New Friends

One of the things I love about Marseille is that everyone will talk to me. This is not true in Paris, San Diego, Providence, Boston, or any of the parts of the greater New York metro area with which I am familiar. And I don’t mean talking in terms of responding to a question or grudgingly giving directions. I mean completely willing to drop everything and start an involved conversation. Of course, I can only speak from my own perspective – that of  a young, female French speaker with enough of an accent to be clearly foreign (and thus, apparently, interesting). Even so, it’s amazing who will start to talk to me, and what they’ll start to talk about. Security guards at the library strike up a conversation about smuggling in chocolates during (and after) the 4-second check of my bag at the entrance. Patrons at an outdoor book market discuss World War II, or how Prometheus was a great guy and thus anyone male is just like him. (As a side note, I’m pretty sure that the guy trying to talk to me about the war was aphasic. He wasn’t so good at forming complete sentences, and he’d say pierre (stone) about three times per phrase, obviously as a placeholder for something else. And he would laugh in an exceptionally hearty but put-upon manner whenever he seemed unable to find the right word.)

Today, as I was walking home, a garbage truck pulled up alongside me, emptying the bins along the street. Marseille has these giant, cubic recycling receptacles with tiny holes at the top to put in your goods, but no visible openable cover to allow the contents to be dumped into the truck. (Note: there’s one bin for glass, and one for everything else – I’ve chosen to interpret this as testament to the vast quantity of wine the French drink, such that they produce so much more glass recycling than anything else.) Tonight, I was watching the truck as it went by, hoping to see how they got the bins open. One of the garbage men saw me standing and staring on the side of the road, and asked me what was up. I asked him the question about the bin door (turns out it’s on the bottom: they use a crane to haul the bin into the air over the truck and then open the door to dump the recycling in) and he answered during the 30 seconds it took the other garbage man to pick up the trash at the spot where we were. Time to go, right? ‘Course not. Completely unconcerned about the fact that the other back-of-the-truck-hanger was already hanging and the driver was getting ready to move again, as well as the fact that several cars were sitting behind the garbage truck, honking their horns profusely because they couldn’t pass on the exactly-one-car-wide street, my new friend proceeds to strike up a chat and ask me what country I’m from, and then what part of the country, and is still talking to me as he tries to climb onto the tiny perch where the other hanger is already positioned and the truck drives off down the street.

This behavior is extremely typical, and was actually something that I came to miss when I moved to San Diego after a year of such overt and forthright friendliness. Lines get held up in bakeries because the person behind the counter is deeply involved in recounting or hearing the story of what went on during vacation when everyone was away. Waiters don’t bring the bill, or the machine to run your credit card, or bread, or the menus, because they’ve begun an animated discussion with the newest patrons who’ve wandered in. Coffee-drinkers sitting in the seats along the street at outdoor cafés ask passers-by how they’re doing and whether they’d like to join them. It’s just incredible, especially in a country so stereotypically anti-social, to be bombarded with such outgoingness and everyone wanting to be my friend. Makes me feel so damn popular!

Ramadan in Marseille

As my friend Andrew astutely pointed out, Ramadan began a few days ago. This explains the sudden uptick in frenzy and sweet-selling at the markets in Noailles, the heavily-concentrated Arab section of Marseille. One fasts until sundown, which happens here at about 9:30 during the summer. But in addition to all the regular fruit/vegetable/olive/nut/fig/bean/battery/watch/cigarette stands that are open every day, everyone had a table full of heaping trays of honey-saturated pastries. What was interesting was that they were out already at 6:30 or so, when I was walking home from work, and thus long before sundown.

Every little store had one of these stands selling several different types of incredibly sticky, honey-covered snacks.

Dates and figs by the kilo.

I went around taking pictures, all for you, dear readers, and at first I tried to sneak around and be as surreptitious with the camera as possible. It helped that there was tons of activity on all sides, so enough people were always not looking at me that I could walk around relatively unremarkably. But after a while, standing around staring right at vendors while taking their pictures gets them to look up, so the incognito approach didn’t work for too long. What was amazing, though, is that they’d invariably be absolutely thrilled to have their picture taken. A bunch of people asked me where I was from – I said I was an American student – and everyone I talked to was more than happy to pose and make it into the annals of American photography. The guy below even gave me a piece of the cake-thing he was dishing out as a thanks for taking his picture: it had the consistency of extraordinarily granular and sticky cornbread, and tasted as though it were made entirely of honey with a token almond stuck on the top.

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See those black things? They're not chocolate chips...

