Bordeaux and Palmiers

The Parisians are famous for being stand-offish and cold. Whoever started that rumor obviously never met the Basques.

I don’t mean that as an insult: it’s more like the mild-mannered swing you take at the popular kids that you so desperately want to fit in with: I’m sure that if the Basques had welcomed me in with open arms, I wouldn’t ever consider calling them cold… they certainly don’t seem that way towards one another. But if they had welcomed me, I probably wouldn’t want to be part of it all so much: ah… a paradox. How lovely.

The attitude towards foreigners or strangers of any kind reminds me less of Paris, where you can get on someone’s good side just by bad-mouthing the other guy, and more of Lille, my first stop along a long list of stops throughout France and Europe in general: the northerners weren’t cold, just distant… and once they had grown to love and accept you, there was no going back. Which is perhaps why they deliberated so long and hard over their decision.

When spelled out in this way, I’m tempted to draw parallels with the weather, and in all honesty, maybe that’s it: cold and wet brings about the inclination to stay indoors with a cup of tea and never venture outside, where foreigners like myself are wandering about, unsure of what to do with ourselves. To befriend someone in either place is to welcome them into your home, something that should be done with trepidation when you’ve got weirdos like me wandering around.

I don’t really know the whys and wherefores: I don’t feel I’ve been here long enough to deserve to know. All I know is that when I watch their fiestas from the outside, I so long to be a part of the club.

A note on the photo:

A few weeks ago, the Basque regatta was held here, in San Sebastian. The streets of Parte Vieja were even more congested than usual, and as I waited for a friend outside our usual meeting spot–McDonalds (stood outside more than I care to admit, but I haven’t stepped in once since I’ve been here)–I saw something strange approaching from down the street, announced by screams and running feet in all directions…

I’m curious, so rather than run away, I whipped out my camera and stepped a bit closer…

To see a man running towards me with a fake bull on his head and fireworks spouting every which way.

I would like to be friends with this man.

You know that life is good when Tuesday afternoon at the end of September finds you on the beach with a cold San Miguel and a view of semi-pro surfers.

I live my life for me. I’ve tried living it for other people: my parents, my friends, the various boys who have passed through my life, whether they were aware of it or not. It’s impossible–I’m distinctly aware of my discontentment, and I never feel my efforts appreciated. And so I’ve stopped. And I live my life for me.

Although…

It’s difficult, when our lives become a sort of performance art of the crudest kind. When “Just ate an apple…” is given the same place of pride as “My sister is having a baby!” When our blogs and our Twitters and our Woofers and our AIM SMS AOL MSN… everything becomes just as important as everything else, which is to say, not important at all.

By virtue of me even telling you this, I make it even less important. The fact that I thought this, that I scribbled it down on the little Moleskine I still take everywhere (thanks, JMo), the page stained with saltwater and sand… that should have been enough. And yet, it’s not somehow.

I have to keep some things for myself, which is why I leave you this picture with no explanation. Find it yourself, if you like, or take comfort in the fact that you don’t know what it is, who it is, where it is, or why, in God’s name, it is so important to me.

I never thought that I would be able to love a city that had so much rain.

I had always knocked London and Seattle off my list of places to live for this very reason–we curly-haired girls have to be careful where we go. And although the torrential rain here sometimes makes it difficult to get out of bed and trek the 30 minutes I have to walk between Amara and San Sebastian proper, where I go to school, it all seems worth it on nights like this.

I love my life here: I love surfing every day and smelling the salt on my skin even though it’s technically fall. I love eating tapas instead of dinner and not remembering the last time I actually sat down to a normal meal. I love speaking Spanish–it’s that childish wonder I got the first time I started speaking French, where you just say the first thing that pops into your head and hope it’s right. I love the classes, I love the city, I love the beach. And most of all, I love views on nights like this, where I feel like the sun was setting over the bridge just at that moment all for me.

To hell with the rain… with all this surfing, my hair’s wet all the time anyway.

For me, it’s hard to say when a place stops being just somewhere I’m camping out and becomes a real home.

