9 March, 2002

In no particular order...

In France, cans are called boxes. So, for example, you don't drink a can of beer, you ask for a box of beer. Also, night clubs are called Boxes of Night.

We live in a small town. In Cannes, where we lived for the first seven months, the France Telecom office was large, there was always a long wait, and we had a lot of troubles with our phone service.

Here, the France Telecom office is small, and has about 3 employees who are very friendly and have lots of time. It is the kind of place where I could go in to sign up for ADSL, and Frederic who works there could call up his friend Philippe at the computer shop in Tyrosse and say "I have a client here with the old computer of Leslie Varela, who wants to add a USB card for the ADSL modem. When can you do it?" It's a very friendly and personal place to live -- a big improvement.

After living here for 8 months, and meeting only one other speaker of our mother tongue, it turns out that there is a wonderful guy named Joe Mock from British Columbia, who lives exactly 185 steps from our door.

He is married to a French woman, and has two excellent children as well. He is an extremely talented musician, and is well known in Canada as a member of the folk group Pied Pumkin.

In order to make more connections here, and also because we wanted to, we joined a monthly reading group. The first Monday of each month, we meet at Jocelyn's house, and discuss a spiritually-oriented book. It is quite an adventure. We can understand most of what's being said, but people can really get wound up and it gets hard when 5 people are talking at once. Still, we've met lots of nice people there.

Xavier Carrere along with his wife Marie and Iban, their 2-1/2 year old son, have become friends. I mentioned to our friend Leslie that I would be interested in doing some design work, for free, for a French person. I want to get some experience working in French, but I wasn't quite at the point where I felt I could speak French well enough to charge for it.

So, I am working on a web site for Xavier, at www.xaviercarrere.com. It is really a fun experience to work in a foreign language. I find that I have an irrational fear of telephone conversations. I tend, too much, to use e-mail as a crutch.

Gia celebrated her 40th birthday on February 25th. To celebrate, and for other reasons that will remain mysterious for the time being, we took a vacation and went to Spain for a couple of days.

It turns out that San Sebastian (pictures), a medium-sized and beautiful city, is only about 50 minutes away. We'd been thinking of it as a major trip, but we could go any time we wanted to without much trouble.

We stayed in a hotel on a cliff (click here to see a picture). It was beautiful and romantic.

Spain is a cool country. It sounds really trite, I'm sure, but the two days we spent there were terrific. The people all seem relaxed. They have enormous quantities of bars, and few restaurants. There were lots of people on the streets. Although it was a Friday night, it still felt more festive than we would have expected.

The only dark note was that driving around in early evening we came upon a square full of riot police, with the all the masks, plexiglass shields, and machine guns you could ever want. We don't know why, except to suspect that there was a Basque rally going on. The Basque separatists have been responsible for many many terrorist attacks in San Sebastian.

We have some beautiful pictures that I'll put up someday.

Here is a link to a Biarritz webcam, with a view of the beach. Biarritz is a gem of a city 20 minutes south of us. If you ever want to see what the weather is like here, you can visit this webcam.

Since we put these pages up, I have been tracking hits to them, and where the hits come from. You may be interested to know that, in addition to our friends, people have visited these pages looking for these search terms.

• undressed nuns
• junior mints wallpaper
• belt conveyor with infrared sensor
• "baby+penises"
• just moved postcard slogans
• nuns undressed
• pictures of spanish american guy with cloths
• plesure balls
• +"burn trash" +"country"
• Barry Pain
• gabriella feet
• passive.aggressive driving
• semi truck wallpaper *pictures*
• surreal gardens wallpaper
• gabriella half woman
• my favorite... pictures of manic depression they really got what they were looking for...

Jacques Chirac is the president of France. He is running against Lionel Jospin for the presidency in the next couple of months. You should know a little about this man, who is a prime player in the European Union. In 1996 (admittedly 6 years ago) he inaugurated the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. It was explained to him, during the ceremonies, how one could search for a document on the computer. The president interrupted suddenly in order to inquire about a technical detail: " La souris, qu'est-ce que c'est ? " (the mouse, what is that?).

Chirac's principal campaign pledge is the fight against insecurity. I am sure all the psychologists will vote for him.

Historically, there has been a traffic ticket amnesty during presidential elections. There is no particular legal basis for it, but if you have gotten a speeding ticket, and you have not fully been punished, any remaining portion of your sentence is pardoned. The result has been an increase in the number of highway fatalities in the months leading up to elections. There is an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of pardoning all the speeders. Interestingly, men are less in favor of the amnesty then women.

On the other side of the ocean, George Bush looks like he used to be a good guy to to go fishing with. What went wrong?

The last update to these pages was September 6th, less than a week before the WTC events. When I sat down to write this update, I realized how completely the world has shifted in the past six months. From here it looks like fascism is starting to thrive in the U.S.

How the news is covered here is too big a subject to cover adequately, but basically we get the same mainstream news as Americans, plus a few tidbits on the side that don't seem to make it to the US. For example:

• that Bush had been negotiating with the Taliban since his third week in office for a pipeline to get oil from the Caspian Sea
• how such a pipeline would be worth something like a trillion dollars to American oil companies
• how half the cabinet members are former oil industry employees
• how in July Bush gave the Taliban an ultimatum that they either build a pipeline or he would carpet bomb Afghanistan
• how the CIA were meeting with Bin Laden as recently as July
• and how the American security services in France knew already, in the days leading up to September 11th, that there would be a major terrorist attack against the US on that day
• how after an entire, though small, war, "we" have now managed to get rid of the Taliban and are ready to install our pipeline, but have not actually caught a single person responsible for the WTC events with the exception of a Frenchman, who happens to be from a nearby town

In Paris you now pay 1/2 price for parking if you have a 1/2 sized car.