Whenever I walk around Noailles (which is often, because it’s the best place to buy produce, is right near my apartment, and always has something interesting to see), there’s this tiny voice in my head that chants on repeat, “If only they knew you were American and Jewish…” Some days I look more American than others; not sure if I ever look particularly Jewish. I do unconsciously check that my star necklace is under my shirt, though, or turned around so it’s in the back and so under my hair. Honestly, it’s probably not necessary, if the American sentiment here (and in the city in general) is any indication: I have never once gotten an anti-American response, and only rarely even gotten neural, as opposed to positive, ones. People here really do seem quite accepting, especially when you’re friendly and speak French and are happy to talk. So I really do wonder about the Jewish thing and whether it would be at all an issue. The habit of hiding my star comes from my first month here the first time around, when I went to Rosh Hashana services and got adopted by a Jewish yente, who told me the city was quite anti-Semitic and so to be aware. I think (hope?) her view was perhaps a hold-over from shortly post-war times. In any case, Marseille is segregated in the sense that there are definitely distinct neighborhoods but I’ve not experienced any outright on-the-street racial conflicts.

Marseille lunchtime

Marseille is a city which, inexplicably, does not do siestas. It’s certainly Mediterranean and it certainly gets warm and sleepy around midday in the summer, but there seems to be no sanctioned recourse. Starting at noon, people descend upon the bakeries and cafés en masse to provide for their lunches. This swell lasts for an hour or so, during which time there seems to be no one in the entire place not delicately ripping into a baguette. By about one, however, a blanket has been dropped over the city and everything is muted. The streets, while not empty, have large swaths of person-free sidewalk in a city center normally full of elbowing and ambling pedestrians. Many stores of a certain type close for two or three hours and those that don’t proudly tout this fact: “ouvert sans interruption”. The sun gets louder (though maybe it’s just a contrast effect arising from the quieter people). It’s the perfect environment to eat your lunch in the shade of the university courtyard, unroll your hammock, and drowse off for an afternoon nap.

But returning to the inexplicable, I don’t know of a single siesta-taking Marseille resident. I know people who go home for lunch, but then come back to the lab far to quickly to have effectively napped. I know, far too well, people who have sleepily tried to muddle through the mid-afternoon mush in an article-reading, experiment-designing, and data-analyzing haze only to be faced with the societal pressure to not sleep at one’s desk. It is so incredibly beautiful here in the evenings and at night – the air has a crisp, lavender [color, not flower] feel to it, and everyone on the the streets is full of happiness and energy. I’d so much rather be active and awake and outside at midnight than at noon.

Academia – noted for being one of the most temporally flexible disciplines – ought to implement a sanctioned nap culture. (Fellow UCSD grads – help me spread the desire!) But especially in a place like this, where the ceramic-tiled rooftops, slanting in no uniform direction, exude a soporific monotony while baking in the sun – here, there are truly times when there would be nothing better in all the world than to be not (consciously) experiencing Marseille for a little while, and just close my eyes and sleep.

Gorges du Verdon

Photo time. On Saturday, we took the day to drive north for a couple of hours to the Gorges du Verdon, an area somewhat inland in the mountains with an enormous gorge running through the middle. The Lac de Sainte-Croix sits at the bottom of 700 meters of plummeting rock face, and the Verdon river, feeding into the lake, winds off between the mountains. The water is a shockingly, incredibly, deep, clear turquoise whose color you can see even way up on the ridge of the gorge. It’s truly phenomenal. We armed ourselves with picnic supplies and ate lunch on a random deserted hilltop amidst the trees, and then started winding our way down to the lake, where we rented canoes and went boating and jumping off the boats to go swimming in the lake. No photos from the boating part, alas, and these here really don’t do the lake’s sparkling color justice.

(Click on the photos to make them full-size.)

On the way down

The river winds between the mountains, carving out the gorge.

Panorama

After the boating and swimming expedition, we stopped in the little town of Moustiers-Ste-Marie, a village forcibly shoved into the mountain side and voted one of the prettiest towns in France. (When I excitedly pointed this out, François suggested that there were a lot of towns that had been given this designation, but conceded that in fact this particular one was probably very nice indeed.) When I was in Provence in May 2003 with my parents, we were going from somewhere (maybe Toulouse?) to somewhere else (maybe Nice or Cannes?), and we stopped here. I had an incredibly clear picture in my head of what this town looked like, and sure enough, 8 years later, it looked about the same. (Not so surprising for a town that laments its “demographic haemorrhage” in the 14th century!) It was quaint and picturesque with flat plains of identical, shingled roofs. Built into the mountain, above the town, was the church – well positioned so you’d have to do some work for your weekly praying. It did afford quite incredible views of the town and the surrounding mountains, like the one below:

Moustiers-Ste-Marie

Driving back home that night at 10, when it was nearly completely dark except for a minute glowing orange-ness way off in the distance, we passed through unseen lavender fields that bombarded the car (with its open windows) with lavender smells that enveloped everything and seemed to come from everywhere (which, admittedly, it did). We also passed  several sunflower fields, full of flowers that all faced exactly the same direction and which I must assume was towards the sun.

