Category Archives: Joie de vivre

Rome

Greetings from Rome! I’ve been go, go, going since I hit the ground so here are just a few tips I’d like to pass on before I forget them in swirl of moving around.

Go in the off season. It’s November and there are still swarms of tourists here but they surge and disappear like flocks of crows. I have found myself alone in a room enjoying a Bernini or Caravaggio more than once.

When the inevitable moment comes when you are jammed against a wall in a museum packed wall to wall with other tourists, just close your eyes and remember “they’re just like crows; they’ll go away,” instead of screaming, “I’ve gotta get out of here—I’m having a claustrophobia attack!”

Buy Dr. Scholl’s gel insoles. The combination of being on your feet for 10 hours a day, with shuffling slowly on marble and streets paved with uneven paving stones, will cause even the fittest feet to ache. Get gellin’.

No matter how much you study the map and read the guides beforehand, expect to get lost—over and over and over. Rome is a hilly city with winding streets and avenues, half of which have no street signs. Think of it as an adventure.

Similar to #4, no matter how prepared you are to see the “Top 10 Sights” according to some guide, be prepared to not be able to figure out how to even get in to the Roman Forum, or arrive at the Coliseum at 3pm to be told “She-a close-a now,” or never find that one thing in the Vatican you wanted to see because you got turned around.

Please, for the love of God—and this is a personal favor to me—please don’t buy a selfie stick from one of the hordes of Bangladeshi or Nigerian street vendors and ruin the view of your fellow tourists, not to mention not really seeing any of the sites you came 1,000 miles to see because you’re preening and posing.

Learn a little Italian. I didn’t do this and I keep speaking Spanish to them, which many Italians understand but I don’t understand when they respond to me in Spanish with an Italian accent. Prego—it’s not just a spaghetti sauce.

Lastly, Americans, resist the urge to refer to the old Saturday Night Live “Find the Popes in the Pizza” with Father Guido Sarducci. They won’t know what you’re talking about and if they do they’ll laugh charitably then probably roll their eyes once you walk away.

And speaking of priests, yes they are all over the place here. I started a little “Nuns vs. Priests” game of my own but lost count after about a dozen on each side. About 75% of the nuns appear to be from India, the Philippines, and other developing countries. The priests, on the other hand, are mostly young and white. I don’t know what that indicates, but here’s a calendar I bought on the street.

More about Rome later. I’m mostly having a great time, although I did have a bit of a good cry in a public garden today. More about that later.

I’m off to Sorrento tomorrow.

Ciao,

Anna

In New Orleans

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This continues a series of posts about a road trip to New Orleans that starts here.

—

And so we spent five days in New Orleans, and it was pretty much as fun and relaxing as I had expected. Different places have different vibes. You can’t explain why, they just do. New Orleans and Los Angeles feel similar to me—like “anything goes, no judging.” Within limits, of course. There’s plenty of crime in New Orleans, and my friend who lives there has a bar near his house that’s a noisy nuisance.

Did it feel relaxed because I was on vacation? No, that’s not it. I’ve vacationed in Berlin and Dubai, in Edinburgh, Scotland and Scottsdale, Arizona. I had some relaxed moments in those places, but they didn’t feel inherently relaxed.

Was it because the car had been towed and was now in a shop? Maybe. The most memorable part of that was that the tow driver’s name was Earl, and Lynn and Christine thought that was hilarious. I guess if you think about it, coming from England, no one there would name their kid Earl—you either are an Earl or you’re not—but you wouldn’t be named Earl. It would be like if I had named Vince Vice President.

—

I had chosen the dates for New Orleans to coincide with French Quarter Festival. FQF is smaller than Mardi Gras and more musically encompassing than Jazz Festival. There were concerts featuring blues, rock, soul, and all sorts of jazz, all performed by Louisiana musicians.

My favorite afternoon was when we were lucky enough to get a table on one of the rickety-looking balconies overlooking Bourbon Street. Here is Molly demonstrating that we’re on a balcony:

When we ordered beers, the server asked if we wanted large, medium, or small. That was an odd question; I’d never been asked that before. I figured a medium would be the safe choice.

