Christmas in the United States

I flew into Washington yesterday, after an uneventful flight, and got a little emotional as we descended onto the airport runway. Everything looked the same, but I was returning as a visitor for the first time in 13 years, and it felt different. I am staying with friends here in Washington for the weekend, and will see my church family and sing with my home choir on Sunday at Western Presbyterian Church and attend a concert of the Washington Bach Consort on Sunday afternoon.

Then I will take a bus to New York City and stay there for a few days to visit with my friends Vi and Joanne, and to do some Christmas shopping! On Christmas Eve I will take the bus to Springfield, where I hope Kenny and Chris will pick me up for the trek to Amherst and the Christmas eve service at First Congregational Church in Amherst.

I'll be with my family in Amherst and Boylston for the rest of my stay in the States, until I take off from Boston on January 2nd - arriving back in Nice on the 3rd.

I wish all my friends and readers an illuminating Winter Solstice, a festive Hannukah, a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year! See you in 2009!

Paris in Three Days

I just returned from three wonderful days in Paris. The ostensible reason for the trip was to attend a Barnard Club of Paris event on Thursday evening. But it was also an excellent excuse to visit Paris again (after my brief two days in September), and to spend a little more time with my Paris friends, Olivier and Jean Yves.

Day One: Eiffel Tower and Barnard Club
I flew up on EasyJet into Orly airport on Thursday morning, and took the train into Gare Montparnasse, which was in the same neighborhood as the evening's event. I checked my luggage into a consigne (luggage locker), and took off for the Eiffel Tower on the Métro. I had wanted to see the Tower on my last visit, but hadn't had enough time. So it was the first thing I wanted to do on this trip. It was a sunny and clear day, perfect to see the city. I chose to walk up the first two étages (floors), and then take the elevator to the top. The walk was pretty easy for me, and it was fun to gradually rise up over the city as I ascended the stairs. There were definitely tourists, but there were lots of open spaces to wander around on the platform and see the city. I spent almost two hours in the Tower; I bought a café crème to enjoy and warm up on the second floor – despite the sun, it was very cold!

After descending the stairs, I walked from the Tower east along the Seine, heading back in the direction of the Barnard Club event off of Boulevard Montparnasse. Along the way, I found the American Church in Paris (a nondenominational church), and lots of lovely views, including the rising full moon. I had lots of time before the 6:30 p.m. event, so I stopped along the rue de Rennes near the train station for tea and a citron tarte - and to warm up. It was still freezing!

The Club event was in Reid Hall, a university location for several American schools, including Barnard and Columbia, with undergraduates and graduate programs in Paris. The evening featured a Barnard professor, José Moya, who spoke on Immigration and its Discontents in the U.S. and Europe. The audience included Barnard graduates living in Paris, as well as a professor at Reid Hall, and the husband of a professor, and Professor Moya's wife and daughter. I had the fun experience of seeing, for the first time in 24 years, one of my former track mates, Ginny Power. She's been living in Paris for 19 years, and has a daughter currently applying to colleges. Her daughter loved Barnard, and will be applying, but Ginny is anxious, of course. I know the feeling! Professor Moya's talk was very interesting, and there were a good amount of questions and discussion with the professor afterward. Barnard women never disappoint!

I headed up to my hosts' home in the 20th arrondisement via the Métro after the club meeting ended, where Olivier was waiting to greet me. Jean Yves was working in Grenoble for the week; he would return the next evening. Olivier fed me, happily, and we caught up before he headed off to bed. The next day he would be working, leaving me to explore Paris on my own.

Day Two: Champs-Elysée and the Louvre
I slept in on Friday, worried about the extreme change in temperatures, and my body's acclimation thereto - and seriously worried about getting sick before the holidays and my trip back to the States. I got up around 10, went for a run in the nearby park (Parc de Buttes Chaumont), and once I'd had a shower and something to eat, it was after noon. I headed out to take the Métro to the Champs-Elysée, my plan was to walk down the avenue and end up at the Louvre, another place I hadn’t been inside for at least twenty years.

I got off the train at the Champs-Elysée-Clemenceau stop, and emerged from underground to see white tents/kiosks lining the avenue, part of the Marché de Noel downtown. These Christmas villages/shops are traditional in across Europe, but I remember particularly the Christmas markt I visited in Stuttgart last year. Hot red wine (vin chaud in France, gluwein in Germany) is a traditional drink for sale at these markets. There were plenty of artsy things to buy, but I headed up to see the President’s home, the Palais de L’Elysée, first. I am quite taken with government and politics, and I thought it would be fun to see one of the places I see on TV all the time here. There were plenty of guards around the Palais; and a large group of Asians taking pictures on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré at the entrance.

I headed back to the Grand Palais, which turned out to be a museum (this I did not know), and there was at least one exhibition I thought of visiting, but the line for the Pablo Picasso exhibit was long, and I decided that the Louvre would still be my destination for museum-ing. As I circled back to the Champs-Elysée, I passed the statue of Georges Clemenceau. It hadn’t occurred to me until then, but I live just off the avenue Georges Clemenceau here in Nice. From Wikipedia: “Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician and journalist. He served as the prime minister of France from 1906-1909 and 1917-1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles. He is commonly nicknamed le Tigre (the Tiger) and le Père-la-Victoire (Father Victory) for his determination as a wartime leader.” I just learned something. ;-)

Back on the Champs-Elysée, I headed east toward the Place de la Concorde, with its large obelisk in the center of the roundabout. I took a picture of the obelisk against the Ferris Wheel that stands at the west end of the Tuilerie Gardens (Jardins des Tuileries). The sun was still out, and as I walked down the garden toward the Louvre, there were people sitting on chairs around a fountain, trying to get the most from the remaining sunshine in the freezing temperatures.

The Louvre was not very busy at 2:30 in the afternoon, happily for me. When I was in Rome, the tour guide told me that the tourists come back in mid-December; they clearly had not come back to Paris yet. It took seconds to go through security and then a moment to buy a ticket to the galleries. I chose to head for an exhibit of French sculptures. It was quite extensive, and filled some indoor gardens and several galleries. As it would happen, the famous Venus de Milo statue was in one of the grand staircases I went down; and I found Da Vinci's Mona Lisa on display along my travels as well. Again, some tourists, but not huge crowds by any means. A very pleasant visit!

I left the Louvre around 4:30, and headed out to find the magasin (shop) where Olivier had recommended I buy my paté. At Christmas time in France, champagne, foie gras and caviar are the traditional gifts for the Christmas dinner. I decided I would bring some paté back to my French-loving sister-in-law who will be making Christmas dinner for our family (and I’ll probably bring some champagne too). I found the small shop fairly easily, and with some pictures, and some basic understanding of the differences in patés (entier, morceaux, bloc), I bought a few for my trip home.

It was now close to 5, and the crowds were out shopping in the Paris streets. Many shops close between 2 and 4 and reopen until 7 or so. And of course, folks were heading out of work on their way home. I found a pedestrian way, the rue de Montorgueil, and wandered in and out of shops filled with chocolates, cheese, olive oil, wine and pastries. I decided to buy some petite buchettes (small bouche de noel pastries, chocolate, coffee and praline) for dinner (dessert) that evening with Jean Yves and Olivier. By then, I was exhausted from walking and being cold, so I got back on the Métro to the Jourdain stop and was able to take a nap before Olivier arrived home to make dinner.

Olivier made a lovely traditional dinner of vegetable soup, followed by pasta with tomato sauce, and of course, baguette and cheese, and then the buchettes I had brought for dessert. Jean Yves returned home around 9:30 p.m. from his business trip, so our dinner lasted until midnight. We decided we would sleep in in the morning!

Day Three: Musée Jacquemart-André
We did not get up until around 10:30 the next morning; we had coffee and breakfast, and then prepared for the arrival of another guest, Marie-Joseph, expected around noon. Olivier went off to do some shopping; Marie-Joseph arrived around 12:30. Jean Yves had suggested we head for a museum he liked very much, the Musée Jacquemart-André on boulevard Haussman. I needed to leave for the airport and my flight home around 4, we decided, which meant that we would head directly for the museum (bypassing lunch). And we did. And the museum was lovely, a mansion in the heart of Paris, built by a wealthy banker, and filled with art that he and his artist wife found around Europe and beyond. Take a look.

We had time for tea and pastries at the museum café before we left, which was a great idea – but then we had to scamper a little to make sure I got on a train to Orly…but it all worked out, and I made it back to Nice with no problems. And lots of pictures with which to remember my trip. I’ll be back!

Christmas in Nice

Tonight was the opening of the Village de Noel in downtown Nice. Priscilla and I reached the festivities at dusk, and rather than wait to hear the politicians talk (they are pushing the candidacy of Nice for the 2018 Winter Olympics), we headed for the Ferris Wheel. We had a great view of the setting sun over the sea and the horizon. Then we checked out the vendor stalls (been there, done that), bought and ate freshly cooked gingerbread, bought and ate freshly roasted chestnuts (Pris), and bought and drank hot wine (Ari). We watched a "spectacle" as they call them in French, or an ice show, as we would call it, performed by local skaters. We wandered through the children's village and saw performers and face painters. And then we went back to the Ferris Wheel, for one more ride in the darkness. All of the holiday street decorations were lit for the first time tonight; the city sparkled. It's Christmas time!

Thanksgiving in Italy

Hey there, Readers. I'm back (well, it's been a few days) from my Thanksgiving Trip to Tuscany and Rome. It was fabulous: celebrating the holiday with a group of ex-pats in a small Etruscan town, exploring the Tuscan town of Montepulciano in the mist, attending an Advent service in St. Peter's Basilica presided over by the Pope, an excellent tour of The Forum and Colosseum, and a warm Roman afternoon for my wandering through the city. Even the long trip home on Monday on the train up the Italian coast was enjoyable. I'll write up more, but for now, enjoy the pictures! (you can see more on my Flickr site - see link at right).

Courir en pays de Grasse 10 km

10th Anniversary Edition – 23 novembre 2008, Grasse, France“Un club, Une course, Une Ville, Une Passion”
(“One club, one course, one city, one passion” – see you can read French!)

[Question to self: Is it over the top to shamelessly advertise athletic achievements on blog? Answer to self: It’s your blog, you can do whatever you want to!]

