Month: October 2017

Sunday in Aix and virtually nothing is open.  A few groceries and boulangeries are open in the morning, close for a couple of hours at midday, and may open again in the later afternoon.  The international chains in Les Allées d’Aix – Sephora, Zara, H&M – are open for the determined shoppers.  A number of restaurants stay open to feed the hungry.  Late in the morning it is possible to see a few locals and clergy chatting happily at the end of the church service – children in Sunday best, priests resplendent, but most of the adults in smart casual.

The result is a lot of confused tourists wandering around looking for entertainment – the museums and galleries are closed too – and mostly ending up sitting in a street-front restaurant, eating, drinking, and watching the passing parade.  I suspect the locals mostly get out of town.  Certainly the petrol stations are busy, and for many people the weekend is possibly the only time they get to use their cars.

In the Centre Ville the tiny streets, and even the super wide Cours Mirabeau, are protected by bollards that pop up and down to allow only special card holders to enter.  Of course everyone walks on the roads, which are surprisingly dangerous notwithstanding the limited entry for cars.  The bollards are no barrier to motorbikes, scooters or bicycles, and few bother to use horns or bells to warn they are coming.  Even cars can sneak up on pedestrians very quickly.  But it is the two wheeled drivers who are the menace.  They do not show the same care or courtesy as motorists, and woe betide anyone who does not leap out of their way.  I am told you develop a 6th sense for when to get out of the way.  I need to develop mine soon.  I do not want to be testing my travel insurance anytime soon.

Anyway, the point I was starting to make about Sundays, is that it is a bit like it used to be in NZ.  That is to say, you can get up late, entertain yourself without the need for commerce, and generally have one day of the week that is spent in quiet enjoyment.  I am not sure if I appreciate it or not at the moment.  I am so used to being able to get whatever I want, whenever I want.  But for those working in retail or running small retail businesses, it is a blessing.  And I am sure we could struggle through with a day off shopping in NZ if need be.  Might even get to enjoy it, as I do Easter Fridays at the moment, although I admit by Easter Sunday I am generally over it!

This morning I went for a walk, just to keep the exercise level up.  The weather has turned breezy, so a bit cooler today.  I encountered yet another military patrol, and this time I was determined to catch the eye of one of the soldiers, just to see what they were focusing on.  I did, and decided he looked about 12.  But I am sure he is a highly trained 12 year old who knows the signs of a potential terrorist and how to use the automatic weapon he is carrying.  I am really not trying to be dismissive.  I know France has suffered a number of attacks, including not far from here, and that heightened security is essential.  But I just don’t know how to react to this facet of life in France (in Europe?), which seems so incongruous in a place like Aix.  Certainly I feel no less secure than I did in NZ, but that is because the attacks are so random it seems pointless to do anything but dismiss the possibility from your head.

So let me backtrack a bit.  I have been here three weeks now, and the last week and a bit on my own.  For the first fortnight my sister Jacqui was here with me, and we got around a wee bit.  After 32 hours in transit, including the world’s longest commercial flight (Auckland to Doha – 18 hours), we picked up my brand new lease car and drove almost two hours from Nice to Aix to take over the apartment.  For the next week we never slept a single night beyond 2am extending eventually to 4 am, but we managed a whole heap of rambling around Aix,  took in an exhibition at Hôtel Caumont, and went a train trip to Marseille for lunch and a look at the old port.  At the end of that first week we had a long weekend in Paris with my friends Sylvie and Camille to show us around – fitted in tours of the Marais, St Germaine, Montmatre and La Pigalle, shopping, eating, and a trip up the Eiffel Tower.  Before she left we also did a quick guided tour of some Provence highlights – Arles, Pont du Gard, Avignon, St Remy, Les Beaux – and she used her last day in time honoured fashion to buy up half the town.

