Paris and the Norman Invasion

Un jour en France....
 
I'm sitting beside a 200 year old stone farmhouse in Normandy, my belly full of fine cheeses and local cider, reveling in the tranquility of the countryside.  Only yesterday I was in a different world -  Cafe Les Deux Magots in Paris, an old hangout of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, sipping a demi-tasse of coffee and watching the swirl of traffic. Did I say "different world"?  Isn't it all a different world from Hornby Island or my back yard in Vancouver where one would expect to find me at this time? What am I doing in France? The short answer is that I have come at the suggestion of my lady friend (one might say "girlfriend") Avril.  Because she was scheduled to attend a conference in Europe she opted to stay and travel for many more weeks.  And since travel is always better with a companion, she asked me to join her. May I say that Vancouver during the dry months is quite wonderful, and a welcome reward for having endured it in the rainy, but when given the choice between August in Vancouver or Avril in Paris, well......
 
As you know, travel has always been a big thing for me.  Better stated, travel has always been a big thing for us - for Ruth and me.  The excitement of new cuisine and music, the opportunity to learn world history, the possibilities of new friendships, the dozens of daily challenges which, if properly contextualized, will become good stories, the change of pace which allows for intimacy to flower.  And so, among the many things I lost when I lost Ruth, I lost Travel.  But travel has always been a big thing for Avril as well, and as our relationship has grown over the recent months the opportunity to travel together presents us both with a huge gift.  As with so many other areas of my life, Avril makes no effort to replace Ruth, either the Ruth of my past or the Ruth who stays with me today.  But she certainly enhances my present - and my future- as I learn new reasons to get up each day and live what has been given to me to the fullest.  Today, that includes France. And more generally, that includes Avril herself and the creativity and joy she brings. Ruth would approve.
 
Three days in Paris - three days in which we did not see the Eiffel Tower, stroll the Champs Élysées or visit a single museum.  Instead, we walked. We walked past the artificial beaches along the Seine (where we saw a miniature of the Eiffel Tower composed of bistro chairs - apparently this year marks the 125th anniversary of both French masterpieces), we walked the warren of back streets on Montmartre, we walked the Jardin du Luxembourg and the cemetery of Montparnasse.  And along the way we appreciated the civic architecture (the famous wide boulevards and the fine stone buildings with the wrought-iron railings were a balm to the eye.  The irritating flashing green signs outside each pharmacy -each sign spinning its lights and patterns in some software-crazed hyperkinetic frenzy- were a blight to the eye), saw the ethnic diversity of the neighbourhoods (I was not too surprised by the hassid who came at me armed, so to speak, with a pair of tefillin but we were totally unprepared for the dramatic shift from Paris to Dakar as we stumbled upon the African zone), paid our respects at the grave of Alfred Dreyfus plus those of Sartre and de Beauvoir (left stones on the former, but not the latter), drank coffee in sidewalk cafés (strange how the chairs never face each other across the tables - they always and only face only the sidewalk) and ate our range of fine food (one night in a boutique upscale restaurant with a small but daily different menu and a selection of fine wines, one night in an Algerian neighbourhood grill joint serving lamb cuts and merguez but no alcohol, and one night in a trendy fusion venture with good vegetarian options and snooty teas).  And each night, a retreat to our little garret in Le Marais. And I do mean little! The cumulative area taken up by the four and a half flights of stairs it took to get there easily exceeded the actual floor space area of the apartment itself. But Avril and I held something romantic about the notion of a little garret in Le Marais and, er, well, the situation did not disappoint.o
 
But now we are in Normandy, though a day has passed since I began this blog. The farmhouse belongs to friends of Avril's (they work in Paris and in Caen, and the neighbour grazes horses and sheep on their land) and they have driven us around their 'hood. We've seen a picnic table by the old bridge over the stream where the women used to do laundry, a massive medieval pigeon tower, stone churches dating to the 12th or 14th centuries, a chateau that has been in one family's possession since before the time of William of Normandy (a.k.a. William the Conqueror, 1066), another but somewhat smaller old stone chateau with the coat of arms above the gated entrance and surrounded by a stream that in earlier day was a deep moat. That one is for sale for about the same price as I'd get for my house on 23rd Avenue. Hmmm....

 
 
History is certainly the big draw here.  There is old European history for sure - we saw the Bayeux Tapestry, sometimes called the worlds biggest comic strip, a 70 meter long cloth embroidered in the 12th century and telling the narrative of William's struggle with Harold and the conquest of England. Exit through the gift shop. But the recent history is what draws the bulk of the Canadian and American tourists. We visited Omaha Beach, the site of the fiercest fighting of the D-Day landing. The large American cemetery on the hard-conquered hill is beautiful and tranquil, and the families at play on the long sandy beach itself seem oblivious to the horror of the past.   But a few minutes spent remembering the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan puts it all in terrifying context. I'll make no comment on the local entrepreneurs who dress you up in battle dress and drive you around in military jeeps. I'm just glad there was nobody with a paintball franchise when I visited Babi Yar.
 
But our weekend draws to a close. No more of the large leisurely meals with endless bottles of wine, local lamb and fine cheeses. Tomorrow we bid au revoir to Avril's friends and head to Provence.  More blogs may follow.
 
May your days be filled with good things.
 
Avi