Menton for good and ill

 

Here is a picture from Menton's citrus festival:

I have real pictures too. And maybe I'll even show them to you.

 They're...

fine.

And so is the citrus festival.

And so is Menton.

Actually, Menton is kind of great and horrible. Gorgeous ocean, magnificent old town scoring probably as high as an eight on the Seussian Scale of old towns. The shops, bakeries, and restaurants look pretty nice, though after several months around here I've come to recognize sadly how many of them are chains, even if they're maybe more local chains than international ones, but plenty of those international ones too. And when one comes to a pedestrianized street, almost exclusively leading into and through the old town, it really is a lovely place. There is absolutely nothing like it in the country I come from.

And then, unavoidably, are the roads. 

Where the citrus festival centers, it is along a kind of parkway center between two streets that they apparently couldn't bear to close entirely off, a kind of grand boulevard ruined for any real use by its devotion to traffic. The ocean too, of course, is lined by a road with its unholy roar of cars, buses, and motorcycles racing urgently along it, and though there are a number of lovely squares and sidewalk restaurants, a big road full of traffic always seems just around the corner, like there's this pretty little city for tourists, mixed artfully in, but the real city is a working city for suburbanites, a... Dubuque Iowa.

I believe this has seeped into the very soul of Menton and is expressed in the magnificent citrus festival displays themselves. A lion, giraffes, a woman, pelicans, parrots, these giant magnificent sculptures are entirely made out of citrus fruits, mainly oranges and lemons, until one gets to, like, the important parts; the giraffes' heads, the woman's face, the paws of the lion, and the head of the parrot, and then, all of a sudden, they are no longer made of fruit, they're plaster, or fiberglass, or whatever is usually used for giant cast figures like that. And it's not bad. It's so not bad we're all willing to overlook it, 

but, let's not lie...

It's not quite amazing, is it?

And neither is Menton.

Mimosa

 

On an impossibly sunny day with temperatures in the mid sixties, we are off on our backyard train to see the citrus festival in Menton where the question "What can one build out of lemons?" will be answered.

For all the constantly mentioned information that my city has the third biggest Carnaval IN THE WORLD, I never really heard of it before moving here. But Menton's citrus festival, The Fete Du Citron? That one seemed to come up a lot. 

Known sort of as the ever so slightly less expensive cote d' azur city, it is nestled right up against the Italian border. When we first visited out here we thought maybe we'd like to live there! Our brief actual visit to the city failed to win us over. The old town was nice (they all are as far as I can tell), but the city and coast seemed road heavy and lacking in charm.

Maybe this was just because there weren't any floats made out of citrus fruits? So we'll give it another look. I mean, what could be wrong with it? It has lemons, the ocean, and it's ever so slightly cheaper!

So off we go.

But before I do, here is a picture of a small vase of mimosas in our house that I took a picture of, and then drew, or whatever it is that I do:

Mimosas

It is mimosa season here. 

Out in the countryside of the coast here there are areas full of these blooming yellow flowers right at this time of the year. In the city they are for sale everywhere and one can see people walking around with bunches of them in the same way one sees people walking with the ubiquitous baguettes. We have been out on the train and seen a little of the bloom in the hills, but it is fair to say that while public transport is infinitely better here than in my home country, it is still, by any rational standard, car-worshipping garbage. So our impulse to wander deep in the countryside for a day among the blooming mimosas has seemed to require too much heavy lifting for us. 

But it is hard to fully embrace giving up on that because mimosas are awesome.

The blooming bushes are crazy full of yellow that sneaks up on you in its intensity. The smell is delightful and interesting, not floral exactly, something else its own. And everyone looks so happy wandering around with their little bunches of mimosas.

Fortunately, when we went to real live French Carnaval Parade, The Battle of the Flowers (a story for perhaps another day), as we went into our bleachers for our assigned seats, we were handed our very own bunches of mimosas!

For many hours I went about with my little bunch of mimosas. As with having a baguette, it gave me a very satisfied, slightly smug feeling to be carrying it around.

In New Orleans at Mardi Gras they toss out beads to a frankly avaricious crowd during the parades. Here they toss out the flowers from the floats to a frankly avaricious crowd. I am as avaricious as the next person, but managed to eschew all the flowers whirling around me. "I am content." I would remind myself. "I have my bunch of mimosas!"

