Lyon: Will Miss/Won't Miss

Will Miss   (In no special order...)

• The sense of personal safety walking down the street in this city, day or night;
• Grown-ups, young and old, using kick-scooters as transportation (trottinettes);
• The glow of the Rhône at night with its illuminated bridges;
• Sylvie, my pilates instructor (--how she’d eloooongate her  “voilà” when, finally! I'd accomplish what she'd been trying to get me to do.  “Vwaaalaaaah”);
• The intermingling of ancient Roman walls and ruins with 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th century architecture;
• People of all ages and genders pulling fabric-covered wheeled shopping carts down the street;
• The multi-colored view across the Saône ~
• The omnipresent roadwork and building improvements which speak to France’s policy of investing heavily in the infrastructure during times of economic distress;
• All that delicious unpasteurized cheese;
• A church-filled country where atheism is embraced and accepted as readily as religious belief;
• A mentality that normalizes 2-hour lunch breaks;
• A town that provides bicycles for its citizens, and citizens who use them;
• Bus stops that tell you electronically exactly when the next bus--and the bus after that--is coming;
• A town with colorful painted walls on the sides of so many of its buildings.

Won’t Miss  (In no special order...)

• All that second-hand cigarette smoke;
• How carefully you have to look to avoid the dog shit on the sidewalk and in the street;
• The noise from all those infrastructure improvements;
• Trips to the laundromat;
• The frustration of being a renter with an irresponsible landlord;
• That 2-hour lunch break when commerce stops in its tracks;
• My crappy second-hand European cell phone;
• The pitch of the bleating repetitive buzzer announcing that the Metro train doors are about to close;
• Women’s fashions in store windows -- either too youthful, too bizarre, or too Ivy Shoppe*;
• Inane French TV programming;
• How milk tastes here;
• Trying to understand that rapid-fire French on recorded messages that are meant to give you instructions;
• Those tiny toilet paper rolls;
• The sticker shock on many everyday items (e.g. upwards of $33/kilo for many kinds of cheese).

 * The Ivy Shoppe:  A part of Berkeley’s past:  An older woman’s clothing, lingerie and accessory shop on College Avenue, completely unchanged in both decor and merchandise from its early 1950’s heyday.

Will Miss

•  Writing these Moments and sharing them with you.  Thanks so much for “listening”.

Wine Tasting

Thirty years ago I decided to stop drinking alcohol.  I’d noticed that ten minutes in, my nose would start to run.  Ten minutes after that I would get the flu.  Not worth it.  Still, I take a sip now and then, and that’s what I did when we went wine tasting in Beaujolais country. 

In California this is what I remember about wine tasting:  vast halls in imposing Napa chateaux, customers swarming while retail employees serve up many varieties (expensive and less expensive) in small glasses or cups.

We’d had a rough morning that Monday.  At the wheel of a tiny Fiat 500, I had put Amanda and Larkin’s lives in jeopardy more than once.  By the afternoon, though, we found ourselves north of Lyon driving through picture-perfect villages surrounded by hillside vineyards, in search of wine-tasting “caves.”   We’d spot a sign and pull over.  Inevitably a small note on the door told us to ring the bell.  A few minutes later the owner of the vineyard, or a family member, would appear, usher us in, and give us a taste of two or three varieties.  We’d buy one bottle (costing no more than 7 or 8 €), thank them, and leave.

The Chateau de Lavernette in Leynes was our favorite.  Anke de Boissieu is the wife of Bertrand, whose family has owned this winery for the last hundred years.  She’s Dutch, and, naturally, spoke to us in English.  She brought us and the bottles to a garden table, their dog Dixie (pronounced Deeksee) following right behind.  Anke answered our many questions, her demeanor always composed and calm.  I’m a reader of faces, but hers remained a mystery.  She almost never smiled.  With complete grace she gave us a tour of the chateau, explaining each room, talking slowly, concisely, about how she met Bertrand; about her daughter’s wedding there a few months before.  I particularly noticed when she commented,  "Even after so many years here, I am never blasée about this place."   An hour later we said good-bye, our 6 € bottle of delicious wine tucked under arm.  As we drove off I said, “I don’t get it.  She just spent an entire hour with us, and in exchange we give her $8.50 for a bottle of wine?!” 

