Un été en Provence

One summer in Provence is often like any other; they seem to have a timeless quality about them.  The many old rituals that mark the beginning of summer here are one contributor to that sense, as I recounted a bit breathlessly last summer. (See L'estival, June 2012).  This year, the images presented in artistic and literary works, especially those by Provençal natives, have revealed other ways in which Provençal summers have eternal qualities.  For example, at the major two-part art exhibition in Aix and Marseille right now called Le Grand Atelier Du Midi, I saw scenes and portrayals of Provence by the painter Paul Cézanne, and others, that were astonishingly similar to sights we can see today even though they were painted up to 100 years ago--the gorgeous seashores and ports at Marseille or Cassis or Nice, and the hilly and mountainous landscapes of scrubby pines, olive groves, red soil near Aix and in the Luberon, the baigneurs (bathers), the agricultural workers, the people reposing on verandas or near open windows.  The artists who make up what is being called 'the studio of the south' all saw, despite their different styles and portrayals, the same amazing azure color of the Mediterranean sea, and the light, that famous Provençal light, that we ourselves can see here every day in 2013.  (See my earlier post about this exhibition, Les oeuvres d'art, June 2013.)

The timelessness of Provençal summers is also echoed in literature.  I've recently completed two parts of playwright Marcel Pagnol's memoirs in which he describes summer holidays in le midi (the south) starting in 1903 when he was the same age as my boys, about to enter quatrième (4th grade, or U.S. 8th grade). In La gloire de mon père we learn about the magical first summer at la Bastide Neuve  near La Treille with his aunt's family, and the epic opening day of hunting season which brought unexpected glory to his teacher-father and a new friendship to Pagnol himself.  The second book, Le chateau de ma mère describes how Pagnol's family managed to continue their visits to the beloved Provençal summer place during the school year despite the difficult and long distance from their home. (Both books have been translated into English: My father's glory, My mother's castle.)  The ways in which Pagnol described the landscape, the daily routines, the summer foods, even the melancholia associated with the end of summer holidays, continue to be evocative of Provençal summers today.  Not a day has gone by this month that we haven't heard descendants of the cicadas that Pagnol described, and the heat in August continues to bake the ground as it has each late summer since time immemorial.  Likewise, 21st century late summer days seem to be as languid as those experienced by Pagnol's family, with slow, lazy afternoons, drinks enjoyed outside, and the late and leisurely market-fresh dinners.  Even that first bit of sadness marking the end of the holidays has begun for us as it did for young Marcel many summers ago.  Some of the details differ, as Pagnol was describing a time when transportation and electricity were still fairly primitive and not widely accessible.  Our end-of-summer melancholia is reflected by the need to turn on electric lights as darkness cuts our dinners on the terrace a bit shorter each night, and by the filling up again of the empty parking spots on our street as locals return from their own holidays.  However, just as Provençal summers have always been marked with a sudden influx of fêtes, special market days, and boules tournaments that then gradually lead to slower, more relaxing days in the sun and shade, the end of summer, or any season really, is also both sudden and gradual, but in reverse. This is as true today as it was in Pagnol's and Cézanne's Provence, and one could even say it is true anywhere.  Gradually, we make small daily adjustments to our daily routines to accommodate shorter summer days and windier or rainier weather and calendar dates that come closer and closer.  Sometimes we may even try to ignore the signs a little as Pagnol himself did.  But then, suddenly, we have to accept, just like every year, that another wonderful summer, in Provence, or elsewhere, has come and is almost gone.

Les boules de neige

Like boules de neige (snowballs) that get bigger and denser the more snow you pack into them, the ski resorts in France are getting more and more crowded in this second week of les vacances scolaires (school holidays). French school 'districts' are divided into three zones (Aix schools fall into zone B), and the school winter and spring holidays are staggered by zone so that holiday locales can adequately meet the domestic demand for accommodations and space. Each year a different zone begins the holiday cycle; last year zone B had the last winter and spring holidays, occurring in mid-March and early May, respectively, while this year zone B starts off the cycle. Unfortunately, we could not get away the first week, so our zone B family's stay at a little 10-room hotel aptly called La boule de neige, in the ski resort at Serre Chevalier, near Briançon, overlaps with a zone A family's, from Lyon. (The Parisians of zone C arrive one week later by which time our kids will be back in school.)

The crowding and the scheduling of the family ski day seems to be especially attuned to mealtimes, which is of course especially French (even if not all that different from family ski days at resorts in other parts of the world). Ski lifts open at 9 here in the southern Alps, and the télésiège (chairlift) and télécabine (gondola) lines are heavy by 10:30, after the leisurely petit déjeuners (breakfasts) with chocolat chauds (hot chocolates) and croissants have been eaten. The activity on the slopes quiets down considerably during the sacrosanct midday mealtime (except at the mountain and village restaurants!), and then again, after 5 pm, when one begins to see bunches of baguettes under the arms of ski parkas in the village. By this time, the last chairlifts stop running and families prepare for goûters and apéros (snacks and cocktails), before the evening meal around 7 or 8 pm.

Interestingly, we've met several adults without kids, French and foreigners alike, who are or were vacationing here at this same time as all of these French families with schoolchildren. If I were an avid skier and a parent without children at home (I am neither), I think I would avoid this particularly crowded time. One would think the accommodations would be cheaper and more widely available, and the village less boisterous (there's a carousel and marching band in ours, and a Wednesday evening super-spectacle complete with torch-bearing skiers and a fireworks display!), while the lines would be virtually non-existent and the snow would be as good and powdery even a few weeks on either side of the school holidays. We were in the Haute Savoie last Easter, outside of the school holiday times and had good snow, very short chairlift lines, and lots of fin de saison (end of ski season) sales on ski gear. (I mentioned this trip in a post in April 2012 called Département 13.). I'm sure the local hotel and restaurant proprietors appreciate the extended and less frenetic holiday times, but for many guests, I suppose part of the charm of alpine skiing is the lively aprés-ski scene. Without the hustle and bustle of vacationing families in the villages, the excitement and energy of the social environment after skiing is likely much lower, weaker, or might we say, softer, just like snowballs made of snow too early or too late in the season.

Le bonheur

While I am a somewhat lapsed knitter (but one who now lives a simpler, French life with more time for little pleasures like needlecrafts), I was initially puzzled by the dearth of handicraft shops in Aix.  Within our first month here, a friend introduced me to a lovely but pricey shop called Au bonheur de dames (ladies' true happiness), where I have spent plenty of  Euros on yarn for the same flouncy scarves I've seen on many women here (see me wearing one creation on Le temps, Nov. 30, 2011) and on some beautiful but expensive needlework kits (my photo shows a little needle case that I completed earlier this year).  Yet, when I went looking for more shopping options, I was surprised by how few there were and how limited.

It didn't take long for me to realize why Aix has so few textile crafts shops.  On EACH occasion that I have brought out my knitting or other needlework in public or among French friends, I have been teased for being an old woman knitting on the football or rugby sideline or in the living room armchair.  Le tricot, la broderie, la couture, ils ne sont pas à la mode!  (Knitting, embroidery, sewing, they are not 'in'!)   This is in direct contrast to my experience in the United States where knitting and other crafts continue to be very popular.  Yet, the young sisters of the French soccer players have been absolutely mesmerized by my projects, asking me questions about the embroidery tension rings and needles, admiring the changing colors on the variegated yarn on my fingerless glove project shown here, and checking on my crafting progress throughout the games.  Surely these pleasures are not reserved for just les vieilles dames (the old ladies)?

I've come to think that young girls in this society, and particularly in the south have limited leisure time opportunities, with Barbies, then shopping and cosmetics, and then experimenting with cigarettes among them.  Clearly, textile handcrafts are largely out, yet other options like physical activities continue to be fairly segregated by gender.  Girls swim, do gymnastics or dance, play tennis, or might ride horses if they have the money.  There are a few exceptions, and perhaps my eagle-eyed readers discovered two of them in my last post (the one with the masculine title Allez les gars, Nov. 26, 2012): in the accompanying photo of my son's football team, there are two girls who play soccer alongside the boys.  They have to, if they want to play soccer here.  While France has a national women's team, the infrastructure for a girls' youth league is not as well-developed as it is in the United States where young girls have many opportunities to play, and so they do.  I have yet to see an all-girls soccer team or league here in the football-crazy south, and it's probably right to say that France does not yet have a functioning equivalent of Title IX (the U.S. law that ensures equal funding for women's athletic and other programs in federally supported institutions).  That means that French girls have to be incredibly determined, tough, and focused, if they want to play le foot, just like the two girls at my son's club as well as the courageous girl I saw yesterday, at a match in Marseille.  She waited stoically with her parents for warm-ups to begin, standing just beyond her all-boy team that was horsing around (and excluding her).  I watched her maintain her poker-face and her rigid posture as she stepped onto the field at the start of both halves.  Clearly, le foot means a lot to her, yet she cannot comfortably express the joy and pleasure she has for the game while playing among and against adolescent boys.  (Blog update: I have discovered a New York Times essay about this same topic, Sciolino, Sept. 16, 2002. "Paris Journal; For French Girls, Soccer is a tough goal", suggesting that not much has changed in a decade.)

How do we find notre bonheur (that which makes us happy)?  As I continue to observe the gender inequality around me and look for evolutions towards a literally and figuratively more equalized playing field for French girls, (and wait for knitting to become hip among the younger French, male and female alike), I am hugely disappointed by France's former First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy's comments in a recent interview with the Parisian Vogue.  She says that women of her generation ....“don’t need to be a feminist....There were pioneers who opened the breach....I’m not at all an active feminist. On the contrary I’m bourgeois, I love family life, I love doing the same thing every day.” (as transcribed in "Carla supports gay marriage." La Connexion, Nov. 26, 2012) Apparently, this privileged and 'bourgeois' mother (whose voice could make a difference) seems to believe that her young daughter and other French girls will have no problem at all in finding equal and full access to life's pleasures and opportunities.

Un stage multisports

My kids participated in a stage last week in Aix.  (Stage can be translated as an internship or a training camp; here, I'd say it translates best as a day camp.)  Day camp experiences are nothing new for my urban, millenial kids whose summer times are way more structured than mine ever were.  In Seattle, they would have weeks of day camps and swimming lessons and a one-week sleep-away camp on the Olympic Peninsula, alternating with 'free' weeks at home or with either set of grandparents, full of play dates and the occasional sleep-overs with friends or cousins.  Idyllic, unplanned summers are no longer the norm for many middle class U.S. children whose lives are often arranged around the pursuit of becoming well-rounded and active.  It's true that even French children have opportunities to attend stages during les vacances scolaires (school holidays).  The big difference between organized summer activities for U.S. and French children though is in the variety of camp choices that are available.  Here, I've not seen long published lists of local summer camps, and the camps that do exist seem to be largely sports-oriented. (The main stage in town is one that does offer a variety of non-sports activities and outings but it fills up each year as soon as it is open for enrollment and so I know very little about it.)  Our boys ended up at a stage multisports (multisport camp) run by a local physical education teacher, and in August, they have the opportunity to attend another similarly sports-oriented one at a local country club.  In general, I am not aware of craft, cooking, music or other non-sports camps as one finds in a city like Seattle.

Despite the apparent lack of variety in summer camp offerings, we learned something last week about the popularity of what might be considered 'alternative' sports in the U.S.  The French of course love the globally mainstream sport of football (soccer), and they are crazy about rugby, which isn't as popular in the U.S., but it is the X games genre of sports that seem to be especially popular here.  These are the sports that involve board- or bike-riding tricks and are often coupled with ample doses of alternative music and street fashions.  At the boys' stage multisports, they learned how to use ripboards (twisty skateboards), and they spent part of another day at a popular private outdoor park just adjacent to the autoroute, sliding along tyroliennes (ziplines ) over land and water.  Among their French friends, several left youth soccer behind years ago and now spend hours perfecting and filming their tricks and techniques on trottinettes (scooters) and skateboards at local skate parks.  One of our boys has even bought himself a trick scooter at a popular local skate shop so that he can learn techniques from his friends, while the other boy is contemplating the purchase of a longboard, both of which we see all over Aix.  Of course, road biking is also popular here, what with the Tour de France and the challenging country roads here in the South, but among the younger set, BMX riding is the thing.  Adjacent to the more traditional football fields and stadiums, we've seen a number of  BMX tracks.

