Mal de Pays--Part 4

We are not living in the moment. La Rochelle nous manque. We are missing La Rochelle. I was in a French bookstore this week. Hearing two people speaking French, I wanted to rush up to them in a way that never occurred to me when I heard English being spoken in La Rochelle. We are missing the ease of our lives there, being able to walk everywhere, the wonderful food in the Marché, the beauty of the buildings, the fact that cars are not worshipped. And of course, we miss our friends, our café dates with them, our studies with Sylvie. We miss the friendliness of people in shops and the chorus of “Bonjour, Messieurs, ‘dames” as everyone enters.

We are in a different kind of ‘in-between’ and this one is more uncomfortable and difficult than the ‘liminal space’ of La Rochelle. Once again, it has to do with expectations. Who could imagine that having expectations would cause so much difficulty in life? However, we definitely expected it to be easier to come home and be Home. We are so joyful to see friends and family, to catch up and to have that experience of being with people who know you well, with whom you have a kind of conversational shorthand. They know where you are coming from. We definitely missed that in France. But now we are also noticing differences in life in a large Canadian city that we hadn’t been aware of before. Everyone is in such hurry, rushing down the streets on foot, honking at people who hesitate for a second in their cars. We are back to the ubiquitous paper coffee cup, sipped as the holder races along the sidewalk. Multi-tasking reigns supreme as we see people texting while they drive!

And the cars, everywhere! Our food shopping expeditions are definitely an exercise in frustration. We mutter together that no Rochelais would ever accept the hard-as-baseballs ‘tree ripened’ peaches we saw in Loblaws. And while Lake Ontario used to satisfy my need for big waterscapes, it doesn’t have the smell of salt or the big waves crashing. I am no longer the French Jeanette and that feels different too. Of course, as well as expectations this is also about change and the difficulty we all have with it. Always difficult, requiring so much of oneself and in this case, so unexpected. Once again, this experience has thrown us a curve!

Discombobulation

We continue to feel discombobulated. Just over a year ago, our home looked like this. There were boxes everywhere, chaos reigned but we were full of excitement and enthusiasm for what was coming.

Now our home looks like this--not much different but it feels different.

Note the balloons from the surprise party!

A perceptive friend wrote to me this week: "I hope you and David are settling in and and not having too much "culture shock" or "back to regular life" shock.  It can feel very alienating coming back after a big adventure." She is almost correct. It is not so much alienating as quite different from what we expected. We thought we would come back to our 'old' life but of course, that life doesn't exist anymore. We will now have a 'new' life, constructed on some of the old but including all that we have learned this year, new interests and a desire to live differently. We are slowly beginning to see that this is exciting too: that building this 'new' life has many of the elements of starting life in La Rochelle. We are nesting again, remaking our home, trying to figure out how to use the space differently and more effectively. Instead of struggling home from the Salle de Ventes with our new table and chair, we are rebuilding Ikea bookcases. We are finding forgotten treasures in the boxes we are unpacking and wondering why on earth we 

packed some of them at all. Value Village will be the recipient of more items in the near future! We are dealing with Ontario bureaucracy, in English this time but still a bureaucracy!  The still pristine Rubbermaid containers have made their way from La Rochelle to Toronto. Thanks to Seven Seas shipping company, they were delivered to our door by a kind UPS man who staggered up the driveway and out to the deck with them. They too are full of treasures, small mementos of that wonderful time--ten months full of surprises.

We are beginning to see that there will be  surprises here too. We are making a list, so stay tuned!

Mal du Pays--Part 3

Now we are Home but strangely not Home. We are physically and emotionally discombobulated. We are certainly in our house but someone else has been living here so it looks completely different. It is almost as though we are in yet another rental home and we are setting to work to make it comfortable for ourselves. There are small changes to the neighbourhood, new homes have appeared, some stores have disappeared. The road works on O'Connor Drive are still in progress and the construction of the big sewage tunnel under the 'hood is underway. Our favourite Thai restaurant has a new bunch of people running it: the portions are smaller and the prices higher. Why did we think that everything would be the same as it was a year ago? We aren't, La Rochelle isn't and neither are any of the people we know. I now understand the angst of immigrants who came to Canada in the '50s and '60s. It was still very expensive to return to their homeland and they would long for Home, remembering it in great detail, as they saved and saved for that exciting visit back. And then, they would return to Canada full of disappointment and stories about how their memories must have been faulty, that things looked so different, people had changed, lifestyles had changed. Just like them, we were imagining our home the way it was six months before we left, conveniently forgetting that we had moved most of our furniture into a storage locker. Nothing looks the same!!

