Bordeaux pics

I wanted to make a video of beautiful bordeaux, but apparently it's only the new  iphone that makes videos.  Rats.

So I figured there's no reason to subject you to my own terrible photography when there's millions of brilliant photos of bordeaux with creative commons licenses.

The miroir d'eau:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/filtran/ / CC BY 2.0

Photographers seem, justly, obsessed with photographing the fountains in front of the Bordeaux Stock Exchange, which sits on the riverbank.  

Here's another view:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tixu/

and that's the fountain, not the river.

A shot taken in the central plaza (kind of like our cesar chavez park, but with less expensive sculpture)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/filtran/ / CC BY 2.0

They seem obsessed with water, right?  have I mentioned that there's no air conditioning here? 

A shot of the skate park, which is also on the riverbank:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bertrande/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

What I love about this skate park is that there's a big kids section and a little kids section (where you sometimes see beginner 45-year old mixed in with the 6-year olds).

The best place to ride your bike in Bordeaux . . .

http://www.flickr.com/photos/filtran/ / CC BY 2.0

on the tram tracks.  This looks like it could be the tram that runs by my house, although the tram tracks look like this pretty much everywhere.

I rarely go over to the rive droit (right bank), but the last time I did I walked by and totally noticed this restaurant

http://www.flickr.com/photos/filtran/ / CC BY 2.0

which almost certainly has the best terrace in all of Bordeaux.

It wouldn't be France without a ludicrously cute carousel, right?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mescon/ / CC BY 2.0

This is Bordeaux par excellence:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mescon/ / CC BY 2.0

Have I mentioned the crazy afternoon thunderstorms? It reminds me of summer in Arizona - all of a sudden, so much rain you can wash your hair in the roof runoff (well, depends on your roof), and then just as suddenly, sunshine again.

Oddly, this is a common sight in Bordeaux:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/filtran/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Must be the time of year.

My absolute favorite square:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/filtran/ / CC BY 2.0

An independent bookstore, an amazing bakery, loads of cafés, and an english pub.  Perfect.

What?  You can't wait to visit me?

happiness is a cold soup

i know that i promised not to write about food here anymore, and i know i even started a whole other blog and then promptly abandoned it (sadly!  but given my lack of kitchen equipment, it would have to be retitled "baking with cari", an activity i wouldn't wish on any person with taste buds).

but is there anything better than cold soup on a hot summer evening?  (okay, so john travolta and olivia newton-john would beg to differ, but i bet they never had a truly terrific bowl of cold soup).  the cold soups (iced soups, soups glacées if you're one of those frenchified snobs) in question here are gazpacho and cucumber-mint soup.

so first, gazpacho.  the relationship of the french to gazpacho is a little like the relationship of the united states to mexican food:  they stole it from their southern neighbors and transformed it into something no self-respecting spaniard would call gazpacho; and the french love gazpacho even more than their own national food (an honor reserved for a number of non-french foods that i can count on my thumb and forefinger).  the real beauty of gazpacho is that it's about as hard to make as a smoothie.  ingredients, blender, done.

and then, iced mint-cucumber soup.  again, as easy as dumping about 5 ingredients in a blender. cucumber, double cream, olive oil, shallots, lemon juice, mint.  so 6 ingredients.  blender.  deliciousness.

and finally, and this is really my last food-related thing, i just saw one of my favorite french tv chefs make a really simple banana-zucchini bread.  frankly i don't like bananas or zucchinis, but this bread looked really good.  (this might have something to do with a memory of a zucchini fritter with jam so delicious that i ate myself literally, literally, sick on them.)  anyway,  banana zucchini bread.  maybe i'll have to try baking with cari after all . . .

day 98 and faulkner

day 98:  in a word- historic.  we have a working telephone.

the sound quality is worse than terrible, but who cares?  on day 97, you are starting  to brainstorm your handle for a transistor radio.  day 98 is magic.

- - - - - 

so what kind a major wimp am i? the kind that goes to the beach for an hour - from 5.30 to 6.30 PM, mind you, and gets sunburned enough to spend the rest of the weekend sweating out the chills.  i'm pretty sure that i've lost all right to call myself a californian.  or at the very least, i'll have to tell people i come from yreka.  

- - - - - -

i hate not knowing the endings to stories.  (so i would have been right at home with the ancient greeks.)  i have, in fact, been known to leave movie theaters  close to the endings of romantic comedies to ask the concessions sellers if the couple ends up together, because otherwise it's just too suspenseful.   

so obviously one of my favorite things about the internet age is the ability it proffers to download entire seasons (and even entire runs) of a tv show at a time, so that you can watch it all at once and avoid finding yourself at a traffic light worrying about what's going to happen to izzy next week (for example). 

i knew that my semi-functional, insanely expensive internet sim card was the bane of my existence.  (you all knew it, too, right?)  but i really didn't realize to what degree, until i tried to download an episode of burn notice today, and found out that even after i made myself some tea, read an article about al franken and ate my 17th cup of chocolate yogurt, that there were still 19 hours remaining.  19 hours.  remember those days?  no, you don't, because i don't think even dial-up was even ever that slow.  

