saturday morning's rose garlic

oh albi, you so charmant

These days, the only time that I don't feel like a giant is when I come out of one of my high schools, the technical school, and have to push my way through the mob of students on their cigarette/hang out break to get out to the outside world. This high school is, I would say, about 90% boys. And most of them are tall, large, rugby-playing boys. Normally this statistic is not to my advantage. However this morning as I pushed my way out to my sunny Friday afternoon, I smiled to myself as I waded relatively unnoticed through a sea of them.

In the States, I am slightly "taller than average," for a girl. In France I am, I dunno, "extremely taller than average?" Most shoe stores don't carry my shoe size (when I ask I get wide eyes, a chuckle, and an 'ah non madame,' without even looking in the back). And I spent about two months looking for a pair of gloves here, and finally I gave up and bought a giant pair of handmade mittens from the grand bazaar in Istanbul. And I wear like the second-to-largest pants size that exists. That is not even possible. How can that be possible? I guess my real question is, why are French women so petite ? They are tiny and minuscule.

Here is my hypothesis: in America, we have so much space. So much. So in the past couple centuries we've just evolved to fill up more of the space. Everything we have is more spacious. Our homes are more spacious, our cars, our lawns (lawns: do not exist in France), our cities are sprawled way the heck out, and we still have miles and miles of countryside with seemingly nothing in it.. So we grew into them. The spaces. Everything over here is closer together and smaller in general. I think it's not really a big deal to go from here to Paris (or to Spain, or whatever), but to the locals, it is a JOURNEY.

Speaking of journeys, this morning I made the journey from my house to the Saturday market one block down the street. One of the things I love about living in a small town in southern France is this. There is a couple who I always buy something from even if I don't really need it because I just really like them and one of them always has their baby in one of those tummy pouch things. They sell dried fruit, nuts, beans, lentils, olives, spices, etc. Their stand is the only place in France where one can find black beans. So, when Brent and I feel nostalgic for Mexican food, we stock up. One time she said to us, "you know, we sell stuff at a lot of different markets around here, and out of all those places, I only have two customers that buy black beans, and it's you two." And proud of it. The first time I bought black beans from her, a very small elderly woman was standing next to me and she said, "I have never seen black beans before...."

baby pouch

Also the guys who I buy onions and garlic from are always so funny. One of them has such a strong accent I can hardly understand anything he says (unfortunately he's always the one who tells me how much it costs, so I just kind of have to guess usually). I picked up this one head of garlic, and the one guy said, "no don't get that one, it's not as pretty as the other ones," so he handed me two different ones, and then when I was paying he put the less-pretty one into my basket, c'est offert ! il m'a dit and then his camarade threw in an extra red onion "because it's the end of the morning," which wasn't entirely true, I think they were just pleased that a young, not-quite-awake-yet American girl wearing pink sunglasses was so interested in onions and garlic on a Saturday morning.

home / home?

One time I was talking with Micka about how last summer I lived in a house in Greensboro with three other girls. And he asked me, "well how did you do it?" and I said "quoi ?" and he said, "you know, like who did what in the house? Who did the cleaning? Who made dinner?" and I found it impossible to explain to him that we all kind of lived on our own terms, we all cooked for ourselves and rarely ate together because our schedules were vastly different. Really our only rules were to keep the common spaces clean and try to take care of things that need to be taken care of as you see them. He didn't understand. He explained to me that before he got married, when he was living in collocation, that he was in charge of cooking, and his roommates cleaned up. They had dinner together every night, like a family. At first I thought this absurd...how could twenty-something-year-old boys manage to keep up such structure in their lives? And wouldn't that remove some aspect of freedom? I suppose the answer is that yes, it would. However, lately I've been wondering to myself what it would have been like if we had committed to that. It would have been amazing! And economical, en plus. College students kind of write off home structure as impossible, undoable, ridiculous. In our house we "aspired" to have dinner together once a week on Tuesday nights, and we didn't actually do that a single time the entire summer. It's like the difference between living next to someone and living with someone. Structure (centered around meals of course) is so essential here. It does create kind of an obsession with food that I'm not always crazy about, but it is a kind of peace and solidity you can count on every day at least once a day (for many French folks it's twice a day...they often go home and have lunch with their families before going back to work). They even break bread together when they eat at MacDo...they sure love MacDo, but they sit down in the "restaurant" and eat it with other people. MacDo's in France are actually pretty hip places to hang out...they all have free wifi and a lot of young people just sit in them chatting away for hours like you would do in any café. I'm not endorsing MacDo...it is horrendous. But I have to admit that Europe's weird embracing of it is somewhat interesting.

The other day I bought my airplane ticket back to America. La fin commence.

travels with steinbeck.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum, always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.


When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.


Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
                                                                                                               -John Steinbeck

enfin le soleil

My house is full of people right now. I've always loved houses full of people, and it was a rare occasion chez moi when I was young, so it makes me happy even if I don't really know the people who are currently occupying my house. It's like a holiday or something (knowing France, it probably is a holiday and I am just unaware).
One of the people currently in my house is a guy named Philip, who was Micka's housemate for a few years when they were strapping young men or whatever. Philip hates cheese, for which he is ruthlessly mocked, mostly by Micka. He has very long eyelashes and a long face, which make me think irreversibly of the Grinch, though Philip is not at all a Grinch. He mumbles when he talks, and the first time he came to visit in November or whenever, I remember not understanding hardly anything he said. Now I only have to say quoi ? comment ? every once in a while, which is good because after a while that becomes truly penible.

It is also penible to always talk about the weather, but I must tell you that the sun and sudden burst of warmth is making Albi radiant. It has never been more charming. When the sun is out, I love every minute of living here. It changes everything. Today I took my lunch down by the Tarn and was staring wistfully across the water and found myself thinking, I could live here forever.... and then I had kind of a moment of reveille when I realized where my thoughts had gone and I began to laugh at myself. Of course a picnic by the river in perfect weather would make me feel like I never want to leave.

Speaking of leaving (and I mustn't, for it makes me all anxious) that is unbelievably soon. I've been here for five months now. I am on the home stretch of my work contract (month of March, one week at the beginning of April, and one week at the end of April) which is simply unreal. I was talking to Philip about this the other night, and he said something interesting to me, which is that now that I have really seen what it is like to live here, I can make an informed decision about where to live. Huh ? Whachoo mean, Philip? Well what he meant was, if there ever was a time to say, yeah why not live in France for a while/forever, now would be it.
When I was in Istanbul I met up with my friend's sister Hayley who lives there. I didn't know her before, but I figured it would be fun to have dinner with her or something since, you know, I was in Istanbul. So we did and it was great, and anyway she's been living there for five years. She moved there to teach when she was about my age, and just kind of stayed. And for her it just makes sense for her to stay, at the moment she sees no reason to leave, she has made a life there. The best part, the true reason why she has no desire to leave Istanbul, is because of her bed. "But I love my bed," she said. Her perfect Turkish bed can't go back to America with her, so she stays in Turkey with the love of her life, a bed.

Oh dear, I am attached. It's like when you find a kitten and your mom is like, no you can't play with it, no you can't bring it home even for just one night because you'll get too attached and then when you can't keep it, it will be like the world is crashing all around you.

Micka admitted today that he might even shed tears when I leave. But with dignity, clarified Philip. Yes, with dignity, I agreed. If Micka, strange little man that he is, who yells at me for touching the dishwasher and when I'm baking yells from upstairs ça sent cramé !!!!! even though he knows very well that nothing is burning and he is just trying to get to me, if he sheds so much as one single tear when I leave, what kind of sorry state will I be in? But I mustn't talk of leaving, for there is still time that remains.

more istanbul : the blue mosque