BMX riding of course is a new category in the more traditional Olympic games that are taking place right now in London.  I don't know yet if the French will be glued to the television during the BMX competition, but in just three days of watching French coverage of les jeux olympiques (the Olympic games), we have watched more judo, fencing, table tennis and handball than we EVER did on U.S. television.  These aren't all that mainstream in the U.S. despite being somewhat more traditional sports, but they have an avid following here.  Actually, I can see why.  From judo's formal bowing, down-to-business engagement, and brutal fighting, to the interesting contrasts between fencing's ancient artistry and elegant footwork and the electronic bells and whistles of the equipment, and the amazing physical reflexes required of table tennis and handball, we are spellbound by the French and other athletes participating in these Olympic categories.  (And the French commentators covering these sports are every bit as excited as those reporting on basketball or swimming.)  It makes sense now why some French kids bring ping-pong paddles to school to play table tennis in the schoolyard during the breaks between classes, and why the men's handball team in Aix gets the broad press coverage it does.  The pursuit of excellence in sport is fairly universal today, (given how even the smallest countries send athletes to the Olympic games), but the sports we pursue or follow may differ significantly, by society, and even by generation.  I'm sure one can guess which viewers in my household are anticipating the trampoline and BMX competitions and which ones are waiting for gymnastics and track and field.  As for national differences, we'll see how interested the French are in these sports as we follow the television coverage here this week, and next week, we'll track the Austrians' television coverage of the Olympic games from our vacation perch in the mountains of Tyrol.  Maybe we'll come across some ziplines, or tyroliennes, there too.

Les vacances

The ability to have leisure time and how one uses it are both sociological indicators of social status. In France, nearly all workers are entitled to 5 weeks of paid vacation a year so the ability to have leisure time is not a good marker of social status here, but the distinguishing factor may be HOW one vacations. The current issue of the Paris Match (18-24 August 2011) shows paparazzi photos of 'Les Politiques en vacance' (French politicians and government officials on their traditional August holidays). Sunbathing and boating at Corsica and St. Tropez, both here in the South, seem to be the most popular vacation pursuits of these rich and famous.

Seaside or village holidays are popular for the French of all social classes though, and we joined thousands of middle class French on the traffic-laden autoroutes heading north to our own seaside holiday, on the Friday of the August long weekend. (Monday, August 15 is a holiday on par with U.S. Labor Day.) We made a pit stop in Paris to meet up for an afternoon with our Seattle soccer friends, the K-D family, and while Paris may have been empty of its residents as it famously is in August, it was full of tourists, with whom we stood elbow to elbow at the Trocadero overlooking the Eiffel Tower at dusk.

Our ultimate destination was Grandcamp-Maisy, a small fishing village in Normandie, along the D-Day beaches of World War II. I had booked a resident-hotel unit, and both the hotel and the campground adjacent to it were packed. French, Italian, British, Dutch families, many with grandparents, were laden with crates of food, beach towels, and supplies to wash dishes and clothes. Many of the French campers with semi-permanent sites had fishing nets, buckets, and bicycles. The woman at reception said to us as we checked in, ‘Just 3 nights then?’ Clearly, we were supposed to stay for a good week, with sufficient supplies. We caught on quickly though and extended our stay by 2 nights and I made a mental list of supplies for next time. Maybe then we’ll try the chambres d’hotes or gites, where one can rent rooms on farms or entire houses.

Most of the vacationers around us were focused on getting their daily catch of mussels and other shellfish and on wearing their nautical shirts around town, while the focus of our holiday was history. We wanted to see the area where Allen’s grandfather had arrived during the Normandy campaign, with the 8th Division, on July 1, 1944, when the fighting was still very active and deadly. While the horrors he experienced are unimaginable, we saw the site of the artificial harbor that he undoubtedly crossed as well as the thick hedgerows through which the war was fought here. We visited three different museums about WWII and the Normandy Campaign, in Caen, Bayeux and Grandcamp-Maisy, the American and German military cemeteries, and the German battery and memorial at Pointe-du-Hoc, and had lunch one day at Cherbourg-Octeville, a port city largely devastated by the war.

Such a heavy pursuit of WW II history was balanced with swimming, at the pool or in the English Channel (Omaha Beach despite its history as a gruesome battlefield is an extraordinarily beautiful beach called Vierville-sur-mer), with sightseeing, in the picturesque town of Bayeux where we saw the famous 1000 year old tapestry that depicts how William, Duke of Normandy became the King of England (remember the Battle of Hastings in 1066?), and with a great deal of eating. We sampled the local ciders and Calvados (apple brandy) and the delightful owner of La belle mariniére introduced us to the local oysters, shrimps and mussels.

Some French are still on holiday, but we ended our first French holiday this past Friday, with an 11-hour cross country drive through the Loire Valley and the center of France all the way to our new home in Aix. It’s quite hot here now, 31 degrees (low 90s), but we’re rested and well-fed and in good shape to slowly prepare for the start of school on Sept. 5. Let's hope that the French government heads are equally rejuvenated from their vacances and are ready to get back to running the country.