Ari's Race Results
Champion Chip Finish Time: 42:12
(The Champion Chip is a small computer chip laced onto your shoe that tracks the actual time you cross the start line and finish line – it alleviates previous complaints from runners about the single race clock ---- still used in smaller races – not taking into account the several seconds – and possibly minutes – it takes those in the back of the pack to reach the starting line in a large race. The Chip eliminates the penalty of being a slow runner, or possibly one late to the race and unable to get in front of those slow runners who wiggled their way to front of line inappropriately.)

Overall Place: 379th of 1863 finishers (unfair: Nice-Matin newspaper only published first 150 finishers in today’s edition!)

Gender Place: 32nd Female (519 finishers)

Age Group Place: 11th of 207 (40-49 Veteran/Masters Female)

First Place Age Group Time: 37:36 (American races are more generous to those like me who can no longer compete against 40-somethings – or at least those 40-somethings on the opposite side of 45 – by creating categories in the 5’s; I typically do very well in the 45-49 age group!)

First Place Men’s Masters Age Group Time (for comparison): 31:10 (Men’s Master’s division is extraordinarily competitive! Happy not to be a man at my age – but then that was always the case, I think.)

First Place Men’s Masters Cash Award: 150 Euros (According to race promotional material, first time race awarded cash to Men’s Masters Division top 10 finishers)

First Place Women’s Masters Award: None (No explanation of why Masters Women were not given same honor. Although know for a fact that First Place Woman argued vehemently and received 70 Euros award. You go girl!)

First Place Age Group 50-59 (for comparison): 44:17 (If I were only four years older…not often one wishes that!)

Race Conditions:
Temperature at race time ~ 8 degrees Celsius (48 degrees Fahrenheit); overcast (Frigid! But decided to chuck running tights and go for shorts. Figured I was going to warm up. Unfortunately, Priscilla never did. But she was just standing and watching….)

Race Course:
Out and back (turn at 5K); gradual uphill to turnaround point (rise of 50 meters barely perceptible headed up but feeling of downhill acute on way back)

Race Clothing
Shorts, Barnard long sleeve t-shirt, green and blue bandanna around neck, silver and gold Live Strong Nike Air Pegasus

Race Port-o-Potties
Four. Cannot get over the fact that Europeans appear not to use bathrooms, or that, conversely, Americans overcompensate by providing bathrooms at every opportunity. In a race of a similar size in the US, there would have been a bank of at least 20 port-o-potties, or two banks of 20 in two different spots. Of four set up at this race; only two were open 45 minutes before the race, when a race official noticed (or was alerted) and unlocked other two. Amazing!

Number of Water Stops during Race
2 (at 3 km and 7 km) – Good. Only downside: plastic cups. It was the first time I have been handed a plastic cup in a race. Plastic cups break when you pinch them to create a small siphon to drink from (done to eliminate possibility of inhaling air instead of water), and lose all the water in them, which I discovered at first water stop. American race organizers use paper cups. I think they are more biodegradable. One demerit for the French.

Race Boosters
1 – Priscilla, wearing easy-to-find electric orange field cap, bearing digital camera for excellent race shots (and patiently waited throughout post-race awards ceremony to see if I would win anything, despite rapidly falling body temperature)

Race Booty:
--Two t-shirts, both outlandishly orange, one long-sleeve, one short sleeve (commemorative 10th anniversary T)
--Race Bandanna (in similarly outlandish orange) – sea of orange gave appearance of joviality to race…
--Bottle of no-label perfume (Grasse is the self-promoted Perfume Capital of France, but not sure why perfume maker not promoted…)
--Pen and Key Chain from race promoters
--Three cereal bars picked up from post-race spread
--No hardware; see race results above

Post-Race Spread
--Pound cake
--Raisin bread and other breads
--Sultanas (raisins) and Dried Apricots
--Pieces of chocolate (broken out bars on plastic plates)
--Orange slices (the universal post-athletic event fruit!)
--Orangina, Perrier (good French brands)
--Cereal Bars (no label brands, but good flavors – chocolate and banana, and apple and apricot)
(Similar to traditional American post-race spread, but missing bagels and bananas and endless plastic bottles of water – go Green France!)

Personal Bests
1 – Best 10km race time this year. Other race times: Capitol Hill Classic (18 May) 43:12 (12th woman, 1st 45-49) (flat with one large hill; humid, temps in the high 70s); Lawyers Have Heart 10K (16 June): 44:09 (40th woman, 5th Masters) (flat course, temps in high 70s)

Friday, November 21st - Reading Guide

Hey there, Readers. I just posted two articles, and they are both long, in my characteristic way of getting carried away by my own writing. But just because you will miss it if you are looking for the latest, I'll just mention that I have written up my own musings on the current financial crisis, which is below the Music entry. I've been doing alot of reading, and thinking, and watching/listening to the media. There's lots to digest. I'm not done, but thought I'd offer up my particular perspective for those who are curious. And yes, I still support the Capital Market System, but my commitment is getting a lot of beating these days!

Cheers,
Ari

Music, the universal language

Wednesday night in Nice found me singing “Go Tell It On The Mountain” in English, led by a French-speaking German, with eleven other singers from my French church, the Église Réformée. I felt at home.

Last Sunday, I attended the 10:15 a.m. service at the Protestant church in my neighborhood, hoping that I would run into a woman I had met there two weeks earlier. She and her husband had sat in front of me that Sunday, and I had heard her lovely voice, and we had exchanged friendly smiles during the Communion service, so I was hoping to speak with her after church. But after the service I had to endure lengthy small talk with some Americans visiting the church that morning before I had my chance to find her. She was standing by the table filled with juice and salty snacks (that’s a phrase I picked up here: “salty snacks” – I don’t think we ever use that phrase in the US. Must be some European marketing translation – or the English. Probably the English.) in the courtyard, and said hello.

[The French do not initiate conversations by introducing themselves; I’m not sure the origin of this, but the name disclosures come as an afterthought in most conversations I’ve had with people. Almost as if they are afraid to get personal unnecessarily. I might not have recognized this myself; I was given the heads up in a book I read about the French. The authors of that book tell the story of how they were wandering through a small town, and stopped to admire a lovely garden outside a home, and ended up conversing with the owner, who, after a time, invited them into his home, and after a time, invited them to stay for lunch, and, after a long afternoon at this home they left, never having learned the names of their host and hostess.]

She made a comment about my singing voice, and I returned the compliment. I disclosed, as I do in most conversations these days, that I am an American, and told her about my sojourn in Nice. I learned that her husband plays violin in the Philharmonic Orchestra here in Nice, and at the end of the conversation, at a moment when she wanted to introduce me to another church member walking by, did she finally ask me my name. And she introduced herself as well. But, all good intentions notwithstanding, I forgot her name as soon as I walked away from the church.

So, although I was looking for her in the service this particular Sunday, I was a little bummed I could not remember her name. I did not see this woman during the service, but I sat in the same approximate place that I had sat the Sunday I had met her. My experience in churches is that people find a place in the pews that they like, and they go back there every Sunday. (I can still see in my mind the spot where my friend Stewart and his wife, Gladys, sat at Western Presbyterian Church for 50 years. And the spots in the pews of where Richie and his wife sat, and where Kermit and the McKenzies sit.) Et voilà, the man I thought to be the woman’s husband sat down in front of me, several minutes into the service.

The service that Sunday was being conducted by a lay person in the church. There are three pastors in the church, two men and one woman; one of the men I like particularly, he speaks quite slowly and articulates, and I always understand a good part of his message. But today’s leader spoke quite quickly, making it more difficult for me to follow what he was trying to say. Happily for me, the service liturgy is set, and followed each week in a small booklet found in the hymnals; the hymns (“cantiques”) for each service are posted on the very familiar-looking plaques hanging on the walls on both sides at the front of the church.

I do not mind not understanding everything that is said during the service, simply being able to sing during the service is enough for me. It’s been fun to learn some new hymns, and to sing familiar hymns in a different language. I make an effort to match my pronunciation to the pronunciation of those around me; I really do want to sound French. [My experience in speaking with the French is that my pronunciation is very French-sounding; it is not unusual for people to ask me again, after I tell them I am American, You are American?] As a result, I listen fairly carefully to the people singing around me. And on this Sunday, the woman singing behind me was clearly a singer. She had a strong voice, and occasionally dropped down to sing the alto line. I turned around to see her; she was an older woman, sitting with her husband. Singing around another singer always emboldens me to sing stronger, which I probably did this Sunday as well.

After the service, the singer woman and her husband behind me moved forward two pews to engage in conversation with the man in front of me, the violinist, while I sat in the pew listening to the organ. It’s one of those things you do if you don’t want to have to get up and have to talk to people that are mingling after the service. Sit and appear to be listening and getting lost in the organ postlude, so that people don’t bother you and you can leave after they have all left the nave. This is a very friendly congregation, and they don’t have a regular after-church coffee hour (only after the communion service on the first Sunday of the month, it appears), so they do hang out in the nave for quite a while catching up after the service. And, therefore, not surprisingly, the organ postlude finished before the couple had finished talking at the end of my pew I got up and the woman looked toward me and reached out her hand to say hello, and, as happens frequently to me, complimented me on my singing. But she was even more direct; she immediately invited me to sing with a group that meets on Wednesday nights at the church.

Wow! Just what I had been looking for! In the past few months, I had looked around, and asked a few people, and they had confirmed in conversations that it was difficult to get into a chorus in the area. And I had been a bit deflated to learn that most churches don’t have choirs, although I had heard a choir perform at the All Saints Day (Toussaints) service I had attended at the cathedral in Old Nice. But I wasn’t really interested in attending a Catholic church every Sunday. The woman singer went on to describe that the group was very small, and that they sang gospel music (why Europeans insist on singing American gospel music, I have no idea, other than perhaps it’s kind of easy to learn – but that can’t be it, it’s not really that easy to learn!). She asked me my voice part, and I told her I was a soprano, and she got very excited, “We need good sopranos!” she exclaimed. She was quite happy to have found me, it seemed. I walked out into the courtyard with her and her husband, who, it turns out, is also a singer with the group. We ran into the violinist on the way, and she made to introduce me – and realized she didn’t know my name -- characteristically. So I introduced myself, and told the man that I believed I had met his wife a few weeks ago. And he confirmed yes, that was indeed true. So nice to be remembered! (At which point, I learned her name – Suzanne – and his, Pascal). And I learned the name of my new friend, Odette, and her husband, Philippe. Odette walked me over to the church office building, and showed me where the group rehearsed, muttered to herself about having to make copies of music for me, and asked me if I could read music. Oh, yes, I said. It looked like I had just confirmed something she had assumed. She wrote down her telephone numbers on a sheet of paper (with her name, happily, I’m sure I had forgotten it at that point), and I gave her mine, in case I had any questions. I told her I lived nearby; she said they would be happy to drive me home after the rehearsal on Wednesday. ALL of this conversation happening in FRENCH!

