 'Nuff said.

Photos

Les Calanques

It would probably surprise many folks to hear that the French are avid hikers.  The american view of the chain-smoking Parisien doesn't quite match the reality: the French are crazy for hiking.  No wonder: the  countryside in the south is simply an enormous field of "baby mountains".

Les Calanques (best translation would probably be "the fjords") are definitely one of the most beautiful sites.  This park between Cassis and Marseilles is awesome.  Jane and I come here regularly.

You can't come in. No, really. You CAN'T come in.

The French have a different level of security need than Americans. The French take access to their abode very seriously. I'm sure I have seen hundreds of french homes in my time in France and I think they ALL have fences with gates. The gates are awkward, break a lot, often left open because they no longer work but a gate is "obligitoire" here.

One of the things that is a little hard to get used to is the bars on windows. Yes, bars on windows. I don't mean just in the mean-streets of Paris (actually, I never saw what I would consider "mean-streets" in Paris…but I know they have mean-streets in the banlieues). I mean every little town. The first floor buildings almost all have bars. And if a window does not have bars it has wooden shutters that would keep out almost any voleur. I'm told this is for insurance reasons. You get a substantial discount. However, these aren't trivial bars. They are 1"sq. cast iron bars. It would take some serious demolition to get through them. In other words, they are expensive.

Doors are yet another amazing feature. Our door in Aix is almost 3 in. thick and has 3 distinct bolts that run through the jam when locked. NOBODY is getting through this door with a crowbar or kicking it down. And that is just the apartment door. The building door is even more intimidating and appears to have some sort of braces that one could use to really batten down if a foreign army is knocking on the door.

Why??? What is this need for all of the security?  The per capita  murder rate in France is 25% what it is in the U.S. and rape is one-third the U.S. rate (DSK not withstanding).  Assault is 20% as likely.  Perhaps there is less violent crime but more burglary and theft?  Nope, one-third as many robberies.  They do have a slightly higher auto-theft rate than the U.S. but then their cars (which they do NOT adore like Americans) are almost all on the street.

So what makes the french so security minded?

Tour de Provence

WARNING: Cycling-geek post...

Last week my brother and sister-in-law arrived from the states for our “Tour de Provence” bike adventure.  My brother and I had seven days to hit the routes of Provence.  It was awesome.   It was sunny every day we rode and the temperatures were almost too hot.  We were also blessed with a helpful (and sexy) support team (our wives).

I highly recommend all of these routes to any cyclist.   They were all chosen for the beauty of the ride with an emphasis on roads without too much car traffic. I’ve included MapMyRide links to all of them and a few ideas for improvement on some.

Day 1: Aix-Venelles-Rogne-Le Puy Sainte Réparade – 80km 

Our first day was intended to be gentle...my brother’s first day in France after arriving the night before with jet lag.  This route was pretty with a few gentle climbs.  We were a little surprised by the last leg: a 7km ascent followed by a great descent into the town of Le Puy Sainte Réparde.

Four category 5s and two category 4 climbs.

View Map

Day 2: Sault-Lourmarin – 53km 

On day 2 we headed out to Mont Ventoux to try the beast while our legs were still fresh.  Unfortunately the entire mountain was closed for a road rally (trying to imagine how cool it would be to race cars on Mont Ventoux).   So...we had to pick a new route.  It was absolutely beautiful.  The beginning was a 30km descent (that’s right...a 30km descent) from Sault to Apt through absolutely amazing scenery.  This was the best ride of my life.  The rest of the ride was also very nice with a long ascent/descent into Lourmarin from Apt.

One category 3 and one category 4 climb.

View Map

Ideas:  

1. This ride could have been the end of a Mont Ventoux ride, i.e., take any route to the summit but then descend to Sault and finish in Apt.  
2. This ride could also be continued from Lourmarin to Aix via Rogne.

Day 3: Sainte Victoire loop – 58km

This ride has become my regular in Aix.  Not too long but lots of good climbs. Beautiful.  It’s easy to understand how Cezanne became obsessed with this mountain.

One category 3, two category 4 and one category 5 climbs.

View Map

Ideas: this route is also great in the other direction.    In fact, it is definitely prettier in reverse because you really see Cesanne’s Ste. Victoire.

