Bordeaux and Palmiers

I have made an important decision about this blog.

After reading the archives, it’s all starting to feel very haphazard. I barely understand it… and I lived it. I don’t know how you can be expected to understand it.

So here we go. I’m starting over. My name is Emily (or Amélie, if you prefer), and I live in Paris. Sometimes.

After my semester ended (I’m still in university), I went to Cannes to work at the film festival for two weeks, before moving on to Spain.

Right now, I’m living in Mallorca, Llombards, to be exact, with my boyfriend, the Canadian. We rent the downstairs apartment of the finca (Mallorcan farmhouse) that belongs to his friends, Ian and Katrina, who are English. We also have some German neighbors, who are renting the other finca apartment.

Every other day, the Canadian and I go to this one beach at the Colonia San Jordi, which I’ll be sure to tell you about as soon as I remember to take some pictures. Every day that we don’t go to San Jordi, though, we go exploring to find a new and exciting beach. The beaches are small and sometimes hard to find, but it’s an adventure every time.

The first time we did this, we went looking for one beach (to be continued tomorrow…) and found this beach. The Canadian pulled up to what looked like the side of a cliff. I didn’t particularly want to get out of the car… but I did it anyway.

The Canadian started to look for a path, so I followed him, my flip flops slipping, fairly sure that if I didn’t fall to my untimely death, I would at least ruin the white dress I was wearing. But the Canadian’s sense of direction served him well, and we stumbled down upon a flat surface that looked out onto the water.

There was a small bed of sand where two Spanish kids were already sunbathing, and further down there was more cliff, where a blonde girl was throwing sticks to her two dogs.

The Canadian and I laid our towels out in the sun and walked over to where the girl and the dogs were. Or at least we tried. The cliff was pretty low, but also very craggy. I decided to go barefoot and ended up hurting myself, but the Canadian didn’t fare much better with his slippy, slidy sandals. Eventually we made it down to the algae-covered bed of rocks and stood with the girl and her dogs, chatting and throwing sticks to them.

Beaches like the one in San Jordi, which is long and covered with bodies, are fun to go to every once in awhile. Heck, until I came to Spain, it was the only kind of beach I knew. But these little tiny beaches that no one knows about are so much fun to track down. I’m going to miss them when I leave.

I have by now traveled through much of Western Europe, but I have seen comparatively very little of the US. I was born and raised in New York, and I’ve seen a lot of the Eastern seaboard. I went to high school in New England, and I lived for one year in San Francisco, but I haven’t seen a lot of Middle America… I don’t really know where everyone else lives.

When I lived in Canada, I had a friend who liked to do random things, which was lucky, because I like to do random things too. One day, we decided we were going to go on a road trip with no destination, and so at five o’clock in the morning, I picked him up, and we drove. We drove from Toronto to New York State, and then we decided that we wanted to cross another state boarder. After consulting our map, we decided to go to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

We took the entire trip on back roads, driving past houses and tiny towns made up of no more than a gas station. We drove on winding, hilly tarmac, often the only car rushing past the landscapes of rural Pennsylvania.

We stopped on the shoulder every so often to take pictures: I had never concentrated so much on where I was instead of where I was going. We didn’t actually reach Lancaster County until the following morning, but it didn’t seem to matter.

I drove for ten hours, and though my sanity was temporarily threatened, in retrospect, I loved that trip. I loved everything about the all-American vibe we got from every town we stopped in. I loved taking pictures of little things I never would have seen otherwise.

I loved the quaint diner we stopped in when we arrived in Lancaster County in the morning, and I loved the severely cheap breakfast that we were served there (and the unlimited coffee).

Being in Europe makes me appreciate the pure Americana of a trip like that. America is just so big compared to Europe: they don’t have landscapes like that over here. There are rural areas, make no mistake, but everything about them seems to be quaint… a little bit false. There’s something so comforting to me about knowing that places like Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania exist somewhere in the world.