We were so ready to come home. The last few days in Paris, while fun and relaxing were somewhat wasted on us. No more living in the moment! We were counting the hours to AC 881. The journey was flawless. We found a taxi in early morning Paris; the airport bus was quick; the Air Canada line short and even though my suitcase was 2.6 kg overweight, there was no extra charge. The French policeman who checked our passports was not at all interested in our now famous visas. He could hardly summon the energy to stamp one of the pages. We had three seats to ourselves, lots of movies to watch and books to read. Canada Border Services was extremely efficient, no long lines. The young man who checked our passport wasn't at all interested in our French visas nor wanted to hear that we had been away for a year. Clearly we were expecting someone to notice that we were at the end of our adventure and say "Hurrah, you are back".

We found flowers, a baguette and some Brie waiting for us from darling Michelle; two quick and rather brusque phone calls from family members and we settled in to unpack and deal with jet lag. Wandering the house at 3:30 AM, I must admit to a fit of pique that no one had called to welcome us back. Now it was not only officialdom that wasn't interested in our return but neither were our friends or family. However, we were looking forward to celebrating my brother's birthday with him on Saturday night. So off we went chauffeured by Michelle, dressed up because this was after all a celebration. When their door opened--"SURPRISE!!" yelled a large group of family and friends! There were balloons and streamers, lovely food and even champagne!!! They had all been sworn to secrecy by Michelle, my brother and sister-in-law, forbidden to phone in case they gave the secret away. It was wonderful to see everyone, to have a chance, however briefly, to connect, hug and kiss and make plans for more catching up.

What a wonderful gift from everyone, the best one ever. It is great to be Home, because in the end we know now that Home is people you love.

Vignettes de Paris

What a different city this is from the one we visited in February! The flowers are blooming, the trees are leafy and green and there are tourists everywhere. They are easily recognizable from their cameras, maps and guidebooks draped about their bodies as well as the curious shoes they wear. We, of course, do not think of ourselves as tourists, although we occasionally have to break out a map! We are in another apartment, on rue du Dragon in the heart of the Rive Gauche, meeting friends and family, just wandering the smaller streets and staying away from The Sights. David's sister has been to visit from Geneva for the weekend and by great good luck, our La Rochelle friends, Géry and Marie happen to be here from Africa so we spent a day with them. We are now chafing at the bit to get on the plane and do not have much left in us to stand in line to see anything. However, we are still having adventures!

• What are the odds of seven Canadians sitting together by chance on the same Métro carriage in Paris AND speaking to each other! Travelling with Mary (3 Canadians), David noticed someone sitting beside me wearing a small (so Canadian) flag so we began to talk. She and her husband (2 more Canadians) were from St. John, NB and visiting France for a month. When she heard us speaking, the woman sitting beside Mary joined in. She was here with her granddaughter (2 more Canadians) from Victoria Harbour, ON. We didn't all break into O Canada but we were all happy to see each other.

• While looking at a map (how touristy) a smartly dressed Parisienne of a certain age asked if she could help. As we were all going in the same direction, we began to talk. Out of the blue, she said to me and Mary: "How are you finding buying clothes in Paris? Isn't it difficult? There are only small sizes and the shops that sell big ones only have huge sizes."!!!! She was on her way to her boutique where she sells hats—of all sizes!

• What a contrast as we sat in a Paris restaurant, eating a delicious lunch with Géry and Marie and they talked with us about their lives in Bénin. Here we were eating delicious food, beautifully served and they talked about the lack of vegetables and fruit in the north where they live. For the first few months, they survived on various carbs, sardines and La Vache Qui Rit cheese! They have discovered where to buy milk so they can make yoghourt; it is possible—sometimes--to find vegetables at the market and Marie is now growing her own. There are power cuts all the time, so they have little access to internet and telephone; they are three hours uncomfortable drive from a small city and 10 hours from a hospital. The local school has close to 100 pupils and one teacher. They are on an adventure, more courageous and difficult than ours in La Rochelle and we are in deep admiration of their good spirits and excitement about it.

• Memories are everywhere here for me. I spent one glorious year in Paris at the age of 20 living with my dear friend, Anna. Our first evening here, David and I set off for Monoprix to buy some food. I suddenly realized was the store where Anna and I shopped; the same store I was returning from when I was hit by a car on the pedestrian crossing at the end of rue du Dragon. Rue du Dragon ends at the Boulevard St. Germain across the street from the apartment where Anna and I lived so long ago. Our current apartment is close to the art school Anna attended. The old 'hood has certainly changed. It is now full of luscious and expensive boutiques selling everything from clothing and shoes to first edition books and letters of famous people. But Gibert Jeune is still around where we used to buy books and stationery, the post office is still on the same corner. Les Deux Magots, the café where Sartre and Beauvoir hung out, is now terribly smart and offers valet parking. We were on the cusp of womanhood then, excited and full of dreams of what lay ahead for us. Now, still friends after 51 years, we continue to laugh about our adventures and look to each other in gratitude for this friendship that has seen us through what actually lay ahead following that amazing year together.