Day 4: Rest day- hiking visit to Les Calanques

We decided to take a day off to make sure our butts didn’t suffer too much (be grateful I’m not elaborating here).  Les Calanques are incredible.  However, my brother (who is training for an iron man) suggested that this wasn’t much of a “rest day” since he and my sister-in-law ran in the morning and hiked all afternoon in Les Calanques.   Jeez...what a baby!

Day 5: Les Alpilles – 83km

Jane and I got to know this range very well during our stay in  2001.  Now was our chance to return.  Les Alpilles did not disappoint us.  The route included a visit to Les Baux, a wonderful medievial city on the top of a peak.  Do NOT take this ride on the weekend.

The winds on this day reached 35km with gusts of 65km.  It was very scary at one point.  We were sure the wind was going to blow us off the road.  

An extra “cadeau” on this day: we rounded a corner during our last few km and encountered a shephard with his wooly charges.  Very fun.

One category 4, three category 5 climbs.

View Map

Day 6: Mont Ventoux – 48km

What can you say about Mont Ventoux? Arguably the hardest climb in Le Tour de France (when it is on Le Tour).  The trip down was incredible. The road surface from the summit to Bedoin is very good and the turns are even banked.  Exhilirating to say the least.

One category 2, one category 1, and one “hors de category”

View Map

Day 7: SCRAPPED! – The joys of cycling. An equipment problem cancelled out last day.  At least our butts were saved!

Total: 322km 

There are many great routes in Provence.  This place is really a cycling paradise.  One of the routes that we didn't have time for looked particularly fun.  It includes a visit to Gordes and Roussillon.

Louberon Loop - 91km

One category 3, two category 4 and seven category 5 climbs.

View Map

Yes sir, right away Mr. I Am Afraid

French pronunciation continues to be a challenge for me.  One of the mistakes I believe we make teaching language is that we wait too long to teach the subtleties of pronunciation.  That is, we wait until AFTER we have already picked up bad habits that are hard to break.  This leads to many, sometimes funny misunderstandings.

When I was first beginning to speak French I would sometimes practice with a friend at work who was fluent.  I remember mentioning "hair" on a couple of occasions when I would consistently say chevOH instead of chevOO.  Of course I didn't just cut my horse, I cut my hair.

It goes both ways of course.  My first French tutor was explaining to me one day in English that he felt he was different than most.  "I am eunuch," he said.   Wow, I thought, what a confession.  I was surprised at how open he was. I realized later he was really trying to say "I am unique".

For me, one of the most careful pronunciations involves my last name.  After a few weeks of trying to get the French to pronounce my name correctly I gave up and simply pronounced it in French.  This had an unexpected side affect.  If I don't pronounce the first syllable just right it sounds like "J'ai peur" (I am afraid).  This is, of course, a freudian slip since in those situations when I HAVE to say my name in french I am usually speaking with somebody who is filling out a form and I am, indeed, nervous.

For a long time I was hoping that I could beat my accent.  After all, I was the kid who was so good at doing impersonations.  Surely I can lose the accent.  A friend of mine here made me ask a more important question: why?  Why do you want to lose your accent?  Don't you find a foreign accent charming?  Right you are!  And thanks for letting me off the hook for good. :-)

Je habite au paradis

What a wonderful weekend.  Maybe it was the week of rainy weather or maybe it was just the events but this was really a fabulous few days.  The weather was a perfect 17C (about 65F) with a sky so,  so blue. After a fabulous 3 hour ride on Friday, yesterday began with coffee and chatting with some new friends on the Cours Mirabeau. We exited the cafe to a find a demonstration going on (a teachers' union…sound familiar Wisconsites?).

When we got back to our apartment there was a young woman across the street singing opera out her window ("across the street" is about 5 meters by the way).  We then spent the afternoon climbing to the top of Sainte Victoire, the local mountain icon. It was about 4 hours and 2000 feet of ascent.  Specatular.

More photos of our trip to the summit

Today was tutoring from a wonderful friend in the morning and then another great ride under the gaze of the mountain.  The day finished watching a cycling race (a criterium) right through our pretty town.

Wow.

Rome

Ok...another diversion.  We went to Rome this weekend for our 29th wedding anniversary (Jane and I met in the Rome train station 30 years ago).  Rome was beautiful.  The italians were er...ebullient?  After 6 months of toning down our american noise level it was fun to be amongst the vivacious.  The French are serious.  The Italians are more relaxed.

