Birthday presents and addresses

When I go back to Geneva, I had planned to scour the stores for a certain birthday present for my daughter, albeit it late. But it was something she said she would like to have in a passing conversation and I had little hope in finding it Argelès, or so I thought.

Running mundane errands (kitty food for Ptah II) with my friend we passed a store that has antiques and junk. I saw exactly what I wanted. Needless to say I grabbed it.

Now all I have to do is call for her address which is written down in my address book … IN GENEVA.

I could plead that she has moved so many times there is no point in memorizing an address. My father used to claim he put mine in pencil because of my many moves.

For a long time I kept all this information on computer but I never had the computer with me when I needed an address, so I went back to the old fashioned paper list in my paper agenda.

However, I didn’t bother to transfer it to the new 2007 agenda because she told me she was planning to change apartments.

Ah well, VOIPcheap means I call the states free, and it will be good to talk to her.

I suppose I could keep computer lists, computer agenda and a printed copy of both with me, but that would only lead to things being in one and not another. Or maybe I can just accept I will never have all the information I want when I need it.

The red white and blue

The American, French and English flags are all red, white and blue as are some other countries, but EDF has given the colours new meaning. EDF is Electricité de France.

I learned about the colouration when on a cold night, I was eating with a good friend. The goat was roasted to perfection, the risotto was just right and the salad was made of a veggie that looked as if a cauliflower mated with broccoli and then bleached its flowers. It worked.

A beep went off.

“Damn, that means tomorrow is a red day,” she said. She didn’t wait for me to ask. “Electricity will cost more.”

I knew she had changed her meter to a night/day one which charges less at night then during the day, good for working families, and those who want to do the washing at night. Not as good for people who are home all day and heat with electricity. Her old meter had probably been put in before Thomas Edison was born.

In the program EDF has 22 red days during the winter when electricity costs the most during the day. Blue days and white days are figured at lower rates. All colours are higherlower at night.

Another beep.

“It will beep for an hour, so I won’t miss knowing what colour I am living with,” she said. She then showed me a table that explained it including charts.

"Interesting." I hope it lowers her bill. Anyone that can make as good a dinner as she does, deserves the best she can get.

The Tramantane

I won’t compare last night’s Tramantane to the winds in the north, for trees stayed in the ground and tiles on the roofs, but it woke me several times, once because it forced open a window. More than once it seemed as if it were swirling around my studio, although I was snug under my penguin-flannel covered duvet.

The marché today, which usually has upwards of 60 commercants selling their olives, cheeses, sausages and other meats, veggies and clothing, was reduced to one brave meat wagon huddled under the protective wings of the 700 year-old church, which has survived decades of this winds and not a few wars.

This is more normal for winter. The ski stations in the mountains now have snow.

Compared to sticky heat, or even the temperatures in Florida last month at Christman, I am content in my slippers and thick sweater with a pot of tea at my side.

Meanwhile the wind continues to blow.

Points of view

A majority of my Arab friends believe as surely as they believe that the sun is in the sky that the TV station Al Jazerra is somehow backed by the CIA.

Listening to the Americans like Rumsfeld, they treat the station as the work of some devilish force.

When I had an Arabic speaker around, I could get translations but it was never often enough and normally when these friends are around we prefer eating, talking, listening to music and even belly dancing a couple of time to watching TV, but now my TV service offers the station in English.

Last night’s debate featured an American, Palestinian and Robert Fisk, two opposing views and a moderating one. It was fair and balanced. However between the Palestinian and the American I worry, because their opinions were so opposite, I wondered if they were talking about the same planet.

One thing that surprised me was when the American said Arabs didn’t know enough about America, that they didn’t study it.

My experience, when I have met my Arab friends, is how many majored in American studies. Those with degrees from other disciplines had read most of the American authors both classical and popular, could discuss the Civil War with more knowledge than most American high school students, and understood how the American government worked that would make a civics teacher weep with joy.

Granted, my friends from the Middle East are highly educated and well-travelled. My trips to the Middle East are limited, but I feel in-depth having stayed with real families and developing networks of friends, rather than just playing tourist, although I have done that too. I can drink matei and crack watermelon seeds for hours while sharing gossip and stories about myriad subjects.