Now, I don’t allow my photo be taken in potentially-compromising situations. But there are plenty of people who do, so here is a photo I found on the Internet of the “medium” beer, along with the “large,” which I think you’ll agree is an understatement.

We had all afternoon to sip our beers semi-responsibly, and we were lucky enough to be perched above a Dixieland jazz band which had attracted some energetic dancers of the Charleston. Here’s what the Charleston looks like. It’s athletic, exuberant, and just makes you feel happy.

—

We started each day slowly, which is how it should be when you’re on vacation. I was always the first up; I can’t help myself. Still, the freshly-made breakfast would already be waiting for me in dining room. It was different every day, and a labor of love. There would be a frittata, muffins or some sort of fruit bread, veggie or meat sausage, homemade marmalade, and of course, coffee. You could make toast or bagels, or instant grits or oatmeal. The fridge was stocked with milk and orange juice and yogurt.

I sat on the front porch and savored the morning quiet with my breakfast and a couple cups of coffee. There were the usual morning sights, like the trash men collecting the trash, parents walking their kids to school, cats skulking by the fence, and people commuting to work on bikes.

Back inside, my crew and the other guests slowly filtered out of their rooms. There were two women there from Vancouver, one of whom got up early to run despite how late they stayed out every night. She and I stretched together on the living room carpet a couple times and chatted. There are six guest rooms at the Ould Sweet Olive, so counting our suite which slept four, its capacity was 14. The rest of the guests were couples from England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Molly, Lynn, Christine, and I would sit in the front room for hours, chatting and drinking coffee, before we got our day underway. We talked about places we’d been, places we wanted to go, kids, pets, and—in hushed tones, politics—because our hostess had numerous photos of herself with Donald Trump on the walls.

Mr. Whooooo

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This is the eighth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I spent our first day wandering the Mini United festival grounds. As I wrote in the last post, Mini owners like to have fun. Cramming is some people’s idea of fun.

I did not participate in the cramming. The most people I have ever had in my car is five. Two of them were men well over six feet tall. I remember the elbows and knees everywhere, and only being able to get up to fourth gear because someone’s foot was blocking the gear stick.

I did happily subject myself to a fake pat down by a fake generic police officer. There are all sorts of things I could write about this, involving naughty British and German stereotypes, but I’ll just say, “Anything for a photo opp with a classic Mini,” and leave it at that.

There was a double-decker bus full of overpriced Mini T-shirts, hats, sunglasses, drink glasses, key chains, and lavishly illustrated souvenir books. I didn’t need to buy anything; I was more than content with my swag bag, which had turned out to contain a bunch of similar Mini trinkets in addition to the bottle opener.

There was lots of racing by professional drivers which I found boring. I’ve never understood the attraction of watching someone drive around and around and around a track.

But then, there were the trick drivers, a la the Italian Job, accompanied by a DJ.

We went back to the VIP tent for our evening feeding, then headed out for the headline concert by Paul Weller. I had never heard of him, or The Jam, his first band. I had never heard The Jam’s number one 1980 hit, Going Underground. There are probably Americans who would be shocked at that, but I was busy changing diapers and going to school full time back then, so I had other priorities.

But also, back in the day, it was probably more possible and quite common for music not to make it over the pond. Not every group was the new Beatles or Rolling Stones, but lots of groups, like The Jam, were huge in their home country.

So Rebecca and I jammed, and I never actually saw Paul Weller because, at 5’3”, I never see anything from the main floor but other people’s heads. There were clearly a lot of drugs in use. A guy near us was hopping on one foot the whole concert, yelling “Whooo!” over and over and over. He was as entertaining as the concert itself.

—

It had been a long day and we were barely started on all there was to see and do.

We trudged back to the tent, feeling like First Class passengers forced to return to Coach Economy. We should have slept soundly but we were so excited about going back the next day that we stayed up talking in the dark. Besides, Mr. Whooo was camping somewhere nearby, so there was a round of mostly good-natured “Shut up!” from us and our neighbors every 10 minutes until he finally ran out of steam around 3am.

