Forty two views of Saorge France

 

At the end of last week we got up early (for us), walked up to the train station (a short walk), and got on The Train of Marvels. This train, really just a regular local train but with a bit better, less scratched up windows, climbs up into the mountains of the French Alps and in less than two hours deposited us up among the fresh air and flowing mountain streams. 

It was kind of a miracle.

Our station, near to the last, was called Fontan Saorge. Absolutely nothing is around the train station of Fontan Saorge, but you can walk 15 minutes down the narrow mountain road to Fontan, or up it, for about as long, through a tunnel, along soaring valley views, until you arrive at Saorge, officially one of the 100 most beautiful villages of France (there are actually somewhere closer to 180 of them, but France is BIG).

I'm pretty sure this day was the kind of thing we meant in retiring here.

Saorge is like,

what you get born for.

It's sort of perched on a cliff there, like something vaguely Tibetan, and it's winding, layered in its Seussian qualities so strongly that this odd thought once flitted through my mind there: 

Dr. Seuss wasn't that inventive, he just went to France.

I took hundreds of pictures in and around Saorge. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. I brought them back in my phone and have been working on them non stop over the weekend. I have settled on, or worked my way to 42 pictures of Saorge to tell the story of the place. These are not really travelogue pictures. I did not make them to tell you about our day exactly. I took them from pure interest, and then tried to put everything I felt about Saorge and even France, into them. Some of the pictures are barely edited, or even completely as they came out from my camera. Some are elaborate fantasias so meticulously built out of the scene I started with that they might as well be paintings.

But they're all Saorge.

Each day for the next six days I will tell you a little about lovely Saorge, the Mountain village, and I will show you seven pictures. The pictures are not an explanation for what I have to say. They more invite you to figure out what they might be, or feel what it was like. They're just Saorge.

There are a lot of cats.

I hope you like them.

 

Lazy Sunday France

 

Having gone off on an ambitious day trip to a mountain town called Saorge, where I took so many photographs my phone died of exhaustion, I feel reluctant to get started on the story of the wonder of that journey before clearing out some of my notes, images, outtakes, and experiments from the past week first. Sunday, a bit of a low traffic day on Clerkmanifesto, is a good day for this, and so that's what we're up to today!

These are all random bits from around my city, mostly with extra layers of editing, image manipulation, and AI. Some of these are alternates from themes or series in my earlier posts, and a few are one offs. But I think they each tell their own story well enough, so I present them without individual introductions:

 

Preparations for the World Cup

 

The World Cup begins in a few weeks, and what better place to follow it than Clerkmanifesto, especially if you are not interested in it. 

But maybe you’re only interested enough to wonder who will win.

I don’t know, but pessimistically speaking, and probably realistically too, stupid France will win, which I say with all due respect and love as a person living in this beautiful country. 

The French are a team positively crammed with talent, and they keep winning or almost winning the World Cup so much that we are all worn out by it!

But having started negatively, let me tell you what I really wish for this World Cup, even if I know what I wish for is beyond my meager abilities in this direction.

 I would like everyone to win, so that, whenever anyone does win, I will rejoice: 

Even France, or England, or the Netherlands, or Portugal, or Germany!

Though I think this nice plan would be a lot easier for me if it were Argentina, Spain, or Brazil who won.

In the past I would run a World Cup betting pool at the library which was fun and a lot of work. I actually miss it. There was something about nudging people into a mild interest in the World Cup that weirdly appealed to me and my Quixotic nature.

Luckily I still have Clerkmanifesto for this kind of endeavor. So pick your team! 

Pick your team!!!!!

Post it in the comments.

I mean it.

 

If your team wins you will receive REDACTED BY THE CLERKMANIFESTO LEGAL TEAM. 

I promise.

I know it sounds too good to be true, but on my life I swear that REDACTED BY THE CLERKMANIFESTO LEGAL TEAM. 

So choose a team in the comments below! Dreams really do come true.

For myself I would delight in seeing our ancient Messi get one more World Cup, but I don't think that lightning will strike twice and though willing, I am also ready to move on. 

Always hostile to the soccer vanity of England in the past, I am suddenly finding my heart softened by my beloved club team, Barcelona, having signed an English player in Anthony Gordon. 

Maybe, dare I say it, England has suffered long enough?