However, if Al Jazeera is Arab or CIA controlled, doesn’t matter. The fact that both sides distrust makes me think they are probably doing something right.

For me it is another point of view to add to CNN, MSNBC, BBC, France24 and the other news-devoted station to try and get the whole picture. This does not mean that I will give up checking with newspapers from the countries where the stories happen to add another point of view. Thank-goodness I am a fast reader.

When a bowl of tea is more than a bowl of tea

Years ago Steve Allen on his late night show blindfolded people in his audience and made them guess sounds. What triggered the memory this morning was the sound of my tea being poured from the pot (properly made with tea leaves, and the pot warmed before pouring in the water) into my tea bowl. Yes bowl. In the morning I’ve adopted the French habit of a big bowl of tea. I use the bowl with a raised cow that a friend gave me to celebrate my Swiss nationality.

The tea itself had been purchased from the tea shop down the street with its cans and cans of different teas with their different aromas and names conjuring up images of places only seen in exotic foreign movies. Two days ago I had bought some Darjeeling, which the owner had measured into a narrow red bag after writing the name of the tea in the small beige square left for the purpose. She sealed the bag with a gold wire strip using it to fold the top of the bag over and over until she reached the tea.

Today will be a work day, concentrating on stories from Canada. As I write at my computer, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, my bowl of tea resting on my breakfast tray, I am overwhelmed by the pleasure something as simple as drinking tea can bring.

Couscous and cinemas

The 10^th Cinema festival of Maghreb opened in Argelés, last night, although they had a pre-festival film the night before, a film version of Mohamed Choukuri, Le pain nu, based on the story of his life as a starving and ill-treated child in Tanger who as an illiterate adult had the lucky chance to be sent to prison where he learned to read. He finished his life as a teacher and writer. The film was painful to watch, bringing home the horrendous poverty that envelops too much of this planet.

A couscous dinner and the film Barakat in which a young doctor searches for her kidnapped journalist husband was the program for the opening along with a photo exhibition. The hall had been reserved, the food prepared, the film loaded in the projector.

The price forthe evening was 7Euros ($9).

Almost double the expected crowd arrived, many from surrounding villages, a second hall was opened. Friends greeted each other. Those who didn’t know each other introduced themselves and sometimes found they knew people in common.

Extra couscous had been prepared, but not enough. One of the organizers, a man who taken a year off ostensibly to make a film, but in reality to fulfill and live his passion, shown the week before, made an announcements. Pizzas were arriving so everyone could be fed.

Although fed well there were too many people to fit into the theatre. Only those with pre-paid tickets could see the film, which they took with good humour.

Today there are many films, but I will go to only one adding another to my international wedding repertoire, this one, Noces d’été, by a Tunisian director, about a young journalist who doesn’t like his parents attempts to push him into marriage.

It’s so nice to have so much happening steps from my living space, but then it was no accident that I set up life so I can walk to whatever I need.

Dangerous Doors

According to a New Zealand news paper the US is testing a new communication tool that will beam into all defence communications in case of emergency. The only problem when they tested it they discovered it was on the same frequency that opened garage doors.

Twilight zone openings and shuttings happened, which caused one American to comment, “I never knew my garage was a threat to national security.”

France24

France24 is a new 24-hour news channel broadcast on two channels, one in English, one in French and quick channel switching show that the news is as close to identical as possible although French-speaking experts will show up on one, English-speaking experts on the other.

However as the case of the bi-lingual American ambassador to France, he was interviewed in both languages, but the questions were almost identical. English came first, because when asked about how good his French was, he said he would see in a few minutes.

World news seems to be covered as well or better than either CNN or BBC, but French news obviously gets more attention. One presenter is from CNN.

Two more clicks of the remote in my quest to know…

Why I am afraid

We read about the Greatest Generation, we read the history of WWII but Gladys Arnold in her book One Woman’s War gives a first person account of the Germans entering France, the Vichy, escaping to London then home to Canada where she worked with the Free French.

Her history brought home facts little known. When the Free French took over two small Islands near Canada occupied by the Vichy, held and election and 98% of the citizens recognized the new French government, the U.S. Secretary Cordell Hull was besides himself because the US recognized the Vichy as the legitimate government of France.