Wednesday evening arrived. I had planned my day so that I would be ready for the 8:30 evening rehearsal – a little different take on my regular days, where at 7:30 p.m. I am plopped down in front of my TV set for the next hour, relaxing, watching the news of the day. I ate early (don’t like to sing on a full stomach), and was getting ready around 8 when my portable rang. It was Odette, checking to make sure I was coming to the rehearsal. Yes, I said, I am coming. A tout à l’heure! She said. A tout à l’heure, I replied. (Loosely translated, See you then!)

I headed over to the church, a little late, so I ran a few blocks to make sure I would get there on time. I still don’t wear a watch (Eric – giver of watch – , I do plan to get a new battery in my Barnard watch one day, and take out one more link, so it actually fits me!), so I am a bit creative in ways I keep track of time. I have come to depend on the clocks in the Parking Ticket kiosks that line the sidewalks downtown for paid parking on the street. The kiosks are electronic (and of course, were unworkable during the blackout in the city a few weeks ago), and the time is shown on their face, so I can easily check the time when I start and end my runs, for example, on the kiosk a few yards from my building, or just check to make sure I am on time to an appointment as I walk.

I reached the church just as Odette and Philippe pulled into the church parking lot in their car. I went into the church office building with them; and we discovered that the church council was meeting (having a “reunion”) in our practice room. Apparently the council usually meets in the church, but for some reason this night the group was sitting in the conference room where we were to rehearse. So, after a bit of standing around, and other singers showing up and being introduced to me – with their names! – we found a key and went into the church for our rehearsal.

We probably started singing about 9 p.m. The scene was familiar to me, people chatting up, finding their music, the conductor (the “chef”) passing out new music, and finally, the group standing in a line in front of the conductor in our voice parts, beginning the rehearsal with some calisthenics and vocal exercises. The warm up was needed; the church was pretty chilly; most of the group wore their jackets throughout the evening (except the conductor, who insisted on wearing just his t-shirt – well, in addition to his pants).

There were four men, three basses and one tenor (the conductor filled in on the tenor part when we were all singing together). There were three altos, and I made the fourth soprano. The mix in ages seemed from mid-thirties, or possibly younger, to my new friends Odette and Philippe, who seemed to be in their late sixties. And basically, everyone was a singer and could read music pretty well, except for one bass, which meant that there was a lot of time spent wood-shedding notes (i.e., endless repetition with the intent of getting it into one’s brain) with the bass section.

The description Odette gave me of the group’s music was not far off: the first piece we practiced was “Go, Tell It on the Mountain.” And, amazingly, we practiced this for about an hour. They all seemed to pronounce the English pretty well, but the music was clearly not very familiar. I did some singing that was not on the written page, just from habit, for which I was corrected by the conductor. Oh ,well. But I was definitely enjoying singing with a small group, and happy to have found a friendly group of like-minded people here in France. Just when I had thought it was not possible!

We finished the rehearsal with “Lo, How a Rose ‘Ere Blooming,” the Praetorius chorale that I think one cannot have gone through church as a child and not memorized at some point. The conductor began by talking the group through the German text (“Es ist ein Rose entsprungen”), which was clearly unfamiliar to most of them (but I have sung a thousand times). It wasn’t until we started singing the piece, that someone said, “Oh, that is (French words used in the song – sorry don’t know them yet!)” and they realized that they all did know the piece.

We will sing the two pieces (and hopefully a few more) at the church service on December 14th. I’m not sure whether this group just got going, or has been doing this periodic performance gig for years. There was a conversation ongoing as we were gathering about how the pastor had asked that the group sing at a funeral service on Friday at noon. There was much going back and forth about what did he think? How would people be able to perform at noon? I got the feeling that, one, that they had never done such a thing, and two, the logistics of such a thing had never been considered. But, if the pastor is all of a sudden getting the idea to have the group sing at a funeral, I imagine this is may be a group just getting up and running. Just a musing on my part.

I had to tell my fellow singers that I would not be at the rehearsal next week, on account of the “fête Americain” of Thanksgiving, when I will be in Rome. They nodded understandingly. ALL conversation occurring in FRENCH!

So, now you know how happy I am that I can talk in French with other French people.

And, I’m singing too. Can it get any better than this?

Sure. I’ll let you know how my 10km race goes this weekend!

Musings on the Financial Crisis

From my warm, sunny apartment here in Nice, France, the problems of the global financial markets seem very far away. But I don’t let them stay far from my thoughts: I am an avid reader of the International Herald Tribune, the local Nice-Matin, and receive online updates from the washingtonpost.com, economist.com, nytimes.com and of course, Yahoo, and am an active listener of BBC radio, in addition to the local French stations, and almost militant about making sure that I am home from 12:30 to 1:30 each day and then again from 7:30 to 8:30 each evening so that I can catch the national news shows on my French TV. I have a friend in Washington actively engaged in trying to dissect the cause of the crisis, and receive articles to read on a regular basis from him as well. Early on, I thought I’d write up an article with my perspective of the crisis, and wrote that first draft at the end of September, but realize now that my perspective came only from my time at Fannie Mae, and in the weeks since then, it has become increasingly obvious that the problems at Fannie and Freddie were just one small part of the overall problems that have devolved into a global Financial Crisis.

I’ve been trying to look at the current situation from a regulatory standpoint, based on my four years as a enforcement attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and from my ten years of consulting to the financial services industry, which included assisting many of my clients with regulatory compliance projects. My inside/outside perspective is not unique, but it allows me take a broader-based view than some of those currently writing about the crisis and proposing regulatory reform.

The more we learn about the contributing factors to the financial markets meltdown, the more the picture becomes murky. The fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took on subprime and Alt-A mortgages into their portfolios was not, as the government would like to have us think, the cause of the mortgage crisis. Fannie and Freddie were each performing their function as a government-sponsored entity (the former better than the latter, by all accounts, even in my biased opinion) and fulfilling their mission in providing a liquid market for mortgages. Those firms, taken over by the Feds in early September, have become bit players in the overall saga that has unfolded on Wall Street and around the world.

The housing bubble was growing throughout first half of this decade. As home prices began their steady and rapid rise, homes became less affordable to average Americans. So mortgage companies began to make available “affordable” mortgage products that would ease the traditional 20% down, fixed rate mortgage that had been the market norm. Adjustable rate mortgages, also a common product, were traditionally designed to take advantage of rising home prices, and were sold with the expectation that the homeowner would be able to refinance the home subsequently at a lower rate, once the price of the home had appreciated. But in the new environment, these loans were modified to make them more affordable, and hence, more risky, for the homebuyer. Subprime loans, which had been traditionally offered to homeowners seeking equity loans, became products for first lien mortgages in this effort to make homes “affordable” for first time homeowners. And in the frenzy of rising home prices, the marketing of homeownership as a right, and property ownership as a quick way to make a buck, caused ordinary Americans to behave irrationally, and ignore obvious risks, even as they were disclosed to them. There has been much discussion of fraud in the mortgage lending market, of which there certainly was some; in any time of rising fortunes, there are participants who greedily make plays for more than is legally allowed. But one can also listen to media interviews with homeowners since the bubble burst, who acknowledge that they entered into a home purchase not fully understanding what they were getting into, but understanding also that they were taking a risk bigger than they had ever taken before.

Studies by members of the Federal Reserve, as well as academics and practitioners, show that the mortgage products themselves did not cause the mortgage crisis. In fact, most of the products had been available for many years. But the manner in which they were used, and the type of buyer who took advantage of those products, coupled with sinking home prices, caused the default rate that presently rears its ugly head over the states of California, Florida, and Nevada, among others. The prepayments of mortgages, common with homeowners, for example, who took on fixed rate mortgages to buy a new home and then refinanced with a fixed rate mortgage, ceased once home prices started to fall. Unable to refinance, and unable to pay the newly adjusted mortgage payment, those home owners were the ones who were among the first to default on their loans.

Meanwhile, as home prices and the growth of mortgage backed securities grew, the market for collateralized debt obligations on non-agency bonds grew, and the credit derivative swaps market evolved. And blossomed, and burgeoned, and soon that market was dwarfing the market of the asset-backed securities on which the swaps were based. So, when housing prices began to fall, and mortgages began to default, the securities began to lose value, and the parties were forced to pay obligations (that most purchasers had never thought would come due, despite their own risk assessments), and found themselves losing money, and/or in the awkward situation that they had no idea how much money they had lost. While the traditional mortgage-backed CDS securities were carefully constructed for particular buyers, the non-agency subprime market in CDSs was new and the guidelines for triggers and defaults were based on guidelines for other types of corporate derivatives, not the unusual characteristics of the asset-backed securities of the credit derivatives swap market.

I’ve been doing some reading about the subprime debacle, to better understand how it impacts our current financial crisis. The book “Subprime Mortgage Credit Derivatives” (Wiley Press, 2008) reviews the credit derivatives market that grew using as collateral the loans issued in the non-agency mortgage market, that is, loans not written to specifications mandated by the GSEs, Fannie and Freddie. These are the loans that stretched the “affordability” standard discussed above. The authors argue that, based on their review of subprime mortgage loan data, and the performance those loans, specifically when reviewing the performance of the ABS CDO and CDS markets and the performance of the associated ABX and TABX indices, the subprime mortgage loans written in 2006 were “the worst ever created by man (except for 2007).” (page 303). The authors do a detailed analysis of these loans and their default rates, concluding: “The results of our tranche by tranche analysis are depressing from a credit standpoint. Subprime mortgage bonds and ABS CDOs are the biggest credit and risk management failure ever.” (page 291).