Good on Ya, Gdynia

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This is the seventh post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I were sitting in the VIP tent at the Mini festival, pinching ourselves, when a bunch of loudmouths barged in. Oops, turns out they were my fellow North Americans.

Rebecca and I were waved over to join them by a tall woman dressed in black and wearing extreme eyewear.

“I am Dagmar,” she said in a clipped German accent, “head of BMW’s Mini Cooper North American Customer Relations Division,” or some such. “I would like to give you a warm welcome to Silverstone and Mini United.” She never cracked a smile; she was about as warm as an ice cube. Dagmar gave us an orientation to the VIP amenities.

“The VIP toilets are over there … these coolers are available to you 24/7 … your feedings will be at oh-eight hundred hours, 1200 hours, and 1900 hours.”

Our feedings? VIP toilets? And those coolers … for years I had a repeated dream in which I entered a house brimming with priceless antiques and treasure chests full of gold coins and precious jewels. Suddenly I would realize that all this was mine. I have no idea what that dream meant but I felt it had come true now as I stood before a tall glass-front cooler stocked with good German beer and bottles of wine including my favorite, prosecco.

“Anne … Anne!” Rebecca was standing next to me, trying to snap me out of my trance. “Your compatriots have the inside scoop on why we’re really here,” she said as we rejoined them at a table.

A tall guy wearing a tall fuzzy hat with a Maple leaf said, “I got the low down from another employee last night. BMW budgeted for 500 North Americans coming to the festival. Only a select few, like the auto journalists and the big collectors, were gonna get the VIP treatment. But then the recession hit and only 15 of us showed up!” We all laughed. There was one rich guy among us, but most of us were regular middle class people for whom our cars and trips like this were a budgetary stretch.

People often assume that Minis are super expensive cars. How much things cost is all relative, so I’ll just say that they cost about the same as a Subaru Crosstek or Legacy, a Mazda 3, or a Toyota Camry. So you could spend a lot more on a car, or a lot less.

—

We waited for our first feeding, aka lunch, and shortly before noon the pit crews from the rack track poured in. BMW must have reckoned it might as well feed them the good grub, too.

I wonder which bunch Dagmar found more distasteful—us rag-tag North Americans in our jeans and T-shirts and fuzzy hats, or the tatted-up mechanics? Not exactly the high-class clientele she’d had in mind, perhaps.

We enjoyed a light lunch of fresh salmon and salads and desserts.

Then it was off to explore the festival! Rebecca and I slipped a few beers in our swag bags. Tacky, I know, but since the swag had included a Mini bottle opener, we figured we were obligated to field test it.

—

BMW has done its brand research. Mini owners love to “motor,” we love good design, and we love adventure and fun. Not all of us are all of these things, but you get the picture. There are all sorts of Mini events going on around the world all the time, like group road trips, music festivals, and art and design extravaganzas. They’re all organized by Mini owners; Mini United is the only one sponsored, every three years, by BMW.

To give you an idea of how passionate Mini owners can be, here are some Minis with the equivalent of car tattoos showing where their owners drove from—in order—Budapest, Kiev, Moscow, and Gdynia, Poland.

These are just the Eastern Europeans; there were hundreds more from Western Europe, North Africa, Turkey, and Asia.

“This puts things in perspective,” I said as we clinked a couple of beers. “Yes,” said Rebecca drily, “I guess our epic 200-mile drive was worth it, if you like this kind of thing.”

On the Road Again

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This is the fifth post in a series about a UK road trip that begins here.

—

Rebecca and I whiled away a week in Wales. We hiked along the cliffs; this was my favorite sign:

We spent a day at St. David’s Cathedral, which is a functioning place of worship. St. David is the patron saint of Wales. He punished himself for his sins by standing neck deep in the sea. The ice cold sea.

