Gathering for Genoa

We're not going to be in Genoa for a terribly long time, just a few nights. But it still behooves me to get ahead here on clerkmanifesto so your steady daily reading isn't interrupted for a single moment. For longer transitions than this I have come up with all kinds of solutions; for instance when we moved to France via a five week trip to Japan I made up almost a hundred posts ahead of time, and then when I was in Japan I added in content from my phone as I could. Once, on a month long trip to Rome for our 25th anniversary I posted fictional accounts of what I thought would be happening, but wrote them all before it happened. Unfortunately this was lost on some readers, and upon my return I found myself at work having to correct the record some. Although, and anyone who has ever been on some fabulous vacation knows, no one really cares very much.

I mean, other than you. Which does you credit.

Of course, a four day trip hardly merits all this fuss. I have often been many days out ahead in my clerkmanifesto postings. Just not lately. Lately I do my French practice every day and write my post. Which is maybe why I'm talking about this now.

Also, I mean, I have to talk about something. And as noted I'd like to do it five or six times today, if I could.

Fortunately too, to help it all along, I have various photography projects to pull from, so they might be able to come into it too. 

For instance, check out these flowers!

Croissants v. Toast

 

Among the almost meaningless details of life in France to obsess over, I would like to discuss today the subject of toast.

In my increasingly lengthy lifetime (well isn't everyone's? Except dead people's I guess), I have gone in and out on toast. From delighted childhood experiments with toast covered in cinammon and sugar and saturated in butter to my daily breakfast during my last years in Saint Minneapolis of avocado on dense german rye toast, toast has made sometimes steady appearances and sometimes disappeared from my life for years at a time.

Alas, this will not be a recounting of my life through toast though.

I'm sorry for that. I would like to read it too!

But I will say enough of my history to note that going to Japan was a bit of an eyeopener when it came to toast. They were really into it! They would make these beautiful milk bread loaves and the best cafes would serve glorious buttered toast with coffee for breakfast, often with a small salad and slightly poached egg. 

I still miss it.

Here in France we have the croissant, and it's pretty great really. Not least because even at the most wildly overpriced beach cafe serving the worst possible croissant, it's only 2.50 at the most and often perfectly edible. Add 20 or 30 cents if you want a pain au chocolate which isn't exactly a croissant, but for our purposes it is exactly a croissant, only with a bit of chocolate in it. 

You're not a caveperson, you know the deal.

But toast is also a regular habitue of the breakfast selection here in France. And here's where the tiny madnesses of France rear their head.

Toast, served with buerre et confiture (butter and jam), is reliably at least three times the cost of a croissant. Three times!

Is this toast made with an exquisite milk bread like in Japan?

Not that I've noticed.

Does it come with copious, stunning French butter?

No, the butter looks to be a modest pat, not usually especially nicely presented, and, well, it's France, and butter, so at least that's perfectly fine, but...

Oh, and there's a little tin of jam at best.

All of this goes for like, five to eight euros!

Needless to say I don't ever have toast here.

And it probably shouldn't fascinate me so much. Some cafe items have a huge mark up here. It's not like I refuse to buy all these perfuntory french cappuccinos for often as much as five euros. I understand about restaurants and cafes and the economics of mark ups. And I would do best to enjoy the delightful nearly at cost French items, like baguettes, or croissants, or fresh orange juice, rather than obssessing over where they make their money back.

But toast?

Toast?!

Some nice alien pictures

 

I have been working with much of my spare time on various photo projects, but finding a coherent way to present them here is usually too much for me. So I tell you about my French bank instead.

Wait, you haven't heard about my French bank yet?

Oh my god, you are in for such a treat!

But I don't want to overwhelm you with fascination, so we'll just start with a little banking anecdote for today. How's that?

We've had our french bank card for awhile, and don't really use it, but we wanted to try it out at a doctor's office for reasons having to do with our in-process French health cards which, I know you would love to hear about now, but will have to wait for another day. We tried out the bank card in paying at the doctor, but we botched it! We forgot that it had a complicated unchangeable pin and so we got locked out of our card completely while guessing our pin. So we used another card, but...

