TALE OF TWO BEACHES

Coming to France from Italy is like entering another dimension. The language becomes soft and swirly instead of clipped and crispy. So does the food. The pizze and panini (that’s plural, Homeboy; trust me) become crepes and quiche. It’s raining when I first arrive, but the sun comes out almost immediately in some sort of sympathetic magic. The Africans are selling sunglasses, not umbrellas. I think they’re all from the same hometown (the Africans not the umbrellas). The only common culinary denominator is the cheese and bread. Being an American, where bread is a minor component of any meal, except in sandwich form, I never realized the historical importance of it until I went to Thailand, where they constantly compare its importance to that of rice for them. And they’re right; I just never knew it. Of course I might have if we’d had better bread in my childhood. Pasteurized homogenized Bimbo white just doesn’t cut it. Fortunately we’ve largely returned to our Northern European roots in that respect, whole-grain brown and rich with flavor. Ditto for cheese, may Velveeta rest in peace. Finding brown rice in Bangkok is getting easier also btw, right there in the buffet line at Siam Square and almost any vegetarian ‘jay’ restaurant. You heard it here first. Cheese is still practically unknown there. Pigs are well-known of course, but not in ‘jay’ restaurants.

So in Cannes I immediately start looking for some Chinese stuff, food that is, since I obviously have a thing for it. We won’t talk about that other ‘thing’. It’s there, Thai too, but it ain’t cheap. Thais love places like this, sunny and superficial, so they’re here in force. Odd thing is, I kinda’ like it, too. It may be pricey in high summer, but not now, cheaper than LA and right close to the beach. I manage to find the most untypical place of course, down a long winding narrow off-center corridor which I finally find after immediately getting lost right out of the train station. That’s what happens when the tourist office is closed and I don’t have a map. It’s not deluxe but I’ve got wi-fi and a market close by. The market is incredible, too, vegetables and fruits and mushrooms that I didn’t even know existed. I’m in heaven, or as close as I can get without a Chinese takee-outee. And I’m warm for the first time in months. This is the French Riviera, deluxe apartments lining the beach and yachts lining the coast. There’s even a section for ‘historical’ boats, sailing rigs from times gone by, still ready to work, the teak only growing more beautiful with age. When I’m not in my room booking my June Scandinavian trip by Internet, I take long walks on a beach that extends to the horizon, punctuated by rocky outcrops and snack bars.

There’s supposed to be an African film festival in town, and I show up at the appointed places at the appointed times, but I’ll be damned if I can find anything festive going on, nor even any schedule, nothing. Festivals are supposed to be festive! That means balloons, flashing lights, etc. This is Cannes for God’s sake, home to the biggest film festival in the world! If I have to ask questions to find it, then something’s wrong. That’s the second time in as many weeks that a film festival has gone dud on me. Don’t they realize some people take this stuff seriously, even travel to attend? Fortunately all is not lost, though I don’t think this is the epiphany I’m looking for, i.e. the cheap chill spot to climax on. Rimini in Italy on down the line looks good, too, so I may have to go check that out while there’s still time before the trip home from Rome (homa from Roma?) mid-April. Since it’s the connection point for San Marino, another of those 192 countries on my list, I really have no choice. Frou-frou French dogs won’t give me the time of day here, either, the pure-bred snobs. Give me an old yellow dog any time, hybrid vigor and the works, please. Hold the mustard. Who needs these psychotic store-bought poodle pronto pups anyway? They couldn’t catch a rabbit if their pathetic lives depended on it.

Daylight savings time has gone too far. We’re barely past equinox and the sun is already setting at 8pm here. I guess I won’t have to go to the Arctic Circle to see the midnight sun. Just move the clock up like they do in China, and put Urumqi on Beijing time. That’s not the deal though, of course. The deal is to see the sun above the horizon all day long, just rimming the edge and rising up on a tilt to do it again without ever really setting. You need to get above the Arctic Circle around summer solstice for that, though, and given the price of accommodation in northern Norway, that may not happen any time soon. If I have a Russian visa for the Black Sea anyway, though, and it happens to be multiple entry… Murmansk is the largest city above the Arctic Circle anywhere in the world, and strangely enough Russia’s only ice-free port (with the help of ice-breakers) with unrestricted access to the Atlantic Ocean.

I get back on the train, still looking for my epiphany, next stop Rimini. To do that, I’ve got to go up to Milano, then back down through Bologna. Italy is so narrow, you’d think that crossing it would only be a question of where. But as they say, all roads lead to Rome. That’s because the Romans built all the roads of course, but small consolation for me. It’s like tacking a sailboat back and forth to get where you’re going. Fortunately railroads were built in a more modern era. Sometimes I think that the glory that was Rome was nothing more than one giant construction project. Almost every town in the Balkans had at least one Roman bridge, the ‘Rimski Most’. They’re still standing, many of them. Almost no roads were built between the Roman era and the advent of the bicycle, except for the Inca Trail in another world unbeknownst. That’s over a thousand years, a MILLENIUM for God’s sake. Of course that has more to do with the advent of the stirrup and alfalfa than the decline of Western Civilization. Sometimes we DO indeed get the cart before the horse, at least when it comes to riding bareback.

Did you ever imagine what Italy might be like without all the baggage of history, without all the tourists, or I should rather say ‘all the foreign tourists’? It just might be Rimini. Rimini harkens back to a day when beaches were for fun, just pure dumb kids’ fun, long before all the eco-tourism or the fashion promenades along the boardwalk. There’s little or nothing here for cultural tourism, just more hotels than you can shake a stick at, whatever that means. I’m not sure I’d want to see it in the height of summer. It must just be an anthill of sunburnt tourist butts strolling down the streets in search of pizze and gelati and giochi for the kids to play. But right now it’s okay, almost like a ghost town. I don’t like to hang around when the party’s over, but I don’t mind it when it’s just getting started, everybody painting and refreshing and remodeling, even though we’ve all got our fingers crossed, all of us, knowing that the people who get hurt in hard economic times like these are not the ones who caused it; it’s the rest of us with bills to pay and kids to feed. Pray to ‘em if you got ‘em, gods that is. And book your travel last minute this season if you’ve got the option; last-minute deals are opening up.

This isn’t exactly what I had in mind for my epiphany/climax/whatchamacallit for this trip, but then neither was Vina del Mar nor Montego Bay for the last two. Hmmm… there seems to be a pattern forming here. Do I like provincial tourist resorts that are maybe just slightly past their prime? I’ll save the existential musings for later. Right now I’ve got a country to catch, San Marino that is, should be about number 80 on my list, almost half way, give or take a medieval principality or two. San Marino lies at the top of a hill about an hour out of Rimini, and if Rimini’s got the hotels, then San Marino’s got the castles, eight or nine at last count. But who’s counting? There are some good views there, but not much more than that for me. Shopping is not my favorite sport. Sex is, but I prefer the home court advantage, so it’ll have to wait. I’ve still got another week or so in Italy to kill and I have to decide where to kill it. Decisions decisions, life’s hard. The problem with Italy is Internet, or lack thereof. Search for hotels in Rome on Expedia and you’ve got thirty pages to peruse. Specify ADSL and you’re down to seven or eight real fast. This is a country for which the great paradigm shift of the last decade is cell phones, not Internet. They’re not the only ones. At least I’ve finally got a day over 20C-68F on this trip here in Rimini, so for the moment I’m content. Decisions will have to wait… until tomorrow.

If Tails Toulouse I Won’t; If Heads Marseille I Will

So I left Barcelona in the middle of the night. The rains had already started by then. I thought maybe I’d get lucky and ride out of it, but no such luck. By the time I got to Marseille, it was worse, God taking a dump on us, rain falling in sheets and wind blowing up a storm. We pulled in at six in the morning, I oblivious to most of the trip, though somewhere we changed drivers, probably at the Spain/France border. If Customs or immigration did anything, I’m not aware of it. They did upon arrival at the bus station in Marseille, running a sniffing-dog through the bus, regardless of the fact that people have already gotten off en route. The French police like to make a show of things, especially in Paris at the terminus of the route from Amsterdam. France is not sympathetic to any loosening of recreational drug laws. Alcohol is the drug of choice by tradition. You just don’t smoke joints by candle light and whisper “Je t’aime” in a breathy swoon. I guess it’s just not romantic. I don’t know why not. They don’t have any problem doing the same with cigarettes. I read today that France is the last country in Western Europe to outlaw smoking in public places. Four years ago the thought that any of them could do that was unthinkable. Ireland was the first, believe it or not, they of pub culture exported world-wide. So now cigarette smokers seek out open doorways in the train station like wi-fi scum looking for a signal. When they find them, they stand right in them, as though an open door were not a passage but an invitation to congregate. This was a conceptual problem already that smokers have co-opted for themselves.

Marseille has some of the cheapest rooms I’ve seen in a developed country in a long time, unheard-of prices like fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five dollars a night. Every room seems to have its own particular price, I guess based on square footage. That doesn’t mean they’ll have a shower, though, and if they do, you might have to pay extra for it. Thus the reputation of Frenchmen is confirmed by the system. We all knew they seem to carry a heavier bacterial load than most Westerners, we just didn’t know why. In France bathing is optional. Smells from laboratories sell well. When the first cheap hotel I inquired about told me there were no showers, I thought she meant there were no showers in the room, i.e. down the hall. She meant none, period. The rooms have sinks, though, so I guess you can take a whore’s bath, whatever that is, in addition to whatever else a guy might do with a sink, considering the crapper’s down the hall. I could use some help here, not being French, so I’ve considered offering a whore money to let me watch her bathe, but I don’t know if she’d do it. It’s probably too kinky. Those rooms don’t even have an electrical outlet, much less TV, or curtains on the window. Now if there’s something scarier than the fact that there are thousands of Frenchmen walking the streets in various stages of un-wash, which we already knew, it’s that they might be giving themselves a mop-job and whatever else over a sink by an open window while God and the whole world looks on. Better leave the kids home on that European vacation.