What, you may want to know, do mimosas look like?

Here is my bunch (no camera tricks today, this comes straight from the... phone). These are shown roughly 24 hours later, wrapped in the streamers that fell from the sky during the parade, and they are now hanging decoratively on our wall:

Old city

 

It's not that old.

The "old city" of my city, where most days we seem to wander aimlessly into, is only about 2,500 years old.

Oh, wait, I guess that is kind of old. 

But the main things one can see walking through are more in the 1500 to 1700's territory. Which I guess is sort of old too. 

Oh I like it! Kind of scrubs off the sharp edges, you know?

From where the tram line runs you go down into the old city, which feels right, a descent, darker and cooler and older. 

This is my favorite "porte" into the city then, and I am sure I have shown a few pictures of it before. But here is one taking my drawing layers to somewhere near its extreme expression:

My carnaval sketchbook

 

I am increasingly willing to call these drawings, or how about sketches? They combine photography, ai, and drawing. I'm still working out how to do it and what I like best. I think I'm refining still, but as we get to the bottom it is more what I'm after. 

But whatever they are, these pictures are glimpses of the Carnaval here in full swing; in the little gated, almost steampunk village in the Paillon promenade, in the main square, and of one of the floats. 

These are hardly documentary, but more captured glimpses, like from my sketchbook, of Carnavalesque scenes here and there in the city.

Expenses in France

Quintessence Moon of The Metamorphosis Academy, roughly located somewhere near the Dakotas, wrote in to ask:

"Are things cheaper in France?"

Before I answer, I want to say that I am honored that I am on the slim list of allowable websites at the legendary Metamorphosis Academy, and I think it's nice that a young person like yourself would ask about my expenses.

Inscrutable, but very nice.

And the answer is...

sort of.

Much like in Japan, there is a quality of going back into the past with France. It's like before corporations and chains took over so thoroughly and there are still corners of things where it doesn't feel like every single possible commodity is absolutely as expensive as it can possibly get away with. A lot is, but not everything. There are the built in cheap things that astonish, like the croissant or the baguette for just over a euro each, but mostly, and this might be because I am in a famously rich and touristic city, there is this weird, enormous range to the cost of things. With a bit of care I can find a pretty decent potato for something like 50 or 75 cents a pound, which I think is how I remember the good old American potato from olden days. But also there are potatoes here running three or four dollars a pound. Oranges, growing all around here might be an even better example, depending on variety, quality, and country of origin, I have seen a range of under a euro a pound to seven or eight euros a pound. And the quality varies so wildly and inscrutably I kind of don't get them very often, finding it too risky.

Restaurants can be a bit tricky too. The ubiquitous pizza is usually about 16 to 18 euros in all the comfy restaurants, but down the street from here there's a guy who sells them for six euros! Six euros, hardly more than seven dollars, for the whole pizza, and it is the best pizza I have yet to have in France. Maybe I should get one tomorrow? Hamburgers, also ubiquitous, are sort of the same here too. They often are to me a faintly insane 22 or 23 euros in otherwise fairly reasonable restaurants, but can be ten euros or less at the better stands and take out places, and I found the take out ones way better. The U.S. seemed the opposite to me, where the 22 dollar burgers were at least incredible despite the soaring prices, and one of my favorite things to get when going out.

Wine shops are full of nose bleedingly expensive wine and I wonder who buys it all because I never see it happening. There is a small minority of the wine that is maybe more reasonably priced than where I came from. But is it good?

I like to pretend so.

Trains seem rudely expensive, but I've gotten used to it and it seems better than any alternatives and at least they exist. Local buses and trams are standard costs to me, no great bargain and overcrowded and walking is so regularly a better option. Housing is cheaper for rent, but not very cheap or available. Though I think our apartment at under 1300 euros should be appropriately compared to one in a place like San Francisco or Manhattan, at which point it is vastly, astronomically cheaper.

I could tell you about the biannual sales mostly affecting clothes, coffee, and the 16 euro carmelized fois gras we had yesterday, but I think we'll leave it here for now, and await your further questions.

 

How clerkmanifesto works part 97

 

As I feverishly work into the night on a handful of overly complicated pictures of the third largest Carnaval IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, it occurs to me that I will have nothing to show you in time for clerkmanifesto to go to press.

So I guess we'll have to talk about something else.

