Waterfall in the sky

 

I can still remember when I first saw it. I was here in this grand, Belle Epoque City as a visitor, a tourist, hardly imagining I would one day live here!

Aw, who am I kidding? My darling wife and I were both fiercely imagining that we would one day live here, almost from the start. But we have vivid imaginations, we have dreamed thousands of things, and the important thing is: I didn't seriously believe that we would one day live here, let alone in just three years.

Anyway, in this singular past moment, I was sitting at an outdoor cafe, and I looked up into the sky and saw a waterfall. I was pretty sure I was imagining it. First of all, through the broken clouds of the day, it looked like an apparition. And my experience with this city was too new at that point to understand how many things there are here that seem too good to be true, but nevertheless... are. Secondly, waterfalls don't normally work like this: They don't start at the top of mountains, with water falling out of thin air, and this one kind of did. It didn't make a lot of sense at first.

So I puzzled over the waterfall in the sky for a long time.

This is the Cascade Du Chateau, built in the 1800's on Colline Du Chateau. It is part of the network of parks, ruins, cemetaries, trails, and viewpoints overlooking the city there, and I don't and probably never will understand why this feature isn't the symbol of the city and a world famous landmark besides, more like The Eiffel Tower, La Sagrada Familia, or The Trevi Fountain. If this city could be said to have a single famous symbol, it is probably the iconic view of its coastline and the Promenade Des Anglais from a vantage point somewhere in the vicinity of the waterfall. And that is all terribly lovely, but this? This is...

A waterfall in the sky!

It is of course a lovely place to visit, and looks best when it's turned on full blast, which I don't think is always the case. I mean it's not a real waterfall, but it's all the better for that. If one consults the tourist literature, and the babble of the Internet, one can take in the world's mild delight in the scene before it drifts off into rhapsodies over all the nearby views. But that's not really my point. And it's not exactly the key thing about it, as charming as it is.

No, the key thing is how it perches in the sky like a little vision of heaven.

You walk the beach, or sit in a cafe, or wander the city, and then something calls you. You look improbably up, and in the clouds you can see just an odd little glimpse, into paradise, straight into the abode of the gods.

Postcards from France

 

Sometimes I spend too much time on my endless variations of my photos to write you a proper account of all the interesting things I find living here in France, like my staircase, the price of baguettes, or the behavior of the seagulls. And so it is today. After an unusually long walk to the Matisse Museum and the ancient ruins nearby, I came home with today's pictures and a few new ideas about things to do with them. And so having spent awhile on these, and with them perhaps not entirely ready to go, I send them to you today anyway, as postcards:

The prized possession and the Chagall Museum

 

Of all the things we have so far obtained in our move to France, none is more awesome than our residents' museum pass. Good at 11 museums in the city, one need merely prove permanent residency in the city and, voila, a special photo pass, like ours, created for us on the spot at the Beaux Arts museum, is issued. It is good for three years! So naturally the first museum we went to after acquiring it, just a few days later, was one of the only ones that doesn't take part in that system. We went to the Chagall Museum.

It is handy to have ten or more museums to walk to, and the Chagall Museum is a cracker!

The Chagall was built in the early seventies to host a collection of biblical paintings Chagall donated to the city. Chagall lived nearby in St. Paul De Vence, but was fond of this city because, well, why wouldn't he be? He was still alive when the museum opened, and he attended the ceremonies.

Chagall was, to quote Nicholas Cage's character's assessment of him in Moonstruck, "A very great artist."

And you can see that in a second with these paintings.

These are big, intense, rich paintings he donated, full of color, complexity, mastery, and interest.

Our walk there was a delight too, along a street with a very excellent bakery on it that I bought a bit too much from on the way home during Christmas Eve. You cross under the train tracks and then climb into a more residential neighborhood ending with the kind of thing that always steals my heart, a dedicated walking path that makes its way to just around the corner from the museum.