Then I drove her back to Nice Airport, dropped her off, and I have been on my own since.  The key seems to be establishing a routine, and working out how to do those ordinary tasks we take for granted at home.  I have never found it too difficult to fit into new surroundings after a few days to get used to them.  In this case the apartment is lovely, and ideally placed whether for walking into town, or accessing the motorway by car.  Being alone is a bit of a challenge, but I anticipated that, and anyway I have lived mostly alone for the last few years.  Somehow not having to go to work does not mean there is nothing to do during the day.  There is still a household to maintain, albeit modest in its demands, and I am keeping to a daily yoga and walking schedule (sadly no convenient indoor swimming pools around).  I am also trying to write a bit each day, and to keep a photo record of my time here with daily FaceBooking postings.  I imagine people will soon get sick of looking at them, but they are a record for me as well.

Food is interesting.  Jacqui and I ate out a lot, and enjoyed doing so.  We also breakfasted on croissants, and occasionally resorted to the very good bread, cheese and charcuterie for an easy meal. But that is not really a sustainable way to eat, and I am hoping to improve my fitness, not sabotage my weight.  So I eat a late breakfast of muesli, yoghurt and fresh fruit, skip lunch, maybe take a hot chocolate, or glass of wine or cider in the afternoon, and cook my own dinner.  Because I am still finding my feet and not much interested in cooking for one anyway, dinners are basic but healthy – grilled meat and salad or veggies – no frills.  I will save the break outs for the times I have people with me.

So sorry, no stories of pigging out on the glorious patisseries, although they are to be found everywhere.  Nor am I drinking live a fish – although the range of wines here is amazing.  This particular area produces a huge volume of very good rosés, which seems to suit the climate.

Communication is also interesting.  I can read more than sufficiently well to get by, but speaking and understanding conversation is a different thing.  No doubt my accent is atrocious, but I have enough of a handle on the basics that people generally understand what I am saying.  No matter what the circumstances, I begin every conversation in French.  People seem to know what I want, but they often over-estimate my ability to deal with the response.  The butcher and I get on well.  He takes my order, asks me if that is all I want, tells me how much it is, and bids me good day.  All in French, both of us.  But others immediately switch to English or Franglais.  This makes me feel inadequate, which of course I am.

I persevere, throwing French phrases into my English sentences, and asking the better English speakers the correct terminology from time to time.  There is, at the end of the day, very little chance of not being able to achieve what I am aiming for, but it feels like a little victory every time a whole transaction is completed in French.

That is enough for today.  I have friends to pick up from Marseille Airport this evening, so that will be another little adventure in itself.  Next time I might add a bit to the grandma story …

Saturday is one of the big market days in Aix, as I suppose it is in many other French towns and villages.  The Textile market runs the length of Cours Mirabeau, and the Food market spreads itself around La Rotonde at the head of the street.  In another month or so the Christmas market will be there too I understand.  So this morning I skipped my yoga session (which I caught up in the afternoon) to rummage and take some photos.  Check out some of the food treats on sale below.

The sun was out, the sky was blue, the crowd was out to enjoy itself.  People were eating, drinking and soaking up the unseasonable warmth.  Even the soldiers patrolling with machine guns in hand looked relaxed.  Yes, armed military, not police, patrol the streets of this little provincial town, as they do everywhere in France now days.  Interesting times.

I love the markets here, but I keep getting drawn into discussion with stall holders and buying things.  Yes, they are usually men, and some of my readers will know I have the same problem with the wine sellers in Farro’s at home.  Well I am in a different place, but I am still me.  Its amazing how easily a friendly conversation in Franglais can lead to the purchase of a scarf, or a bag, or even tea towels with Cézanne prints on them.  Do you think they see me coming?

Some of my FaceBook friends expressed an interest in the story I started last time based loosely on my grandmother.  So here is a bit more …

What I do know is that she arrived in Auckland in 1910, before the Great War.  Somehow she met and married one William Pera Aperahama, native of a NZ as foreign and distant from her home as it was possible to get.  Later he fought in that war back in and for her old world, and would eventually succumb to the lung disease that resulted from mustard gas poisoning.  But not until quite a lot of water had flowed under the bridge, as they say.

Him I never knew at all, except as a dark and exotic face in a sepia photograph of a very young man in military uniform.  I have had the original of that photo restored, and it hangs on my wall alongside another predecessor from my father’s side of the family.  People amuse me by assuming the two men are related, which is about as far from reality as it is possible to get.  But for many years the young man in that photograph represented my much treasured claim to be truly of this place – actual tangata when, although I never heard that term until well into my adulthood.