What would you like to talk about?

Oh, right, you can't talk.

Wait, wait a second.

I have been writing clerkmanifesto since 2013 and this has never come up before?

If you can't talk...

I can write anything I want!!!!!!!

I can show pictures, write, chat, doodle about absolutely anything I want right here and no one can stop me! I can write absolutely utterly completely anything I want at all!!!!

Wow.

Holy... I mean, what the hell.

Unbelievable.

So.

What should I talk about?

Carnaval, the lead up

 

I associate Carnaval with Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and so I associate it there with a very dear friend Matthew who... died. 

And is dead.

Dead dead dead dead dead. 

Kinda for awhile now, which doesn't make it any better.

Matthew was lovely, and quirky, and immensely talented, and very New Orleans. I still remember the first moment I saw him, on the campus of The California College of Arts and Crafts in the 1980's. He was dressed like he had walked out of the Continental Congress, his hair tied back in a bow like Thomas Jefferson.

I visited him twice in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. And though I am not by nature inclined towards massive drunken street parties, I have mainly fond memories of these events.

So it was a bit of a surprise to find that my new city has the third largest Carnaval in the world!

What does that mean?

I really don't know. It might be the kind of statistic bandied about here, but not as strongly supported everywhere else? Rio and Venice don't seem to be in any dispute for first and second largest carnavals. Third place gets a little murky. New Orleans? My own city? Cologne? Trinidad?

Whatever.

It is kind of big.

At least I think so. It just started.

The build up was something else though. The city has been preparing for it for at least a month. We transitioned directly from Christmas decorations and Christmas villages into massive bleachers and infrastructure for an event taking up the whole of the Massena Square. But even though there was a ton of structural preparation, as we got closer to the opening it didn't really feel like so much was happening. Out and about on the official first day of Carnaval there were a few more things to see, more music, more things closing off, but it still felt mostly like preparation.

Today, however, it went off. There was a parade and Carnaval Village finally opened, and while I can't describe it all as terribly wild (maybe because it was daytime), it was crowded and large, and the part of the parade we saw was suitably over the top and amazing, with actual carnivalesque opera.

As people slightly advanced in years we weren't exactly heartbroken that when the parade ended so we could cross the street and get some pastry, cheese, and syrah wine. But there are two weeks more of this and we do have some really nice bleacher tickets for one of the flower parades next week, so you'll likely be hearing more about it.

A quick picture of two giant floats dwarfing our usually impressive central fountain:

Making perfume

 

Here is the long awaited story of how we went to Grasse, France, perfume capital of the world, and made our own signature scents!

What's that? 

"Who was awaiting this?" You want to know?

A PERSON CAN WAIT FOR SOMETHING EVEN IF THEY DON'T KNOW THAT THEY ARE!

Let me set the scene:

Back before our France adventure, when it was still just a glimmering dream in our eyes, we were watching the Japanese dating show I recently told you about, Offline Love, where young Japanese people go to the city I live in now and let fate and a few contrivences of the production staff guide them to each other. In this show each person got sent on one special little trip and was able to invite one of the other "contestants" to come with them. One of these adventures was a trip to Grasse, where they would make their own personal scents!

This very much captured my wife's imagination. So after we were in this area of the Cote D'Azur for a few months we booked our own perfume experience!

Grasse is a beautiful old hill town that we were even able to glimpse a bit of from our first apartment here in Theoule Sur Mer, though it was farther up towards the mountains than it looked. I find that pretty much everything around here is farther than it looks, but maybe that's because we walk so much. We took a very handy train to Grasse from what amounts to the backyard of where we live now. The train follows the coast into Cannes, where we have been many times, but then deviates from the main coastal train route up into the hills, wandering through the countryside and a couple of small cities. We had never been on this train route and it was mildly pretty and interesting. The famous mimosa bloom, already started then and still going now, was showing off with some glimpses of amazing floods of yellow flowers. After a little over an hour our train ended its route in the medium sized town of Grasse.

Hmm, well maybe not in the town of Grasse.

It was more like a place surrounded by roads. And then all around that was something a bit like suburbs, semi rural suburbs I guess, or maybe like Bloomington, MN, or the San Fernando Valley. Up the hill, way up the hill, was what turns out to be a richly historic and pretty large ancient city and modern tourist attraction known as Grasse. We did go there later, but only briefly because we had to go home at that point and it was rainy. It was not particularly walkable from the train and required a slow bus on a winding road.

