July | 2015 | stumbling through the camino

Things get better after Orleans, obviously – walking the Loire to Tours

Posted on July 30, 2015 by MT

Orleans, OM10

I left Orleans in a bit of a sulk. Didn’t take to the place. A week to develop film. Blow me.

The previous cycle of one-horse towns changed after Orleans. Along the river Loire the towns were more populated and had more shops, more things to do. Our trip until Tours would be moving with the Loire southwest and stopping every 20km or so for the night. The first day we walked 26km and stopped at Beaugency. Everyone was in fine form. There was, according to Google maps, a photo place in town, we were finally using our 4kg tent at the local campsite, and the weather was perfect for walking.

We got to the campsite, set up our tent, dumped the rest of the things and went to explore Beaugency. First stop was the pizza place by the river. It was nice until we got up to leave, and then it was though we’d aged 200 years. Crab-walking up the street like John Wayne with incurable haemorrhoids.

Oh and that goddamn photo place had moved 7km up the road. Pack of wankers, update your Google maps. 7km doesn’t sound like much unless you’re a lazy, backsliding pedestrian who has to walk there.

Take it off Google then you god-damned cock-tease

But it doesn’t matter so much as I was able to break the seal with the very first op shop of the trip. Bless you, croix rouge. L waited outside and ultimately fell asleep, while I looked for something suitably heinous. But they were all out of stock so I had to buy this flirty blue number instead. For a euro. Makes up for the lack a little thus far I suppose.

That night I had the worst night of sleep on the trip. Only one that came close was Orleans after a night of cheap beer. A tent is no true way to travel. It gets dark very late and there are people around who won’t shut up. The tent is tiny as well. It’s like trying to sleep in an envelope. So I dozed fitfully and tried not to think about tomorrow.

Try sleeping next to a caravan full of partying germans and your own knee stuffed in your nose

I woke up feeling very unimpressed with the whole venture. But L had the passports and I was unable to overpower her and make for somewhere with public transport. So I gamely held out until Mer, 15km away, where I, in Australian parlance, dropped my showbags. I was not walking any further that day, not with the painful row of blisters on one heel, and my aching body, and my sad feelings.

L was lovely about it, happy not to be the one tapping out early. It was meant to be a big hike, some 36km that day, and I didn’t want to walk another goddamn step of it. So we caught a taxi the rest of the way to Blois.

Having the knee brace is an excellent out. I wear it for a patella that doesn’t move where it should, and of course for the way the brace looks, but if I wear the brace I don’t get any knee problems. But hopping in a taxi or limping about people see the brace and ask you how bad it is. I usually say it’s an injury of the sport because I can’t remember what the French doctor had called it. Expensive was probably one of them.

Blois was pretty as well. All these towns have cool bridges over the Loire, and Blois was no exception. They need to update the design so I can tell which bridge goes where in my photos. Our stay in Blois seemed to include lots of cyclists. The whole way down the river is a cyclist’s paradise. Whole families go for the trip. Bikes everywhere, cycling down the lovely Loire, and here we are, a pair of jackasses, humping it everywhere on foot.

Since Orleans the towns have really improved. Beautiful towns straddling the river, thronged with people, lovely streets to walk down. The only complaint I had (asides from the lack of photo and op shops, the constant walking, in fact pretty much everything else) is that the weather, although good for walking, was continually cloudy and not fantastic for photography. I could stand a hot day if it meant taking some decent shots of the scenery. Hell, the next day, when we got into Orzain, there was some decent breezes on the bridge which nearly knocked over my tripod. It at least knocked over a few bikes, loaded down was they were with all their travelling shite.

The other big news in Orzain (Orzain on one side of the river, Chaumont-sur-Loire – the prettier, fancier town with the chateau on the over) is that there was a fripperie open on a Monday. Too much of a good thing however, had to browse through tens of metres of racks of sports coats from France and Italy and couldn’t find a thing in my size. The jumpers were top shelf but I couldn’t spare the room. But things are picking up, that’s two shops in three days.

In Amboise there was another victim of the digital revolution:

This shit right here is why I’ll go digital.

But the town made it back up by having an op shop. I bought a fantastic set of pyjamas as seen here.

Finally we stopped in Tours for two days to get our lust for life back. Happily they had a photo lab and an emmaus so that was two boxes checked for me. There was nothing in the emmaus though. Somebody who knows what they’re doing already came through and swiped all the good stuff. You could tell by the way the only cameras that were left were crappy 35mm things nobody wanted.They did have a couple of Kodak Instamatics for sale for five bucks, and we tossed up whether to get them or not. But we weren’t sure what film it took so we left them there. A quick search shows they take a 126 cartridge but honestly if even 35mm is a hassle I don’t want to looking for trouble.