In North America rooms this cheap would have long been overrun by junkies or closed by order of the local government. Junkies don’t need showers either. That’s the way it is in Vancouver, BC, Canada. You can smell them coming. Apparently half our genes are devoted to smell. Now you know why. That leaves room for a lot of creativity in Evolution by the way. But the junkies in Van City don’t care about that; they have another concern. They also have their own district between the upscale part of Gastown and Chinatown. They roost like vultures, gravitating to the sunlight and surveying the terrain for easy pickings. Zoologists probably go there to study their feeding and mating habits, if they still have any. Marseille just has winos, good old fashioned bums begging coins for booze. I don’t know where they sleep, probably on the street. The cheapest hotels close their doors at ten, eleven or midnight latest. That’ll keep the riffraff out. This is a part of Europe scarcely known or acknowledged anymore, the old Europe, mostly southern and eastern, of poverty and degeneracy and petty crime, far from the tourists and modern development, wherever unemployment is rife and competition for scarce resources is fierce. A tourist concentrating on these areas could see Europe almost as cheap as anywhere in the world, certainly as cheap, or cheaper, than West Africa. This includes much of Portugal, southernmost Spain, southern France west of the Riviera and Italy from Naples south, in addition to most of the East European countries. Conversely the New Europe of budget airlines and capitalistic fervor hasn’t even scratched the surface here yet. There is no bus to Paris and the cheapest one-hour flight is four hundred bucks. So I’ll take the TGV. There’s no choice. International buses have cheap rates and traverse the country, but they don’t serve local routes. Welcome to France. Enter Sarkozy.

So I opted to go a half-notch upscale. For forty bucks and change net, I get some old European style with rough beams in the ceiling (including fake adze marks), a large bed, six stations of French TV, a sink, and… a bidet. I’ve got a bidet in my room, but no bath. Crapper and shower are down the hall, five euros to bathe. While I contemplate the ceiling beam right over the bidet and the multiple uses to which a nylon rain poncho might be put, I remember the scene in Tropic of Cancer (or was it Capricorn?) where Henry Miller’s American friend used the bidet to lighten his intestinal load to the chagrin of… well, everybody, but especially… the whores taking their whore’s bath. Now I’m getting the picture. Hey, I want my five Euros back! Even funnier was my architecture professor at Jackson State trying to explain the concept to the down home bloods who’d probably used outhouses during childhood. When he could get a word out at all between stifling his grins and muffling his guffaws, he called them ‘bidgets.’ I’d read Henry Miller so I knew what he was talking about, despite the bad French, but the rest of the class was lost. So we shared a bond there, derriere la scene, united in our imaginary knowledge of the ways of the world, while the peasants wallowed in their ignorance.

Marseille is a fast food paradise. That’s good considering that sit-down meals would be about the same price as the cheap rooms. I’m in the shawarma part of town, little Africa. If you want bouillabaisse, then that’s another quarter. Moroccans here seem right at home, sipping mint tea in sidewalk cafes, while their wives stay at home and do all the work, just like good little Tangerines back home, ‘the other TJ’. There are Asians here, but they seem fairly Frenchified, offering lunch specials with wine. The Vietnamese restaurants don’t even have pho’, the national dish, good old rice-noodle soup. Pizza is ubiquitous, and good. Kebabs and frites line every corner. The bakeries are to die for, of course. Me, I try to limit myself to fast food no more than once per day, not because of restaurant fatigue, but high carbs and boredom. So I cook noodles in my room and make sandwiches to order. The space between my window and the outside shutters makes a fine fridge, thank you. They have a combination cranberry/mango juice here, so all is right with the world. Kidney stones are in remission and I’m taking the TGV to Paris Sunday. I’ve got a wi-fi signal in my room, just by accident. Plan C just might salvage this trip yet. I’ve had visions of Marseilles for a long time. I don’t want to sound spooky like I had a premonition or something, because after all, I could’ve gone to Toulouse, but I think I always thought Marseille might be a part of France I’d like. It’s hard to learn the language of a place you don’t really like, after all. For me to enjoy a place is to internalize it, know it’s insides until I feel like a local. What cathedral? What statue? Show me the produce section.