C to “F, it’s hot”
Even the shadows are melting in this heat
Nice is not so nice when it’s this hot. Seriously. The heat dome that hovered above the Mediterranean affecting life in France, Spain, Greece, and Italy for the past couple of weeks has paralyzed us. In Paris, it’s been entirely unpredictable. Their summer started off with a hail storm that dropped fist-sized chunks of ice that broke cafe tables and windshields. Then they reached mid-to-high 30s C, which is freaking hot as F, 98–102 with extreme humidity. And then it suddenly deluged one evening last week, dumping an insane amount of rain all at once, flooding the Metro as staircases became underground waterfalls. On the streets, people were trapped while they dripped, navigating to the few dry places they could find to stand or walk, and for some as they tried to bicycle home, pedaling harder than usual up to their knees in water.
And forget about Spain. I don’t know how those people survived it with daily temps at 45C (113F). The people there are going through a period of anti-tourism related to a shortage of affordable housing that they believe is caused by everyone converting their apartments into short-term rentals. Whether that’s true or perhaps they just need to be paid more since they are one of the lowest earning countries in Europe is to be determined, but some of the people have turned on the tourists as the scapegoats. They march through the streets of Barcelona chanting slogans telling tourists to go home, blaming them for climate change, and shooting them with Super-Soaker squirt guns while they are trying to stay cool sitting under umbrellas at the street cafés. Ironically, at those temperatures I would wear a Target T-shirt and proclaim my guilt as a tourist hoping for a little wet relief. We’ll be visiting Barcelona in September for the first time. I’m sure I won’t be so cocky once I’m there.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain, then, about Nice. We’re definitely in the low 30s here with the addition of Florida-like humidity, which is the real cause of all discomfort, but we still get a weak sea breeze and our temps arc throughout the day, being somewhat cooler in the mornings and evenings. Here in France, because it’s France, schools have been closed, construction workers sent home, deliveries delayed, and other rational decisions have been made to protect people that would never happen in the US. The building project happening directly behind our apartment balcony has come to a standstill. I haven’t see the construction workers for two weeks now. While I don’t miss their jack-hammering, I do kind of miss the concert-volume opera music they play during the day, the crew being Italian. If this project was happening back home, I would be serenaded all-day by 70s-era classic rock that has never come off the radio. But not here, it’s Corelli, Caruso, Tebaldi, and Pavarotti. I see them drinking Peroni on their 10:00am break, too. Gotta love it here.
Nowhere to be found in this heat
No AC for most of our neighbors, instead they rely upon shutters and sweating
This leads me to a brief discussion about air conditioning, which is a great source of debate in France. There are some who believe that AC just makes you sick. This is a widely-held belief in France and, in fact, you will see men wearing scarves, albeit lighter fabrics, even during this heat wave. If your neck and throat are exposed then you are asking for a cold or the flu. There are others that just think air conditioning is bad for the environment. Like dryers. They will be the first to tell you so in between drags on their cigarettes. I saw a statistic recently on France 24, our English speaking French news channel, that only 25% of people in France have AC. Contrast that with Spain or Italy at 40%. That seems about right as I look out my window and I see a lot of open windows in the surrounding buildings with the shutters propped partly open. Brutal. Myself, I am surveying this scene from the comfort of my centrally air conditioned apartment, set to 22.5 (72.5 F), so you know where I stand on the whole matter. This recent heat dome has probably done more to change long-standing opinions and practices than any political- or health-motivated belief systems. As I am forced to eat to stay alive, and therefore I must go shopping, I do leave the apartment occasionally. On the way to the market I saw three young men carrying a “climatiseur portable” down the sidewalk. I had to step up into a doorway to get out of their way as they were definitely on a mission. And two blocks later, I saw another man and his young daughter rolling another unit down the street using the plastic pull-behind rolling basket designed for grocery shopping as a dolly. The box was angled precariously as they rolled along, and the girl looked so excited as she anticipated the cold air in her future that I don’t think she was aware of her impending sniffles. I have to admit that using the basket was pretty clever, but I hope they returned it after they got the unit home.
I have done my best in these posts to give an unvarnished account of my experiences since moving to France. If I have been successful then you should know that we are very happy here, but we’ve also experienced countless small difficulties that have presented us with daily challenges. Some of them are truly stupid, but nevertheless they attack my joy. For example, none of our stuff is here yet, and so our apartment walls are bright white and empty. I feel like we have been institutionalized. While I see it as a forced aesthetic sterilization, my wife is unfazed, as usual, and probably just thinks it’s “clean” or “modern.” I know why Munch created The Scream and why it’s so colorful.
But after four months, I finally got the phone call letting me know that our personal belongings were going to arrive. When they picked our things up in Federal Way on March 18, I was told it would be 4–6 weeks. Ha. They arrived this past Saturday on July 5th. I think our things went on a separate world tour different than the one we’ve done, touring the entire Pacific coast, through the Panama Canal, probably stopping over in Miami for a medianoche sandwich before carrying on across the Atlantic before finally reaching port in Antwerp. Then after going through the unloading, customs clearance, and the batching with other people’s possessions onto a double 18-wheeler, and driven from Belgium to Nice, our stuff was transferred to a smaller delivery van that would actually fit onto our tiny street. That transfer of goods took place 50 kilometers from here on the side of the highway and cost us an extra €250, by the way.
All I could think of was what are the poor guys who are going to deliver our stuff going to do in this heat?