We got our film back in the afternoon and wasn’t that a bittersweet experience. It turns out L had gone a fortnight saving only the best shots for the Olympus Trip 35 and finally got to the end of the roll yesterday. She opened the camera to change the roll, and boom – turns out she hadn’t actually loaded film into it. And one of the three films I’d loaded, the first roll, it turned out I hadn’t switched the film release switch back after winding my film, so the film hadn’t advanced. We’re sitting on a 2/4 success rate for film so far. It’s enough to make you switch to digital.

All my tripod-mounted shots from the tower in Méréville, all the beautiful tiny bridge pictures in Saclas, the wonderful shots just as the dawn light hits the fields of wheat, all gone. Damn. I keep remembering where and when I took photos and it hurts, it really does.

Still, there were some nice shots:

Blois. Fun fact – the day after Blois or the next, can’t remember, I was reading a book that brought up Blois. Said that in WWII relieved American generals would be sent to the casual centre in Blois before being reassigned/sent home/taken out to pasture. But because Americans had trouble pronouncing the name of the town, they called it ‘Blooey’, which was where the popular expression, back in the day, of ‘going blooey’ had arisen.

Blois

Blois Church, or one of them at least. Took three shots and the tripod as the camera didn’t like the light much.

Most of the days were overcast and windy, so most of the shots of trees and stuff look blurry. The tripod was a necessity as I could go from a shot that comes out well like this one:

Blois

I mean I didn’t actually use the tripod for that one – as the OM10 automatically selects shutter speed depending on the light available, I could go from a shot like this which turned out great to a shot like this that didn’t:

Blois. This bloody couple stood looking at that door for five minutes while I waited for them to move their dawdling carcasses

The second shot was taken only two streets away not five minutes later, so the light was fairly similar but the camera selected a slower shutter speed. In lower light it’s too chancy knowing if the shot will work or if it’ll blur. I mean, bumping up the aperture notches up the shutter speed but as it shortens my depth of field it won’t work well for the scenery and landscape shots I’m taking.

One of the other things that didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped were some of the nature shots on bright days:

Méréville

Méréville

I know for next time the scene was too bright to pick out any of the detail in the shadows. Rookie mistake, but the more balanced shots turned out better a few metres away:

Photos along the Loire were fun. On the last one here I had to run out over to a little island at Amboise and through some water plants that turned out not to have as much buoyancy as I thought, so I got a little wet:

Fleury-les-Aubrais

Beaugency

Chaumont-sur-Loire

Blois

Chaumont-sur-Loire

Amboise

Also a quick selection of the beers I’ve had along the way – for some reason Loire towns are pretty keen on their blondes and wheat beers, weirdos.

Next big stop is Poitiers in a handful of days. I think I’ve got this business figured out now. Regular coffee breaks, podcasts and the occasional air-drumming to pass the time while walking, and while not walking, take some photos of bridges and eat way too much at every meal (“carb loading for tomorrow”).

Paris to that treacherous bitch Orleans

Posted on July 24, 2015 by MT

Disappointed as we were three hours early on Monday and missed out

We’re at the final destination for the first week – Orleans. In that time we’ve covered the route from Paris, deviating from the guidebook walk as it meandered the fuck all over the place. We instead chose a more direct walk figuring we’d still have our fill of forests and churches along the way.

I took more pictures on my D-Lux 4 than the OM10 mostly because it was easier to pull out the Leica than drag out the Olympus and set it up on a tripod. We’ve been walking during the early morning, and besides it’s been cloudy, so it hasn’t been ideal photography weather for the OM10 without the tripod. The Leica is pretty easy to take pics but I like to be able to adjust my settings by dial rather than menu dive for each shot. Most photos are full of green. I grew up in an arid part of the world so you’ll have to forgive the shots of green stuff.

One of the bridges at Saclas, where my arse done and sat down in a nettle bush

It’s a pretty repetitive routine every day so I won’t break each down separately. There is nothing more tedious than trotting out updates for each day, which L laughs at because that’s what she’s doing on her blog. Who cares? “Day 3 – 23.4km! We walked by a forest. Day 4 – 22.1km! I saw a bird!” Maybe I haven’t been sufficiently lost in the magic of it all, labouring as I have been for breath. I prefer to present it as very long stretches of the same with the opportunity to have some nice things along the way, especially ones that can be conveyed through pictures and not numbers of kilometres.

I mean I’ve been trying to sex it up a bit on Instagram by including glamour shots with wheat but there’s only so much you can do with grains, or in this case castles:

Sexy castle action in Étampes

So to provide a simple summary of how the day goes, it’s more or less like this:

Wake up. Gently move to see if anything is properly hurting. Attempt to warm up muscles. Try not to scream.
Get dressed, put everything in pack, yawn.
Heave pack to shoulders, emitting a keen of loss.
Walk
Break
Walk
Break at town for coffee.
Repeat steps 4-7 until at final destination for day.
Find accommodation, drop bags, shower, nap, hobble around town.
Eat and sleep.