I have a hard time writing about the place where I am.

The second I leave, it’s easy: I suddenly remember all the things I loved about being there, why it’s so special and so different from where I am now. But writing about the place where I am is a struggle, which is why you haven’t read anything yet about the past several weeks I’ve been spending in Llombards, Mallorca.

I don’t know why I’m suddenly able to write about it. Maybe it’s because I’m so close to leaving: in eight days, I’ll be headed back to Paziols, and you can bet that that’s when you’ll be hearing all of my stories about Llombards and Spain. For now, though, all I have to offer is this story. Maybe it will speak to you and let you know how much I love it here, even if I can’t really say why myself.

I’m living in the downstairs apartment of a finca that my boyfriend’s friends own. Ian and Katrina moved to Spain several years ago, and although they’re old enough to be my parents, we all get along great. They rent this apartment to travelers who want to have the true country experience of living with rural Spain, and they rent the other half of the finca to a German couple.

Ian has installed a small pool, which is right next to the deck that we rent along with the apartment. It looks out into the fields that Ian owns along with the land, as well as into the next yard, where there are two horses being kept.

I love to sit out on the deck with my dinner (no earlier than nine… we are in Spain, after all) and watch the horses. They chase each other through the pasture, completely oblivious to the world around them. They don’t know anything about the horses that live in New York or Paris to draw carriages of tourists through the streets. I doubt that these horses have pulled a carriage in their entire lives.

Isn’t it funny how sometimes memories, correlations, associations, don’t make sense to anyone but you? For the longest time, the Billy Joel song “Vienna” was inextricably and unexplainably linked to New York. I don’t know why, but now I know that I was wrong.

“Vienna” still isn’t about Vienna—I loved the Austrian city covered in snow at Christmastime, but not enough to devote that song to it. Vienna, for me, is about Paris.

“You got so much to do and only so many hours in a day.”

“You can’t be everything you want to be before your time, although it’s so romantic on the borderline tonight.”

“Don’t you know that only fools are satisfied? Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true.”

It’s so true, it’s almost a cliché. In fact, it’s sometimes embarrassing to admit how true “Vienna” feels because of how much everyone else agrees with you. How could this song have touched so many different people in so many different ways?

And then, most of all, “waits for you.” The idea that a city even can wait is so foreign to a New Yorker, where buildings are knocked down and built back up again before you can blink, and storefronts change as often as the seasons. And yet, Paris has been waiting for centuries. Each time I arrive in Paris, I wait patiently while I check into a hotel in a new part of the city that I don’t know. I wait for that moment that I now know is so perfectly Paris.

When I come out of Notre-Dame-St. Michel Métro, and see the booksellers on the Quai d’Orsay, I remember. I feel at home. I remember suddenly how long Paris has been waiting. Cities in the States wait for no one, but on this side of the Atlantic, buildings have been patiently standing on the same streets for hundreds of years. Somehow, even though I know it’s childish, when I step onto the Quai d’Orsay and recognize those buildings again, I feel as though Paris has been waiting for me.

When I visited Naples for the first time this year, I had never been to Southern Italy. I had been as far south as Rome, which, as any Southern Italian knows, is not south at all.

My father’s family comes from Sicily, which is technically not Southern Italy either, but I knew that my roots lay in this country that was so mysterious to me. I had no idea that I would feel so at home in a place that I, and even my father, had never been.

Naples is not a city that most people enjoy. It ranks up there with Marseille as a “dirty” city, a city that is not worth visiting when there are such beautiful things (Capri or Monaco) to see. I have never been to Marseille, but if it really does rank with Naples, then I know one thing for sure: I will love it.