By the time I knew what tangata whenua meant I knew I was not it, because Grandma’s husband was not my mother’s father.  Not her natural father anyway, although he was her legal father and the man whose household she and her two full brothers grew up in.  I should have figured it out long before my mother spilled it out.  I knew all of my uncles and aunts, the older three dark skinned, brown-eyed and glossy haired.  The younger two and the youngest, my mother, all fair, blue-eyed and curly haired.  So how did that happen?  And having happened why did my grandfather, by all accounts a proud and truculent man, continue to maintain the household and bring up three children not his own?

All I know for sure is the bitter legacy it left for my mother.  As a child she had no more idea than I that her father was not her natural father, but she felt the sting of contempt the respectable of the time reserved for those who did not measure up without knowing what she did to deserve it.  Bad enough her Pakeha mother was married to a Maori without so obviously straying from her marriage vows as well.  For what was hidden from a child was as plain as the nose on your face to the rest of the world.

I was there the night one of her older brothers flung the truth of her parentage in her face during the course of a drunken rant.  She was already the mother of two small children, and while not understanding what was said, I can still recall the impact.  And the provocation was that most emotional of all issues – land.

 No wonder the bitterness seemed to well in my mother from that day forward until it seeped through her skin and began to rub off on those around her.  As a small child I had learnt from her lessons of tolerance and racial equality.  Not as broad and liberal an approach as we aim for today, but well-intentioned and imbibed with the ideal of fairness.  As a teenager she taught me hatred and intolerance and blame.  But too late.  Do not the Jesuits say give us a child until he is seven and he is ours for life?  In my case at least it was true, and the earlier lessons took better than the later ones.  But quoting my mother’s own earlier lessons back at her led to a turbulent ride for a teenager.

Of course time has completed the circle.  My mother no longer hates, has adopted grief for the past in place of bitterness.  Such is age, which does not usually encompass wisdom, just painful acceptance.  I cannot find it in me to blame my mother for what she became in those years.  I only blame her for trying to spread the poison.

As a young woman my mother was a beauty.  At my age she was still an attractive woman, although lacking that well-cared for and dressed look that preserves the luminescence of wealthier women at that age.  As an older woman now you can still see that she was once striking, although she is shrinking and fading before my eyes.  But as a young woman she was embarrassed by her family while hardly aware of the reason why.  True, as young adults during the war her siblings had been involved in the odd scandal of the sex out of wedlock sort.  But it was war time.  And the Yanks were garrisoned in Waikaraka Park at the foot of her street in Onehunga.  Plenty of other families had similar tales to hide.

What my mother craved was not sex or glamour, and certainly not rock and roll.  What she craved was respectability.  A steady income and a rock solid family to rely upon – that was what she wanted.  So when a shy and unprepossessing but persistent young man began courting her, she let him.  She took a look at his family.  Fourth generation kiwis of Protestant Irish extraction.  None of the slight hysteria of her own Roman Catholic upbringing.  Father in paid employment, mother at home with the kids – no illegitimates.  Sisters plain, but apparently respectable.  A modest house, which they owned, and a car.  Well-off aunts and uncles who looked down on her a little.  She approved of what she saw.

And my father was kind and steady and not a drinker.  At least not a real drinker like her brothers and most of the men she knew.  Nor did he bet on horses, which was the hole her mother kept chucking money down.  He even had his own car, and gave up smoking so he could afford to take her out.

So she said, “yes”, and lo and behold within a couple of years she had a house of her own looking down on the WOOD IS GOOD sign at Penrose from the slopes of One Tree Hill.  She also had a live-in mother who could not afford her own lodging, so in time honoured manner stuck with her youngest daughter.  And I had a live-in grandmother who loved and indulged me because by then all the men had left her life except sons and son-in-laws.

Oh Lordy Lordy – may God have mercy on my soul.  REMEMBER – this is a story.  

 

I have been in France for 11 days, 3 of those in Paris, but otherwise mostly in Aix-en-Provence, where I have rented an apartment for until new year’s eve.  Then I fly out, missing the event entirely, and arrive back in NZ on 2 January.  What am I  doing – well let’s start with today.