In the 17th century, it was customary not to smile when getting your likeness carved. Étampes

And everything else can be broken down into different categories:

Walking – It’s not so bad now. First few days were hellish. Feet hurt at the end of the day. Scenery is nice if you’re into wheat fields. Google maps has been a great help there, except when they led us into an open field telling us it was a straight road through. We took it anyway, tramping over cut wheat, but then had to stop when the next hurdle was a crop of corn a metre tall. I swore to myself that it was the last time a mere crop got the better of me, and we went around.

The detour brought a pleasant surprise – a clear, cold running stream in the next little collection of houses. Dunking our feet in the cold water was a lovely stop, but then a bit further upstream we encountered these long thing beds for water to run over. It looked kind of like the beds that recycled toilet water runs over, so we assumed we’d just washed our feet in effluent.

Later, we were at a bar having a drink with another pilgrim, and some local heard we were Australian and offered to take us for a drive around to see the sights. Nice, we thought, Australians aren’t usually offered much more than an escorted trip out of the bar. The first stop on the tour was a visit to the local cresserie, which is the place where watercress is grown, and more importantly had waterbeds very much like the one we were worried carried effluent. I thought about telling the story to our guide but with my French it would have come out as ‘you water your plants with piss’ so I held my tongue.

We climbed that bitch. Backstage passes to the Australians, Méréville

Food – We started on Saturday and had our meal that night provided by our accommodation. No problems there. Sunday and Monday proved terrible for finding anything open. Seriously, all that money lost in provincial towns because they couldn’t cater to the wandering foreigner crowd. The only choices we had were from the takeout joints with the big plastic kebab meat thing spinning out the front.

On that: L gave me a book to read written by an old guy from Canberra who had completed a similar walk in Spain. He had to give up the fancy meats and gorging along the way as they caused havoc with his guts. He recommended for travellers to have smaller, more healthy options along the way, as it was far better for their stomachs and for the walking.

In the spirit of experimentation, and out of desperation, we had kebabs and hamburgers Sunday, and on Monday I had a spicy vindaloo, to see whether such gastric blows to my body would combine with the stress of walking and cause any problems. This wasn’t a calculated risk by any measure, as the few toilets along the route were found in the occasional tabac and they were designed with few comforts in mind. All the rest were bare fields with foot-high wheat and the occasional treacherous corn.

Happily, I discovered that my digestive system is better than the one found in an elderly guy from Canberra. So take my advice. Get the cheese for dessert. Dig in to the fancy hams.

But since everything’s bloody shut anyway, you’ll be content with a baguette for the day. Possibly a kebab if you’re lucky.

Towns – in Australia, every small town has at least 30km between it and the next one, and it has three pubs and a couple of shops. Here, there’s 5km to travel, but you’re lucky to get both a tabac and a boulangerie in the same town. The other thing about rural towns in Aus is that there’s always an op shop or an antique place. This is one of my great loves in life. I don’t have to buy anything. I just like to browse, maybe even ask for a price and do that whistle between the teeth like ‘good luck chief’. But there’s nothing in these towns. Just a collection of houses, a mairie, a bank and pharmacy. Probably a church too.

So how am I meant to do a bloody camino without accumulating a collection of vinyl, cheap cameras, and 70’s sportswear when there are no op shops? The main motivation for doing this trip was not the spiritual whatever or the fitness or Christ knows why else people do it, I thought I was getting a go at the finest types of op shops one can find in the world – the small country places with flexible pricing, a shed out back full of stock to paw through, run by old ladies who can be charmed into discounting everything. I’ve seen ONE antique store so far and that asshole was shut, possibly long deceased.

This is how I want to travel. Let me browse through musty racks of dead men’s suits. Let me search through Kamahl and ABBA records to look for the good stuff. Let me try on dusty sunglasses and search for a pair without an eye-watering prescription lens. This is my pilgrimage, and so far the gods of second-hand wares have been unjust.

In the meantime there’s not much else to do when we’re not walking. The towns are pretty dead. So for want of other entertainment, I’ve been drinking. Seriously, if all that’s open in town is a brasserie, what else am I gonna do? The pint count has been growing at an alarming rate.

Everything is cheap though – I put change on the counter for two coffees, five bucks would cover it, I thought, and the lady came out with most of it back. 1.20-1.40 for an espresso. I mean at Postale in the 18^th where we lived in Paris, for a while I was paying 1.80 for my coffees until I realised I’d misheard him and they were actually 2.20 or something (I usually just left money on the bar). The other place, down by Metro Jules Joffrin, charges 2.80 or something silly. Here, when it’s time to pay here we ask how much it is, and when they tell us, we remind them that it was for two coffees and a lemonade, just to be sure they didn’t leave two of them off. And they’re practically giving away the beer.

People – all of the people have been very friendly and helpful, even if we do get some stares from some of the more provincial types. And L and I have mastered French conversing – I will try to say something, which L then corrects, so my French has little training wheels, but I confess that sometimes I mess things up so splendidly that we have to switch back in English. But nobody has been proper offended or thrown a drink at me yet, as there’s some kindness shown to somebody making a go, however badly they cock it up. It’s shameful to get by on the foreigner speaking crazy card, but get by on it I must for now.

Although as an aside I just saw a guy walked past who looked exactly like a young French Ivan Reitman so it’s not all bad.

I’ve seen some lovely spots though, some beautiful scenes for photography. Of course we always wish for more than a point and shoot and a cheap film camera with a dirty lens, but a) we should never use our tools as a hindrance to our visions and b) it’s not like there are any goddamn places around here to score an SLR on the cheap. Nonetheless, some of the panoramic shots have been beautiful and I hope they came out well, but it’s been frustrating. One sees a lovely photo opportunity of the way the dawn light gilds the fields of wheat, and so you stop and drop your pack and rig up the tripod and go through all of that, and then you pack it all away and continue and you realise that just ahead, not thirty metres after the patch of shadow there’s the shot again but even better but you can’t be screwed going through all that again. Some have been easier, with the bridges and running water and things like that, although I did sit in a patch of thistles, for which the tiny, tiny shorts I wear did nothing to protect me.

Anyway, it hasn’t been so bad. The first week would always be the toughest one. Everything after here gets more interesting. Wine country, hopefully. Photos of wheat will slowly turn into photos of grapes. Small towns will have twelve vintners each with a cut-price bargain bin in the front yard. Small children will run from their homes to offer me glasses of wine on my thirsty walk. And for the love of god somebody, somewhere, will have a crate of old records for me to look through.

PS – I wrote most of this before I got into Orleans. Figured once I got there things would get better. You know what I found? Three photo shops all saying it’ll take a week for developing film. A week. Besides that, there’s not an op shop in sight. So I’ll have to make do with shots on the D-Lux and I don’t know, pawing through rubbish piles to get my fix until I come across a developed country again, as clearly it’s not the case between Paris and Orl-bloody-eans.

Day 1 Review – Nice but for the Walking

Posted on July 18, 2015 by MT

Who does this sort of thing for fun, geez? I think I surprised a lot of people by not going down with heat and keeling over to die in a ditch somewhere, but I can only manage a sideways hobble now. It was ok up until the last five or so kilometres. I would like to say I looked at interesting things but the scenery doesn’t really excite you when you’re labouring for breath.

We’re staying in an abbey in Vauhallen tonight, and we were the only visiting guests that weren’t into Jesus, but dinner was included and it didn’t get very preachy so it’s all right by me.

This is our place for tonight. L is looking sad but then it’s her fault anyway, so don’t feel bad for her

Tonight’s offerings for a thirsty traveller were half a bottle of red to share amongst five. I know you can’t expect much of a bar in an abbey but still. Anyway they cleared out and I got a taste but it wasn’t enough to make the board for the wine bottle count. Went to three religious sites though, so there’s already an uncomfortable skew towards churches and not brasseries.

There was barely anything left, had to be finished

Lovely spot though, with lovely people. Everyone else vanished for mass so we’re trying not to move to excite any of the leg pain while listening to the chickens in the field over.

And tomorrow will be an even longer day. Dear lord you’re meant to ease into crap like this.

Last Day Without Leg Pain – The Trip Begins Tomorrow!

Posted on July 17, 2015 by MT

This is going to be us

Can’t wait to get the first bloody day of this walk done. L told me the first day is a nice and easy 28km, leaving our apartment for good and climbing the hill to Sacre Coeur before heading south out of Paris. There are things I like doing and that will not be one of them. And for the next 10 weeks we will be doing a lot of the things I don’t like doing. Bloody camino. Bloody girlfriend.

If I were tan, sleek and fit it wouldn’t be so much a problem, however I’ve spent the last week or two in the south of Sweden visiting friends and neglecting to walk further than necessary. But I did take a bunch of photos, and gotten over the whole ‘there’s an old camera, let’s buy it’ phase because now I have a bunch of old shitty cameras that don’t work.

Still, Sweden is lovely. Shame the light was bad for a lot of the time. For both the photos and because it was cold as hell. I left and came back to a 36 degree Paris, Swedish rain nearly did me in.

I had to drag around a tripod for the forest shots, which slowed everything down. There was an open-air art installation in the forest that we went to, which made for some pretty shots. Just wish I had sold a kidney before I went so I could get a sexy, sexy camera to do the place justice.

There’s a bunch of castles here as well but they’re more ‘manor houses with moats’ than big stone monstrosities with drawbridges and knights, so that was a let down.

I can’t really stay mad at L when she’s in nice pics though

One last night of freedom. I’m going to a bar.

Choose your weapon Pt. 3 – Taking a chance in Sweden

Posted on July 9, 2015 by MT

Photoshoot in the lovely forest near Åhus.

I’m on a short trip before the walk and back to my old ways – buying questionable cameras in secondhand shops. I couldn’t leave Europe without first stopping in the south of Sweden to visit old friends from the wild days of Newcastle’s university life many moons ago. They’ve settled down somewhat and produced a few lovely children of their own, so I only had a short break between the kids I babysat in Paris and the kids I now babysit in Åhus, Sweden. The children are younger here; one is only four months old, and while it’s fun when it’s happy, a screaming tiny human is another matter entirely.

Anyway, enough about kids. It is cold and wet here. I left the tropical heat of Paris for this? Don’t bother bringing warm clothes, I was told, it’s going to be nothing but warm summer air and ideal bathing conditions. Try keeping warm in a singlet and a pair of jean shorts with half my arse sticking out the bottom. This is the last time I trust a Swede’s weather forecast.

We got ONE sunny day. OM10 Superia 200

Sweden is nice but I’ve been to exactly one op shop so far which is condemnable. It was, however, their once-yearly big sale, so that redresses the outrage somewhat. Most of it was sensible light furnishings, books in Scandinavian, and the type of clothes you’d wear in an igloo.

The cameras were kept behind the counter, but when I asked to see them I got three large boxes shoved under my face. Love Sweden. In Paris, try asking for directions in English without getting an eye roll. It’s like you ask to name their first born or something entirely trying. A lift to the airport. Help moving house. The eye roll I got in Sweden was different. I asked, ‘I’m sorry, do you speak English?”, and I got a look and an ‘Of course.’ Like how dare you fault my education and perfect pronunciation.

I found out later that my friends here have their other friend who goes into that store to buy cameras, so it is likely that the cameras I bought are his leavings. I paid probably too much for the two, but I was interested in the lenses that came with the two cameras.

Camera one is a Chinon 1000S, pretty battered but with an additional 135mm lens, so we’ll see how that goes. It’s got a decent action, but it was pretty grubby. It does have a name on it, which I like. I like it when I get a camera with the previous owner’s name on it, even though I’ll never get it back if it’s lost. My SRT101 is called Penny Parkinson which sounds like a superhero’s alter-ego. The 1000S is called Klas. Adding a foreign, exotic touch there.

The other one is a glossy black babe, the Konica T3. Has a nice feel and action – doesn’t have the jerky action of the OM10. It also had another lens with it, a 85-210 beast, but as I’ve never used anything but a 55mm lens I wanted to try something new. So I paid too much for it, shook some hands to show there were no hard feelings after my haggling (“600 kroner? Go huff some meatballs.”), and we left. After the op shop we went to the forest down by the sea, and man, that’s where you kinda get why Scandos still believe in trolls and elves.

Not the best but you get the idea. Also couldn’t find elves. OM10, Kodak 200

The ground is mossy, the trails beautiful, the air serene. Slippery Jesus it’s nothing like the vermin-riddled sweltering deathpits we call forests back home. The day was overcast so I got some fairly meh shots (the OM10 shits itself if I get too demanding with nature shots or low light), and the roll I put through the Konica was always going to be risky business, doing all the adjustments by guesswork, especially with the new weird lens.

Trying out the macro lens. Konica T3, Superia 200

The cloudy day and changing light made it a bitch but hey, it’s never going to be perfect right? So we went picking herbs here and vegetables there and tiny strawberries from the roadside, all of which are very Swedish things to do. And then it started raining so we huddled under a tree for a while, which is also apparently very Swedish.

Once we arrived at home again I checked out the cameras on the web. Sadly, they weren’t rare, beautifully-made and exorbitantly expensive treasures, but reviews were favourable. The only hitch is that both cameras take the PX625 1.35v battery, which was discontinued years ago because of the mercury or orphan souls or whatever was used in the making of it. This is the third fucking camera I’ve picked up that uses that goddamn battery. I mean I’m learning about photography and what cameras to buy and what to leave behind, but I don’t want the learning process to be so dependant on me learning from my mistakes. Next time I’ll be a little less eager to throw my kroner around. Apparently the thing to do is get 1.4v hearing aid batteries, which are kinda similar, but even though I’ve found Swedes to be pretty friendly, I can imagine the eye roll if I ask people on the street where they got their hearing aid from.

Leaving Paris Pt. 2

Posted on July 9, 2015 by MT

Still got it. OM10

For somebody that doesn’t like traveling further than the local I’ve somehow managed to live overseas a little more than anticipated. And when I’m here there’s a lot to keep me here. Yes, one misses friends and family and the familiarity like crazy, but it’s easy to sugarcoat your time away and pick the best bits to remember. For example, I miss the beer in Berlin. Going out on a 20 and coming home a wobbling mess with change in hand, even after a dodgy kebab. I didn’t speak German so I miss the way you could walk through busy streets and feel like you were by yourself as you weren’t listening into other conversations. I really miss the way you could trundle down to the supermarket and come back with a crate of longnecks for 11 bucks and spend the week drinking fine pilsners in your bedroom. I really miss the beer.

With Paris it was harder. I had to interact further than pointing at something on a menu and grunting in a Germanic way. I had a bank account here, bills, and regular haunts. I didn’t make friends more than ‘that guy with the missing tooth I see at the pub sometimes’ but I was still somebody. I won’t say I became Frenchified. Spent a lot of time in brasseries, drank a lot of wine, yes, but still on the outside of the people. Anyway, these are the things I found about the place.

The City

Tourists can be annoying but complaining about tourists is just another humblebrag. Oh, we have a city so beautiful that millions of people visit every year. Our lives, they are ruined.

On that, I don’t think the French are rude, or at least I don’t think it’s down to them being French. I like to think that people can be arseholes on their own without making excuses based on culture, race or anything else. So you might get a dud waiter or some jackass in the street. So nobody wants to help you with directions. Try living in a city where you get around on a moving metal tube full of sweaty tourists and accordion players and see how cheerful you are.

The only thing I really hated was walking anywhere. Pedestrians were the worst. I strongly believe that the French could have improved on the Maginot Line before WWII, and instead of constructing forts along the border, they would have been better off building a series of market stalls, pavements and turnstiles, which would have left German tanks and infantry divisions stalled indefinitely.

The People

Compared to Australians I think the French are more reserved. You’ll find out pretty quickly if an Australian doesn’t like you. They’re easy to read. With the people I knew in Paris it took three months before I kind of got that maybe they weren’t too annoyed by the fact I was talking to them or that they had to spend time in my company, which I chalked up as a win.

French women are very pretty and stylish but they don’t age, they harden. French men in their 30s and beyond set an unfair standard for the rest of the world. I saw a guy talking on his phone in the street, lounging with his leg flung up and over a railing. It looked like the most uncomfortable and ridiculous pose to consider but damn it he pulled it off. Some men look at fashion examples like Beckham or Clooney to emulate, but all I have to do is think of that contortionist and wonder whether he would approve of my clothes or not. Probably not. But then I do come from a place where tucking your wifebeater into your footy shorts is considered swanky.

The bar where I spent most of my time. OM10

The Food

I walked places with a baguette in hand. There is a reason why the French are depicted this way. Baguettes are fucking delicious.

The food in general was pretty choice but the real standout was the boulangeries. If you go, don’t waste your day on selfies in front of the Mona Lisa. Find a good boulangerie and ham out on éclairs for the afternoon. Find a park, put down a towel and turn yourself into a fetid mass of pastry crumbs and gluttony.

Coffee was meh but it’s boring talking about coffee. As a guy from Melbourne it’s expected. I used to live with a barista whose boss had met every donkey of the Bolivian farmer he bought his beans from. The tasting notes for the coffee at that place read like breathless erotica for caffeinated beverages. I mean I like coffee but that was some next-level nonsense.

You can’t get a decent flat white in Europe. The lattes in Sweden are ok. Milchkaffees in Berlin are alright but hard to pronounce with a hangover. In Scotland they taste like scalding transmission oil. So you just don’t drink them. Switch to what the locals are having. Here, the espressos started out like wolverine piss but with some dedication and sugar I got to liking them.

Wine with lunch was good but not exactly new for me, however much I could now bellow ‘it’s cultural!’ if I drank too much in the afternoon.

The Language

The language was fun. When I got here, I could remember the remnants of a few French courses at uni some years back. I wished I could have remembered more. It’s hard learning a language in the country. You don’t want to speak it when somebody repeats what you said back to you to make sure they got it. Yes, I said ‘croissant.’ I’m standing in a boulangerie. Pointing at a croissant. Was my pronunciation that bad they were confused by the noises I was making?

Early on I bought some music gear off leboncoin and I had a coffee with the guy selling it. We spoke English together, thank Jesus, and he made the comment that when people asked him in the street ‘do you speak English?’ he would give the Gallic ‘err, err, quoi?’ rather than a ‘yes, I do.’ The other side to that is looking like a foreign imbecile when you’re trying to say things in their language. Usually they will give up and switch to English out of pity. I didn’t like being an idiot in French. I prefer being an idiot in English where my idiocy is self-inflicted by choice rather than language proficiency.

Later on, as I progressed, my French was like a box full of words and phrases. Fine for simple things, like ‘Yes, I said croissant,’ but for anything more complex it was like trying to put together an op-shop jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.

I could nearly make it the whole way through contributing to a conversation or telling a story, but usually it ended up like this:

Me (fr) – Do you often have in the country the… the… the thing… like a ham… it has been known to eat apples.

Me (fr) – So there I was, beer in hand, when the cop said to me… something… it wasn’t good… about a fish, perhaps?

Me (fr) speaking about L – I’m just out on a date with my daughter!

I did however get very competent at saying ‘I don’t speak French very well.’ But when you say that fluently they assume you’re being modest, not understanding that out of everything you could possibly say in French that’s the thing you’ve practiced the most. And Parisian French is fast. Telling them to slow down has no effect. So they keep belt-feeding Parisian French at you while you’re all ‘Oui, c’est ça, c’est ça’ and hoping like hell they didn’t ask a question.

I mean if I could live anywhere and all the tropical beachside bars were full Paris would be on the short list.

Leaving Paris Pt 1 – The Job

Posted on July 1, 2015 by MT

Here is where I'd pray for the strength to make it through until happy hour

Here is where I’d pray for the strength to make it through til happy hour

My time in Paris is nearly up and everything’s coming down to the ‘last time’ I do something. Sadly the weather continues to be bloody hot so the ‘last time’ I bathe in a stranger’s sweat on the metro is still some way off. Happily finishing up at work means I can escape the heat with cold 1664s through the day.

I finished six months in what was one of the more interesting jobs I’ve done before. As a foreigner with limited vocabulary landing a job in Paris was going to be either in bars or with children, and as I preferred not to destroy the mystique of bars by getting a job in one, I went for the babysitter route. I was a manny. A bro-pair.

It was better and worse than I expected. I went through an agency who hire out English-speaking babysitters so the little French children can learn another language. No French required! The idea being that if you’re only speaking English to them they’ll learn right quick. I got paired with a lovely family who have a 7 year-old girl and a 4 year-old boy and went from there.

Looking after children is the ultimate in contraception. Kids of my own are now a distant future, one in where I make enough money to hire a nanny to look after my own progeny.

I have no idea why the company thought it was good to have somebody that didn’t speak French in for the ride. At the start of work I had no idea of what they were saying, and to them I was just a stranger who spoke weirdly. It caused arguments like this:

Me (en) – Ok, time for bath.

Kid 1 (fr) – Ok, let me get my car. (Heads off to bedroom)

Me (en) – What are you doing? The bath is this way!

Kid 1 (fr) – But I’m just getting my car for –

Me (en) – And now you’re talking back! Hush, you impertinent French miscreant.

Kid (fr) – Why don’t you like cars? Why don’t you want me to be happy?

Me (en) – No dessert for you. Not like, ever again.

My French grew, but it was a matter of survival. I couldn’t comfort a crying child in English. Or explain why they couldn’t eat dirt off the street. Even so there were problems at bath time as my French wasn’t quite there. I’d get words wrong or put them out of order:

Me (fr) – It is the weather for the bath. To choose a car, must, go.

Kid (fr) – I want ten cars!

Me (fr) – Ten cars are too big for the bath. It is not good for yourself wash. Five cars, and very rapidly.

Kid (fr) – …

Me (fr) – Now, forget, what is always the first thing inside the bath? Wash, wash, wash! Always forget. We wash. Forget.

Kid (fr) – Are you trying to say ‘remember’?

Me (fr) – What? I do not know that word. Explain to me the word. What is it the word?

Kid (fr) – Never mind.

Me (fr) – Forget. We wash. Forget.

One of the days in the week is eight hours long, which is a merciless affair without a break from the incessant need and the fights. No you can’t have bon bons for lunch. I think twelve muffins would be too many. You said only one song on the iPad, so why are you screaming at me when I take it away after six? You’re hungry? There’s food at home, just a minute away, so if you’d get off the ground and stop crying we’d be there… Honestly, I felt I was just veering from one catastrophe to the next most of the time, listening to their problems and unable to help with anything more than ‘Uhh… I don’t understand. Again?’

Plus, they cheat at games. Flagrantly.

After an eight hour white-knuckle ride you’re cursing your missus for ever bringing you to this hellhole. Why did I leave my job in Australia? I’m not cut out for this. I’m pretty sure I’m losing my hearing.

There was a month where nothing was working for me. The kids were unsettled and I wasn’t enjoying being around them. French was an exhausting struggle. I’d come home and take to a bottle of wine with grim determination.

