Unsettled

 

No sooner was I back to my computer and to happily writing and photographing the world as I came to it, when a sudden trip has whisked us off across France in search of an apartment to live in. This means that I am back to posting with my phone, on the road. I don't mind this per se, but it works very poorly. Knowing this has caused me to hedge my bets and once again post a few things to tide me over until I return.

Fortunately I have two months of material!

I did post a large number of my pictures along the way of our travels, but often without much context or organization. I don't really even know what pictures I've already showed you, but I think it would be better if I didn't worry about that. Instead I am going to go into my rather large pile of highly edited and constructed pictures and pick some random ones out that catch my eye. You may or may not have seen any of these, but for a little travelogue fun I will try to add a few notes here to give these pictures a little more context for you.

This first picture is extremely doctored.

If there was any bona fide tourist location in our very humble and delightful Kyoto neighborhood it would be the Daitoku-ji Temple, which was really a kind of huge park of Zen Temples near our house. While one could walk through the area, only certain of the many famous temples were visitable, and those for a fee, all of which we paid. Most of these pictures are from this area today. This first one was taken of a closed and locked up building, and taken through a crack in the doors. I lightened it to visibility. After that I added in a stream and a cat. Then I made it into a ink painting scroll. But it was a lovely area and this fairly well captures the fancy of looking into that closed and mysterious world.

This also is from the same temple complex, along a long walled path at the southern entrance that we rarely used. I was fascinated by Japanese manhole covers, but my one minute method of photography did not let me do a survey of them (anyway, tokyo's were the best I have ever seen and I adored them!). Honestly this was not the best part of the temple complex, but I was not entirely able to resist its grand symmetries.

This is still in the same temple complex where a bamboo grove grew behind a bamboo fence (and also behind one of its impressive border walls). There is a very famous a tourist mobbed area of bamboo forest in the city's west (Arashiyami, a neighborhood we loved but never went back to). But I was pretty enamored of this grove (not tourist mobbed!) and have some nice pictures too of crows on a wall in front of it.

But this is just a tree, and a fence, and then the bamboo.

This is from a world heritage temple sight in Uji, which is a famous green tea and tourist area of Kyoto- like a city of it's own, but its also kind of a part of Kyoto. This is from the Byodoin Temple. It was pretty! It was a Phoenix Temple, with phoenixes on the roofs. We were mainly interested in the tea in Uji though and drank a lot of it. And to our surprise the best tea was in the tea room of this temple complex! 

Oh the tea was something else! Gyokuro for the win! I did not much care about tea until I tasted gyokuro! It is savory. It is... oh... it...

There were no deer.

Cafe Zino was to the south of the Daitoku-ji Temple complex, and maybe a bit west? An old man made excellent coffee there and played jazz albums of which he must have had a thousand. The Jazz was all popular commercial jazz of the 40's and 50's, most of it now largely forgotten by the world. The whole thing was strange, calm, amazing, and perfectly normal for Kyoto. So I made him a poster.

On the road again

 

As my darling wife and I are on the road again, this time on a brief sojourn across France in search of home, leaving me with the complicated job of posting from my phone, I thought I'd show some older pictures here that I haven't yet gotten around to showing. These are of the alps, flying out of Switzerland, a sight that made me long a little for mountains. They seem simultaneously inexhaustible and explorable. 

I used AI to clean these up a little as they were taken out of an airplane window, but I didn't add in any elephants or anything like that.

In a small beach town in France

 

I like it alot here in Theoule Sur Mer. It's a bit like one of those French Villages I always read about in Peter Mayle's books, with all the curious French residents and mystifying town activities and rituals, but on the beach and with a steady stream of visitors. I don't know how much the place will shut down as the season closes, and dread it a little because we rely on the few useful shops and boulangeries around here. Yes, there are two boulangeries here, but no cheese shops. The town had a festival this weekend and we went a few times. It was for art and wine, but the art was just a bit of idle window dressing. It was absolutely for wine. I was too shy to buy any, and have an awful lot of cognac at home anyway. The crowds all looked like villagers of old acquaintance, but what do I know? They could easily be a collection of international retirees.

Curiously enough we are leaving Theoule Sur Mer, but just for a few days as we are off to Sete, a few train rides and five hours travel along the coast, to look at an apartment and the possibility of living there. It is confusing enough to not be sure if we are retired here or if we're on a vacation, but to be leaving vacation for a vacation-like trip makes it doubly so confusing.