Now what?

Do we go online? Do we call customer service?

No!

No no no no no. This is France.

And I can't tell if this is wonderful or agonizing, but in trying to vibe with my new country let's go with the "wonderful" interpretation.

Here's what you do here:

You go into your bank and see your banker. 

So we walked over to our bank, which really is a five or ten minute walk from home, and made an appointment with our banker for later that afternoon.

That afternoon we went back to see our banker. It's all very professional, and personal, but not at all personal, and feels a lot like what I imagined life was like in the 1930's, or maybe the 1950's. We have our own banker! Our banker told us that our bank card was now ruined forever and we needed to get a new one. We decided to get one for each of us. Then we sat in her office for awhile while she typed a lot on her computer, ordering, in what appeared to be a very complex process, two cards. We both got codes sent to our phones which we read to her. Then there was more typing and then? Voila, we were done! New cards ordered, pleasantries all around, and off we went.

Since we were out about the town as many as eight minutes away from home we went and got a happy hour drink.

Our cards will arrive in a week. 

I'm not sure that story turned out as fascinating as I hoped. So here are some pictures of Doris the super intelligent alien in highly altered old paintings:

Going to Genoa!

 

After a lot of back and forth about it, we finally decided to go to Genoa, Italy for our anniversary.

We weren't sure, maybe because it sounds great but a bit skeevy.

Despite having been off on small and large trips to more than twenty cities or villages here in the south of France (and once to Monaco, and once just over the border to Ventimiglia, Italy), we do carry around a small sense of "Weren't we supposed to move to France and have all of Europe right at our fingertips?"

But at the risk of being on the one hand obvious, and on the other hand crass, Europe is big! And going places costs a lot of money! This trip going to the nearest big city in the absolute nearest country to us for a few nights is pretty reasonable, but we are old age pensioners now! Which means we could go on twenty trips a year timewise, but even modestly done those would add up to being a ton more expensive than one annual, lavish saved up trip of worker bees maximizing our precious days off.

So, there's some balance to it. And our best trick so far has been going for the low hanging fruit. Thus the day trips to everywhere interesting we can on the Cote d Azur, with an overnight here or there, scouting places to live, and even a little visit with the darling cousin and his darling dog in Montpellier.

 And now we stretch our legs just a tiny bit: Genoa.

But it's not much of a stretch being just round the coast from here. Our round trip trains for two come to about 120 euros and we can get there in a few hours.

Genoa is the type of city we never would have gone to. There would always have been something more appealing to people flying across the Atlantic. It might have caught our eye with its rich history, palaces, possible Caravaggio (its provenance is questioned) and saucy accolades of being the best rarely visited city in Italy. But still, Genoa?

And yet now it is the equivelent of our taking a nice trip to Des Moines, Iowa.

I love Des Moines. But isn't Genoa Italy more interesting and exciting than Des Moines?

Probably.

I guess we'll see.

After many fits and starts we finally booked this trip today. So I looked up some interesting things about Genoa to spark your interest:

It has a huge Medeival city center, possibly the largest in Italy. It is filled with fascinating winding streets, fecal matter, elaborate palaces, and drug addicts.

Blue jeans are from there! The very word "Jeans" comes from "Genoa"

Hmm.

That's about it.

It actually sort of reminds me of Des Moines, just a bit bigger, with more focaccia, and thousands of years older.

We'll probably manage to have some fun.

Exhausted, we rest

 

Naturally after our exciting adventure in the glamorous Cote d Azur town of St Laurent du Var, where we went to a doctor, the beach, and the mall, we resolved to take it easy today. We decided to sleep in and then lie around doing nothing all day.

But the truth is we're always a bit restless. We're often trying to do things like that, to lie about all day, or sit leisurely in cafes for the whole afternoon, or linger over happy hour for as long as the misnamed happy hours go (usually three to five hours), but I don't think we've ever managed to actually stay anywhere for more than a couple hours, and even that is from us extending our endurance through our careful frenchifying.

