Quelque temps en France

“ La maison a une âme”, said one of t he lad ies – neither of whom spoke a word of English. “ A what?” “ A ghost” , the lawyer replied. We raised our eyebrows, having just spent the last hour listening to the legal proceedings relating to the house we decided to buy . We’d understood about 20 percent of it, and were still somewhat unsure about which of the two ladies was actually the one selling the house. But at the end, they seemed happy and gave us the keys, which we took to be a good sign. “ It’s a good thing”, the lawyer insisted. So now, for better or worse, we own a small cottage about a kilometer above sea level in th e Pyrenees. As is becoming something of theme, we decided to do this quite impulsively last November as a weekend escape from the flatlands of Toulouse and slightly as bribery to encourage people to visit us . Buying a house in the Ariege, however, is not a fast process. The mayor of the village (populati...

"Is anyone going to Primark this afternoon, or is there still tear gas?", asked a post on the Toulouse English speaking forum last Saturday. The extreme has become the norm. The weekly parade of the gilet jaunes and their accompanying destruction has not dissipated, but has now reached something of a rhythm. The protesters, the police and the general public have each found their place in the new normal, with coping strategies to allow the gilet jaunes to be greeted, like most things, with a resigned shrug. Our personal strategy has been escape the city. Generally, each Friday night we head into the mountains - where there are still gilet jaunes, but more of the singing songs on roundabouts variety, rather than the throwing bricks through windows type. We've been staying in a sequence of gîtes and chambre d'hôtes. The former are Airbnb like, with an additional stressful examination stage where the owner checks your cleaning and electricity usage while you...

I’m not sure whether I can write a lighthearted blog about this.  I didn’t want to talk about politics in these blogs and quite frankly, I’d like to go back to complaining about grumpy waiters. But one does not choose the times one lives in, and in what is becoming something of a pattern, I find myself having moved to a country just in time to catch the biggest sociopolitical upheaval in modern history. Rosie’s in the US this week, so I’m looking after Sam. This morning I dropped him off at his Nanny’s, and made my way to work. My route took me past the local high school, which was barricaded with hundreds of teenagers while black clouds rose from makeshift bonfire made from garbage cans and gasoline. I was briefly stopped by the police, who seemed to have chosen to stop cyclists going to work in place of stopping the kids attempting arson, and continued along my way. My usual route goes slightly out of my way to ride along a ‘rightsized’ street where the bikepath runs pa...

I never considered that the blogs would be read by the locals, which was foolish in hindsight. For the first several weeks of my job, after introducing myself, I was greeted with a slightly over-familiar look and ‘ah, yes - I’ve read your blog’. Each time, I slightly cringed at the thought of the rash cultural generalizations I’d made and muttered something apologetic. But, at the risk of offending more French people, perhaps enough time has passed to justify another entry... I sit on the sofa, for the first time in several months, with a cat. Obtaining said cats involved vast sums of money, kindness from friends in Boulder and bureaucracy. The final collection of the cats was a 2 1/2 hour tour de force of office apathy, with enough characters to make a functional sit-com (the mis-placed hiphop backing dancer at the main desk, the aggressive middle manager who was typing something very important and would talk to you in a minute, the guy who went out for a cigarette every ...

For the second time in my life, I find myself working in an environment envisioned by a mid-20th century architect to be an ideal academic sanctuary. NCAR had towers with grandiose windows nestled in the peaks of the Front Range of Colorado, with little crevices for thought and corridors and grand halls for conversation, while CERFACS is an inverted world, with pockets of tropical forests on the inside - a concept which makes little sense at the end of summer, but I’m assured is quite pleasant in November. The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of an introduction to French working life. Our work colleagues at MeteoFrance and CERFACS have been welcoming and lovely, but we remain at a loss as to how to organize quite basic parts of our existence: how to pay our taxes or enroll ourselves in healthcare, for example - questions where even for French people it’s annoying and complicated, but for somebody arriving from outside the system with no history and only basic Fr...

One of the concerns we'd had before we came to France was that our mental perception of life here was mostly formed in the mid 90s when we were teenagers, and that the reality of modern French life might prove to be a disappointment in the rose tinted context of carefree youthful summer holidays. However, the last couple of weeks have served as reassurance that the seaside world of our youth remains mostly in tact. This weekend marks the end of les vacances, a month-long exodus for most people from professional work. Fully embracing the local culture, we've spent the last couple of weeks on a sequence of mini-vacations with various members of our family. Despite the fact that the whole country is on vacation, the culture revels in informing you that the holidays are almost over. On August 1st, the supermarkets stopped selling fans and summer clothing, despite the fact it was still hot enough outside to cook eggs on exposed metal surfaces. The newspapers are full of stori...

Keeping up with Kilian Jornet  We are settling into something of a rhythm. We are being shouted at less in swimming pools, and are becoming more accustomed to the simplest of tasks being associated with vast amounts of bureaucracy. We spent a couple of days preparing for Rosie's parents' (Peter and Allison’s) visit after mostly neglecting our house during the heatwave. We spent a couple of afternoons gardening, which involved hacking at the spiky, nettle-y vegetation and unearthing some 200 year old pavement. We then tried to plant some grass seed, which was instantly consumed by huge numbers of ants. The house, it seems, is reluctant to be tamed. We don't yet have a car, relying on our bikes and an electric car share scheme to get around. The cars can be picked up at any time, rented by the minute but cannot generally be booked in advance. This set of rules encourages you to drive to a place and release the car back to the system, but it gets you some looks. Our...