The authors hypothesize that the quality of the 2006 loans was affected by two factors. The first, that “the traditional relationship among FICO, Loan-to-Value, mortgage document type or doc type, debt to income ratios and defaults failed to hold for the 2006 book of business.” (page 303) The second argument they make for the deterioration in loan quality is stronger, based on their analysis of the data:

“The main culprit, in our opinion, is the unobserved underwriting variables and the extent to which originators were willing to push the envelope in underwriting these mortgages. In a booming housing market, loans leveraged to the hilt (CLTV > 100, low doc, purchase) are most prone to being underwritten with the loosest guidelines. But as housing turns, these loans will show the weakest performance. In such an environment, overreliance on FICO proves fatal, as it had become the last line of defense (and with loose underwriting, turned into a line of sand). So it is no surprise if many originators pushed the envelope on FICOs, (e.g., thinly filed FICOs, comingling of borrower and co-borrowers’ FICO and income). Such mortgages are also the most likely candidates for inflated appraisals. We suspect lenders loosened such secondary criteria as time on job, time in home, time since last bankruptcy, and so on, criteria that never makes [it] into a term sheet. In essence, loans with seemingly similar or even identical reported characteristics would perform very differently in this environment.” (page 70)

This further bolsters the argument that the mortgage companies that perpetuated the bubble by creating more and more risky loans was an act of complete irrationality.

Lack of regulatory oversight is an oft-quote phrase in the writings and press reports of the past month and year. But it has also been well documented how the opportunity to regulate certain products was bypassed by Congress, and efforts to coordinate the regulation of products between the SEC and the CFTC have stalled continually over the past decade. Hedge funds are the current target of the popular press and regulators, as fingers have pointed to these unregulated firms as the buyers of the CDS and other highly leveraged and risky products in the mortgage market. Certainly transparency in what they were doing, and where the bulk of their investments lay, could have given regulators a better sense of the overall derivatives markets, and an early warning of the ungainly size of the leverage of many of the firms. But the very nature of hedge funds is that they are private, and that their educated and wealthy investors agree to invest their funds for the expertise and risk that come with those firms.

I’m still doing some thinking about a regulatory approach. More to come.

November Work Week

It’s been a while since my last posting, so apologies to those of you who have visited and wanted to know my latest. I had a lovely trip to London (some pictures alongside); highlights were reconnecting with fellow musician/Amherstian Anita, seeing her daughter, Maya, at 9 years old (last seen during her first year of life) and meeting her newly extended family, husband Kareem and step-son Musa; my first ride on the London Eye; wandering through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, and making what now seems like a regular visit to Harrods just before the holiday season!

Back in Nice last week, I had to attend to several things, including planning my next trip (Rome), renewing my lease, working with my banker to get the pin code (lost in the US mail) that will allow me to start using my French credit card (and stop using my American ones!), and finding a doctor. All of these tasks required me to engage with the French, their unique French systems and their language. I continue to appreciate the help I receive from people, the patience of the French as I speak their language, and all the positive outcomes.

I will spend Thanksgiving with a friend from my Washington Western Presbyterian family, Don, who after many years of visiting Italy finally bought a small townhouse in a town about an hour’s train ride north of Rome. I will spend a few days with him, and then the weekend in Rome. I’ve signed up for a Runner’s Tour of Rome; hopefully they will get a few other runners signed up so that it actually happens. I’ve been offered a private tour for 200 Euros, alternatively. (I can make up a good run around Rome myself, I’m guessing, without paying that amount!)

As I have been working at keeping myself in shape, over the past several weeks I had been looking out for a road race in which I could participate here in France. While visiting Priscilla a few weeks ago in Grasse, I saw a poster advertising a 10 kilometer race in her town. I found the website and all the information, and realized, as I had learned when trying to enter a 10 km race while visiting Nice in April, that I would need a doctor’s certificate: a requirement for running road races here in France. So, after consulting with Priscilla, I had looked through the yellow pages and found a sports doctor who had an office just down the street from me. I called him and made an appointment, and saw him on Friday. HUGE difference between French medicine and American healthcare – well, first, socialized medicine, of course. Everyone is covered, so no big insurance concerns on the part of doctors. And so doctors can afford to do things pretty simply. My doctor was the one I talked to on the phone and with whom I made the appointment, it was he who buzzed me up into his building, answered the door, and asked me to wait until he was done with his other client. He ushered me into his office, took down my particulars onto his computer, conducted an exam on a table in his office, wrote my doctor’s note for the race, and then took 40 euros from me before ushering me to the door with his last little bit of advice regarding pre and post-race activity. No staff, no waiting, no forms to fill out, just the doctor! Amazing.

So, I am ready to race next weekend. Then I’ll be off to Italy on the train to celebrate Thanksgiving, and when I get back, it will be December! And time to return to the States for Christmas….where has the time gone?

Election - November 2008

Wow! President-Elect Obama. Am still pinching myself, and finding myself happy, continuously. For those of you who wondered, indeed, the rest of the world was just as ecstatic as all those Obama supporters in the US about his winning the election. I would have liked to be in the US celebrating the resounding victory with my friends, but at this historic moment, to have been overseas celebrating with my European friends was also a memory to keep forever.

I awoke spontaneously at just after 3 a.m. in France on November 5th, realized immediately that it was just after 9 p.m. in the States, and that there would be initial results reporting. I turned on my radio and listened for the next few hours to the French stations announcing the electoral college tally. Finally, at just after 5 a.m. my time, as requested, my mom called me with the news, that the election had been called for Obama. So incredibly exciting! I waited until after 6 a.m. to send a texto to Priscilla to give her the great news. "Beautiful" she wrote back. At that point, I was listening to Barack's speech from Grant Park on the BBC news. It was one of the first times I had heard him speak in real time (live), and it was a magnificent speech. Chills went up my spine. This was history in the making - as trite a phrase as that now is!

Credit goes too to John McCain, for a very eloquent and supportive concession speech. I hope he does decide to go back to the guy he was, and continue to work hard on behalf of the people in America.

I am proud to be an American in Europe now. As one British paper's headline said yesterday, "America just became a little cool again."

United States Presidential Election 4 novembre 2008

I can't let today pass without encouraging all of my American friends at home to vote. And vote for Barack. He is the guy to get us where we want to go. And if you live in Virginia, vote for Mark Warner. Another guy you want representing you.

I have great admiration for all of you, including my Mom, who have devoted untold hours to this campaign. Because of you, we will make history.

I will be in London tomorrow, expectantly celebrating the election with American friends.

Long live democracy!

Tell Me About The French

I get this question from a number of you, but you can’t really talk about the French without talking about their country. I read several books before I came over here to become acquainted with the country; “Six Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong”, was the one my friend Erick suggested had a good overall look at what I was getting myself into with my move here. A few other books written by ex-patriates who have lived in Paris and acculturated to the French lifestyle (“Almost French” & “A Town Like Paris”) were also helpful for me in highlighting some of the more obvious things that make France different.

So herewith, my own observations about the things that make France French, or at least different from what I know as an American.

Mondays. In preparation for my trip to Corsica with Priscilla back in September, I organized myself to get to the bank on Monday before we left Tuesday morning so I’d have some cash for the trip. But when I got to the bank that Monday morning, it was closed. Arghhh! Lesson learned! There is a 35 hour work week in France, and if you are open on Saturday (which the bank is, conveniently for a number of folks, I am sure), then you close on Monday, so that your employees get a proper 5 day work week. Most businesses that open on Saturdays are closed on Monday; although some are open Monday and closed some other day of the week (it is Tuesday for the hair dresser in my building). The big commercial supermarkets and superstores can afford to open six days of the week, given a high employee count (and ability to manage work schedules), but it’s not the same for the smaller companies and shops.

Streets. Living on the fourth floor of my building (called the 3rd floor on the elevator, as the first floor is designated “0”), I hear a lot of what is going on in the street below me. And believe me, there is a lot! OK, so New York City has machines that clean their streets, but in Nice, the city workers take out hoses and wash down the street. Regularly; even in a rain storm this morning! Now, I’m not complaining, really, because honestly, with all the dog crap on the sidewalks and in the street, having someone actually get rid of that crap makes me happy. (I take off my shoes once I’m in my apartment, you have no idea what kind of stuff you may track around the floors – floors which I tend to spend some time on stretching before a run, for instance. The other phenomenon that I have learned to accommodate in my sleeping habits is the nightly trash pickup. Nightly! I can’t think of an American city where I have lived that had daily trash pickup, even NYC. But this is a country of small apartments and no disposals, so I guess that makes sense? On the other hand, I wonder if it’s not just a socialist thing, keeping the workers busy for their 35 hours a week (kind of like the street cleaning – again, I’m not complaining!).

Bread. Americans eat like there’s no tomorrow, but there is no comparative activity I can think of that occurs daily in American gastronomy like the quotidian buying of bread here in France. In the morning you see people holding croissants or pain au chocolat or some other sweet thing in their hands as they head to work. Around noon, you see the exodus as folks leave work and kids leave school for lunch, and every other person you pass is carrying a baguette, or two, or three, even. And at the end of the day, the same phenomenon; I suppose if you didn’t get one in the morning, you pick it up in the evening. In the two block radius of my apartment, there are six places to buy a baguette, either in a boulangerie or in a supermarket or a patisserie. The fact of the matter, I learned from Priscilla, is that a good baguette is fresh for about four hours. That’s it. So, if you want fresh bread, and apparently folks do, you buy it just before you are going to eat it. I’ve written that folks will freeze the uneaten sections of their bread, for eating later, but mostly, I think the French embrace their national obsession with fresh food, and go for the real thing.

