1. Just because you’re somewhere doesn’t mean you can be a tourist there. This is dumb because: duh. But it’s a helpful reminder as we have now entered the batshit crazy part of our journey that we’re not going to get to see much of every place we get to from now on. We just had a week in Marseille. It was so lovely and historic, and actually we were, in the end, able to do a shocking amount when I stop and think about it. But the two big “adventures” Christopher and I each had hoped to take the boys on— me to the calanques, a set of cliffs and inlets about half an hour to two hours, depending on which “calanque” you chose, away from the city that three different people had told us we HAD to go to, and C to the Chateau d’If, the fortress on a tiny island much closer to Marseille, where both Alexandre Dumas was imprisoned and a rhinoceros sent as a gift to a French king was famously abandoned— well, we couldn’t do them. We did do another great -nque activity, and twice at that: pétanque, our family’s new favorite activity. So fun, and so much shit-talking and relatively little sensitivity about it! We played kids vs parents, and wouldn’t you know, had our asses handed to us! Not every tournament (we did multiple best-of-7’s and -5’s) but enough that we’ve decided for Griffin that when he gets back, he’s gotta start an Arlington High School pétanque club.
We also made it to some really awesome museums: the Beaux Arts that’s in the Frenchest building you’ve ever seen.
And the Mucem: museum of European and Mediterranean civilizations. Holy cow, that one really won my heart. The mix of high and low- crafts and everyday items, gorgeous movie and advertisement art, graffiti, religious items— in the “Populaire” exhibit of favorites from their collection was a blast.
And the exhibit titled something like “Alternative Empires” was like a what-if extravaganza. What if the European system of, you name it: language, calendar, music, hierarchy, hadn’t become so globally dominant? My favorite part, naturally, was the listening booths, each of a different culture’s musical storytelling traditions. So simply done: just wood boards with holes in them like my Grammy used to have in her kitchen, filled with hooks to hang her pots and pans on. They were painted teal and had simple ecru line-drawings of the instruments and clothing of each group. And you’d just sit in that little corner with headphones on. I don’t know why it inspired me so much, but I started getting all sorts of ideas of music I wanted make out of each of them, especially the Gnawa music/chanting from Morocco, and the Jongo from Brazil.
Oh yeah: and SOCCER, or football, whatever. It’s like this global religion that we Americans (for the most part) are on the outside of. We went to a game in Marseille and it was NUTS. Earsplitting from beginning to end, and our taxi driver the next day told us she thought the stadium was EMPTY! “Very sad,” she said. She also told us she’d waited for 26 hours, “making barbecue on the sidewalk” to buy season tickets. The game went by so fast, especially compared to when you watch it on TV. It was super fun and we’re all Olympique Marseille fans now. They were playing the team from Metz, and I kept wanting to sing the “Let’s Go Mets” song, stupid NYC-born-mom joke, but the boys reminded me I’d probably get beaten up for it. Passionate fans. Speaking of, we’re in Bordeaux now, and there are folks everywhere wrapped in green, orange and white flags cheering and setting off fireworks. I did some googling and figured out: Ivory Coast beat Nigeria in the Africa Cup of Nations today. 🇨🇮
Ok, this was all meant to say I was going to write dumb stuff, as in duh stuff. The other “revelation” was that you don’t realize how much of an impact a place has on you until you’ve left it. Duh. But because we’re kind of starting to speed up the rate of change, it’s going to be harder for me to calculate those impacts AND it may be harder for me to write it down. Tarragona is on my mind today, and it was two cuties (lol cities but I’m gonna let that one stay!) ago but I’m not ready to say exactly how it changed me or how it’s staying with me.