The cathedral was erected on top of a monastery circa 500 AD. The interior was fantastic, though cramped, with signs like this throughout:

It was impossible to get good photos inside because it was so dark and I couldn’t back up enough to get perspective. That’s okay; sometimes it’s good to just be and really see, and not be preoccupied with getting the best shot.

The little gem below is from the exterior. It’s important, in the UK, to look up or you’ll miss the gargoyles, murals, and curlicues.

—

We wandered about the countryside. You know the expression, “take the high road?” Well there really is such a thing as a high road. They’re useful during floods, apparently:

Back in town, we stopped at the butchers—a real butcher shop—to buy lamb. This is Wales, after all, which has more sheep than people.

Rebecca is a great cook, and she managed to make lamb stew with spring potatoes and peas on a camp stove. Here she is doing her impression of a posh Oxfordshire camper, complete with pinky aloft.

There was one rainy day, so naturally we attempted to cook inside the tent. This is a Very Bad practice. As experienced campers, we should have known better. The stove toppled over, the meths ran along the floor, flame followed, and we screamed and scrambled to put them out. We succeeded, but there was a burn hole in the floor of Rebecca’s newish tent.

We often recall this story. She remembers it being her fault, and I remember it being mine. At least it’s not the other way around! All that matters is that neither of us got burned and we still had a tent over our heads, if it did have a hole in the floor.

We returned to the pub a couple times and learned a great deal about McGiver, Mr. T., Luke, Bo, and Daisy. The farmers just couldn’t get over that I, and American, was so ignorant about my own culture.

If our road trip had only been this much—this sojourn in Wales—it would have been enough. But we had only begun! We packed everything back into the Micra and bade farewell to our beautiful, peaceful, seaside outpost. Off we went to our next destination, Silverstone, England, for the Mini Cooper Festival.

The “Welcome to England” sign made me laugh. The drive was like going from Minnesota to Wisconsin, and yet here we were crossing country borders, sort of.

Rebecca wasn’t laughing. She was driving 200 miles on a week of sleep deprivation and encountering Bank Holiday weekend traffic jams and spring road construction projects every two miles. As we slowly progressed I watched her shoulders rise up to the level of her ears. This was my introduction to certain charming British terms such as “buttock clenching,” and “fuckwit.”

The drive took most of a day. By the time we neared Silverstone, Rebecca was laughing in a way that made me nervous. Once again, as we neared our destination, the skies darkened and the winds rose. We pulled into the campground adjacent to the racetrack and festival grounds at dusk and this time did a little better at pitching the tent. We looked around. We were surrounded by a sea of tents and teepees populated by rag-tag Mini owners from all over the world. We were famished, so we walked and walked and walked until we found the food stalls and bought some extremely overpriced and under spiced curry in a paper cup.

We trudged back to the campsite to use the porta loos before it started raining. Neither of us said anything, but we were both thinking we should have stayed in Wales.

Springtime of the Daleks

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Have you ever tried to pitch a tent in the dark in a gale force wind? That’s what Rebecca and I did on the second night of our UK road trip.

“Park the car between the cliff and the tent site to block the wind,” I yelled helpfully.

“But the tent is bigger than the car!” Rebbeca pointed out. There was a lot of flapping and flopping and “f—ing!” and hysterical laughing before it was done.

Here is Rebecca blowing up her “lilo,” which is what Brits call an air mattress. She is purposely not looking at me, or she would burst out laughing and end up sleeping on the hard ground.

We got things pretty well organized, then settled down to sleep. Our bodies were the only thing weighing the tent down. We lay there in the dimness watching the top billowing wildly.

In the morning, we crawled bleary eyed out of the tent to scenes like this:

That’s the wonderful thing about seaside weather; it can change within hours. Rebecca made some coffee and porridge on the cook stove with the meths. I still couldn’t get over that that’s what they called camping fuel.