Time. Life moves at a different pace here. Americans work long hours and eat lunch at their desk or pick up something quick at McDonalds or Subway. The French close down their stores and offices for two hours each day for lunch. I walk by cafés anytime between noon and 3 p.m. and see people sitting there, a carafe of wine between them, relaxed and talking. Americans (OK, at least in the working community) organize their lunches out to conduct business. I think the inverse is true for the French. This relaxed schedule is certainly guided by the 35 hour work week, and I have to admit, I haven’t met any French yet that strike me as go-getters. This is a country known for its small businesses, but not for any rags to riches stories. My friend Erick who works as a tax attorney here in Nice, longs to go back to the US, where he lived for a time many years ago. He is tired of how long everything takes in France; in America, we make decisions, move forward, and stick to deadlines. Priscilla warns me, as I look for a doctor here in Nice, that I should find an office close to where I live, because doctor visits inevitably take hours. (I told her that I’ve waited for hours for my doctor in the States, too.) In my unemployed, all-the-time-in-the-world status, this waiting concept does not bother me. I’ve waited in a long line to buy a train ticket; and seen long lines in the Post Office, and know that government offices are notorious for making people wait. The French appear to be content to wait; but then there’s another side to them. Priscilla and I were waiting in a long line to get into a concert this past weekend; when the doors opened, everyone massed toward the doors, line be damned. We overheard a Frenchman observe that if these had been Americans, everyone would have stayed in line. Well, maybe the English would have, anyway.

More observations to come…

Running and the Sea

Readers: My dad suggested I make one of my blogs into a short story. I thought it was a good idea. I didn't choose the one he suggested, but another one that I had not yet posted. Your comments welcome. Ari

* * *

I can almost feel it; the sensation of slipping into open water after a run, refreshing and invigorating my sweaty and overheated body on a summer day. I wonder if it is a dream; I try to conjure up the actual experience. I can’t think of one; I’ve never lived close enough to open water that would have given me this opportunity. Even on runs during family summer vacation weeks at Orleans on Cape Cod, or at summer weekends at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where I was a frequent 5 kilometer racer on Sunday mornings, I can’t remember ever running to the beach and jumping in the water to cool down. I never was a beach runner. But as I run along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, a pedestrian walk that curves around the beach front that hugs the Mediterranean, that is all I can think of.

Only in Nice for two months, I have already spent many afternoons on the beach and in the sea: stretching out my bright yellow towel on the rocks, carefully taking off my shorts and t-shirt, and then carefully treading across the varieties of small stones that make up the beach as I head to the sea. My first experience in the Mediterranean was one of pure joy; the salinity made me euphoric: I could float! Stretched out on my back, flexing my newly-toned abdominal muscles, I could lie there in the rolling waves for minutes upon minutes. And the water was comfortable; not freezing, like the Atlantic I remembered from the Cape beaches, but refreshing, and swimmable.

The origin of the water sensation came to me. Only open in the summertime, in the States I had made frequent use of my condominium’s outdoor pool after my Saturday bike rides over the past two years. Hot and dirty from several hours in the northern Virginia country roads and sun, I would head to my room, pull off my bike shorts and running top (never did buy a proper biking shirt), and pull on my black one piece Lands End suit over my sweaty body. I would pack up my small beach bag with my sunglasses, suntan lotion, cellphone, and iPod, wrap a beach sarong around my hips, slip on my flip flops and head down to the pool on the first floor of the building.

Ahh, it felt great as I slipped into the cool water (there were never quite enough hours of sunlight to truly warm the water in the pool, enclosed on three sides by the walls of the condo building), my tired legs invigorated as I did laps across the small, rectangular, 40-foot pool in its child-safe three feet of water. But my arms longed to stretch, and the pool length was enough to satisfy this longing (perhaps 12 strokes across in one breath), and its smooth water felt wonderful on my thighs and calves. After 10 minutes of crawl, breast and side strokes, I would ease onto one of the beach lounge chairs by the side of the pool, positioned to catch the sun’s rays, smooth lotion on my legs and arms, and exhale as I enjoyed the pleasures of physical exhaustion.

I wanted that feeling again. After a month of running along the Promenade, mesmerized by the view, I decided I wanted to finish a long run and jump into the cool waters of the Mediterranean. The sea, flickering in the sunlight, beckoned.

Mechanics. I couldn’t quite figure out the mechanics of finishing a run and jumping in the water. Beautiful in concept but awkward in execution. How would I get home? Run home for ten minutes through the streets of Nice, dripping from the sea? How about bringing a suit or extra clothes to the water before I headed out on my run? But where to leave them? The Promenade was a very public place; an open beach; hotels and restaurants with sidewalk tables lining the drive along the sea. This idea did not seem practical.

It was a Sunday morning. Actually, it was no longer morning. I had slept in that day, just making it to church on time, deciding as I lay there in bed, not wanting to get up, that the run of the day could come after lunch. It was a beautiful day on the Cote d’Azur, 72 degrees, sunny and clear, with a slight wind. In my shorts and t-shirt I ran west, toward the airport, intending to keep my run flat and easy. But instead, as I approached the airport, I veered off the Promenade and the water toward the neighborhoods. I was feeling good; decided to extend this run a bit. Inspired to try and run to my friend’s office building in a section of town called St. Augustin; I had previously checked out the map, figured it was not that far away. It was my target. Up and over the train tracks that cut through the city; up a winding road whose steep wall revealed a cemetery high on the hill. On a Sunday morning, there was little traffic, and no other runners. At the top of the hill, I found the office building, turned around and headed back toward the sea.

It was a long run for me; I could tell. The run to the end of the Promenade was about 40 minutes; the added run up the hill past the cemetery had added at least 15 minutes, I calculated conservatively. Two months ago, my usual run was 30 minutes, once or twice a week. But being a former marathoner, my body seemed to remember how to do long runs. I was easing back into that rhythm. On the way back to the Promenade, I took different roads, exploring more of the city I now called home. But the sea beckoned and I circled back to the expanse of sky that covered the water. As my feet clicked along the pink tarmac, I stared at the sea, and the mountains rising up behind the city. My chest swelled with a love for this new place I called home.

I was hot. Cool thoughts flooded my brain. I really wanted to be in the water.

Ten minutes left to my run. Figure out how to do this.

Yes, I would do it. I ran to the pink-domed Hotel Negresco, my landmark on the Promenade signaling where I would turn north into the city streets and head toward my home. But instead of turning left, I turned right, and headed down one of the many stone stairs that led down to the pebbly beach. I walked out across the stones in my new LiveStrong Nike running shoes. The beach was not crowded on this October Sunday afternoon. It was early October, no longer the end of the summer; it was autumn. The only folks still on the beach were tourists from Italy, or Germany, or colder climes, determined to make sure that they had had a beach experience in Nice. It was 1:30; lunchtime, or getting there. The Promenade overlooking the beach, typically crowded with runners and bikers and walkers of all types, would be deserted soon.

I walked to the water’s edge and sat down. I unlaced my shoes, took them off, and peeled off my damp socks, laid them next to the shoes on the sand. Took my house keys out of my pockets (one in each pocket) and slipped them into one of the shoes. I pulled off my t-shirt and laid it out on the rocks beside me. Then made a quick decision, and pulled off my running bra too. Stood up and walked tenderly over the shifting pebbles three feet to the water. A gentle lapping of waves onto the beach, but enough of a wave to make me unsteady – a little anxious to get into the water and not be conspicuous with my naked torso – I knelt down and eased into the water.

The refreshing sensation of slipping into open water after a run, invigorating my sweaty and overheated body. It was no longer a dream.

Music and religion

I grew up with music: playing it, singing it, listening to it. Music is closely intertwined with my religious life too; I have sung with church choirs as long as I can remember (including a stint as a paid singer at The Riverside Church in New York City for two years just after college). Music history itself is closely intertwined with religion (something I was able to weave into my college senior thesis). Bach (among others) would not have been quite the prolific composer (I’m guessing) without the need to provide settings for religious services on a regular basis. In moving to Nice, the question of how I would integrate into the musical life of the city for me was a question of when, not if.

I began by looking for a church. The first church I found was an Anglican Church, across the street from my real estate office on Rue Joffre. (A European History major who focused on the middle ages, 20th century history is not my forte, but at the suggestion of a friend, I had read Barbara Tuchman’s book on World War I – The Guns of August, so I actually have some familiarity with the names on the streets around here – lots of French WWI heroes recognized by street namings.) I attended the church one Sunday in September; it was a welcoming congregation, and the Anglican service was familiar and spoken completely in English (when I attended my brother’s church several weeks later on Worcester, Massachusetts, I considered again how small we are as a world family). Typical of Anglican services, there was a cantor for certain parts of the service; in this church there was no choir. Even the organist didn’t get too play too much; and the congregation was the typical English “don’t sing too loud” crowd. I was probably singing too loud.

There was a coffee hour after the service, in the adjoining building (apparently some wettish weather prevented the coffee hour from being held in the garden, as usual), and I went over to mingle with the crowd. There was coffee available, and some salty snacks, but there were also bottles of wine on the table near the coffee; for a Euro you could buy yourself a little after-church wine. How civilized!

The English are an institution here in Nice. I’ll let you look up the history, but the fact of the matter is that the English love the French Riviera (and that’s what they call it, not, like the locals, the Cote d’Azur), and lots of them not only vacation here but have settled here in their retirement years. The French can’t knock the English too much, because they do a lot to keep the economy humming, but what the French can’t stand is that the English make no attempt to integrate into France, with their biggest transgression being the fact that most of them don’t learn to speak the language. In a conversation with a Niçoise woman one afternoon waiting for a concert to begin (all in French!), she asked me if I was Anglais (English), to which I answered yes (taking it as whether or not I spoke English as a native), but later, when I disclosed that I was American, not from the UK, she had a whole different perspective on me. And she was particularly praiseworthy of my French conversational skills!

That coffee hour at the Anglican church was another small world experience: In introducing myself to a woman lingering there, I discovered she was a Presbyterian minister who was vacationing in Nice for the week; I ended up spending the next several minutes grilling her about the goings on at the General Assembly (Annual Meeting of Presbyterian clergy and elected officials) that had occurred the previous month. I made sure she knew about Western Presbyterian in DC before I let her go. (http://www.westernpresbyterian.org/).