Adventure Loss Anxiety

We are suffering from a new and unnamed syndrome: Adventure Loss Anxiety. It has put us into a bit of a funk, poised as we are on the knife edge of fearing the end of our wonderful adventure and longing to be home. Wandering as we have for the past five weeks, always moving to different places, seeing different scenes and landscapes we now want some stability, but with adventure thrown in.
We have had time to begin to think about what we have learned over the past year, what we want to bring to our Toronto life from our La Rochelle life and to try and make a few plans about how to do that. We are bringing back our unfinished projects with renewed energy to tackle them differently (including weight loss-nothing like a few Devon cream teas or English breakfasts to throw that into disarray!!). We are beginning to see that our return to Toronto will be an adventure in itself. We are different; everyone we know has been through their own year of change and adventure; we want to live a bit differently. All of this helps us to see that really our adventure isn't over and that one of the things we have learned is to see the adventure in everyday activities.
We are enjoying these last few weeks. They have been filled with visits with friends whom we won't see again for some time and we have had some relaxing times together wandering the English countryside. In spite of unseasonably cold and rainy weather, even for the UK, we managed to have some great hikes across the moors and along the cliffs.

Our friend in Cornwall took us to visit some very old tin mine sites and then to an excellent play, produced in a large tent in the middle of the Cornish countryside.

We visited Tintern Abbey, the beautiful ruin that inspired Wordsworth to write one of his most popular poems and hiked up the trail that is said to have inspired the poem.

We slept in ancient hotels, full of atmosphere, and continued to meet interesting and welcoming people. One day we lunched at the British Legion Café, run by local women. As we were looking for accommodation by the seaside, I asked if they knew of a place where we could see and hear the waves. "Oh, Betty will know that " they said, and sure enough Betty sent us off to the Hartland Quay Hotel, right on the edge of the cliffs, where by chance their "best room" was available. The waves crashed on the rocks through the night, we could watch the activity on the beach and at the end of the day see the sunset—all my heart's desires in one little place.

 Now we are in London, saying goodbye, before we set off for our week in Paris. Not a week of sightseeing but rather lovelier times with family and friends. And then, September 9 in the early morning we will say goodbye to this amazing time as we board Air Canada for the flight home. I expect there will be some tears; of sadness for what we are leaving behind, of joy because we will be on our way home, of amazement for all we have done and of laughter for all the funny and wonderful things that we have experienced.

We don't think this will be the end of the blog. No promises about every week but this is not goodbye but rather

 A bientôt nos amis!

All Aboard!

There we were in solitary splendour, sitting in a 20s first class carriage, complete with the door at the end, where I could wave goodbye to the masses, just like the Queen. We were enjoying our return journey on the South Devon Railway, the volunteer-managed steam train line that runs in this area. We had imagined that we might be the only ones in our carriage when there was a great commotion behind us: "Dahling, this is perfectly mahvellous! I think when I was a gell, there were sofas but this is perfectly mahvellous!" In swept a slim woman of a certain age, bright red hair beautifully cut, clutching a very small dog. I felt she gazed upon us with distaste and carried on to the furthest end of the carriage where she installed herself with three friends, two men and a woman. We said goodbye to our dream of a Queen-like journey and settled in for some local colour. And once again, we felt like time travellers. The redhead and co. sounded as though they had been plucked from a Nancy Mitford or Evelyn Waugh novel. I searched my memory, her voice sounded familiar. Finally I remembered Joan Greenwood. This voice had the same affected, husky purring tones.
 "No one cooks in London anymore, dahling. My American friend (with a look from under her lashes down at us) thought my rosemary jelly came from Harrods." 
"Ooh, dahlng, look, a perfect English meadow. There are hardly any left anymore. People do keep planting things in them and spoiling them."
And one of her companions chimed in, seemingly channelling Sebastian Fleet:"Quite wight, dahling, it's a shame weally." I looked for a teddy bear but there was only the dog.

We had begun our journey at the Staverton station, often used as a film set it is so unspoiled. We were greeted by the station-master, a friendly fellow with a cane whose job it was to sell tickets and see to both the signal box and the closing of the level crossing gates.