I think people need to give Naples more time. Naples doesn’t jump out and welcome you like Paris or London or Rome. The charm in Naples lies under the grit, behind some of the daunting doors, and within the reign of the camorra*. So much of Naples’ beauty exists behind closed doors: in private courtyards or monasteries that a tourist wouldn’t think of entering. The best meals lie in simplicity: the best restaurants are not those with a view of Capri, but the tiny, family-run pizza places that make simple, homey dishes of pasta and tomatoes and the native mozzarella di bufala. Naples is not a rich city. It is not fancy, like Rome and Milan and the other northern cities. It never was.

Naples is crowded, and in this way, it reminds me of New York. The streets hardly have room for the cars, what with all the pedestrians, stray dogs, scooters and vendors setting up their booths on them. This connection with New York automatically made me think that Naples was a fast-paced city, like my old home, but in jumping to this conclusion, I was terribly wrong.

Time in Naples cannot be so easily defined. Time in Naples does not function like it does in other parts of the world. Naples exists in two times, as so much of Italy does: the present and the past. So much of Naples is in the past. Neapolitans are superstitious and religious, combining both rural folklore of curses and hexes and the traditional beliefs of the Catholic Church in their daily lives. Nowhere else have I seen the mix of traditional Western medicine and pure Christian faith so intertwined in the case of illness or death as it is in Naples.

I won’t say I’ve never met a city I didn’t like. I’m a native New Yorker, and I’m generally more forgiving of cities than most people. That said, I really did not like Chicago. Lancaster, Pennsylvania (the city, not the county) gave me the willies. I really did not like Genoa, in the north of Italy, at all. But when it comes to Naples, I’ll take it, garbage and all.

*The well-known Mafia runs Sicily (and much of New York), but further north in Naples, it is the camorra, the crime organization that is built, not upon families, but upon a well-established hierarchy. The camorra is involved in every business in Naples in some way, and is so ingrained in the commerce and life in Naples that it would be almost impossible to eradicate it.

One of the top tourist destinations in the south of France is the principality of Monaco. As the legend goes, the first Grimaldi snuck into the city dressed as a monk in order to take it over, the Italian word for monk giving the state its name. Monaco is indeed beautiful, especially in the summer, and the palace is worth visiting, if only to watch the archaic changing of the guard, a ceremony that the French take even more seriously than the Brits, who are famous for their version at Buckingham palace. However, following the morning in Monaco, the village of
Eze will make the trip into the Alpes Maritimes worth it.

Eze is built into the side of a mountain: as you climb, you can browse its many artisan shops and art galleries filled with paintings and jewelry constructed by the locals of this small village. Climb to the top of the stone stairs carved into the mountains, and you will find not only a restaurant, where you can regain some of the calories you burned climbing to reach it, but also a garden of exotic flowers that rivals the one in Monaco, established by the first Prince Reiner, Albert I himself.

From the top of the village of Eze, you can see all the way to Menton on one side, almost to Italy, and to Nice on the other. Surrounding you are the mountains that provided the same bright white schist used to build the royal palace in Monaco. Below, the clock tower rises to greet you at eye level, and the flat roofs of houses are scattered like uneven stepping-stones below.

The first time I went to Eze was on a clear day in February, which already feels like spring in the south of France. On that afternoon, as I looked down on the houses in the village, a little girl was jumping rope on her roof. The bright neon of the plastic cord seemed so silly against the true green of the mountain landscape. Her backyard is one of the most beautiful panoramas I’ve ever seen. She woke up every morning to see the sun rise over the Alps from her bedroom window; she could walk out her front door to see the Mediterranean Sea. As I descended the stone steps to go back to the real world, I wondered how long it would take that little girl to realize how lucky she is.

At Christmastime, I went to Mexico for the first time with my family. My uncle loves to go on golfing vacations, so he booked our two families (eight cousins) at the Isla Navidad resort.

After all of my solo-traveling, it was nice to stay with my family again. I am so used to budget travel, hostels, sleeping in a bed that’s too small (and I’m 5′3), that being in a place with a swim-up bar was pretty sweet. For awhile.

OK, so I’ve been spoiled by my own mode of travel. But what’s a girl to do? After a few days of lazing by the pool and reading American fashion magazines, I got bored.

I got ten pesos (a dollar) and set out on the boat that would take me from the island resort to the Barra right across the water. The differences between the resort and the town were drastically different: I’m sure that some of the jewelery stands in Barra had to do with the fact that the resort was right across the way, but the town didn’t seem any better off than any other small Mexican town in the country. The people went right on living their lives, oblivious (perhaps happily) of the almost all-American resort that was right across the bay.

I wandered around the town, happy to hear the rapid-fire rhythm of Spanish surrounding me, pulsating in the tiny town. I saw the Church, the life-sized nativity scene still posed for the Christmas season, even though the humidity made it feel more like summertime than December. I sampled some typical street food: eighty-cent chicken tacos that dripped as I walked, perfectly spicy and tasty. I watched whole families set up for work: children helped their parents set up the restaurant for the day or threaded tiny beads on string to sell as necklaces to the tourists.

I’m so used to Europe; I feel as though I am a part of it. No matter where I go, I always find some little niche that feels like home to me. Even if I can’t understand the language or I am not familiar with the particular culture of a place, I can at least find some semblance of a pub or brasserie and sit down with the draught beer or tiny coffee that every country in Western Europe offers. Mexico was completely foreign to me: much closer to my native America than to my newly adopted Europe, and as America had been becoming a more and more distant dream for me the longer I stayed away, it was hard to find anything in Mexico that grounded me, that could become a safe haven from which I could watch the rest of the world and try to understand it.

As I headed back towards the boat which would bring me to the resort, I stopped outside a dingy-looking building that advertised itself as a bar called “Piper Lover.” I peered in, and then I committed, carefully climbing the rickety stairs to see what I would find.

A group of American ex-pats sat, as I imagine they do everywhere in the world, over a table full of pint glasses and beer bottles, smoking and laughing and talking as rock music played just a little bit too loudly in the background.

I smiled and turned away, back towards the boat. It wasn’t for me, that American living. That self-proclamation: “Here I am! I’m in your country, but I’m different!” But I found comfort in the fact that there were Americans living here, trying, perhaps, to know Mexico as well as I now know France.

You’ve already heard me wax poetic about Montmartre , my favorite arrondissement, but I’m going to have to carry on one more time to tell you about the fête du vin that happens every year at harvest season, i.e. late September/October to celebrate the release of the new wine that is made from the grapes that grow alongside the hill, a remnant from Montmartre’s early days as a city separate from Paris, where the liquor taxes of the metropolis did not apply.

My first fête du vin was last year, but I’m sure I’ll be attending for many years to come. The festival starts at the base of the Mont with a parade that winds up to the very top. The parade is made up of groups from the different regions of France, all there to sell (and celebrate) their wine. When I saw the parade, I was amused to see a group of boys my age (early twenties) there with the rest of the men in their red velour suits. I love France for that: no matter how cool you think you are, you’re never too cool to dress up in red velour and represent your countrymen. Your terroir.

In the end, terroir is what the whole festival is about. Terroir is a foreign concept to most Americans, a word that begs translation but no English equivalent offers itself. Terroir is a mix of pride and modesty, a representation of who you are based on where you come from. Terroir has its roots in the Latin word for earth, a word that links you, your wine, everything, to the soil from whence you came.

The entire festival celebrates, therefore, not only wine, but other elements of terroir that go along with it. Tartiflette, a traditional French mix of potatoes, lardons and cheese, is sold from huge frying pans in the street. Alongside bottles of red, white and rosé are jarred cassoulets, terrines and jams.

Of all nationalities, the French are the best at this: celebrating something that others take for granted. Pulling a part of daily life out of the obscurity of habit and hurling it into the spotlight. “Look. Look at this wine. This food. This life you live. Don’t take it for granted. Celebrate it. Look at it. Rejoice in it. It is yours. It is part of you, and you of it. It is your terroir.”