Rome photos

Parlez-vous anglais?

Not surprisingly a good deal of my time in France is spent improving my French.  Most days I get together with friends to do a "language exchange".   The idea is that you and and another individual get together and speak each other's language.  A typical meeting is a couple of hours with one hour in french and the other in English.  I love these.  It's a great way for me to get concentrated time with somebody who is in a similar place.  My language partner understands that I WANT to be corrected and is usually very patient with my American accent.  The conversations, of course, are whatever we want to chat about although they have a tendency to become Q&A on various cultural questions that each party is curious about.  I cannot believe how much I have learned about the french way of life from these fun talks.

What surprised me about language exchanges was how poorly equipped I was.  I don't mean my French. I mean my English. When I first started studying French it was quickly apparent to me that I had lost all consciousness of the English language.  Yes, I speak English but do I understand anything about it?   I had forgotten what an article was, much less had any concept of what the verb tenses were in English.  I understood NOTHING about English.  Thus, my concept of language got better rapidly when I started studying french.  In fact, it was one of the things that I found interesting about language study (most of learning a language is simply a brute force battle to convince your brain that the foreign words are worthy to use memory space).

So...I can tell you when to use the plus que parfait and on good days understand the strange rules for the subjonctif. But English? That’s another matter. I remember my first exchange rather well. My friend almost immediately said he was struggling with “when to use any vs. some” in English. Ha I said, this will be easy! Finally I’m a master at something here! However, I was almost immediately stumped. Um...”would you like some peanuts”...um...“Would you like any peanuts”...What IS the rule? I realized I did not have a clue. I am not equipped to teach somebody English. I could probably teach French much better than I could teach English.

Humbled...again.

London

Ok…so this is supposed to be a blog about France adventures but we took a side trip (an adventure from our adventure?) the previous  weekend to London to see Jane's family.  It was a lot of fun.  We spent a couple of days re-discovering London (it had been 30 years) and a day visiting with Jane's aunt and cousins (a great crew…lots of fun).  We stayed in a fun neighborhood at the northwest corner of Hyde Park, close to Notting Hill.

It was very different to be back in an English speaking locale.  I was feeling the usual anxiety (will I understand them?) every time I talked to a stranger.  But surprise!  They talked English! That said, I was surprised that I sometimes struggled to understand the British accent.

London was, generally, very expensive. As an example, the metro cost $6 for a short one-way ride.  Wow!  We found ourselves planning our day to avoid transportation.  This was OK because we really love to walk in grand cities.  Paris, New York, London….we can spend all day just walking.  We discovered some fantastic markets too.  Probably the most fun was a street called Portobello Road that we visited on Saturday morning.  A packed market of sort of bohemian/international stuff.  Every language imaginable.  Very cool.  We also enjoyed the Borough market and the neighborhood around it on the south bank.  Another highlight was Speaker's Corner.  I love that concept.

Harkening back to my memories of London, we saw some great entertainment.  My sister, who is in a Sweet Adeline  group, would be proud of us for watching a comedy group that was also a barbershop quartet.  They were hilarious.  Again, a little hard to catch everything at the beginning of the performance but by mid-show we were on track.  

The rest of London was fun but the best time was definitely the time with Jane's aunt and cousins.  So great to have family here.

Skiing in the Alps

We finally got to take "le train des neiges" to the Alps for a day of skiing. This is quite an amazing service.  The train picks us up a few blocks from our apartment and then takes us to a variety of resorts near Gap in the southern Alps. On arrival to the closest town, they provide a shuttle bus to the resort. This only costs 15 euros for everything, round-trip.

The skiing in the southern alps is very warm. The French from these parts aren't very excited about skiing in the "north" in the grand resorts like Chamonix. They prefer their sun. Not surprisingly, with this kind of warmth it suffers the same problems as Whistler in America: rain and thaws in the middle of the season. it rained 2 days before we arrived so the snow wasn't very good. They are actually having problems keeping things open right now because of the lack of snow (it's been extra warm here for a couple of weeks).