I decided I would visit another church the following weekend. This time it would be a French church. If I wanted to integrate into French culture, attending an English church was not going to help. On my meanderings, I had found another church, which appeared to be Protestant, not far from the Anglican church (this one was on boulevard Victor Hugo – another familiar name). I had to go to my dictionary to look up a word; the sign on the door said “Culte – 10:15.” I wanted to make sure I didn’t assume anything: “culte” means “worship” in French. So the next weekend, at 10, I headed over to the Église Réformée. (http://www.eglise-reformee-nice.org/)

I was there a little early, but it didn’t look like too many people were in the congregation. But the group there clearly knew each other; and the guy who appeared to be giving everyone hellos was the same guy who showed up a few minutes later in the front of the church in a black robe and white collar.

It was indeed a Protestant church; the service order was familiar, even one of the hymns was familiar that morning (“Tous unis dans l’esprit” – “We are One in the Spirit”). I liked the pastor, who, happily for me, spoke very slowly – which went a long way to help me at least understand the words he was saying, even if I didn’t understand the whole conceptual idea he was trying to convey. Although there was no coffee hour after this service, I told myself that I would return to this church.

But this church also had no choir – just an organist who played not so much. Actually, that morning, it looked like the organist had rolled out of bed after a late night to play this morning gig – he was a 20-something from the back of him, with hair that hadn’t seen a brush for a day at least. The post-sermon meditational music he played that morning was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I smiled.

But if there was no choir, it did not mean that this church did not support the musical arts. That morning I found on one of the tables in the back of the church a brochure for a series of musical programs going on in the church during the year ahead. Suddenly the congregation was feeling a little more like home.

I missed church at the Église Réformée for a few weeks, due to my travels back to the States and a Sunday morning spent sleeping quite late, recovering from my trip to the States. In the interim, I attended a mass at a downtown Catholic church (see previous posting, La Vie en Rose), and found, like I had around the world, that the Catholic service is fairly predictive, whatever language is spoken. I like it at times, but not for weekly fare.

In the interim, I had started looking in the local paper, Nice-Matin (“matin” is French for “morning”), for musical events in the city. I discovered that they published a “cultural calendar” on Wednesdays, so two weeks ago I purchased the paper on Wednesday (I still can’t get myself to by the paper every day here, it seems so expensive at 85 cents [euro] – although I realized when I was in NYC a few weeks ago that even the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal when purchased on the street are $1 or more.)

In the newspaper, I found a free concert to be performed that Saturday by the local professional orchestra (Orchestra de Cannes Provence Alpes Maritime Cote D’Azur – known to locals as ORPACA – http://www.orchestre-cannes.com/) at the Nice Conservatory (http://www.cnr-nice.org/). I had heard ORPACA with Priscilla in another free concert in a small town, Le Cannet, just north of Cannes a week or so earlier. They were a group worth going to hear. (The performance we had heard of Ravel’s Piano Concerto even prompted Priscilla to get the CD.) I called Christiane and invited her to join me at the concert. That weekend was also the monthly concert to be given in the series at the Église Réformée on Sunday afternoon. I had a weekend ahead full of free concerts!

The Saturday concert was pretty impressive. The conductor of ORPACA had come up with the idea twenty years ago of giving Conservatory students the opportunity to play with the professional orchestra, and over the years, many successful students had gone through that experience. The concert featured four of the program graduates, and they were all talented and impressive in their concerto solos.

The next afternoon, at the church, I heard a small Niçoise chamber group. (Beethoven, Serenade in D Major op. 25; Schubert, String Trio in B flat major, D.581 and Mozart, Quartet for flute and strings in D Major, K. 285) The fun thing was to see that the cellist I’d heard do a solo the previous evening was a member of the quartet. I already felt like I knew the Niçoise music community!

While at the Conservatory on Saturday afternoon (we had gotten to the concert hall quite early, given that the concert was free, and wanting to make sure we got a good seat), I had picked up the flyer with all the other concerts going on at the Conservatory in the year ahead. I found that they had Monday early evening series, and the next concert would be the Monday upcoming. So on Monday late afternoon, I walked up to the Conservatory (deciding that walking was more efficient and more economical than taking the bus), and had the opportunity to hear some of the principal players in ORPACA (including the conductor, a flutist) perform some fairly eclectic chamber music. The program featured a harpist, and some interesting and captivating pieces by Ravel and others. (Debussy, Sonate for flute, viola and harp; Faure, Berceuse op. 56 for violin and harp)

So, although at this point I had not yet found a choir, I had certainly found music in Nice!
The season is in full swing, and there continue to be plenty of concert offerings for me to take advantage of. This weekend was the Ensemble Baroque de Nice (http://www.ensemblebaroquedenice.org/) season-opening concerts; I heard them perform Bach’s Orchestral Suites on Sunday afternoon in the Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate in old Nice. I was a little disappointed to be sitting mid-nave in the cathedral; the result was similar as for those who sit mid-nave in Washington’s National Cathedral; lots of notes were left in the rafters. But the group was very good. I left that concert and walked by the Église Réformée, to see if the concert advertised for 18h was still in progress. The Alliance des Lyres, had just begun the second half of the concert; so I got to hear Rossini’s Stabat Mater performed by a quartet of absolutely wonderful soloists (and supported by a lackadaisical chorus, unfortunately).

Just so you don’t think I’m a complete classical music nerd, Priscilla took me to hear a jazz quartet at the local community music center (right next to the Conservatory) on Friday night. The quartet featured Hadrien Feraud , a 24 year old whiz kid bass guitarist who has already played with all the big names around here, apparently. He had three very competent and talented kids (they all looked so young) play with him (drums, lead guitar and keyboards, respectively), and P and I left the concert believers in the kid’s talent.

This coming weekend, the City is sponsoring an entire 3-day weekend (on All Saints Weekend, no less, which is a national holiday in France, the Catholic country that it is) of free concerts at the city’s Acropolis – a large convention center. ORPACA, the Ensemble Baroque de Nice, and a few other orchestras from neighboring areas (including Monaco) will be featured.
As a former arts administrator, I can’t help but note the mechanics of arts presenting and administration I have noticed here. As you may know or be aware, the French state basically supports the arts. The Conseil Générale des Alpes-Maritimes (the region of which Nice is the largest city) gets lots of publicity for making most of the concerts happen (I think every concert I have heard so far was supported by the CG). The byproduct is either that the concert is free, or there is a nominal charge. Amazingly, admission charges to the concerts I have attended (so far, only in churches and community centers) have never exceeded 14 Euros. Barely 20 dollars! As the per-concert price of choral concerts has headed toward $30 in the States, I’m happy to pay to attend concerts here. But lots of them are just free. [The alternative is the “big name” concert promoter-organized concerts that one can attend in Monaco or Cannes for big ticket prices – pop music icons and bands and famous entertainers…]

So, will I find a chorus to join? I read a notice in the newspaper Nice-Matin this week that the Catholic church around the corner from me is looking for “new” voices to join their choir to do special services each month. I think I may just join them.

Blueberries

Myrtilles. I found them today in Picards, the supermarket that sells ONLY frozen food. That’s it. (Frozen food in French is “surgeles” – sur – on; gelés – iced, basically.*) The store is a little surreal, it’s a fairly large room whose dominant color is white, lined with waist-high, open-from-the-top deep freezers in which you can find any kind of frozen food possible. It’s got the feel of a room for the insane (but no rubber walls), or a factory where they assemble microcomputers – all anaesthetized and sterile. Until you look into the glass-covered freezers, all you see is black and white placards perched on the tops of the freezers with the names and prices of the contents therein. Vegetables, fish, chicken, beef, pasta, pizzas, complete dinners, pastry desserts, fruit, ice cream, you name it, if it’s food that can be frozen, it’s here.

I was looking for blueberries. Ever since having them in New York City a few weeks ago, I had looked for them in fruit stands and in supermarkets here. But the berries that were so prolific and cheap on the streets of New York were nowhere to be found here in Nice. Finally, I thought, perhaps, frozen. After church this morning, I wandered around the city streets – it was quiet, as most stores are closed on Sunday mornings, but there are some stores that open in the morning (and then close for the afternoon). And I saw a Picards on my walk that was open. I’d heard about the store from my French tutor in the States, but had not darkened their doors since my arrival here. But this morning I went inside.

And there they were. In among the framboises (raspberries), mangones (mangos), et cerises (cherries) were Myrtilles sauvage – blueberries (handily identified by the blueberries on the plastic bag!). Sauvages implies that they are wild (and apparently from Sweden) but that sounds better than cultivated blueberries to me. Now I can have blueberries on my yogurt again!

P.S. Myrtilles went on sale this week at Picard’s – bonanza!

*Priscilla, my professional translater, tells me that a better translation of surgeles is under ice, or in deep freeze. I need a better dictionary, she tells me!

Brown Sugar

Brown sugar, a staple in most American kitchens, is not, I discovered this week, a staple in French kitchens. Searching supermarkets for what is known as sucre Vergeoise blonde, a key ingredient in my famous chocolate chip cookies, therefore this week became my own quest for the culinary Holy Grail.

It all began when I visited Corsica last month with Priscilla. During our week there, we drove to the town of Conte, to visit with one of her Alte Voce singer friends, Rosanna (See article Alte Voce). Rosanna is a lovely, warm, engaging and vibrant woman, and during our visit, I learned that she is also a very good baker. She offered us samples of her cookies while we were there, and I complemented her, letting her know that I was a cookie baker too. She became quite animated, and asked for a cookie recipe from me. She brought me a piece of paper, and I instinctively wrote down the recipe that most of us grew up knowing as Tollhouse Cookies, the recipe listed on the back of a bag of Nestle’s Semi-sweet Chocolate Morsels. [In the last decade or so, myriad varieties of so-called chocolate chips have become available, as the major confectioners’ marketing departments search for additional sales (e.g., peanut butter, chocolate mint, dark chocolate, white chocolate, minis, etc.), but the original ones from my childhood were the semi-sweet, melt-in-your-mouth-gooey-chocolate pieces in cookies hot from the oven, from the yellow Nestle’s bag.]