Likewise when the Vichy ship Richelieu docked at New York, a majority of the crew disembarked to join the Free French almost causing an international incident. The men were hustled to Canada before their intentions could be known.

Although I had read a lot of WWII history, I had never realised that we did not give full support to the Free French rather than the illegitimate puppet government of France.

Arnold also gives a fascinating description of fascism.

"Everyone could understand communism, we thought. Hundreds of books have been written and its exponents were only too glad to talk about it. But fascism was more subtle, more difficult to pin down. It came in ways the majority of people did not recognize until too late. It was not the ism of the poor. It was the worm that could enter the heart of the wealthy, industrialized nations where bread, shelter and overcoats for everyone was take for granted. It led to dictatorship, and the dictator was usually the tool of a small, power group, representing the top economic and military echelons of society.”

When I say America has moved closer and closer to fascism since the turn of the century, people look at me as if I have two heads, but combing Arnold with the 14 definitions of a fascist society I see that the US meets 13 of the criteria.

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4. Supremacy of the Military
5. Rampant Sexism
6. Controlled Mass Media
7. Obsession with National Security
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
9. Corporate Power is Protected
10. Labor Power is Suppressed
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
14. Fraudulent Elections

And I am afraid.

Disney blues

The Dorchester Eagles, a Boston-based Pop Warner football team for kids 8 to 15, won a chance to compete in the national finals. Great…

Wait a minute…they have to raise the money to go, and they can’t save on cheap accommodations or camp. The sponsor Disney says they MUST stay in Disney hotels and buy passes to their parks and others in the region.

“Like more than a million amateur athletes before them, the Pop Warner kids -- ages 8 to 15 -- were bound for Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex, which takes in tens of millions of dollars a year from participants who solicit charitable donations from friends, strangers, businesses, and nonprofits to compete in events at the park,” according to The Boston Globe.

Another team, the “St. Philip Saints, faced a $22,000 debt after its $50,000 trip last month to the sports complex,” The Globe reported.

I have not been a Disney fan for years. It seemed stupid to pay $93 million to an exec that didn’t work out. I didn’t like that they sued a small Florida nursery school for drawing their own Disney like characters and putting them in the window without paying Disney for a license. There corporate behaviour in opening Eurodisney had the warmth of Attila the Hun, driving companies out of business by their slow payment among other things. At an IABC conference the Disney spokesman told how they get publicity by co-op Olympic winners. The US is badly in need of real news, not Nancy Kerrigan in a Disney parade. We won’t even discuss the mega ego of long-time Disney head Eisner, who will be history shortly. You can create a fantasy world, which in itself is wonderful, without destruction of others.

Meanwhile the kids from Dorchester are frantically trying to raise more money for the trip than most of their parents earn in a year to help Disney’s profit stay at or beat last year’s $3.4 billion profit.

I often complain that American culture has become corporate culture not human culture, that Americans aren't citizens but consumers. This story only adds to this belief.

An apple rethink

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but I have never been a big apple fan, (apologies to my former assistant who is living his life-long dream with an apple farm in Pennsylvania), but for some reason as I stood at Patricia’s vegetable stand, the stack of apples caught my attention. They were natural of course, no wax no polish, but the way the sun hit the red and yellow of the skins, I felt adding it to my fresh coriander, clementines, onion, and Swiss chard was the only option. Then I forgot about it as I chatted with Caroline about her new baby as she rang up her order. And I paid no attention when I added my fresh produce to the green African bowl on my sideboard.

Because I had a late breakfast and a late lunch that could be called linner or dunch, I didn’t want to eat another meal before going to bed. I looked at the apple. I had also bought cheese from the cheese shop. Which one? Why not both?

I cannot think when I enjoyed a mealette so much. The crunch of the apple was like music, the sweetness ran over my tongue and lingered. The cheese, a tomme, was a mild contrast.

Maybe an apple a day isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Cold nights, warm bed

Florida’s heat had left me drained. Nights in a bedroom where there was no access to outside air had left me tossing and turning with only a sheet for cover. Thus being back where winter is more like winter, I was thrilled with the cool air, the need for my flannel pjs, the puff covered in its blue flannel and penguin pattern.