I got up and did a yoga practise – I am supposed to be improving my fitness while I am here – and then set out for one of my many little challenges.  Today it was beauty treatments.  Having already navigated the system of having to pay to subscribe to an establishment or else pay triple prices for everything, it was time to go beyond nails and dive head first into the world of waxing and tinting.  So I psyched myself up, practised all the necessary instructions, and set off full of trepidation.  Exposing ones body to a chic French fashionista is bad enough, without having to explain the technicalities of what is required in a foreign tongue.  However, I survived been waxed and polished by an expert, and so another hurdle leapt.

After lunch (actually a late breakfast because too nervous to eat before beauty treatment) a knock on the door and it was Rita’s husband.  Rita is the lovely neighbour who keeps an eye on me for Madame (apartment owner who lives elsewhere).  He wanted me gone I think, so he could let the maid in.  Yes, I have a maid once a week who cleans, and tidies everything away with such ruthless efficiency I have to rearrange my space back to usable when she is gone.  I have never seen her, and suspect I never will.  Money is left in an envelope in the drawer, and she comes and goes in my absence.  Seems to work for both of us.

Then I had to go and post a letter to confirm that my son in law, who is trying to get permanent residency in NZ, was actually living in a genuine marriage with my daughter.  The letter not a problem, but how and where to post it?  Siri on my phone sent me down the road towards motorway to an address that turned out to be a block of flats.  Monsieur Rita pointed me gently in the opposite direction to the large La Poste building on the intersection I walk through every single day.  The machine that sells the stamps insisted there was no such country as Nouvelle Zélande, and once it told the man at the counter the same thing he was so kind as to sell me a stamp in person.  Hurdle 2 for the day negotiated.

Finally I set off on my long daily walk.  It was a very warm day, and the first thing that happened was that the arm fell off my sunglasses.  Fortunately every third shop in Aix is an optician, so soon got that sorted (“pouvez vous aider moi” seemed to work), but managed to spend E30 on a case for them at the same time. Oh well, I had been meaning to buy one sometime.

Finally, when I got weary, I sat drinking my rosé, watching the world go by from Bar Cézanne, and wondering once again what I am doing here?  Bloody Brian.  My refrain but only half true, because I have always needed to do this.  Who could have known I would meet and love another man before I followed through on my plan?  C’est la vie, et la vie est bonne.

Aix is full of young people.  They dress in the tightest jeans (boys and girls) and t-shirts, sneakers and leather jackets.  They seem not to care what the future holds for them.  Phones in hand they strut and stroll, greet and kiss, chattering like the birds in the trees on the Cours Mirabeau at dusk.  And the dogs.  I want to photograph every one for Johan.  I have never seen so many different breeds.  They go everywhere – into shops and bars and restaurants.  On the train.  But contrary to popular belief the streets are not paved with dog shit.  They are very civilised, these dogs.  I am beginning to see why Johan loves them so much.

 

My hair is grey.  So light it is almost bright white.  For the first time in my life I am a platinum blond.  It is naturally slightly curly, cut in a shortish bob.  So people constantly tell me I look like Marilyn Monroe.  Of course I do not – my curves are somewhat exaggerated compared to hers – but I know what they mean.  It is the hair – just the hair.

At the moment I am sitting writing in the sunny front room of a two bedroom apartment that I have rented in Aix-en-Provence until the end of the year.  My real home is in Auckland, NZ, where I have a slightly less grand apartment in the inner city suburb of Grey Lynn.  For my sins I am a partner in a law firm, who specialises in advising local government.  Interesting, but not exciting.

So what is this blog about?  Not law I promise you!  No, I am a single, 62 year old baby boomer off to have an adventure, think about the past, and pontificate on life.  There was a trigger that brought me here, and I might tell you about it some time.

For now I warn you, this blog is about me.  I will tell you about living in Aix-en-Provence, and some other things that you might find interesting as well.  But my intention is to be self-indulgent; and by that I mean truthful, fickle, and occasionally embarrassingly open.  So read on at your peril.