I had to rethink what I was doing with them. Could they see I wasn’t having fun? Maybe that’s why they weren’t too. So I developed more of a ‘screw it’ mentality. They didn’t eat all their carrots? So what. It’s not worth a ten-minute fight. One of them is splashing in a puddle? Who cares, he’s four, let him have some fun. Go splash in a puddle next to him.

So it got better. Most days I got a smile when I picked them up from school. Baths were mostly trouble free. But you’d never get some things right. I feel the best approach to discipline is getting the tone and rhythm of what you’re saying to be firm and constant. And it’s super hard to tell somebody what they’re doing is wrong if it’s like this:

Me (fr) – now see here, when you, uh do that thing, he is sad. Um. So don’t do that thing the next weather. Forget. Don’t forget! Remember. Sorry.

So there would always be those moments. I’d feel like the kids came to me in pristine condition and I was ruining them with my lax, ignorant Australian values. Thankfully the parents were understanding. They were lovely people, incredibly helpful, so much so it was nice to be able to have two freshly washed and fed children to present to them at the end of their long days at work. I could deal with the minutiae so they could come home to drawings, desserts and relaxation. On that side it was hard to leave a job like that. They liked me and I liked them, which is a rarity in any line of work. And it was a welcome change to have a boss that had a legitimate reason for being unreasonable (ie. they’re 4 and tired).

It was also important to find another reference point for raising children that wasn’t just my own experience of growing up. None of that ‘back in my day we did it like this’ reasoning. I got to see first hand how a family in Europe went about their lives. I got to hang out in parks after school with the other nannies. That was more fun as an idea than reality. On the whole, most of the other nannies were first or second generation migrants from Senegal, Cameroon or the like, so I was something of an odd duckling. Being the outsider wasn’t too bad unless you had the who was kid running around without shoes or doing something stupid, and that’s when you felt the eyes of disapproval. I started to really enjoy it when other people struggled with their kids. Ha! I’d think. It’s not just me. Then, I was part of the group, united in mutual disapproval.

Actually, my kids had a migrant nanny before I came along, so I have the uneasy distinction of stealing a job from a refugee in France. Who looked after other kids and brought them to the same park.

(Who was a lovely, lovely woman, friendly despite the fact we could barely understand each other, generous despite the clear evidence I was spoiling her ex-wards with loose rules and discipline. But it was still a fun situation for me. I was happy to have her around though, as when the kids had problems at the park they’d go to her, and she could understand their tear-mingled French better than I can. There’s no way you can comfort a kid by saying ‘I don’t know what the problem is, perhaps you can stop crying and tell me?)

Still, on the long days of keeping watch in crowded places, fights over the sweets and the iPads, trying to explain why they can’t be pests to strangers in the park, and topping it off with spilling the dinner on the ground, there would be times where you’d think of the Holy Land, that time and place just after knock-off when the parents came home and I was released and could go to the bar.

I know there are people who have children of their own or else work with children and this all comes as no surprise. Before this most of my interaction with children was perhaps grimacing when they came into a café on a Saturday morning. Or else at gatherings subtly moving away from a friend’s kid so that I wasn’t the closest responsible adult in case the kid fell over or cried or dabbled with meth. I would never have considered myself good with kids, but that seems like a silly label. Good with kids. That’s in the same category as good with houseplants or good with programming DVD players. Just do stuff that makes the kid happy and try to keep it alive, that’s my motto.

I’ve mostly dealt with adults my entire life so I wasn’t used to the need, the constant and unrelenting need, as well as the unrelenting pushing of your buttons. Each day was a slice of ‘I want you to do this for me and while you do that I’m going to annoy the hell out of you because it’s fun watching the veins throb in your forehead’, but doubled, so that one kid would eventually throw a fit because you chose to help the other. I’d have found it shocking and hilarious if I wasn’t sad that the house of Lego I’d just made wasn’t stomped flat in a fit of rage. I never get to play with Lego.

The golden time was just after dinner when everything was quiet peaceful for a while. One of the kids would climb into your lap to draw a picture or point out robots in a book and you’d think that soon you wouldn’t be here and it makes you sad. They might have been tiny emperors all day, causing you to tell yourself a hundred times never babysit again, but in the end you think it’s not so bad after all. And then the kid farts on your leg and looks up with a grin mid-drawing. Try holding onto a grudge then. The bad times become a distant, far-off memory. Something to forget. Always forget.

stumbling through the camino

the longest pub crawl

Month: July 2015

Things get better after Orleans, obviously – walking the Loire to Tours

Paris to that treacherous bitch Orleans

Day 1 Review – Nice but for the Walking

Last Day Without Leg Pain – The Trip Begins Tomorrow!

Choose your weapon Pt. 3 – Taking a chance in Sweden

Leaving Paris Pt. 2

Leaving Paris Pt 1 – The Job