And so it was with sitting around today. We didn't make it. At some point we were off looking for tonic water and gluten free beer. We both wanted thread and I needed a few big needles. We had to test our bank card (it failed!) We wanted to window shop a restaurant for an anniversary possibility. I needed cashews!

So we were out there again.

The city was packed with people, mostly sticking to the shaded sidewalks. This crowdedness is nearly always true here, but a very big Jazz Fest is happening now so we might be at a peak of vacation frenzy. A lot of events in my city pretend to be really big but aren't, but I do believe this is a significant Concert Festival. Sting is at this Jazz Fest! Busta Rhymes! Lola Young! Obongjayar! So it must be big. I'm not much for massive steaming crowds and standing in the heat listening to what may sometimes only barely qualify as what I might imagine jazz is, even in an ever expanding jazz diaspora. My only interest in "JAZZ" is probably tragically stuck in the fantasy of cool smoky bars, sipping whiskeys while, I don't know, Charles Mingus plays. So you can see I'm no help to Jazz at all. But for fun I checked out some of these acts on line and would happily go watch them, albeit in a small, cool, uncrowded club, with whiskeys, and for not a lot of money.

I digress.

Although I say that like it's a problem.

It's the point.

So with that let's sign off for the day with some random photos from around town.

St Laurent du Var with bathroom pictures

 

It has been too hot to go on any real adventures here in France. I hope that hasn't taken too much of the spice out of clerkmanifesto for you. I've tried to make up for it by converting my pictures of flowers into Dr. Seuss versions for you.

I have now done this 3,748 times.

And then...

AND THEN!

We had a doctor appointment in St. Laurent du Var!

I know it's not far away, but...

1. It is an out of town adventure!

2. Maybe I could take some pictures of it and convert them to Dr. Seuss versions?

3. I'm almost certain this Dr. Seuss thing is just a phase and eventually we'll work our way through it. This may help us work our way through it!

4. It's still in the nineties mostly here so this was probably our biggest chance for advenure anytime soon.

And what an adventure!

Actually St Laurent du Var is only two train stops away from us and is not... great. More than once on this trip I thought "What a pit!" But! 

It has a large mall on a beach. 

And after we walked endlessly, half lost on pedestrian unfriendly, baking hot streets to find an eye Doctor who had mysteriously moved her office there, we finally made our way to their ratty beach on the far side of the airport from us. This beach was conveniently in front of the mall. So after the beach we went into the mall, which is always a bit like going home for us. It was also, mildly, air conditioned! We shopped in it unsuccessfully for a while, and then we had a drink that spilled over into a really nice lunch.

Oops, I think I just gave away the whole story.

Fortunately I have pictures. These pictures have naturally been Seussified, and though they are hardly comprehensive as an account of the journey, you already know the whole story of the trip, so these with a bit of commentary ought to fill you in the rest of the way.

Feast your eyes:

I did not take pictures of the more private and often ugly Doctor going part of the trip, except, there was this figure on a shelf behind the reception of the opthamologist that reminded me of Doris the Alien. So here's one for you.

We made it through the hot city to the beach. Here's my shadow on the beach:

And then from the shore this is looking back at the Cap 3000 mall.

Looking back another way from the beach was what looked to be an enchanting old hill town. I really want you to know that this is NOT indicative of the charms of St Laurent du Var. In fact, these pictures are making everything look way prettier. Though the town did look intriguing, though far away.

On the (hot) beach I saw what looked to be swans! In the ocean! I walked down towards them and found the prettiest area of the beach was closed to access because it was a bird nesting site, so I just peered in longingly.

Then I took some pictures of swans from a legal distance so as not to have my French visitor's visa voided.

We're almost at the end now. What a journey! I didn't know that you would want to see pictures of everything on this trip, so much of our mall wandering will have to go undocumented. But when we made it to "The Garden of Crepes" or "Le Jardin du Crepes" inside the mall, to have beers, it turns out, at the bar, I came to my senses and snapped off another photo of our restaurant. It gave us fond memories of The Rainforest Cafe in the Mall of America, but with better food, which we decided to eat some of after the beer.

And that's about it, except for one last thrilling surprise...

Pictures from the bathroom: