Despite all of my oatmeal eatin efforts, despite only putting the villages farmer’s vegetables and fruits into my body and my minimal consumption of the poisonous substance we humans have cultivated and named refined sugar I have a small but bothersome cold I haven’t been able to shake for almost a week now. So here I am, having woken up about an hour ago to kids laughing, french birds chirping and the desire for a real cup of coffee, not knowing where I could get anything bigger than a shot of espresso anywhere in France, I walked into the kitchen with a very settled feeling, finally after four weeks of being here I have a stable feeling within myself and have found as much of my footing that I need right now.
Back to the coffee, now normally, being myself, I am always up for being french in every sense of the word all the way down to drinking only little shots of very strong coffee, but I woke up this morning and felt something else, I thought of my dear friend Carmela who has taken it upon herself to expand her world and take a driving tour of the US and is doing a brilliant job of making an atmospheric and exciting blog about the whole thing. She’s in New Orleans right now and I just felt her energy this morning, so I brushed my teeth, trying to ignore the slightly sore feeling in my throat and a vague memory of a small coffee machine came back to me from my first day here, when the dad was showing me around the house. In the kitchen, beside the Nespresso machine was a coffee maker that had somehow gone unnoticed by my eyes for four weeks. Extremely excited and feeling the perfection of my path down to the tiny details, I opened it up to find a filter filled with moldy coffee, the thing obviously hadn’t been used in a long time. I preceded to happily clean the whole machine out and made a fresh pot of coffee. I put a little of the quinoa, soy and almond milk mix that I buy from the little organic, or “Bio” in french, shop called La Vie Claire in the village and took it outside. It’s a truly beautiful sunday morning and there is greenery all around me. I had the strong desire to write, but I am also thinking of going into Geneva today. Whatever happens isn’t the issue though, it’s how I feel in my head and my body and I feel f*ing great!
I took my coffee inside and checked Carmela’s blog to read about her latest adventures, and checked my email to find a response from an old school friend of mine who’s been going to school in Paris saying that she would love to see me before she goes back to L.A. for summer break. I went to talk to the mother to ask if next weekend was the three day weekend she had been telling me about and she goes on to tell me that it’s actually a four day weekend and that she won’t need me to take care of the kids at all during that time. So excited, so I’m planning on taking the train to Paris on either wednesday night or early thursday morning and spending some time with Claire and hopefully getting to see another friend from Venice who’s in Paris for a bit.
Everything is incredibly beautiful and let me tell you, it was hard for a bit, being in a new place without knowing anyone, and not only that, but missing the most beautiful people I’ve ever known that have supported me and made me laugh and that have grown with me that I left in Venice. But I began to feel better when I started using my time alone to be productive, I have started to write about my life, I finally feel that I have the time and the confidence to write it all down. It’s the thing that really got me back to myself and the reasons that I came here instead of wallowing in what I had left in Venice. I’m going to go to Geneva on tuesday to the only well stocked english language bookstore on this side of France/Switzerland and get myself the a book on nutrition and some small fiction book, whichever catches my eye. I’ll read on the train ride to Paris.
I have been using tumblr as a way to share my stories and photographs with my friends but I’m not really feeling it anymore, so I’m transferring it over here. Yesterday, I woke up early, around 8:30am and got ready to go to a town called Annecy with the family, apparently there was some sort of flea market going on and they wanted to find a new dresser. I made a bowl of oatmeal and took the cd’s I had gotten from the bibliotheque, or library in english, and hoped in my car. I put in some death metal and we were off.
I haven’t driven on a autoroute before but I was going to follow them so I felt fine. As they began to reach 90 and then 110 kilometers per hour, my little european car was rattling to keep up with them. I had a power grip on the wheel the whole way there and eventually got to 130 kph and reached Annecy before 11am.