I wrote down the chocolate chip cookie recipe from memory (I have submitted my own version of the recipe to more than one cookbook compilation over the years, with my own twist of substituting Grand Marnier for vanilla extract), and gave the paper back to Rosanna. She started reading it and I realized it needed to be in French, of course (duh), and then seconds later, realized it had to be in metric measurements if she was going to be able to use it. Hmm, not in my repertoire, the measurements, that is. Rosanna was a little deflated, but we went into her kitchen to see if she had a measuring cup that had ounces by any chance (hard to imagine, however) marked on it. Her measuring cup was an interesting beaker-like plastic cone with markings on it – but not in ounces, but milliliters. Back in her sitting room, I was able however, to annotate the recipe with the names of the ingredients in French – most of them. By the time we were getting ready to leave, I was promising (apparently this happened between Priscilla and Rosanna in French around me, I didn’t actually understand the promise at the time) to send my hostess the complete recipe in French with understandable measures.

Before we left, I asked Rosanna for one of her cookie recipes. She proudly whipped out a piece of paper and wrote down six ingredients. Et viola! She described, with some prompting, what was to be done with the ingredients, so I made a few notations on the piece of paper. We talked about the temperature of the oven (“the highest heat possible” – another lesson learned about French appliances; ovens are not as sophisticated as American ovens; the temperature dial on my oven here is not in degrees, but in digits, 1 – 9, you figure it out!), and upon learning that I had an electric oven, Rosanna declared, “It is not possible to make these cookies in an electric oven. I have tried.” (Spoken in French, I believe.) But such a declaration was not to be a deterrent to my own interest in trying to recreate her cookies!

A few days after we got back to the mainland, Priscilla emailed me a link to a website that had American/European conversions for kilos, pounds, ounces, etc. “For your recipe for Rosanna” she wrote. I looked at the site, and tried to make conversions between cups and kilos, but found it a little frustrating. I took off for my Paris trip that week, so I forgot all about the recipe for awhile. Then a week or so ago, before I left on my trip to the States, Priscilla let me know that while she was with the Alte Voce group the previous weekend, she had heard Rosanna tell someone that she was going to get an American cookie recipe from me. Whoops! I hadn’t realized I was on the hook. I mobilized into action.

One of my purchases while I was in the States was a box of brownie mix, as my friend Erick had expressed a wish for brownies when I asked if there was anything I could bring him back from my visit. Having bought the mix, though, I realized that I needed a cup measure, and was pretty sure that I would not find one of these in Nice. I consulted with my mom, who found among her “things” in the house, a nest of cup measures (one-quarter, one-third, one-half, one), which was helpful, but we also talked about finding a cup measure with liters and ounces. She was sure she could find one in the Dollar Store, she told me. So, on my last day in Amherst, while I was finishing my packing to head back to Nice, Mom headed out on her quest to hunt down a cup measure. She returned victorious (“the last one there!”) with a plastic cup-and-a-half measure, with milliliters listed on the other side. Stage One, appropriate utensils, (partially) completed.

A few days later back in Nice, now equipped with a way to measure ingredients, I went back to my recipe with the earlier calculations with the measurement conversions. But in looking at the calculations (1 gram = .035 ounces), I realized that simply converting ¾ cup of sugar to grams was going to come out with a pretty weird number. It became evident to me that I would have to experiment with ratios, using the European measures, rather than doing a strict conversion. This began to make more sense once I started shopping for ingredients. A cup of butter is easy to figure out in the States, because butter is sold by the pound, and the tablespoon measurements are frequently listed on the side of the bar of butter (and most bars of butter are ½ cup). But butter in French supermarkets is sold by the gram, typically 250 grams, and not in bars, and not carrying any notation showing 100 or 125 grams for easy measuring.
But figuring butter was my base, and that 250 grams was more or less a cup, and that the sugar ratio in my recipe was 1 to 1.5, I started coming up with my recipe in grams. The new “European” cookie recipe looks like this:

Traditional = European
¾ cup white sugar = 175 grams sucre blanc
¾ cup brown sugar = 175 grams sucre Vergeoise blond
1 cup butter = 250 grams beurre
2 eggs = 2 oeufs
1 tsp. vanilla extraact = 1 cuillère à café vanille (Arȏme Naturel de Vanille liquide par Vahiné)
2 ¼ cups flour = 550 grams blé
1 tsp. baking soda = 1 pc. levure chimique
½ tsp. salt = ½ cuillère à café sel
1 cup chocolate chips = 2 pc. Pépites Créatives (chocolat pour pâtes à gâteaux) (2 x 100 g)

The unfamiliar sounding ingredient in this list was the “levure chimique.” I would not have known what exactly to look for with regards to a baking soda substitute, because baking soda does not exist on French store shelves. But the recipe Rosanna gave me had “lev. Chimique” listed, and I was able to find the packets of this leavening agent (really, not quite sure what it is, but presumably what we call baking powder and/or soda) in my local supermarkets. Stage Two, workable recipe, complete.

So, I was ready to experiment making cookies with my “new” measurements. I headed out to buy ingredients. (Actually, the ingredient search was coincident with my figuring out measurements, but I am telling the story serially here.) As I have written, shopping in supermarkets is a pleasurable pastime for me, and I can spend hours (literally) shopping in French supermarkets these days – actually “shopping” is not the right word, “cruising aisles and looking at items on the shelves” is more like what I do. But given my experience cruising aisles, I knew my ingredient shopping would require a dictionary in hand. Experience had shown that buying something without knowing exactly what the wording on the label says could result in a surprise (if I had known that volaille was another word for poultry, I would not have bought that particular box of tabouli mix, for example).

White sugar, flour, butter, even the levure chimique, were not hard to find in my local supermarkets. What I became stumped with was finding what I knew to be brown sugar. I went to two different stores, without success, and then consulted with my friend Christiane, who said, of course, they must have it in the store. She accompanied me to a Monoprix on the main drag in Nice, and we found the sugar shelves, and of course, there were lots of “brown” sugar packages, including sugar in cubes or pourable sugar packaging. They call it “sucre de canne.” But I told Christiane what I was looking for was not on the shelf. She was puzzled; I described to her a moist brown sugar that could be packed into a cup measure. She said she didn’t know what this was. Good, I wasn’t going crazy.

That night on the phone with Priscilla, I bemoaned my failed attempts to find brown sugar. “No, No, they do have it here!” she said animatedly. “I saw it in my local grocery here the other day.” But she agreed that this was not an item that was mainstream in French cooking. Then she gave me, in her own Priscilla way, the exact name of the thing I should be looking for: Beghin Say Sucre Vergeoise Blond, or Brun. So equipped with a name, I headed out to the local Italian Cocci Market around the corner from me the next morning. Et violà, sitting there looking at me from the shelves was a small kilo package of sucre Vergeoise Blond (different producer, but same product). Success! Now I could make real American cookies. Stage Three, ingredients assembled, complete.

A quick word about the chocolate chips. I now live in a country where there are almost full aisles of chocolate in just about any food store. They love real chocolate here; America makes feeble attempts at chocolate products in comparison (though things are getting much better than they used to be. Trader Joes has helped revolutionize chocolate bar choices. Bringing chocolate back from Europe is no longer the first request I get from family). That being said, given that chocolate chip cookies, and cookies, basically, are not in high demand here in the land of the baguette and the croissant, I had only one choice for chocolate chips in the supermarket. My recipe above is specific, simply because those are the only chips I found, in every single store I visited. In my cruising of the baking aisles, I did find varieties of instant chocolate chip cookie mix, though, and I actually bought a bag of it to try and see what the French think of as chocolate chip cookies. The comparison between my American cookies and the French wannabes was striking – the brown sugar difference, Priscilla and I decided.

The purchase of the French cookie mix, while a culinary disappointment, was fortuitous, as the instructions on the back were very helpful as I was trying to write instructions in French for Rosanna. French phrases for cooking are not exactly intuitive. Here’s how instructions for my cookies turned out:

Prechauffez votre four th. 9 (200° C)
Dans un saladier, mélangez de beurre mou avec de sucre blanc et blonde. Ajoutez des oeufs et vanille et fouettez à nouveau.
Mélangez tous les ingrédients sec (farine, lev. Chimique, sel) et ajoutez dans le saladier avec les autres ingrédients.
Ajoutez finalement de pepites de chocolat et mélangez sans trop pétrir.
Avec deux cuillères à café, laissez tomber des petits boules en lignes sur une plaque à patisserie beurrée, bien espacées.
Faites cuire 10-12 minutes jusqu à ce que les cookies soient blonds (un petit marron, aussi bien). Une fois cuits, laisses-les tiédir avant de les décoller.

I was ready to bake. Almost. Although my furnished apartment’s kitchen is a pasta lover’s paradise (courtesy of the Italian owner – lots of big pots for cooking pasta), I found it woefully underprepared for a baker. So, during my trip to Carrefour to purchase my comforter and bedding last week, I also went in search of cookie baking fundamentals: baking sheet, spatula, and a strong wooden spoon for mixing. These were fairly easy to find in the aisle with kitchen accessories. I also noted on the shelves nearby the baking paper that I was pretty sure the French used (and shown on the side of the box) for baking in the oven. This practice from the old World has definitely left the American kitchen. I decided the good old American cookie sheet greased with butter would do for me. Stage One, appropriate utensils, complete (as far as I knew at the time!)

The ready-made mix purchased also at Carrefour was my first cookie effort. Using my new utensils, I was able to produce the chocolate chip cookies as instructed on the back of the package. They looked OK, the oven worked fairly well. I was ready to make my own recipe.
Actually, at this point, I made Rosanna’s cookies. Here’s what she wrote down that day to give me:

1 kilo Farine
300 g Sucre
250 cl hile
250 cl vin blanc
2 p. levure chimique
1 p pincée sel

I had found all her ingredients easily, and set about making the dough. Realizing that a kilo was a lot of flour, I planned to cut the recipe in half. But I started to pour out the liquids in the full measures (ml incidently, not cl, as she wrote down) by mistake, so I plunged ahead with the full recipe. And yes, it was a lot of flour. As a baker with experience, I also realized that the wooden spoon was not going to be helpful, that I would have to knead the flour (a total of 9 cups!) into the mixture. Kneading the cookie dough reminded me of baking gingerbread at Christmastime; one of my more pleasurable times in the kitchen, but also lengthy – kneading 9 cups of flour into a sticky ball of molasses and brown sugar takes time! And Rosanna’s recipe was just the same, although the dough was not so sticky (no brown sugar in her recipe).