And the same for Brazil.

But in the end, and when choices must be made half the Barcelona team is playing for Spain, so I simply cannot resist them. Plus, I choose Football! This is delightful, intricate yet direct soccer, with some of the most dazzling technical players in the world. 

But don't worry. If you're at loose ends you can pick Spain too!

Or Ecuador.

Japan?

Norway?

Senegal?

Curacao?

Wait, Curacao is in the World Cup?

Ah fuck it. Let's just all adopt Curacao.

A note on immigration

 

Sitting in all the heat and loveliness of the Chagall Museum garden café, I suddenly noticed two French flags carefully arranged on the cement facing of the main entrance to the museum galleries. How proud the French are of their French museum.

As an immigrant to this country, I feel a small tincture of delight in presenting this list:

What if the three greatest French painters ever were:

1. Van Gogh
2. Picasso
3. Chagall

Sure, there’s a perfectly fine case for:

1. Delacroix
2. Monet
3. David

But that's just an argument, and not choosing the list with Van Gogh seems like a tough sell.

Did you know that the country with the most International visitors every year is France?

I'm proud to contribute.

Life is a paradise with room for a thousand improvements

 

On a warm, sunny day, I sit with a pint of beer in the garden café of the Chagall Museum. Olive trees loom over the ramshackle white garden cafe structure, half open to the calm grounds of the museum. Emotional French music is playing. It’s all pretty good.

The white structures of our café are festooned with fake plants, even as the whole building threatens to collapse under the weight of the completely genuine vines and trees growing wild and swallowing it all up. Oddly, the juxtaposition works, though it strikes me as possible that the challenge of putting a café in a grove of ivy and small olive trees, in the graceful garden of the Chagall Museum, in this beautiful city, would be in its not working.

A large tour group of Japanese people makes its way to the tented entrance of the artfully weathered cement museum building. Some of them carry umbrellas, which was a clever thing I saw people do in Kyoto, and that I copied to endure its terrible September sun.

My wife and I both sit here writing at the edge of the shade. This is the extent of our visit. Having seen the museum many times we will not go in again today.

My beer is almost gone and the strong sun makes its way to the tall trees at the west end of the garden.

I thought maybe I’d like to make a list of everything wrong with perfection, but now I’ve forgotten why.

Live from France

 

My cough is much better thank you. It still happens, mostly in a bursting chain, but it is so mild compared to the sleepless week of coughing that I almost enjoy it now. Like after the library I worked at was so visciously busy and relentless for years, and then got quieter simultaneously with our getting a giant automated check in machine. Everything just felt light forever.

It all still feels a little light.

I am floating...

Summer is coming and I am committed to taking my family out for coffees and leisurely drinks in lovely shady courtyards and even sometimes at the slightly pricier beachside restaurants until I have used up all my month's money. In the warmer weather I often have large beers. Today we had a camembert with thyme and honey.

We continue to look to move from this lovely town that's not quite right. Montpellier awaits, which is maybe the right place, but the process is slow. Apartment hunting in France is very difficult. The prices are mostly not bad, but nice apartments, which one can casually see in the multitudes while walking around ("I'd like to live there, and there, and there, and there!") are strangely rare when it comes to the actually available listings. I guess it makes sense. If you had a lovely one bedroom apartment in a 17th century building with patio windows overlooking some postcard looking square in the middle of everything you need, why would you ever leave? 

Wouldn't you just die and be buried there?

The answer is yes, apparently.

We went to Biot the other day, which is another of those medeival hill towns I don't get tired of but my darling wife does a little. It was an easy 9 out of 10 on the Seussian scale. I guess I can see my wife's point: they're all so ridiculously quaint in similar ways. But for me it always makes me lose my mind completely. My brain madly races. "Can we live here?" I ask. Sure, there's practically nowhere to buy food, and everyday would just be spent in the glorious town square cafe, and walking the same enchanting maze, but when I see the charming colors and winding ways my analytical abilities and common sense fall apart.

I just want to live somewhere ridiculously pretty!

It's all in reach.

I didn't take any real, arty pictures of Biot, just a few quick ones from the cafe in the square where we lingered with increasing length over our coffees. So naturally I had to clerkmanifesto the pictures up so they gave off the proper feeling. 

And I added Doris.