I don’t know how to describe the beauty, it’s different for me because this isn’t some sort of short lived vacation, so how I see things isn’t as if I won’t ever see it again, everything’s possible. I want to see the world, I want to find where home is for me and France is the first stop. Back to Annecy, there is a “small” lake (only in comparison to Le Lac of Geneva) beside gorgeous green mountains. The town is so beautiful, there are canals and bridges and old, truly old churches. There were huge crowds of people because of the once monthly fair that goes on, there were endless lines of tables filled with real antiques, not like the “antique” fairs that you find in L.A. were the oldest stuff you can find is from the 50′s. I found butter churners, and rusted cow bells, dolls, like the ones my mother had that were missing eyes and must have been from the 30′s. We were walking around when the mother spotted two very groovy chairs that she decided to buy for the house, after some hagling in french that I tried my best to understand she got both for 170 euros. I walked around a bit while she waited for the dad to get there and I found an old Super 8 camera and I wanted so bad but I wouldn’t know how to work the thing, so I coveted and moved on. I then found something, that within the next fours hours I visited at least four times, a Canon A1 film camera, it was 85 euros, and again, I didn’t know exactly how to work it so I decided not to get it, but walking around, it was in the back of my mind the whole time.
At around 1pm the dad, the mom, the three kids and I went to get lunch at St. Antones by an old roman catholic cathedral. We sat down on the patio and I ordered tuna tartare, I’m trying to include raw fish into my diet, I will hopefully find some raw dairy products at some point as well. I tried to eat it, but ended up eating all the vegetables instead, it wasn’t good to say the least. I saw some huge burgers pass me by after I tried eating the beautifully plated tuna and wished I had ordered something a little more american. Experiences are invaluable though, that’s why I came here and I’m happy I tried something new in a very old place.
After lunch I had two hours to myself to walk around. I did a couple circles around the old town, didn’t go to the lake though, so next time I will. I got a small bark of dark chocolate with macadamia nuts for 2 euros from a darling little chocolaterie and perused the shops. I wanted to find a coffee shop to sit down and write at but hesitated because my french isn’t very good and I only make a fool of myself for the people I crush hard on. I met up with the family around 4pm and we took the cars into the little village, trying to avoid the police because you aren’t really allowed to drive where we were driving but we needed to pick up the chairs they had bought. After some careful maneuvering around ticked off French pedestrians we got to the furniture guy, for lack of a better nickname. I helped load the chairs into the car and we were back on the auto route to Veigy.
On the way back the mom and I stopped to do some food shopping for the week, you bag everything yourself here, and if you want a plastic bag you have to pay for it. They are doing more here for the environment than “health and environment conscious” L.A. We stopped at home, unloaded the stuff and I took off to watch see the sun set over Geneva.
I hit traffic on my way there so I let the Oscar winning songs of the 1930′s and 40′s keep me entertained. After about 20 minutes of inching forward I turned a left and parked. I took my camera and a book, which I didn’t end up reading, but I can’t seem leave the house without one. I walked around, most everything was closed but it was stunning and quite peaceful, I walked across the bridge to the other side of the city to scope it out, having only walked around the other side. I knew there was an English language bookstore on the other side and I wanted to check it out, even if it was closed. It’s incredible, I am already pretty familiar with the city and I’ve not spent that much time here, if you pay attention to your surroundings, which it’s hard not to do here, you can create a mental map in no time. Avoiding the stares of some very creepy bench dwellers I continued on and ended up following some very romantic sounding music, I came across a group of men serenading some couples probably on their honeymoon and I stopped into a place called Globus, which usually I would run away from solely because of the name, anything that sounds like world domination I’m just not down for supporting. They were open though, and the smells from inside were very enticing. I got a small cup of tiramisu ice cream for 4 swiss francs and sat down on the steps.
As I had gotten up very early I started to feel my energy waining, so I decided to head home, although trust me, it’s not the easiest thing to leave a town as lovely as Geneva at sundown. I was also starting to feel the need for some real food, having had only sugar, albeit high quality French sugar, for the last 6 hours, my head and stomach were asking for something a little more nutrient rich. I made the drive home sans traffic, I put some potatoes in the oven and sat down to watch a little bit of one of my favorite films, Io Sono L’Amore.