_ _ _ _ _ _

if there is something romantic about living in the land before air conditioning, where the heat is oppressive from 9 am until 2 am, where women carry fans, and where windows stay open throughout the night, then there is something terrific, or sublime, in reading  faulkner in the heat.   the dust, sweat, and inertia is both the characters and yours; when someone finally jumps into the river,  you can feel the refreshing rush of cold water.  i had always thought faulkner's characters to be overdrawn, laconic and inscrutable, but now i think it was just the air conditioning, getting in my way.  

 

i want to grow up to write like gail collins

maybe this is only hilarious to me because i don't get CNN and was therefore taken by surprise, although I shouldn't have been, at the total absurdity of american politics.  

postscript 

::warning - preachy link ahead::

sooooo sorry.  really.  sorry.  but this is an excellent article by thomas friedman about the international political impact of reducing your oil consumption.  read it.  and if anyone's planning a sit-in at the vta to protest the deplorable state of public transportation in santa clara, call me.  i'll kayak over.  

sorry.

please sit down

i may have actually found a job!  at the very least, i'm in the middle of a two-week working interview for a job teaching english to kids ages 1 - 7.  they haven't decided whether to hire me yet and i haven't decided whether to take it.

the upsides, obviously, are fulfillment, glory, and the ability to buy myself new jeans.

the downside is that today i found myself standing in front of the open fridge, wondering what to eat, and singing "sh! be quiet, please sit down" while tapping my fingers together in time.

(to the tune of london bridge)

(you're trying it, aren't you.)

just shoot me

while translating a document, I just used the (non)word "sook" as the past tense of seek.

 

have you ever been forced to read a document that you are sure is making you dumber as you read it?  this is clearly proof that that can happen.  

rugby! peaches! socialism!

rugby!

one of the fun things about france being a smallish country is that national sports events resemble college games way more than they do the super bowl (and everbody knows college games are way more fun).

today the national rugby semi-finals are taking place here in bordeaux, in the stadium which is about a half a mile from our apartment.  usually a game just means hot-dog stands on our street, but today's game is different:  not only is it a semi-final, but it is a semi-final between toulouse, three hours to the south, and clermont-ferrand, three hours to the east.  which means the totality of the crowd (about 40 thousand people) are being bussed in.

i envisioned the jam-packed tramways close to our house, but I was not prepared for what I encountered riding my bike home from the grocery store:  two large busses parked on the sidewalk, out of which spilled an endless line of seriously tanned middle-aged men with huge straw-colored mustaches to match their straw hats, dressed exclusively in blue and gold, smiling beatifically and reeking of beer.  

I approached, realizing that navigating a tightly-packed field of about a hundred drunk men was going to take more than sharp steering, when an extremely drunk young man spotted me and gallantly offered to lead the parting of the red sea; this was working well but ended when he collided with the ping-pong table that was being set up in the bike lane.  luckily at that point enough attention had been drawn to my plight that I made it through the rest of the crowd without incident, and was able to continue my ride home with everyone behind me yelling "bonne journée!"

peaches!

there are peaches!  peaches peaches peaches peaches peaches!  I saw the first ones at the grocery store yesterday.  I was eyeing them for a few minutes, when a lady came up beside me and asked if it was really peach season.  I told her I thought it seemed a little early, and she agreed.  these peaches came from spain, and since mass spanish produce is typically not as good as french produce, they make up for it for by getting to market early.  neither of us said so, though, because this close to the border you never know who is spanish.

it's the same dilemma with every fruit, every year.  we've had strawberries in the markets for three weeks now, but it's way early for strawberry season.  on the other hand, we haven't seen strawberries for 9 months!  i've cracked and bought a few baskets already; and i've gotten what i deserved - sour, or mealy, or just untasty strawberries.

so i cracked and bought 2 peaches today - just to try.  we're taking the train to paris tonight and so i also bought a baguette and a dried sausage.   i had in my head all those books where some european journeyman starts out on a several-days walk through the countryside with just a baguette and a sausage to see him through - but then i thought we might get hungry and i got cheese, olives, almonds, wine and water as well.  nobody every made it anywhere in real life powered only by sausages and bread.

socialism!

god know i love countries where you have to start training at the age of 11 to sell tickets at the cinema.

most of the places I have applied to for a job have just not replied, since no-one is hiring, but I have been rejected from a number of prestigious places that are hiring.  i thought i might detail my accomplishments here:

not hiring:  any job that requires use of a word-processing program.  (includes galleries, translation agencies, businesses, etc.)  restaurants.  also, any cool sales jobs, eg. bookstores, cinemas.

hiring, but not hiring me:

Sephora - unqualified, lack diploma in cosmetics sales.

Ikea - unqualified, lack diploma in sales.

After-School Tutoring:  unqualified to privately tutor 4th to 6th graders in english, lack TEFL (teaching english as a foreign language) diploma.

local department store:  lack diploma and 3 to 5 years of experience in ready-to-wear sales.

luckily for me, I was accepted into the Bordeaux Women's Club, proof that I qualify for something!