On television here, they are passionate about investigations into naughtiness. They have, very frequently, an investigative journal into strip teaseuses, or a special on Paris after hours. On the shows with guests, they have topics like "Secretly I lead a cabaret."

There is not very much overtly erotic content on television apart from the advertising, but they seem very anxious to wedge sex in "legitimately" somehow.

An interesting aspect of life here is that we see aspects of the United States that are censored over there. For example, there are old childrens books and cartoons that are overtly racist.

I find this very interesting, and it causes me to wonder if it is really a good thing to just erase the past that way. Kids nowadays (listen to me... I must be old) have no idea how life was in the past. When I was born, there were still segrated schools, but nothing overt is left from that time. This makes it hard to realize how far we've come, and what immense progress was made.

All the PC discussions in the world haven't given me the same understanding of how the world has changed as seeing a really racist cartoon movie from the 40's.

Capbreton is cool. It's pretty mellow, and we've made lots of friends here. It's less dead than we expected in the winter, and quite nice in the summer. We couldn't stomach living on the Cote d'Azur. It's a beautiful area, but there are too many people and we went mad every time we had to drive somewhere. It's impossible to imagine that we were at one time thinking of moving to San Tropez.

We really like this part of France. We can go to Spain for the day quite easily, and there are several interesting small cities around. However, it does feel as if something is missing here. I haven't yet put my finger on what it is. I think of a book by Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere. Before I lived here, I always lived in places that were big centers of energy -- New Orleans, Boulder and other places. This is the first time I've ever lived in a place nobody's heard of. I don't think my ego has adjusted yet.

From the magazine portion of Le Figaro... I don't know why, but it seems particularly French:

"Brigitte Bardot provoqued involuntarily the flooding of numerous French web sites. To protest against her campaign against dog eaters, Korean gastronomes undertook to block the discussion forums under an avalanche of e-mails. The assault was immediately arrested by a number of internauts, who just added some lines of programming to block all messages coming from addresses ending in .kr."

The Euro is here, and it's great for us. However, it is hell for everyone else. As an example, more than a year after we arrived in France, it was still very difficult to know what is a "good price" for something. When I went to get the oil changed, they could have said "600 francs", and I would have said "sure!" to a $90 oil change. We really depend on our gut knowledge of pricing. Now, the Euro is exactly the same as a dollar here, though the exchange rate is a little different. For the French, the francs are gone but you see, everywhere, what the franc equivalents are of prices. It will be a long time before people are really comfortable with it. Interestingly the Euro has resulted in one of the largest lawsuits in history. Here is a translation of another article from the Figaro:

"The Euro was introduced with much fanfare and not too much trouble. However ... the designers of the bills based the map of Europe on a satellite map by a company called M SAT, without telling anyone. The original satellite map had several specific features that were either unique or enhanced by hand in order to make up for deficiencies in the satellite photo, and these features are also found on the Euro bills. On the M SAT photo, for example, a plain in Italy was retouched and clarified, and a forest in the northern Alps was shown in exceptional detail. The Euro bills have the same features, which apparently could not have come from anywhere else."

"So, the authors of the map have decided to sue the Banque Centrale Européenne. Since we are talking about the design of virtually all of the cash in Europe, damages are expected to be large. The map author joked: 'each bill cost 70 cents. For a book, the rights of the author must be around 10%. We'll see for us...'"

This picture says something about the relationship between France and England.

If you have been looking for a snappy rejoinder to unwanted sales calls, it works really well to say "Well, actually I'm not interested. I'm living it up in the south of France, and my phone just gets forwarded here." I can never tell if they really believe me, but it definitely stops the sales pitch in its tracks.

Here in France, the middle age is called the medium age.

We saw an ad on television for a show entitled: DIM BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE. In fact, it was for a show called "Beautiful People", running on Dimanche (Sunday).

Some of the hardest things to get used to are physical reflexes that work in the US, but not here. Two examples:

• At intersections with traffic lights, there are no lights whatsoever visible past the line where you're supposed to stop. If you pull too far forward, you can no longer tell when the light changes. You have to guess, and it can be stressful. After 18 months, I still consistently pull too far forward.
• Many stores have doors that open inwards. I think that it is a law in the US that businsses have to have doors that open outwards, so that if there's a panic at the ice cream parlor, the 4 people waiting for their cones won't be crushed in the rush. Almost every single time I go shopping, I walk into a door because I expect to be able to push it outwards and it won't go.

Our house is amazingly stricken by mold. If you imagine the worst it could possibly be, then multiply by a factor of 5, you might be close. Apparently, many houses here are built without adequate insulation, and the rising and falling temperatures from day to night, coupled with a high-humidity environment, cause rapid mold growth. We moved into a beautiful, freshly renovated apartment, and we are going to leave behind a wreck of a house that needs to be stripped bare inside before it will even be rentable to anyone else. We won't post pictures unless you really beg.

Unimportantly, but because some of you might be interested, after using a Mac from 1986 until 2001, I have switch to a PC this spring. It's easier to get repairs done locally, and easier to test web sites on.

Article found somewhere by Katherine Robertson, an American friend who lives on the Cote d'Azur:

The Black Berets in Afghanistan
French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan to Convince Taliban of Non-Existence of God

Kabul---The clean-up portion of the ground war in Afghanistan heated up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of the remaining Taliban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of sidewalk cafes at strategic points near the front lines.

There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will propagate fear, uncertainty and doubt by looking remote and unattainable.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, "The Taliban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous proportions. There is no God and I can prove it."

Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man's inescapapable lack of freedom of action, with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoke from the Frenchmens' endless Gauloises and Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.

That's all for today...