Wine tasting here is so personal.  It’s the owner of the vineyard -- the owner! -- whose day you suddenly interrupt when you ring the doorbell.  He or she sits with you, talks with you, asks where you’re from, answers your questions, watches you enjoy his or her offering, and then thanks you for the few euros you hand over for a bottle.

~~~~

The French word for sunflower is tournesol:  turns to the sun.  On the way back to Lyon that evening, we pulled off the road to have a closer look at a field lush with them.  My “girls” climbed out of the car and spent half an hour taking pictures of each other surrounded by sunflowers, laughing, as the sky turned pink-blue-slate with the approaching night.  I joined them for awhile, but this felt like their time, their moment.  When they came out of the field, we took a few more minutes to admire that dramatic sky before climbing back into our Fiat 500.

French Class

At around 10:15 this morning I notice I’m having fun.  Each morning this week I’m in French class at the Lyon Bleu.   That means I’m surrounded by nineteen-year-olds from all over the world, plus one unfriendly fifty-something couple from Pittsburgh.  My teacher, Grégory, is twenty-six, and absolutely adorable.  He’s lively, quick, and funny, even while keeping us focused on the difference between when to use de and when to use en.   

Today is “audio-visual” day, and we spend most of the 2 hours and 15 minutes talking about Ben, “l’Oncle Soul.”  Ben, uncle of soul that he may be, is also twenty-six years old and sounds a lot like Otis Redding.  We listen to his song Soulman several times and parse out its every word.  In Soulman, Ben l’Oncle Soul lists a number of famous people whose personality characteristics he lacks (e.g., he does not have the sagesse of Gandhi, the assurance of Mohammed Ali, the bonté of l’Abbé Pierre, nor the aura of Che Guevara.)  You guessed it -- what Ben DOES have, listen up baby (écoute ça, baby), is soul.  (No one knew who l’Abbé Pierre was except for Lise, the young German woman sitting next to me, who insisted he was a famous Chicago gangster.) 

In 1965, I was one of these nineteen year-olds.  I look at their beautiful smooth-skin faces and there I am, my whole life ahead of me.  My mother had just died a few months before, so I was confused, insecure, and sad even as I was thrilled to be in France, learning the lilt of the language.  That’s why I majored in French in college:  because the entire language sounded to me like a song.  All I knew back then was that this was a song I wanted to know how to sing. 

Sitting on my other side is Kayo, from Japan, whose father died two days before the earthquake.  With a brave smile Kayo says everything is fine now.

I want to tell her she doesn’t have to act so brave, but, actually, I guess she does.  Instead, I simply say how sorry I am, and smile whenever she looks my way.

Eurostar

Do you know that adorable comedian Dimitri Martin?    He did a short riff once on flying in an airplane, which I (the quintessential hate-to-fly person) loved.  He was wondering at people who cvetch about flying.  He pointed out that essentially you sit in an easy chair, ascend 30,000 feet into the air, glide along for awhile, and when you land, you're in a whole different far away place!  What could be more amazing than that!?

 He captures with his humor the very thing that Routine squelches:  the absolutely marvelous truth about what has, to us, become so ordinary.

 That's what I find fun about being forced to think and communicate in a foreign language.  Ordinary sentences become new again, and often reflect a foreigner's way of perceiving from a different angle.  Like Dmitri's airplane journey:  not a pain-in-the-ass, but something quite magical.

 I boarded the Eurostar (don't you love the name of that train?) at 10:25 this morning, and it glided along like an Olympic gold-medalist on ice, making its way to Paris beneath the English Channel.   I was busy reading, so didn't notice how long we were in the tunnel.   Quite some time.

 Then, suddenly we were spewed out into daylight!

 That's what it felt like -- cannon-balled into the French countryside.  Only moments ago we'd been in England!

About fifteen minutes afterwards the young French guy asleep in the seat next to mine opened his eyes and said, "I've been asleep.  Are we in France?"

 I nodded, and he beamed.

 Presto, we were in France.