Then it was off on a hike:

If you live in a place with four distinct seasons, like Minnesota with its harsh grey winters, you appreciate the pure bliss of a spring hike. I do believe that our bodies are attuned to the seasons and nature in general, although that connection is blunted by indoor lighting, artificial schedules, and screens, screens, screens. But if you get outside on a spring day and start paying attention to the colors of the sea and the tiny blossoms and the sounds of larks that you can’t even see because they fly so high, very quickly you feel alive—alive, and free, and joyous.

We hiked for hours and said barely a word to one another; it wasn’t necessary. Then we headed into St. David’s via narrow, hedgerow-bordered roads and farm fields.

We learned we would have to return the next day to tour the cathedral, so we wandered around and ended up in the pub, which fortuitously had a pub quiz that evening. We were enjoying our fish and chips with mushy peas and a pint of ale when a crusty farmer sidled up to us and began making marriage proposals. “I’m a millionaire farmer,” he declared. “Ye could do worse.” We laughed at first, until we started wondering if he was serious because he was so persistent. Thankfully the quiz started and he went back to join his crusty friends.

Now, Rebecca and I had been to many pub quizzes in Oxford, where the typical question was, “In which scene of Hamlet does Polonius offer Laertes a string of aphoristic clichés enumerating the shoulds and shouldn’ts of a young man’s life?”

This wasn’t Oxford. The first question was, “What common household items did McGiver use to escape from a drug lord in Season 3? Was it: a fork and spoon, a pen and paper, or chopsticks and a cigarette lighter?” The rest of the questions were based on other great American TV series like the Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team.

Rebecca and I looked at each other and tee-heed. We weren’t going to win this quiz, but this was much more entertaining than playing cards in the tent. We had had a few pints when Rebecca raised her hand. I can’t recall what cheeky question she asked of the quiz master, because as soon as she opened her mouth the whole pub turned and stared.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Ahx-fohrd-shaw,” she replied (Oxfordshire), intentionally overdoing the posh Oxford accent. They all laughed, we laughed, and the questions about McGiver went on for hours.

—

If you ever go for a walk in the country, be sure to bring a flashlight in case you end up walking back to your tent much, much later, in the dark, on unlit country roads after having maybe one too many pints.

Fortunately, Rebecca and I had packed our headlamps, so we had loads of fun impersonating the daleks from Dr. Who:

“You shall be exterminated!”

Beinvenidos al Hotel California

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This is the fifth post in a series about Cuba that starts here.

—

After a few days in Havana we packed our bags and flew to Santiago de Cuba, a city on the other end of the island. The plane took off as soon as the last passenger stepped on board, half an hour before our scheduled departure. What if that person had been half an hour late? Would we have waited for him?

The plane was basic. The little signs you see in planes, the ones that say, “Fine for Tampering with Smoke Alarm” were in Russian. At least, I assumed it was Russian, and that they said the usual things. The seat tray in front of me was a piece of plywood held in place by chains and hooks that would have cost $5 at Ace Hardware. As we ascended, mist seeped into the cabin. No one else seemed alarmed so I tried to stay calm.

About an hour into the flight, the co-pilot came on to make an announcement. I could understand his Spanish perfectly; maybe he wasn’t Cuban. I was happy to be able to tell my group what was going on. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I translated, “We are hearing a strange noise somewhere in the aircraft and we can’t figure out what it is, so we’re going to turn around and go back to Havana.” Everyone laughed nervously, then fell silent as the plane banked steeply.

We sat on the ground in Havana for a while before taking off again. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the co-pilot said as we took off, “We apologize for the delay. The pilot is new and neither of us has flown this kind of plane before.” What “kind of plane” did he mean, I wondered? A Russian plane? A run-down plane? There was no mention of the funny noise. Presumably whatever had been rattling had been fixed, or determined to not be life threatening.

—

The first thing you notice about Santiago is that it is HOT. Hot as hell and humid. I don’t mind heat to a point, but if it’s too hot, this Minnesota-bred traveler’s brain and body become lethargic. We had flown almost 550 miles to experience “real” Cuban music that could not be heard in the capitol. I’m not a music connoisseur; most music sounds good to me unless it’s horribly out of key or country (which seem like the same thing to me), so I was skeptical.