The other thing that has worried me since we got to Nice was where were they going to park to unload our things? I have been dealing with a coordinator in The Netherlands and I have gone out of my way to send pictures to her with measurements showing the clearance of our garage, the tightness of our street, and the very limited parking possibilities. When on the morning of the delivery I got a WhatsApp message from the driver informing me he would be arriving in an hour, I asked him if he had received the photos I sent. His reply? No. (Of course, not.) I sent him the photos and asked if his van would fit under the opening of our garage door. Again, No. But he then followed it with, “We’ll figure it out.” Here is where being in France for several months has changed me. I just had to let it go.
The next text I received a couple of hours later was that he would be here in ten minutes. I went down to the street ready to freak out. As I stood in front of the door to our building waiting with angst, I saw the truck turn the corner at the end of our block. Oh, boy, here we go. And then, I saw two cars parked in front of each other pull away from the curb at the same time on our side of the street, which is a one way street. The truck pulls right in behind them. He has all the parking he needs on our street right in front of our building. Unbelievable. I am apoplectic. All of my worry, angst, and over-communication? Completely unnecessary. They just parked in front. WTF. This is France in a micro-scene.
It’s sweating balls out. I see three guys get out of the truck. All three of them are maybe five foot, eight inches and 125 pounds soaking wet, which they surely were in this humidity. I know I have several tubs full of heavy art books, a few more full of Dutch Ovens and frying pans. and quite a few more full of art. These guys are tiny, nothing like the muscular moving dudes I am used to back in the States. Am I worried? Of course, I am. I haven’t yet mastered the previous paragraph.
The entire truck was unloaded and delivered to my balcony in about an hour and fifteen minutes. What?! How is it that the skinniest dudes are always the strongest? They just banged it out in the blazing sun. They even managed to smile. I learned they were from Romania but lived in Nice now and they do this every day. Bless them. We plied them with cold water and tipped them generously.
Our things have been sitting in storage or on a ship for nearly a year now. I can’t tell you how excited I was to have them back. This happiness came as quite a surprise because before we left we had rid ourselves of almost all of our belongings. I didn’t think I cared that much about “stuff,” but the things we kept were the collections, books, art, and kitchen supplies. They were things that took years to acquire and they represented, in the case of the art, all of the places we have lived or traveled to. It was like regaining a part of myself that I lost.
Over the next three days, we opened the tubs and started putting things away. I started with the kitchen and I took everything out of the tubs and stacked them on the counters and the bar and I thought, “Well, there is no way this is all going to fit in here.” The kitchen swallowed all of it and I still had one cabinet completely empty. Again, another really stupid thing, but I was tearing up over getting my giant cutting board back. This was made for me 20-years ago by my Mother’s husband, John, out of an old solid oak door and sits on the counter at 74x46x4 cm (29 x18x1.5 inches). I love this thing. It makes cooking and prep a breeze. I can pile up onions here, garlic there, parsley over there, lemons over that way, and there is still plenty of room for more. I have been using this flimsy bamboo cutting board we picked up somewhere along our travels. It’s worked out fine, but it’s tiny and cheap. Then I found my knives. Heavy-handled Zwillings that I’ve had for a quarter century and I’ve taken very good care of, sharpening them bi-annually. I picked up the 8-inch chef’s knife and I could feel the universe adjust as it melded with my hand.
The next morning we got up early and we took the tram to IKEA and picked up some things to make the kitchen even more organized. Rails to hold the pot lids, a magnetic knife holder, and a rack to hang kitchen tools. All of it installed the second I got back.
Yesterday was art day. We opened the 19 boxes of art and again, weren’t sure it was all going to find a space on the white walls of our asylum, but by now I was learning to just let it go and trust that the appetite of this apartment was going to continue to swallow as much as we wanted to feed it. It was like Christmas all day opening box after box and finding treasures. Reminders of our lives together and the places we’ve been, Mexico, Taiwan, India, Sedona, Charleston, France, and places we’ve lived, San Diego, Santa Monica, the Bay Area, Tucson, Phoenix, Atlanta, and of course, the Pacific Northwest, all represented in the artwork. Then spending the afternoon deciding where they should hang, testing out different spots as we held up pictures for each other, and approved or rejected the proposed locations.
By the end of yesterday, the house was full of stories again. Memories in every corner, color flushed the cheeks of the walls, and life returned to the space we live in. And the heat wave broke yesterday, too. By 6:00 p.m., the breeze off of the Mediterranean returned, the trees waved for the first time in weeks and I saw my neighbors laundry dancing on the lines. We opened all three sliders to the apartment and let the glorious outside air pour in. The AC in all rooms now set to OFF.
After a much-needed shower, I roasted a spatchcocked chicken with sliced lemons under the skin and Za’atar crumbled onto the outside with sea salt. I made some Maakoudas, Moroccan potato fritters full of onions, garlic, black olives and parsley, and I stirred a sheep’s milk (Brebis) yogurt with preserved lemons, a few pinches of cumin, and a couple of twists of fresh black pepper as a dipping sauce. All of it prepared efficiently and without stress with my recently repatriated professional kitchen gear. We sat outside on our porch, which was now mostly cleared of the tubs and boxes, dining al fresco at the table enjoying the beautiful cooling breeze and much more tolerable 80 degrees. The sky was that Nice blue I love so much. I sipped on Carricante, a white wine from Sicily, it’s aromas of citrus, crunchy green apple, orange blossom, and just-ripe peach, along with a strong mineral note like crushed rocks and salty air pairing perfectly with our Mediterranean dinner. We were exhausted and even a bit sore, but also the happiest we’ve been since we arrived in March.
We are finally settled here, the unrelenting Med-lifestyle having overtaken us and teaching us how to flow with it. And, our moving truck driver was right, you eventually just figure it out.