I'm a bit settled in here, and so have mixed feelings about leaving, as necessary and intriguing as it is. And we'll be back soon enough with at least a month and half to go here. In this homey spririt I offer you some pictures of me knocking about our apartment, with an assortment of fictional cats. I hope you'll enjoy them as I'll be back to the unwieldy posting from my phone for at least a few days after this.

A few words on mass transit

 

With a deep interest in urbanism, anarchist utopias, and cities, and having moved to France not least to find somewhere my dear wife and I can live functionally without a car, and having spent something approaching two months living in Tokyo, Kyoto, and the Cote D' Azur, I have a lot of thoughts and new experiences in how cities can work, and where they're still hopelessly stuck to their detriment. Maybe I will manage to delve into this subject more deeply, but today I am going to limit myself to a what will mostly be a few reflections on buses.

It might be a bit of a screed.

Kyoto was a city like nothing I've ever been to. It is jammed with people, commercially vibrant in a way I have never seen- where businesses genuinely exist in relation to where people live (in a way that I had long been wondering why the world wasn't more like. Even a place like Nice has blocks of eight story apartments in sections of town full of dead space and no commercial activity). Loads of people rode buses and trains in Kyoto even though the trains were a bit incoherent and incomplete, being operated by different lines and companies, and not really covering the city fully, and the buses, almost always packed full, and reasonably frequent, were jammed into the city's car traffic without much respect or care. It was a better system than possibly any place I've ever been to, and on a curve it gets top marks. But what a curve! We are so inured to cities slavishly devoted to the automobile that even cities like Tokyo or Kyoto, still assigning vast resources and privelege to cars and roads for cars, come off by comparison like they're fucking Venice!

Not that Venice doesn't have a few problems.

But the streets aren't one of them.

But I promised just a couple things about the buses, though it applies to trains as well, and it can really just be this one thing, a simple measure with which to understand at least an aspect of any city:

If your city buses (or trains) are jam packed, you aren't running them often enough.

The news from Cannes

 

We got off to a rough start in France. Probably two full days of travel, through Singapore and Switzerland and nearly any time zone you can think of (Look, we're over India! Look, we're over Bagdad!) made us crabby and unfit for new challenges. And Kyoto and Japan won us over in ways we didn't really know existed, so it was complicated. But a week into life here and we were dazzling the pharmacists at the village pharmacy with our french as we bought ourselves some flu ("grippe") and covid ("covid") shots as a treat. Well, maybe not dazzling them, but I don't think they hated us and that's a win you want to take in France, and maybe in the whole world when it comes down to it.

Anyway, with our feet under us we headed off to Cannes for the first time today.

Here's the thing:

We have already been to Antibes twice, and we really thought we'd love Antibes. The Internet's story of Antibes is that it is less glitzy,  with a more low key cote d'azur charm. And sure the large old city old parts of Antibes are about the cutest thing you can ever see, full of quintessential French alleyway fantasias that keep walking out of postcards into the real world. And not walking out of the cheap, bulk postcards, but walking out of the really amazing postcards you don't buy because 3 euros is ridiculously expensive for a postcard, but then you do buy it because if you're going to go to all the stupid trouble of sending a postcard you're not going to send some generic scene everyone back home already knows how to tune out, no! You want to send the kind of picture that says something about how amazing this place is!

Where were we?

Ah, yes, Antibes was pretty.

But between its picturesque alleys and squares, all turning slowly to Fall colors, and with heavy leaves crashing into the ground with hilarious thuds, there were mostly restaurants and tourists (like us! But we live here now so...) and it all felt a little show offy. Sure, that is a quality to be expected on the Cote D' Azur, but we thought if Antibes was full of it, Cannes would be twice as bad.

But Cannes was fun.

Yes there were rich people and tourists and close to enough the same amount of sheer beauty as Antibes, but it also didn't really seem to care so much about it all. It had tatty souvenir shops and toy stores and yes, the best crepes ever, but it was much more of a rambling mix of stuff.  It was oddly comfortable with itself, and we liked it a lot more.

Like, A LOT more.

Did I mention the crepes?

They were traditional buckwheat crepes. One had apples, goat cheese, and walnuts, the other ham, truffles, egg, cheese (I forget what kind).

We climbed up through some sort of park to a church fortress up on a hill where I took the only one minute session of pictures that I have of the city, so it's a bit of a narrow slice, but I include them so you can have something to work with. And while you mull them over I'll think about what I want to say next time about our bus ride home.