I rediscovered another pleasure. After doing a toilet-run, my feet tingling from the cold tile floor, jumping back under the covers to discover the bed still toasty from my own heat.

Playing with words.

Reading Natural Curiosity by Margaret Dabble in bed this morning, (reading like this is a luxury still appreciated every day of the week, after years of jumping out of bed to go to work) her heroine mentioned she had recovered love.

Recovered, recovered. The word bounced around my head and I kept going back to the sentence rather than reading on.

Recovered meant to find again as Dabble had used it. You get something back. If you recover from an illness you find your health again. I recover my keys from wherever I have tossed them. I have often thought finding keys should be an Olympic sport.

But if you recover a couch with new fabric you hide it where you can’t see it. If you open a box to reveal its contents, but when you recover it, the contents are hidden an opposite meaning.

I went to www.etymonline.com to find the history of the word.

C.1300, "to regain consciousness," from Anglo-Fr. rekeverer (1292), O.Fr. recovrer, from L. recuperare "to recover" (see recuperate). Meaning "to regain health or strength" is from c.1330; sense of "to get (anything) back" is first attested 1366. Recovery is c.1302, in Anglo-Fr., both of health and of legal possession.

Nothing about the second meaning. I looked at my click-clack (French for convertible couch because when you change it from a couch to a bed it first goes click than clack as you lift the seat up and down). The blue cover is in perfect condition so there is no need to recover it. When I do maybe I should use the word reupholster and when I put the lid on a box for a second time, I can close it rather than recover it.

As for my constantly missing keys, I hope to recover those as regularly as I lose them.

Galette-rois

The boulangerie case had was filled with frangipane http://www.recette-dessert.com/galette-rois-frangipane-r262.htm of all sizes. Since it was just going to be just Barbara and me eating the round, flat slightly almondy pastry, I chose the smallest one.

After our chicken from the man down the street, I cut it in half. Since there were no small children to say who got one which piece, she selected her own.

The fava bean was in hers. Mine had the little ceramic figure, two mice, with the French words for “the lovers” in tiny French letters.

We each wore the crown for a few minutes. She confessed that she still had her ceramic figure from when she got the figure last year. In Geneva, I had the King. I told her I kept mine. As a person who throws out everything, I feel the need to slip them into my change bank. I have no idea why. It is all part of the celebration of the Three Kings Day.

Jacques me contactez s.v.p

Je pense que j’ai un couple des locataires pour 29 juin à 15 juillet, mais je suis perdue votre email. Ou téléphoner à Barbara.

Merci.

French love

The couple at the next table at L’Express Bleu Brasserie held hands. His gaze radiated love for the woman. His clothing was that of the successful French businessman including the black raincoat. His black hair was speckled with grey and his skin was weathered from what could have been much time on the ski slopes.

Her style was jeans with high black boots. Her white sweater that came to the top of her thighs was belted. She stroked his hand but the look in her eyes showed which one in the couple loved the other more. Besotted would apply only to the male. She was the besottee.

Had they not been touching and that her skin was too dark to be the result of a mixed marriage, one might assume they could be father and daughter.

His eyes never left her face as he hung on her every word.

And oh yes, he wore a wedding ring. She did not.

Monsieur Kamel I miss you

I held the tea cup in my hand in L’Express Bleu, the barasserie at the Gare du Lyon, my petit dejeneur in front of me. The murals of people in 19^th century dress are behind me, photos of trains in front of me. Suitcases outnumbered people eating. My hands were still shaking. On the taxi ride from Puteaux to the train station we had two near accidents. Another coat of paint and we would have crashed first into a taxi then into a bus.

My usual taxi driver, Monsieur Kamel, took the vacances scholaire. He told me that when he drove me to Charles De Gaulle when I went to Florida before the holidays. Now I was back and heading to the South of France riding with another cab driver. My friend teases me that I am the only person she knows that befriends taxi drivers, but after numerous trips to airports and train stations in his taxi with him we have shared much information.

He is of Algerian descent although raised in France. He wears a full beard and talks at a speed that keeps me concentraing. We have exchanged so many ideas. He has asked me to come home to sample his wife’s couscous and sometime when I am in Paris long enough I will take him up on it. The last two times I have been in his taxi he has called people he knows to “meet” me. Thus I feel I know his sister, a school teacher, and his friend another cab driver.