We were transported to our “hotel”, which seemed to be some kind of abandoned camp compound with whitewashed, cement buildings spread out over several acres. I checked into my room and collapsed onto the bed, so out of it that I wondered if I was being drugged. Of course there was no air con, not even a fan, and no window screens, which allowed clouds of gnat-sized mosquitos into the room. The walls were bare and white, there was a bare bulb overhead and a double bed with a thin white sheet. The bathroom was the same as in Havana, with one threadbare towel and transparent toilet paper but instead of a flimsy toilet seat there was no toilet seat. Nice!

I turned on the black and white TV and there was only one channel; I believe Bonanza was on again. I groaned and attempted to wrap myself in the sheet like a giant burrito to keep the mosquitos at bay.

I woke up to knocking.

“Come to the pool!” a woman’s voice called.

Pool!? I detangled myself from the sheet and saw that my left arm, which had fallen out of the burrito, was covered with hundreds of tiny red welts. I flung the door open and there was one of my fellow travelers, an 80-something lady who had been subjected to a strip search at the airport upon our arrival and had taken it all in stride. She had a bottle of rum in one hand and a cigar in the other. Ten minutes later we were floating on a life preserver in the deserted but clean pool, sipping smoooth rum out of the bottle and smoking an even smoooother cigar. Cuba was heaven.

Hedgehogs, Mice, and Echidnas, Oh My

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I pride myself on writing realistically about life. You can count on me to tell the truth as I know it, to question everything, and to imagine the worst case scenario. I don’t know why the Pentagon hasn’t called me yet to offer me a disaster-planning job.

But that doesn’t mean I’m depressed, or even “unhappy”—the more generic term. Being a highly-analytical thinker has its rewards. I notice and think about things that other people do not. There’s often absurd fodder for laughs. Sometimes I’m the only one laughing, but that’s okay, right?

—

There was an article in the Sunday paper about a study that debunked the popular myth that “happy” people are healthier and live longer. Yes! My friend who works in an old folks home—or whatever they’ve been rebranded as now—has always said, “There are plenty of miserable, crabby 90 year olds. And they’ve always been that way, because their kids tell me they have.”

—

About five years ago, I kicked the depression that had dogged me all my life. Since then I have felt mostly contentment, punctuated with the normal situationally-appropriate emotions. I felt angry when my landlord raised my rent $300 a month, which forced me to move. I was stressed when I moved again three months later so Vince could live with me. I was anxious when Vince was in solitary confinement. I cried for everything my sister and her kids went through when she had cancer. I felt awe hiking in Petra, in the Jordanian desert, and nervous about crossing over into the Palestinian territories. I felt powerless rage when I was banned from visiting Vince. I had a blast with my friends in Berlin. I’ve been bored at work. I was proud when Vince led his squad at his graduation from boot camp. I am excited at the prospect of remodeling my kitchen.

Hey, I guess I just wrote my Christmas letter! What a year it’s been.

—

None of it lasts. Some people figure this out somehow, much earlier in life than I did. Emotions come and go. The pleasant and the unpleasant, they’re all fleeting. So enjoy the nice ones while they last and know that the bad ones will dissipate. Don’t panic if you feel blue once in a while. Don’t latch on to the negative feelings or thoughts. If the blues don’t go away for weeks, of course, seek professional help.

—

In the last week I’ve had some really good times with people I love.

Yesterday I took my mother to tour the Purcell Cutts House, a prairie-style home build in 1913 and owned by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. This is the living room:

The guide explained that the simple, serene style was in part a reaction to the chaos of the age. The architect was from Chicago, which was the industrial center of the U.S. Meat packing and other industries attracted droves of immigrants and African Americans from the south. There wasn’t enough housing, and the water and sewer systems weren’t up to par. There were no child labor laws, workers’ compensation, welfare, or social security.

So architects brought nature and art inside. Obviously this was not a house that could be produced on a mass scale. The immigrants and African Americans still lived in poorly-heated hovels. But at least this one architect could escape all that and find sanctuary at home!