But never mind that, our perfumery was not located in the tourist wonder and charming hilltown of Grasse, even if surely, dating back as it did to the 1700's, it started out there. It was located out in the general and not historic or particularly nice sprawling remainder of Grasse. We walked there without much joy along sidewalks next to large roads. We looked for a place to lunch and failed utterly.

But I am not here to rain on your lovely story of us making our own perfumes! Or on my story for that matter. So let's just move on from our wandering the roads futilely looking for food and leave us waiting in the parking lot of our perfume showroom. 

They were closed for lunch. Perhaps the staff went out to eat at the local McDonalds? 

But we were not alone waiting for our exciting perfume experience! Other people waited with us.

Most of them were Japanese. Offline Love was very popular!

But fear not, the worst part of the whole perfume experience is over now, thank god, because the perfume making was pretty neat. 

We had a sceduled appointment and it cost, well, a lot; a bit over 100 euros each! There were probably about 12 people doing this perfume thing, and each person got their own special mad scientist carol in the perfume laboratory.

I think I even have a picture!

Yes, yes, this is in the main room:

 And here is my work space:

See all those little bottles everywhere? Those were the scents we worked with. We each got the same 120, in three rows of 40. These were the base scents, which were the strong undertones of the pyramid of scent we were building. This would be the most lasting and powerful scent. The next row of 40 was the midtones, and they rounded out the base scent and were more floral I think. And then the top row of 40 were the top notes of the perfume, mostly fruit and some flower, fresher, lighter smells, what you smelled most of initially with a final perfume, but which were also more ephemeral and didn't last so long.

We were shown how best to smell the bottles (take it easy and don't overwhelm the nose. It is a lot of smelling) and set to work testing out the bottom row of 40 scents. Our job was to choose five or so that we liked, just going on our immediate preference, and then rank those five. When we were done the perfume people came around to us individually and gave us the portions we should use of our five base notes, based on harmonious blending and our preferences. We poured them out porportionately into our beakers.

You can see my full perfume beaker in front of some scents, below:

We went through the same process more or less with each of the next two rows of scents, though we were to test those scents against the base we started with to make sure we liked how they worked together. I picked a lot of woods smells in my base notes with a bit of rose and ocean in my midtones, and all the citrus I could in the topnotes.

They took our beakers away when we were done, and our recipes, to keep on file in case we want to order more of it later. We had to name our scent as well. I called mine "Underwood". Then, shortly, we got our bespoke perfume back very prettily packaged in our own perfume bottle with its name on it and everything.

So do I positively reek of "underwood" now? You wonder.

No! 

Now it has to mature for three weeks!

But that's more like two weeks now from when I'm writing this, and I am very much looking forward to trying it out.

And as soon as the AI can figure out how to share scents online you can smell it too!

So many people

 

It was fine when I stayed put in Minnesota for the most part. The world seemed large, but Minnesota sort of spoke to the rest of the world. It acted as a microcosm. And even the travel we took from there hearkened back to that place as a kind of knowable reference point. Minnesota was an analogy.

Then we tore up all the flimsy roots and flung ourselves off once again into the wide world. And there are so many people. Japan was crammed, absolutely crammed, and not afraid to go out and show it. It's not much different here. People are everywhere!

You will not understand how many people there are and neither will I. Yesterday I was talking about all the people taking pictures of the beach here. Everyday ten thousand new people come here and they take a picture of the beach.

I ask you:

Where do all these pictures go?

I follow ten stories, a hundred stories every day, I have a thousand, and I write just one. But do you know how many stories there are?

534,565,109,336,298,004,288,776,364,987,303,219,997,136,399,001,002,697,142,314,688,887,410,014,879,523,659,823,226,444,112,970,003,660,985,321,658,017.

And those are just the good ones.

The moment

 

There's a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty where the super cool and awesome photographer played by Sean Penn, perched high in the Himalayas to photograph rare snow leopards, explains how when he finally has the shot, sometimes he just lets it go. That occasionally he just wants to let the moment be, or something like that.

I am not the world reknown and beloved fictional pulitzer prize winning wildlife photographer played by Sean Penn. I am just another guy with a camera phone out on the beach. There are thousands and thousands of pictures taken just on this beach in this city every single day! 