Sure, I say that I’ve “lived” in a myriad of places, from Toronto to Cannes, Andover to Royan, but the places where I’ve really and truly felt as though I could hang my proverbial hat have been few and far between.

I guess it comes from moving so often: when you feel as though you could leave a place at a moment’s notice, you never really become a fixture there: you never really connect with it. I may have lived in Toronto for a year and a half, gone to school, even gotten a job there, but was it ever really my home? A place that I could imagine living farther into the future than my next plane ticket? I don’t think so.

Cannes, which I loved so much it made me move to France… even Cannes wasn’t really a home for me. I know I’ll never be French, but being French has nothing to do with being cannois, and I was never going to be that either.

Paris’ sparkle has worn off… and I’m OK with it. It has stopped being the place with the lit-up Eiffel Tower and quaint streets… I have to look for them now. Sometimes I don’t even notice how beautiful the city is until I’m looking back through my old photographs and I see–really see–the sorts of things that surround me on a daily basis.

Maybe it takes being far away to know. Maybe it takes remembering what it’s like to do your grocery shopping and take out your trash and buy your toilet paper in what is meant to be the most romantic city in the world for a person to realize just how amazing it is.

When I left Paris this time, I left it in the way that I leave only one other city: New York. There was no goodbye, just a “see you later, until next time.” There was no adieu, just au revoir. Because I’m slowly coming to realize that no matter how much I carry on about hopping the next place to here, there and everywhere, Paris has carved a space into my heart, and I don’t think that there’s any way to get it back.

The more time I spend in Paziols, the less time I have to write.

My first year, all I did was write: this blog didn’t exist yet, but I kept a journal, I worked on novels… I didn’t do much of anything else as Anne-Marie and Alex drove all over the region, signing papers and applying for insurance.

Last year, the second year, was the year of my attempt to blog every day. I fell into bed every night around two after documenting everything we had eaten and everything we had done and had to be dragged out in the morning to start yet another day. I found time to write when dinner was being made by Patricia, so I still managed to work on my other projects as well.

This year, though… this year, it was impossible.

What with making all the meals and planning all of the daily activities with Anne-Marie, not to mention running a morning French atelier and the afternoon club cuisine all by myself, there just weren’t enough hours in the day: I had to choose between blogging and sleep, and while the decision was difficult, I chose my bed.

I’ve been back in New York (on Long Island, to be precise) for nearly a week now, and I’ve spent much of that time blissfully doing nothing. But this morning, I got a pang remembering our active days in Paziols, and I decided to get back to documenting all the days I was too busy to write about when I was actually living them.

Peyrepertuse is my favorite of the Cathar châteaux and one of my favorite outings we do in Paziols. We usually only go with the older kids, because of the five sons of Carcassonne (Aguilar, Quéribus, Peyrepertuse, Termes and Puilaurens), it is the most perilous to climb.

This year, the gusts of wind that have (either in truth or in myth) carried small dogs off the steep precipices had abated, and so the climb was relatively easy, with only the portion that takes you up slippery rocks with only a rope to hold causing a few tumbles and a near-missed serious camera injury.

We climb Peyrepertuse, not only because it is the most complete of the three châteaux that we visit (Aguilar and Quéribus being the other two, which have slowly been taken down over the years by townspeople looking for material with which to build their houses), but also because every day there are falconry shows that take place in the center portion of the château.

The shows, which are either run by this young man or his father, show off various birds of prey and their ability to gerer le vent–to figure out how to use the wind that blows through this valley to fly.

One of our counselors (fondly referred to on my other blog as manouche #1) was selected to have a vulture walk all over him–mostly to demonstrate the fact that vultures do not attack live beings (fun fact: vultures can see from a mile in the air whether an animal is sleeping, resting or dead), but also because the vulture was attracted to his shiny chain necklaces. No counselors were harmed over the course of this demonstration.

As much time as I spend in Paziols, and as much as it becomes more and more of a home to me every day, I was struck with the realization recently that, until this year, I have never been here without an agenda.

I suppose I’m still here for work, so that generalization doesn’t apply: not yet. I still hope to come down here by myself one day and thoroughly explore everything that interests me in the region. But the cards haven’t played it that way yet, and up until this year, I’ve always been here with a throng of kids, leading them around, showing them for the first time the sights that have been mine for three years.

This year, two things happened differently: for one, we now have a little break between the two sessions, where we don’t actually have activities planned, other than to get the house in order for the next session. But several kids are still here–either extending their first or second session–and as much as our time feels like free time, I’m still making dinner for 16 people, and there are no random jaunts down to the waterside for me.

At the beginning of camp, though, way back in June, we arrived early with only one veteran camper and my boss’ niece to care for, and they ended up caring for themselves in large part. Whereas now, I never have the time to go down to the Prade–a walk the rest of the camp takes every afternoon to cool off in the river (this is when I make the aforementioned dinners for 16), at the beginning, there was time.

I read once about an Italian idea called festina tarde, which means “make haste slowly.” I love the idea, and as Italian as it may be, it still applies here: making haste slowly is what we did with that handful of days. We made up more than a dozen beds, washed the house inside and out, stocked the pantry, checked the cars, ran loads upon loads of laundry…

And yet we still found the time to sit together on the terrace after dinner and a long day to talk–about nothing and anything. We were still able to take walks through the village, saying hello for the first time of the season to the familiar neighbors we had left for a year. We still headed down to the waterside and play.

This girl headed back with the rest of them a few days ago–once the other girls arrived, she stopped being the only head turning like at a tennis match, trying to decode the rapid-fire French the rest of us were speaking, becoming just another one of the campers. But there was something in those first few days that I hope she’ll never forget: I know I won’t.

I’m usually fairly against blog posts that rely too heavily on pictures, but after finding even more from that day we spent at la fontaine des eaux, I decided to make an exception and let the pictures speak for themselves today. Happy browsing!

I have a predicament.

Well, maybe not so much a predicament. Predicaments seem awfully serious, and it’s quite difficult to have a predicament when your days are filled with photo-taking and swimming and cooking. It’s hard to accept the fact that the only real job I’ve had in months seems much more like a vacation than my life of being an unemployed not-so-starving artist ever did.

Call it what you will, I do have a problem: it stems from having blogs that are so concentrated on one topic… this one on travel and the other on food. It means that when I have something else–something that doesn’t fit into either category–to write about, I don’t know where it should go.

What exactly is it that I want to write? Can I mold it to fit into the outlines I’ve set up for myself by constructed places where my creativity is limited? It’s an exercise in writing, of that much I’m sure–something I detested in creative writing classes I took in middle school, but something I know is probably the best way to stretch your mind. But the mindset of writing for the sake of it has slowly evaporated over the last few months when I was so concentrated on writing for work, and now I want to say exactly what I want to say and be done with it.

Why did I choose here? Because it’s a sentiment that, for me, is intrinsically linked to the place where I am: Paziols.

Paziols is a place that brings different things to different people, but to all of us New Yorkers, it has brought something new. I can tell, and not only because of what the girls write as they rotate through their own blog, extolling the virtues of small towns and smaller supermarkets and everyday events made monumental because of the lack of hustle and bustle that has become their lullabye.

For me, it’s the little things. Sending the kids down to Proxi–the aforementioned tiny supermarket–is a stressless situation (something I’m not terribly familiar with). The pace of life allows it: this is a town where everyone knows your name, a town where our neighbor calls in the morning to let us know that it’s probably a good idea to meet the mayor, because everyone is talking about us and no one knows our backstory in the way that they know the lives and habits of everyone else who lives here.

This is a town where we can eat dinner at 10 o’clock at night, where we can take walks under the stars through the vines. Where we’re more afraid of being chased down by wild boars than of the crimes that had become so banal when we heard them every night on the news–I haven’t heard them in weeks.

I could get used to this.

I was always a city girl… now I’m not so sure.

Everything in Paziols is connected.

It’s not a concept I grasped easily: I knew that there was a reason that we were watching Marcel Pagnol movies and taking walks in the vineyards, but the walks themselves never conjured the image of Manon des Sources, and watching Jean de Florette never made me think of the vineyards I knew so well.

This year, for some reason, it’s clicked.

I think a lot of it has to do with the group that we have this year: they’re so keen to learn, so ready to make connections to things that they learn in morning French atelier. I’ve never seen someone so proudly use the word vaisselle before–a term that refers to the act of doing the dishes, and something that everyone here is happy to loudly state that they déteste.

I recently wrote about our trip to Tautavel, home to the centre de la préhistoire. Usually, our one afternoon in Tautavel followed by the film La Guerre du Feu is enough prehistory for me, and I’m happy to move on to the next thing, but this year, it just didn’t happen like that.

First, there were the projects in the downstairs room: constructing mini spears from sticks and stones and a cabane like the one that we saw that was reconstructed from one that the prehistoric men used when hunting elephants.

The next day, one of our infamous lazy Sundays, was spent at the fontaine des eaux, home to a natural source of water that runs at the same temperature all year long. The fontaine des eaux is right next to the river, where we sometimes go to wade (it’s not really deep enough for swimming).

Of course, some of the girls just explored, sitting on the bridge and talking or swimming and playing games, but a few of them, especially the two boys we have in our group, decided to make good on the bamboo that surrounded the area and construct their own spears for fishing.

They were able to understand–much more quickly than I did (three years later)–how interconnected everything here is. One lesson runs into the next: we may try and put the atelier de français in the morning, but that doesn’t mean we stop conjugating verbs in the afternoon. The châteaux may be the perfect location for learning about the Cathars, but if the boys construct an elaborate game of knights in shining armor, the vocabulary my be reintegrated into the day.

I love to watch it happen before my eyes: watch as the girls remember the names of the different tools used by prehistoric man, listen as one of the boys compares the landscape here to the one we saw in La guerre du feu.

Of course, watching as the kids dress up as prehistoric men is amusing as well.

I find it pretty incredible that, after three summers of coming back to Paziols and conducting the same program over and over again, there are still things I haven’t seen: festivals, hikes, museums that we always plan to visit and end up not being able to work into the schedule, or excursions that we do with the group half at a time, and I’m left back at the house, since I don’t drive.

Of course, there are also the things I see multiple times. I’ve been to Carcassonne at least four different times, made the drive back and forth to Barcelona and Perpignan even more. I’ve seen every single one of the Cathar châteaux twice (Aguilar even more). To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d have much more to offer you with regards to travel this year.

Boy, was I wrong.

Because even when you live in a place, even when you spend every spare moment visiting sites in the area, even when you think you couldn’t have possibly missed one thing… well, you always find something.

The Musée de la Préhistoire in Tautavel has been on our list since the beginning: I’ve been four times now… it’ll be five when we go with the second group later this summer. I took anthropology in college, so I’ve become the designated translator and teacher when we move through the two museums, looking at the tools and fossils on display and learning about the history of man.

There is a reason that the musée was placed in Tautavel: the town is the home of the Caune de l’Arago, the place where the first specimen of European man was found in a cave in the mountains. It is still an archaeological site, and a short hike allows any visitor to reach it.

Some kids made the hike last year–the one in the wheelchair we had last year was one of them– but I didn’t get to make the trek. This year, however, everyone wanted to take the walk, and so I made it with them.

I love the way that every year brings something new–it’s nice to see the kids witness the sites I now know by heart for the first time, but I also like to see new things for myself. The walk up to the top of the caune is a little bit steep, and the day we did it, it began to rain, which made the rocks slip and slide. I spent a lot of my time ensuring that none of the kids were falling off the cliff itself, but when we made it to the top, I had time to stop and see the view.

Of course, the walk back down was also spent giving a hand to the kids as they carefully tried to find footholds in the rocks, but I also had time to look out onto the mountains that surround us and think about the prehistoric man–the one whose bones are forever encased in glass just a short drive away–and think about how much and yet how little this landscape must have changed since he walked these paths.