Last weekend, I hosted a cookie-baking party for Vince and his cousins.

They’re not pretty, but we had fun. Strangely, Vince and I had prepared enough dough to yield 16 dozen cookies but only nine dozen made it to the final stage. Hmmm…or should I say, Mmmmm….cookie dough?

—

So enjoy the moments that contain things you love. In my case: design, craftsmanship, nature, history. Kids, creativity, and cookie dough.

Beautiful France

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ANNE

I am writing this the day after the latest terrorist attacks in Paris. There were multiple terrorist attacks in Lebanon the previous day which are getting a lot less attention in the west. I don’t think this is callous disregard for people in the Middle East. I think it’s about what Paris stands for.

I’ve been to Paris and it’s wonderful but the trip that helped me appreciate joie de vivre was to Provence in 2012. I went for a Mini Cooper festival. Yeah, it’s a thing. Specifically, Iggy Pop was the festival headliner, and seeing Iggy Pop in concert was on my bucket list. So off I went.

I had taken a heavy-duty meditation class for three months prior to this trip, so I was as chill as I will ever be. I missed my flight from Paris to Marseilles because I was too absorbed in watching planes come and go through the cavernous windows at Charles de Gaulle airport. I got to Marseilles after dark and chose to drive the two-hours to my hotel in the dark instead of spending the night in a hotel. So part of my perception that France is “so laid back” was my own state of mind, and the fact that I was on vacation. If I actually lived in the south of France, had to get up and go to work every day, pay bills … well, I’d be willing to try it to see if it was as stressful as daily life in the U.S.

I turned the corner out of the rental car company into the enormous tunnel under the port of Marseilles and ran smack into a thousand-car traffic jam. Here’s where I first noticed something different. In the U.S., people would have been laying on the horn, screaming the F bomb, and abandoning their vehicles to “go get someone to straighten this out.” I witnessed something like this when I was in a 25-car pileup on the freeway in St. Paul during a blizzard a few years ago.

But not in the south of France. People were honking, but only in a half-hearted, “I’m bored so I’ll toot a tune on my horn” sort of way. We all had our windows rolled down because it was a hot evening and there were diesel fumes and of course most of the people were smoking. My fellow travelers were listening to a comedy show on the radio. It was in French so I didn’t know it was a comedy show until the people around me started laughing and it echoed throughout the tunnel. Some of them looked over at me and I fake-laughed. Not one of the thousands of us got out to “go find someone and get this fixed.” Eventually we started moving and were on our way.

—

My friend Heidi flew over from London for 24 hours for the festival, but after that I was on my own for however long I was there. A week? 10 days? I can’t even remember. Time seemed to slowed down.

I went for a hike along the Mediterranean:

Yes, there were vineyards, and sections of the trail smelled like pizza because they were planted with rosemary and oregano.

I drove around the mountains in my rental Peugot, which was smaller than my Mini Cooper. I stopped at a farmer’s market and bought some fresh produce, Roquefort cheese, a small bottle of champagne.

I ate at a seaside restaurant. I was there for hours—no one came to whisk my plate away and deposit my bill the moment I’d taken my last bite.

France, in my mind, stands for beauty and enjoyment of all life’s moments and pleasures. Food that tastes like food, drinking (and—gasp!—even smoking) in moderation. Seeing and appreciating beauty, not just rushing blindly through life checking off items on a to-do list. I know France has got plenty of ills, but I believe these are some of the reasons she is targeted—because fundamentalists (of any faith) hate beauty and pleasure. Not to mention topless sun bathers.

Today, I will be French. I will appreciate the sunrise from my front window. No terrorist can take that away from me.

Breaking Free

Living Well, Despite what Life Throws at You

Category Archives: Joie de vivre

Rome

In New Orleans

Mr. Whooooo

Good on Ya, Gdynia

On the Road Again

Springtime of the Daleks

Beinvenidos al Hotel California

Hedgehogs, Mice, and Echidnas, Oh My

Beautiful France