Nevertheless, I think of this little moment sometimes.

I see the most beautiful ocean yet again, the water a strange shade of lurid turquoise every so slightly different than it has ever been before. The Paillon River, usually a trickle or even a stagnant pond, is running richly out from underneath the very center of the city, a lovely aqua green against the rocks and into the sea, while the sea's high waves roll hypnotically up the river. Larger than usual waves smash into a rare break of rocks at the river mouth and a pure white lather of ocean hurls into the sky.

I think 

"That would make a nice picture."

And then, with my wife, I just stand there.

French apartment

 

There are so many things I haven't had a chance to discuss about our move to France, and since hundreds of thousands of people follow clerkmanifesto now looking for tips on their own future relocation to Europe, I feel a certain responsibility to cover some of those things that got lost in the heady rush of our arrival in this country.

That's why today I am going to discuss... The French Apartment.

You see, I live in one.

I am writing to you from one right now, tucked in a dormer window of a studio apartment that likes to put on airs of being a one bedroom but really really isn't one. 

The rain is pleasantly falling outside in an otherwise quiet night. 

Here, let me get up, turn around, take a random picture through my window, and report back:

 Well, whatever. It is now an hour later and that's my picture... drawing thing, through the partially reflecting dormer window, and that's France. You wanna move here, go for it. They do many things sensibly and with great style here in France, though they lack a bit of whimsy, and for the first ten or eleven years that you stumble around here still trying to learn French be prepared that you will often feel like Mr. Bean.

Well, maybe not you.

Anyway, one thing we read a lot about before we came is how very difficult it is to rent a French apartment.

It sort of is, but I don't want to go much into that now, especially after I already used up all my time I have for this post on making a four layered picture/drawing of me reflected in my window.

What I really want to talk about is what I didn't understand when I obsessively researched French apartments from an anticipatory vantage point in Minnesota.

The prices for renting French apartments are not too terrible considering how the cost of all houses and apartments in France is nearly as bad as those in the United States. And yes, though there are 67 million people in France, there are only about 10 apartments available for rent at any given time in the entire country.

 But the most shocking thing even in that is that there aren't any bargains.

I just didn't figure on there not being bargains.

Let me put it this way:

Say you're at a restaurant, and though the lobster seems nice, you don't have 85 dollars for it. So you're like, well, what are these no frills ham sandwiches going for then? 

65 dollars. They are going for 65 dollars.

That explanation maybe didn't work.

Let me try it like this

 If you can't save a bunch of money, or get an amazing apartment, by living in some wildly out of the way place, with few shops or services available, or by living in an ugly apartment block wasteland that France is full of in their own weird version of suburbs, why wouldn't you just live, well, somewhere like we do now?

I don't know.

But I am glad we got the one apartment they had available in this city 350,000 people.

Offline love

 

Before we moved to this city but after we had visited and were planning to move... somewhere around here, we watched a Japanese dating show that took place in this very city. It was called "Offline Love" and shown on Netflix. It featured a group of Japanese young single people none of whom knew each other. They were sent wandering out into this city and given a base. The base was a cafe/restaurant that had been closed down, rented out for the duration of the show, which was maybe a week and a half or so? They turned in their phones and were given a mailbox where they would receive messages from the show, and could send and receive them to and from each other. Also there was always some nice food at the cafe for them, and tables to sit at. Mostly though it showed them wandering this city with a sort of bespoke guidebook, sometimes alone and sometimes together, and there were some specific area related trips or dates as well.

The "point" of the show was to see how much fate could bring them together, though there were also some events and dates that would contrive to bring couples together in particular ways.

I'm not sure when this show was made, maybe a couple of years ago. We have eaten at the cafe, which is on a very charming square down the street from here. In fact there really aren't that many days we don't walk by that particular cafe. The show must have been popular back in its home country. I always like to look in at the people sitting at the restaurant just to make sure there is at least one Japanese couple or group having a drink or food there.

There always is.

A French mall on the Cote D' Azur

 

Today we went to the mall, a mall so big they call it

The Mall of France!

Not really.

But it was a big mall, full of people on a Sunday, and we took a train to it, walked across crowded roads, and went into the first gaping entrance we found. And it was a mall, like all the malls ever anywhere.

Albeit with a few more pastries,

And a beach.