Marking My Days (Or, Calendars, Surfing and Shopping)

My friend says that if you want to get something done, you need to have a calendar. Meaning, if you have a plan, you can track your progress against the plan, as all good project managers know. I was a bit obsessed with lists when I got to France, and indeed the lists focused me on getting those things done that I wanted to accomplish. Et voila! Here I am, after four weeks in France, with an apartment, a phone, a few trips under my belt, and a pretty good feel for my new city.

I’ve been encouraged by more than a few of you to let the lists go, which seemed like a good idea for a time – but my friend’s calendar comment came to me today. It would be so easy to just do nothing for the next several months, let the waves take me, as it were. But as most of you know, that’s not really me.

That being said, here’s a capsule of my lazy days so far in Nice. Wake up around 7 or 7:30 a.m., turn on Riviera Radio (FM 103.5) to listen to the Full English Breakfast show, broadcast from Monaco, and hear the latest business updates from the BBC. Get myself motivated and head out for a run on the Promenade des Anglais. It’s about a 5 minute run from my apartment to the beach, and I head west once I hit the Promenade – watching the waves and clouds and the planes taking off from the Nice Cote d’Azur airport as I run, and happy not to be part of the traffic clogging the roads as workers drive down the Promenade into Nice. It’s a flat out and back run (I’m already consulting city maps to find a hilly run for variety) and I’m back in 40 minutes or so. Back in the apartment, I shower (happy to have ended up in an apartment with good water pressure!), dress, make coffee and eat some breakfast – a granola bar, or perhaps yogurt and granola. Maybe watch a little French TV as I eat (the set came with the apartment), but have already found that French early morning shows are just as bad as American morning TV offerings.

Then I am free to do whatever I want. The one thing I plan to do every day (generally in the afternoon) is get on the Internet – at this point I am frequenting an internet café (which is a little misleading, as the store offers internet access and telephone service, with just a few candy bars for sale at the desk – it’s not really a café), not having committed yet to setting up internet service in my apartment. It costs me 2 € an hour, and today I purchased 10 hours for 19 €, finally committing myself to a place which is three blocks away from my home. I like the idea of having to go out for my Internet habit; I could easily sit in my apartment for hours and surf. The downside, of course, is that I am accessing my personal sites from a public place, but I do my best to protect myself, and habitually erase the cookies and temporary files from the computer before I leave it each time. It also keeps me from having to worry about viruses and such on my own computer at home. So far, the USB Memory Stick is serving me well for easing communication with all of you.

Shopping is my other almost-daily scheduled event. I love food shopping, and being able to explore new stores, and thousands of new products on the shelves, means I have endless opportunities to expand my knowledge of French and European food offerings. And improve my French, of course. My first instinct was to look for American products in French supermarkets, but I quickly found that this is pretty much a waste of time. So, I look for products that I like and see if I can find something that makes sense given my options. Yogurt, for example. First of all, the French (all Europeans?) have an obsession about yogurt, it seems. There are complete aisles of yogurt offerings, in different sizes, in different flavors, bio (organic), for babies, for kids, for women. Priscilla tells me it has to do with the French obsession with their digestive tracts. For me, it has more to do with calcium consumption. But a good digestive tract is not to be laughed at! I was able to find plain yogurt (Nature), but skim milk yogurt (écreme) was a harder thing to figure out. I finally decided that part-skim would be fine, unable to figure out exactly what was listed in the little information box on the side of the container.

My favorite stoned wheat crackers are AWOL in the aisles of my French supermarkets (namely the neighborhood Casino, upscale Monoprix, and mammoth Carrefour stores, so far). There are plenty of regular American-type crackers with all their hydrogenated oils and salt, but I’m down to Wasa crackers to satisfy my attempts to avert yeast-filled products. An aversion which, I have decided, while quite easy to achieve in the US, doesn’t make sense here in France. For heaven’s sake, there is a boulangerie (bread store) on every block, practically (and in every town and every city – really). French people buy a baguette EVERY DAY. What’s the point of being in France if I’m not going to participate in this daily practice (tradition)? Actually, I have learned that while families may buy a baguette (or several) every day, they do not necessarily eat it all each day. In all the homes I have been in, baguettes sliced in half (and half again) can be found in the freezer, and are offered up for breakfast, toasted. It appears that their freezers have special drawers for this purpose. Go figure.

So, I am now a baguette eater. Actually, I have started experimenting with different breads from different stores. I have tried a tomato and cheese loaf here in Nice, a sliced paver au berger in Paris, and am looking next for an olive loaf. I also now have a baguette (sliced in half) in my freezer. And I am thinking I should start frequenting the store around the corner from me, to build up a relationship with my local baker. You never know. Call me a convert.

Coffee has been easy. I admit, I have not been trying out espressos in my local café (although I have had my share of them over here), but I make coffee in the Italian coffee maker my proprietor left in my apartment. I heat my milk and froth it with the small electric spinner I brought from the States, for my own café au lait, which they call écreme here (which doesn’t make sense to me, given that the skim milk is called ecreme, but there are lots of French words that are the same with different meanings in different contexts…not unlike English).

Cheese is my other staple. And of course, here I am in heaven. The local stores have tons of cheeses, and the specialty stores have even more. I just have to get over my timidity in trying new varieties. But I’ll get over that. My favorite new cheese so far is the Corsican cheese, but you can only have that in small doses (a very smelly cheese). I put a very green Roquefort cheese on my spinach salad tonight; you don’t get mold like that in the States!

Chocolate is my other indulgence. This is the land of great chocolate – actually it’s hard to find bad chocolate on the Continent. Having just come back from Belgium, the land of excellent chocolate, with a 250 gram box of dark chocolates, I am rationing…but there are just as many great bars of dark chocolate to choose from in the supermarket around the corner.

Hmm, bread, cheese, chocolate, coffee, (oh, yes, and wine). What else do I need to be happy each day? Rhetorical question.

Back to my lazy days.

A favorite activity back a few weeks (before the Corsica and Paris/Brugges trips), was hanging out on the Nice beach in the late afternoon. I’d bring my bright yellow towel (purchased at Carrefour), my iPod shuffle, and newly purchased sunscreen, lie down on the pebbly beach in my black and white bikini, lather on lotion, plug music in my ears (not too loud), and enjoy the sound of the ocean waves, the sun, and the murmurs of the French, Italian and Germans enjoying the end of their summers. I also would swim a bit, if the sea was not too crazy. The weather hasn’t been as luscious as it was in early September, so lately I have been buying the International Herald Tribune and walking down to the beach in the late afternoon to read the paper on the Promenade benches, listen to the waves and watch the people.

So, back to the calendar.

I’m thinking that I have a limited time for all this laziness. I’m thinking that at some point I will need to get a job again (a lot later than I was originally thinking, if my budgeting holds). I’m thinking (and realizing) that it is easy to do nothing, and that time will simply drift by – and then my time will be up, and I will not have done anything that I wanted to do. This matters to me, because there are things I want to do!

After four weeks, I am restless. Taking a nap during the day is a pretty relaxing thing to do. I think I am getting relaxed. I haven’t achieved a consistent 8 hours of sleep each night yet, but that was nearly impossible when I was sleeping on the ground in a tent in Corsica or sharing a bed in Paris. Maybe this week (although it is midnight and I went to bed at 9 tonight, and got up at 11 pm to write this)…

I found my calendar in my briefcase this morning. October is around the corner. It will be June before I know it. Time to make a plan.