Because it was Christmas Eve they were closing an hour early, and in the mysterious French way they had closed off about half the museum, possibly to make it easier to empty? We even had to wait a bit until there was capacity room for us. On the plus side they didn't charge anyone anything, including us! A savings of 16 Euros is nothing to sneeze at, but because I have come down with a cold I did anyway.

I love the little front yard garden cafe here too. We managed to slip in just before closing for coffees. We drank them peacefully as they played pop folk music from around the time the museum was built. We immediately started imagining coming here all the time.

I took some pictures. I put myself in them as a sort of "I go to the Chagall Museum and disappear into the paintings." I worked all day on them, decided they were a disaster, then decided they were pretty good after all.

Here I am in the museum:

And then here I am as I inappropriately made myself at home in the paintings:

Visiting the market

 

Yesterday, in a Christmas post, so to speak, I bemoaned our tendency to constantly bring home too much food from the market and from all the delightfully appealing little stores all around us in this city. But, fairly speaking, I did want to make sure I had plenty of food on hand as things closed down for Christmas. I sort of assumed everything would close down for Christmas in some big way, maybe because in the little town of Theoule Sur Mer, where we started out, places closed down for Christmas pretty much at the start of November, and are only slated to open sometime, allegedly, in January.

This, where we live now, however, is a big, modern city, and it only seems to be closing down maybe an hour or two early on Christmas Eve day, which the signs seem very apologetic about, and then for Christmas Day itself, which hardly seems some fantastic hardship. I've got too much food here anyway. Hopefully I'll have worked my way through it by the time you read this.

Another problem at the market is our tendency to launch into buying too early. I think we get excited by something we see and just start throwing stuff in baskets. But the Liberation Market has like 80 sellers. It might be worthwhile to walk around and get the lay of the land and formulate a plan. I've yet to learn to master fully the kind of greedy indulgence France brings out in me. "It'll all be here tomorrow." I need to tell myself.

 Eventually I'll believe that.

Yesterday's post naturally led to a few pictures of me hamming it for the camera (well, fake me, in a real place), but the truth is I spent hours on making pictures of me in the markets that I still wanted to show you, so thank god there's always a tomorrow here on clerkmanifesto too...

Shopping

 

Joyeaux Noel!

But we're not going to talk about that except to say: I love Christmas, but not Christmas. 

Hmm, I guess a tiny bit of talking is required.

I love Christmas Season, but Christmas itself is sort of the death of Christmas for me. It's not a day I do anything with, so it's kind of sad. It's just a big sad day where everything is closed and now it's no longer Christmas... it's Winter.

On the other hand, Winter is pretty nice here, 60 degrees F, a bit rainy, we'll see how it goes. Plus a lot of Christmas stuff seems to carry on a bit after the big day here. I don't know how I feel about that. But anyway, what with it being Christmas and all, and everything closed, I can talk instead today about...

Shopping. Food shopping.

We shop most days.

And I think that is not often enough. Because too frequently we seem to be lugging super heavy bags home through the streets of our Belle Epoque City. Can't we ever just get one thing, like a baguette? Or let's just add an eggplant? Or look, there's a nice bottle of prosecco? And don't we need toilet paper?

Maybe we can never shop enough to not be lugging home too much. Or maybe we're still stocking up a new place and a new way of life and we'll learn it all eventually. My life seasoned me to buy a weeks worth of potatoes on my weekly drive to the grocery store chore of a shopping trip. Learning to get a single potato because I am planning on eating a potato is a whole new skill! For instance, at the giant street market today I bought three potatoes. I didn't even need a potato! But they were super cheap and looked great. But they weigh a lot! And one potato really would have done for me, along with the extremely pretty spinach, the petite pois (shell peas), the pomegranite, the eggplant, the delicious little oranges from right around here, and a couple more lemons. Too much! And then off to the laterie (just a cheese shop I like) where in additon to a goat cheese, old gouda, and some roquefort, I simply had to get a liter of their lovely milk for my coffee.

What the hell?

I've got to figure this out. We had so much damned stuff we had to drop it off at home!

Before going out to the boulanger for more.