My notes from my conversation with Rosanna about the cookie making was that one should roll out the cookies and sprinkle with sugar before baking. At this point, I realized that I did not have all the utensils I needed; I had not purchased a rolling pin for rolling out cookies. Hmm. It was McGyver time; time to improvise. I took a glass (luckily I had one thick enough not to break on me), and to the best of my ability, “rolled” out the dough to ¼ inch thickness or so, cutting the dough into squares and then putting them on a baking sheet. At this point, I saw the value of the baking paper I had rejected in the store, as I sprinkled sugar on the cookies and watched the crystals drop between the cookies onto the baking sheet. This would make a messy cleanup once the sugar baked on the sheet, I thought. In my next batch, I sugared the cookies before placing them on the sheet.

While not exactly pretty, and while missing that last cup of flour (I got tired of kneading!), the cookies turned out tasty. Like shortbread, and very enjoyable with jam or jelly and a cup of hot coffee or tea. Stage Four, Rosanna’s Canistrelli Corsican Cookies, complete.

Finally, it was time to make Margarita’s Chocolate Chip Cookies. I decided to make a half recipe – this time I knew the measurements well enough! – as I now had two pots full of cookies sitting on my refrigerator of which I was not looking forward to being the sole consumer. Knowing the recipe like the back of my hand, and having all the ingredients I needed, the process was quick and easy. The oven cooperated, the cookies came out browned and sugary and tasting like they should. I am feeling confident that with my French recipe, Rosanna can do the same. Here’s hoping!

* * *

Rosanna’s Canistrelli cookie recipe (in English, with American measurements)
9 cups flour
1 ½ cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup white wine
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp. salt

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl, with half the flour. Turn mix onto board to knead in remaining flour. Roll out dough in ¼ inch thickness, cut into squares and put on greased cookie sheet.
Cook in hot (375-400 degree F) oven for 10-15 minutes.

Time Management or What Do You Mean You Don't Work?

In the Hugh Grant movie, “About a Boy,” Grant plays a 30-something guy who is independently wealthy (courtesy of a father whose one successful song turned out to be a Christmas song, ensuring annual royalties until the end of time). He is single, doesn’t work, and basically just dates women and breaks up with them (a similar plot line for another favorite show of mine, “Two and Half Men” – “Mon oncle Charlie” here in France). What made me think of the movie today was remembering the voice-over the character gives about how he spends his days: he measures activities in 15 minute time increments, as a way to keep the 24 hours in a day from becoming totally overwhelming. I thought of that as I went through my day in carefully orchestrated increments (but not quite of the 15 minute variety): cookie baking in the morning, swimming and sunning in the middle of the day, a visit to the bank in the afternoon. I bought two newspapers today; I plan to read them sometime in the late afternoon and early evening, before the television news comes on. Oops, forgot to schedule in my Internet time; perhaps I will do that before the TV news.

I watched a Poirot movie on the television yesterday. (Those of you who know that my television set sat unplugged in my condo in Virginia most of the time may find it amusing that I am becoming a television watcher of sorts here in France.) I’ve always loved M. Hercule Poirot; I think I read every single mystery that Agatha Christie wrote with him as the lead investigator. I remember pleading for my dad to get me the final in the Poirot series, “Curtain,” in which Poirot is killed, but identifies his killer. It was 1975; it was a momentous Christmas for me. Anyway, the movie I saw the other day was yet another typical setting of British upper crust society spending a week (or who knows how long) on some estate in the Cotswolds (or someplace like that), where of course someone is killed, and Poirot happens to be a guest for the weekend. Watching the movie (dubbed in French, of course), I thought, what do those people do all day? Clearly they were rich enough not to work; it seemed (in the story, anyway) their days were measured by meals, served like clockwork by attentive servants, in the main dining room. And their evenings were always cocktails, followed by dinner, followed by games in the drawing room and after dinner drinks, or some such civilized thing.

Now that I am unemployed, I have a whole new perspective on what it means to not work. My perspective comes from the fact that I am voluntarily unemployed, an important distinction from those made so involuntarily. My days are basically without the stress of searching for a job. Not that I don’t think about it, but no part of my day is planned with activities like writing a resume, or contacting a former colleague about possible job openings, or reading newspapers for help wanted notices, or scanning the Internet for possible other things to do with my life other than the job I just left. My life at the moment is filled with the mundane activities that come with building a new life in a new place just for the fun of it.

I have devised a schedule for my days, but I remain fairly flexible and laid back about it; if I want to sleep late in the morning, I do. It is such a lovely departure from the past two years, in which I went to bed each night planning whether or not I would get up at 5 a.m. so that I could do a run or a workout in the gym before leaving for work at 6:30 a.m., or deciding I would let myself sleep until 5:50, and to leave by 6:30 for the metro so I could be at work not later than 7:15, for the daily 8 a.m. meeting for which I was responsible. In a weird “can’t let that early morning habit go” reaction, however, I am letting myself wake up early, as the local Riviera Radio station out of Monaco plays an hour of BBC News at 6 a.m., and I’ve wanted to hear the latest out of Washington and Wall Street to see if “how low can we go” is still the recurring theme of this crisis. But if I want to go back to sleep after that, I do.

Unlike the achingly proper British, I do not keep posted meal times each day, but certainly planning and preparing for meals has become an important and time-filling activity in my new life. After my initial awkward experience with a pain au chocolat my first day in France (see August postings, Wednesday Morning in Nice, and Anxiety Produces Nothing Good II), I decided I would ease into my new country’s culinary habits. Meaning that I have been trying to replicate my American eating habits here at first, and slowly add in the components of a true French meal. Some of the meal components have needed no transition at all; I have been a cheese and yogurt eater forever, and I love wine with dinner. It’s the baked goods that I’ve been taking my time with; several years ago I stopped buying yeast breads, so that the only grains in my home kitchen were crackers, Trader Joes being my favorite location for new and exotic varieties. Between boulangeries and patisseries here on every corner of Nice, it is hard to avoid the lure of the yeasty loaves and butter-filled pastries that cram shop windows and whose smells waft through open doors on the streets. My niece, with her one year experience living in Italy, said to me, “Don’t worry, you’ll lose all the weight you gain in France when you get back to the States.” Yeah, well, I’m pretty happy with my weight right now, so I’m not in a mood to tinker with it. I have decided to make bread purchases an occasional event (but there is nothing like brie on a soft olive loaf, yummm), which my workouts and my body will deal with accordingly.

Shopping for food is practically a daily activity for me; the shops here sell things in small sizes, and there isn’t that much room in my kitchen to store anything in bulk, or much of anything at all, really. I lucked out with a fairly good-sized refridgerator in my apartment, but many people here manage with a refridgerator the size of which you would remember from your college dorm room. Even while shopping at Carrefour, the Wal-Mart-sized super store, I found the food packages were remarkably small; I spotted no Costco-sized mega-rolls of toilet paper or super-sized bags of rice or cereal. (They do sell awfully large bottles of soda, however.) But honestly, given my life of leisure, having time to stroll down aisles and look at all the unfamiliar products and packaging, and new words (these are words you don’t learn in a foreign language classroom) is a delight for me (and a good time suck).

Exercise is the other planned activity during my days. Although I take pride, as a runner, that I can do my sport pretty much anywhere, in any type of weather, and in any type of attire; as an aging runner, I have shifted from being a running snob (“Who needs cross-training?”) to a gym-rat of sorts. When I moved to my Lexington Square condo four years ago, I looked at the small gym available to residents and said to myself, Lifting weights – I want to do that. In the next four years, I became a pretty regular user of the small but serviceable workout room (in addition to my regular, if infrequent, runs on the C&O bike trail), eventually using just about every piece of machinery in there: the bike, the elliptical machine, the treadmill and the weights and weight machine. When I arrived in Nice, I decided I was going to find a gym to continue my exercise habit (and also thought it would be a good way to meet people). So I engaged in a search through the yellow pages, and visited each of the gyms listed within walking distance of my apartment. I was looking for a gym with a pool too; the pool at Lexington Square, even though it was open only during the summer, had become an important post-exercise activity for me. Never one to spend more than 10 or 15 minutes swimming, I just felt that doing some laps post-biking or running made my legs feel that much better the next day. The gyms in Nice ranged from a Gold’s Gym (one large room with a sweaty, dank smell, lots of weight machines, one treadmill), to FitnessLand (huge, with pool, exercise class rooms, weights, many machines, sauna and whirlpool). The young lady at FitnessLand figured out my French wasn’t that great, but it turned out her English wasn’t that great either, but she won me over, especially when I learned that I’d get two gyms for the price of one, FitnessLand, a 15 minute walk west and Espace Wellness, a 5 minute walk several blocks south of me. I paid for the pools (they both have them, but you can’t really swim laps in the Wellness pool – Aqua aerobics is really big here in France!) and the space, but the locations are great, and there are tons of classes to choose from at each gym.

I am busy now trying to figure out my schedule for what days I will go to the gym and what days I will run. Oh, yes, and I plan to buy a bike somewhere along the way, and so will have to fit bike rides into the schedule too. But coming up with a plan is just to make me feel like I know what I’m doing; if I wake up one morning and decide I don’t want to work out, I won’t. No hard feelings.

That’s the beauty of my new life. I can do what I want when I want. Eating, sleeping, working out, writing emails, writing generally, can all be done on whatever whim I have at the moment. There’s no time pressure. It’s such a change for me from the requirements of being at work at a certain time, or at a meeting at a certain time, or at rehearsal at a certain time. And I no longer have the pressure of having a list of things to do, that NEED TO GET DONE, and having that unsettling feeling of not knowing when I will get them done because of all the other time pressures. Such freedom!

But there remains an insidious voice inside me asking questions : What makes you think you can just chuck all of your life aside as you know it and lie on a beach by the Mediterranean sea wearing only your bikini bottoms while you work on a getting a tan in the fading autumn sunlight? When did you think you could just stop being a contributing member of society? What kind of ego lets you just escape from the world that everyone else is toiling in (and believe me, as the far as this goes, I know some people are REALLY toiling right now, given the current financial environment, that’s MY industry) and kick back and do nothing?

I have stock answers for all those questions, but the voice is persistent. I’m trying to ignore it for now.

The time to look for a job will come soon enough.