I seem to have become a serial blogger, mostly enabled by staying up in the middle of the night with a supply of cheap brandy while Rosie and Sam have adopted a more conventional (and arguably healthy) sleeping timetable. Rosie is thus slightly resentful that I am solely responsible for the depiction of of our lives, and even more so that I am writing down and stealing her jokes, threatening to stop telling them altogether (which I duly noted down and stole for my blog). We have returned to the city. The last week involved staying in a mountain hut which we had traveled to while simultaneously renting a campsite emplacement and a house in Toulouse as well as owning a house in America, a financial situation which was not particularly sustainable in a month where I don’t yet have a job. We were then greeted by a huge mobile phone bill from America, which acted as a suitable incentive to attempt to get a French sim card and home internet. This seems to be a relatively advanced level...

There was a time when I could have been accused of setting unrealistic goals for adventures in the mountains, but the tables have turned. Seemingly easy hikes are transformed into substantial epics when provided with a squirming, occasionally uncooperative, 35 pound backpack to carry. The morning of Rosie's birthday, we set out (at her request) from our tent on the Spanish border for the town of Porte Puymorens, an arbitrary destination about 25 minutes away by train, but a full day's hike (at baby-carrying speed) with about 4000ft of elevation. Sam alternated between engagement, sleep and frustration and so we modified our progress accordingly - moving fast while he dozed and feeling mildly concerned when he shouted out "DOG!!" in wolf country. We stopped for lunch in an unmanned cabane, stocked with ancient furniture and emergency packets of cigarettes. A cabane We walked for hours through tiny villages and high pastures, eventually to a pass with a long steep...

It could be Colorado. The view from our campsite is a high plain at about 4000ft, the twinkling lights of a small town and a cascading skyline of peaks beyond, lumbering and massive with the familiar horizontal grading of vegetation transitions from agriculture to forest to the desert of the high alpine. We're escaping the heat of the city in the village of Enveitg - a tiny intersection of worlds, with a few trains a day leaving for Paris, Barcelona and along the eastern flank of the Pyrenees to Perpignan. We spent yesterday mostly underestimating the scale of the mountains, still falling victim to the fact that meters are a remarkably big unit of altitude. After cycling to the wrong trailhead, going back down to the valley, and then the right trailhead, Sam was already pissed off. After I misread a sign which said the lake was 3 hours, rather than 3km away, Rosie was also pissed off.   All this was significantly ameliorated by Sam learning the word for flower, which he remi...

It’s so very hot. We spent some time today discussing whether this was because cities in the south of France in August are stupid sweaty places to hang out, or whether it’s more because climate change is making everywhere awful. Either way, we need to leave town before the weekend when the temperature indefinitely rises above 37C - our vague plan to head into the Pyrenees and simply stay there until the numbers look sensible again. The heat has largely suppressed our attempts both to create a functional French existence and to tread water in the academic world, in addition to the combined efforts of an increasingly uncooperative 15 month old and, of course, the endless tortuous bureaucracy. Following advice from those who have done this before, we have been trying to do only one thing a day. Yesterday was trying to join a car-share scheme, but in every online form, it seems there’s one trick question which is impossible to pass. The car share scheme required a proof of address, whi...

Things do not happen on demand here. 10 years in America has conditioned us (for better or worse) to be able to get pretty much anything we need, any time we want. In France, it seems, you might be able to get something if you follow the rules without fault (irrespective of whether you could possibly know them or not) - and even then there’s a 50/50 chance that it’s a holiday, or just inexplicably not possible today. Things ordered on Amazon do not simply arrive at your door, shops will be randomly closed because it’s a Tuesday or because the owner has found something more interesting to do. For example, as we ate dinner a couple of nights ago, we cleaned our gear in the automatic laverie opposite, not paying enough attention to the closing time - at which point the door instantly slammed shut with our washing inside. We were aiming for an early start the next morning, so came back into town for 7.30am when the shop was scheduled to reopen. Still locked.  Had breakfast. Nope....

Today is our third day of our impromptu, largely unscripted bike tour.  Last night we found ourselves on the kind of campsite that we both last went to about 25 years ago, with a little pool, table football and the tour de France playing in the bar. The evening's entertainment was a guy, perhaps in his late 60s, dressed in a black silk top and taking requests from the assembled campers to sing old French songs white illuminated by a single fishing disco light.  For what he lacked in tonal accuracy, he made up for in enthusiasm. He was accompanied by his wife, sitting looking sightly bored in front of a laptop running kareoke software. Sam was digging it, and at one point led a mosh pit occupied for the under twos. We set off moderately early in the cool morning drizzle to cross a set of hills called the black mountains.  Our early progress was hit and miss - it became rapidly clear that Google had no idea how to make directions here, or its bicycle directions are design...