We picked the resort of Puy Saint Vincent.   The resort is relatively low (4200 feet at the base and 8100 feet at the summit) so we didn't suffer any altitude issues.  The slopes were mostly intermediate but there were a few more challenging runs as well.  The lifts were simliar to what we have in the U.S. with chairlifts and "tire-fesse" (literally "butt pull").  There was a "snowboard cross" race the day we were there.  Very cool.

There are many, many resorts here but they are generally smaller than the U.S. The price of a ticket is cheap (25 euros with our "train des neiges" discount). Renting skies seemed comparable to U.S. prices.

We're hoping to ski some more. There are several resorts that offer x-country skiing, mostly groomed for skating.

Quelle belle vie

OK...I've been TERRIBLE at updating the blog the last month.  We've been very, very busy (more on that in the next post).   Things have calmed down now and today is absolutely awesome.  It's about 15 degrees (60F) although it feels even warmer. The sky is as blue as it gets.   I had a 2 1/2 hour ride this morning through mountains and vineyards.  Now we are relaxing on the balcony of our apartment.  Here is a peek of life on Rue Cardinale.

Des choses routieres

I love to drive in France.   The french are particularly good at transportation.   The rail system is amazing and the road system is also enviable.  The autoroute system (equivalent to the U.S. interstate system) has beautiful surfaces and is designed for speeds well in excess of the 130 km/hr limit. Most of the french system is funded by tolls (curiously, the French would consider the U.S. very socialist in the manner that Americans fund their interstate). The guy who uses it pays for it. And the tolls are not cheap. Their beautiful roads are expensive.

Buy what I really love about the french road system is the “D” highway system that goes everywhere the autoroute does not.  These roads, usually through beautiful scenery and often windey are really fun to drive.  The french “rond-points” make sure that you almost never need to stop and the signage is pretty amazing at getting you from little town to little town without a lot of fussing over maps.

Unlike Paris, it is really helpful to have a car in southern France.    The public transport is very good here but it is very time consuming to sightsee by bus and train.  We agonized over the right approach to getting a car: buy a used one? overseas delivery of an Audi? lease?  In the end, we decided to just do occasional rentals.  The price of rentals is very low since we are here in the off-season.  We can rent a car for a 3-day weekend for 70 euros.  This includes insurance of course.  So we just rent a car every other weekend.  Its kind of a hassle to learn a new car every other weekend but its also kind of fun to experience so many european cars.

The cars are, of course, quite different here.  The size of the average french street makes it completely impractical to drive U.S. size cars here.   Even the U.S. manufacturers produce different cars in this market. I’ve rented a Ford and a Chevy here that I have never seen in the U.S. Japanese cars are rarely seen here. It’s kind of amazing. The argument is that you can’t get service for them. Still? I remember a similiar attitude in the U.S....about 25 years ago. Am I in a timewarp? Why haven’t the Japanese been more successful in creating a service infrastructure here? Most of the cars on the road are Renault and Peugeot-Citroen. French chauvinism?

The car itself is not a revered thing in France.  Probably a good thing as they are ALL beat-up.   When I rent a car it is always necessary to do a little inventory of the scratches and bumps.  In the U.S. this is mostly the rental company proving to you that nothing is wrong.  In France this is to make sure both parties agree to all of the previous dents.  One car I rented had FIVE dents in various places.  And no wonder: there simply isn’t enough room in the little villages to drive.  It’s like playing bumper cars.  I’m really glad I did NOT buy the Audi over here.  I can’t imagine how I would have been able to keep it in good shape before bringing it home.

This week we visited Saint-Tropez.  The city on the mediterannean is located on the southern edge of le Massif des Maures.  Saint-Tropez was just so-so.  However on the way there, by absolute luck (I missed a turn), we happened upon the most beautiful mountain road I have ever been on.  For a hour+ we went up and down a tiny, forrested, winding path through the Massif des Maures from north to south.  It was spectacular (and a little scary).    Gratefully we only saw a handful of cars (I discovered the real meaning of “blind corner” on this path).

How to get there:
Start on the A57 at Gonfaron (north-northeast of Hyeres).  Head south on D39 toward Collobrières.  Take the D14 over to D39 and continue until you hit N98 (St. Tropez) or end on the mediteranean at Bormes-les-Mimosas.
Google maps: http://tinyurl.com/27eqfmp