We waited on the platform, admiring the plants and all the old advertising signs. In one corner you will see the luggage trolley, filled with old leather suitcases, many of them with what seemed to be original luggage tags of people long gone and forgotten. And then we heard the now familiar tooting of the train whistle as it came down the track and steamed into the station

.

We found ourselves in an old British Rail carriage, complete with plush and framed drawings of places of interest in Britain. In a great puff of steam, we chugged out of the station. And then  it all seemed familiar: the clicking of the wheels along the rails, the chuga-chuga sound of the engine, the smell of coal and as we had the window open, a few cinders flying in. I was back in time. I was eight and for several months travelled to Ottawa with my Dad every morning on the Wakefield train. It was a special time for me, having my Dad all to myself, then taking the streetcar, like a grown-up to my school in Ottawa South—ALONE!! As in those days long ago, the conductors were jolly and helpful. The difference was that the ones on the South Devon Railway are all volunteers. And what a happy bunch they are! I don't think I have ever come across a group of volunteers who are so uniformly enthusiastic about what they are doing. They all had big smiles and were always ready with a quip. But for one woman in the ticket office, they were all men so you can imagine that they were now living out their boyhood dreams of working on the railroad. Whatever the reason,  they deserve congratulations for making this experience such a pleasurable one.

We are leaving Staverton today. We will head close to the tip of England in Cornwall to stay with a friend for a few days and then north to the Cotswolds to another cottage in a very small village. We are going to miss the church bells and the train whistle as well as the beautiful countryside of Devon. It has been a relaxing and restorative two weeks.

We are not sure of how easy it will be to connect to the Internet for the next two weeks, thus this early posting. We will certainly have more adventures to report but may be a bit late in the posting of them!

Village Life

It is Sunday morning and the bells of little St. Paul's Church are pealing over the village. It is an inspiring and joyful sound. We watched the bell ringers as they practised on Thursday evening. We were impressed by their slim bodies and after a while we realized that this is very hard work—an excellent aerobic and arm workout! The bells have stopped now and I wonder how many people will be at the service after the rigours of the Garden Show yesterday. So many people worked so hard to pull it off and it was pronounced a great success by everyone, including the Canadian interlopers. We set off for the lunch, scheduled for 1 PM and arrived by 1:10 to find the tent full. Luckily, they found places for us and we sat down to roast beef, new

potatoes, salad, bread, wine and cheesecake. The people around us were very friendly and chatty, wondering about us and sharing information about their own lives. We were both struck by the difference between this experience and the one we had last year in Warkworth, Ontario when we attended the Longest Lunch (tables set all the way down the main street with a home-cooked lunch). There we couldn't pry a word out of anyone. They studiously ignored us. I wonder if this year has made us more approachable? Or do we just blunder in now and begin conversations? Anyway, it was fun and we enjoyed meeting these people, some of whom had grown up in the village. Someone sent us to meet a local teacher who had worked for years in Montreal. Now retired in Staverton, she returns to Canada every summer to go to the Stratford and Shaw Festivals (although the original Stratford is a stone's throw from here!). A long welcome speech from the chair of the organizing committee ended with his invitation to any of the judges who wished to speak. This fellow, in the most delightful of Devonian accents, then

 
regaled us with his disappointment in the shape of the 'spuds'. When we reached the display

tent, there was his note for all to see. 

Look at these spring onions (trimmed and untrimmed—2 different categories), and this Best in Show display: have you ever seen such large parsnips? We were impressed by the number of entries from young people

and from Mrs. A. Mann who seemed to be everywhere: gardening (those are her potatoes), baking, arranging flowers and winning prizes at them all. It was not

surprising that when it came time for the Honorary President

to present the prizes that she was a winner.

When they began the races, e went back in time to our own childhoods and Sunday School picnics.  43 in total, there were egg and spoon, three legged, parent and child relays, and of course the Mature Women's (which had 2 contestants) and the Veteran Men (which had many more!). The competitive spirit is alive and well. Look at the expressions on these faces!

We finally left around 6 when they were beginning to organize for the tug of war with several more games to come. It had been a lovely afternoon and great fun.

We had a great hike this week along the Devon coastal trail. After manoeuvring roads like this,

we set out across fields to the cliffs on the edge of the Channel. 

 It was a magnificent walk with breathtaking scenery in all directions. Imagine how surprising to find this bed of flowers at the bottom of a long hill through a forest!

  

Of course, there are stiles everywhere but this one had a place for dogs.

We are having fun, relaxing, reading a lot. Perhaps this coming week, we will turn into real tourists but I wouldn't bet on it. Village life is slow and enticing!