Since taking my daughter to the airport last year, he always asks about her and shakes his head that neither she or my hostess are married. Given a bit of encouragement, I am sure he would start seeking husbands for these women.

Monsieur Kamel has another wonderful quality. He is a sane driver.

The Syrian Bride,

If I were getting a Ph.D in international communications, films or women’s studies, I would want to do my thesis on marriage in movies. There are many, not just the American like Father of the Bride, but ethnic ones like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And each culture has them such as Monsoon Marriage, which I saw with my Indian neighbours who pointed out cultural things, that I would have missed.

I have added a new one, The Syrian Bride and like the Indian film, my Syrian friend pointed out things I would have seen but not fully understood. The film was made by Israelis and was the story of a woman in the Golan Heights marrying a distance cousin and moving with him to Damascus. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0423310/ to read about it or to see the trailer

My friend said that she knew many Damascian women who did the reverse. What made the movie so painful, was that as soon as the woman crossed the border to her new husband’s country, she could never return to her own people. They might wave across the border from barbed wire to barbed wire, but that was it.

She also told me that in the Golan Heights people loved Assad not like in Syria where he was feared and hated, something I would have missed as much as I would have missed why the mother snuck her cigarettes in Monsoon Marriage.

The family dynamics of living in an occupied land, parents saying goodbye forever to a much-loved daughter combined with difficulties of getting the bride’s passport cleared on both sides was a contrast to the normal happy marriage movies. In one scene, a border guard brings the bride, dressed in a white gown, veil and gloves, a chair to sit on. The day is hot and she accepts it. She is alone staring through a gate and across a stretch of land looking at her new husband to be. She can not go home. Her passport, which reads nationality unidentified, as do all her families’ has been released to the Syrians. She cannot get it back. She can not go forward. I won’t tell you how it ends. Find the film.

“Do many people have a passport stamped, nationality unidentified?” I asked my friend. Until that moment, I had never heard of such a thing. In my quest for nationality, I had never thought of what happened to people when their nations cease to exist or they are trapped by occupiers.

“Yes,” she said.

We talked long into the night instead of going to bed early as planned because I was jet lagged and because she had to go to the hospital where she is a resident the next morning. She has educated me to the results of governmental policies of centuries not in broad terms that would be taught in economic or military history courses, but on the results of those policies, that could leave a woman in a wedding gown, sitting in a chair caught between two countries.

Shaking off bad feelings

Usually when I get off the plane at Charles de Gaulle, there is a tremendous relief at being on my home continent, a chance to heal, but this time, I carried the heaviness with me despite the warm greeting of my friend and former neighbour where I was staying for a couple of days before finally heading home.

The evening was especially nice as we ate freshly prepared Syrian food and shared a conversation with two of her friends, one whom I had met before and whose family I have come to like from my Damascus visits. The conversation, as always with them, touched on politics, religion, medicine (I was the only non medical student), families, literature, history nourishing me a little.

When I collapsed into bed, the same feeling of having come back from a pummelling stayed with me, although I wouldn’t have traded the time with loved ones for anything.

Walking to the ATM and La Defense did nothing to lighten my mood. The same streets I usually strut with pleasure because I am in Paris and it is ordinary not a once in a lifetime experience to be there looked dreary.

I was the only one at the SNCF office and the clerk who waited on me was in a joking mood practising his English with a word or two among his French. He asked my nationality. I told him to guess. He didn’t. Only when I pulled out my Swiss identity card did he believe me. I did admit that I had grown up in the States and had started to learn French very late.

With my ticket for my nest safely in my hand, I walked back through the concourse and back to the flat. Even though it was raining, everything seemed alive again, I had left the depression back at the SNCF office. It has stayed there.

The three-seat theory

It is no secret that when height was being handed out, I was in the liver line. I am exactly three airline economy seats tall. This is one of the reasons I chose to fly back to Europe from Christmas in the States on New Years Eve. I usually can find three seats and can sleep the flight away.

This year I even had my choice of three-seat beds. It made the trip seem like a short haul instead of 7+ hours.