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In other news, I have successfully moved into an apartment in Marseille! (See Going Postal.) This is the view from my living room windows:

Marseille lit up at night, and Notre Dame de la Garde glowing on the hill in the distance.

Insistently canceling a bank account

Friday morning, I successfully managed to close the bank account that I opened Thursday afternoon.

As you might recall, this bank account that I opened at La Banque Postale came with a confused and overly-friendly bank operator and the minor problem of not being allowed to deposit any money into it for a week. After some soul-searching Thursday night, I figured it would be a better idea to close the whole thing before it was too late and they had already captured my money, and try again with a proper bank.

So first thing Friday morning, quick like a bunny, I scurried into the post office and sat around waiting for my so-helpful-it-hurts incompetent bank man to emerge so I could snatch my papers out from under him before he got a chance to file them away. When it was my turn, he lit up, all excited to see me — little did he know that I was about to break his heart and take my account details elsewhere. We went into his office, and I said, rather timidly in hopes of not hurting his feelings, that I really needed to be able to deposit money immediately, and thus I wanted to cancel the account.

It’s clear that he’s taken this as a personal affront. What do you mean you want to close the account? he says. Don’t you have faith in me? I told you that I’d protect you.

It’s not you, I reply, going for my best commiseration voice. It’s simply the terms of the account; I need to be able to deposit money right away and I can’t wait until next week for it to be open.

But it’s only 5 nights! It’s not a big deal. You’ll be fine until Wednesday or Thursday. I don’t understand; why don’t you trust me?

Listen, I say, switching from kind befuddlement to serious studiousness, this is my own personal situation. I need to close the account. Do you still have the dossier with my papers? Can I just take it back from you and then have the account closed?

With a sigh, he sits down, shuffles through the papers on his desk and finds my folder (sure enough, unfiled as of yet), all the while saying, very hurt, “Je comprends, vous n’avez pas confiance en moi! Je vois, je vois, c’est pas un problème.” (I understand, you don’t trust me! I see, it’s ok, really.) You see, he explains very patiently, this is why I told you not to put any money in when you opened the account, because I knew if you changed your mind, then you wouldn’t be able to get the money out. So see, it’s really very good that you didn’t deposit anything yesterday, because if you had, you wouldn’t have been able to change your mind today! I’ve had Americans do that before, want to change their minds the next day, and that’s why I always advise people to open the account with 0, instead of depositing money immediately. And it was a good idea, wasn’t it?

He writes ANNULÉ across the front of the account form and has me sign beneath it. I ask him to give me back the second copy of my papers – if nothing else, I’ll need the xerox of François’s passport and renting affidavit so I can bring it to a different bank – but he assures me that he doesn’t have them as he had given them back to me the previous day. I was 100% certain that this was not in fact the case. No, he insisted. You have those papers. Remember that nice folder I gave you yesterday, with the flowers on it? Where is that? They’re inside.

I don’t have the folder with me, I explain, but I can assure you that you did not give me back a copy of everything. But if you can’t find them, just give me the dossier with all the originals, and then that will de facto close the account, since you won’t have any of my papers!

Nonononono, he insists. I definitely gave them back to you. Where did you put them? Look, where could they be if I have them? And he goes through a big, exaggerated show of holding up the trash can, looking under the cover of the copy machine, puttering through a few of the many papers scattered across the desk, all, of course, to no avail.

I stare at him and shrug. He pauses for a moment, and then says, upon reflection, You know, maybe you’re right. Maybe I do have your papers! And if you’re right, of course, you’re right, and you should indeed be right. Let’s see. Some more shuffling in a hidden box somewhere and, lo and behold! the other copy of the papers gets magically produced, and he hands them back to be.

Ok. Mission 1 completed: necessary papers procured so I can re-open an account somewhere else. Mission 2, definitely closing this one, and potential Mission 3, getting back all of the papers (i.e., the bank’s copy) so they have no information on me, still uncompleted.

I ask him to give me back the original papers as well, so the account will definitely not be opened, but he says they need the papers in order so that they can close the account. (Don’t ask how this makes sense.) But at this point he’s a bit confused; he’s lost his firm moral standing what with my retraction of confidence in him. I ask if I can just take a quick look at the packet of papers he’s got. He hands them to me, and, very smoothly (if I do say so myself), I remove the xerox of my and François’s passports, all the while assuring him, “I’ll just take these, don’t worry, it’s much easier this way.” Telling him it’s easier makes him complacent. Ok, he says, a bit bewildered. Whatever you say.

So that account is closed, or at least un-openable since they have no official documentation, and I’ve got an appointment with BNP Paribas for Monday morning. Seems I’d gotten my way just by assuring this guy that it was much easier to do things this way. Who can but resist taking the easy way out?