Chapter 6ix: The Parking Angel

The Parking Angel

We always have a car in France because of the kinds of places we travel to, often small towns and villages, off the beaten path, away from hordes of tourists, if we can.

This is not to say we do not also use trains, buses and the Metro in the larger cities.

We do use all manner of public transportation when having a car is impractical, as in Paris, of course, and, for example, during our recent stay in Menton for a week.

The intrepid traveller uses local trains and buses, and the metro, to richen the experience of being in the country that he or she is visiting.

The challenges of buying tickets, navigating the schedules and routes, rubbing shoulders with the locals, avoiding getting pick-pocketed, using a smaller ecological footprint, etc. - all these means of moving from one place to another, (including taxis) are adventures too.

Transportation in France also means a lot of walking, whether you really want to or not, actually.

Good for the health too.

Okay, so much for the preamble and free advice, now to the story.

1. Credit Card Stress

or VISA, We Hate You

It is currently early April and we need to book some flights between Paris and Norway in June. Despite all that is available to us - free wifi, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, high level of computer literacy, tons of experience with online transactions, passwords, and patience - the system keeps spitting us out and pissing us off. 

We try again the next day, but to no avail, so we drive into Antibes in search of a Travel Agency to buy the airline tickets in the old fashioned way: face-to-face.

2. The Parking Job
or A Just Possible “In”, And An Impossible “Out”

Our fifteen minute drive into Antibes is easy enough, and miraculously, we find a parking spot at the curb in the centre of town.

We are driving a small Peugeot 308, and with it, I have become proficient at parallel parking in very tight spaces, almost as skilled as the locals.

The space available is about a metre (say, 3 ft) longer than our car. I am happy about this, until I hear the young plane tree (a French tree popularized by Napoleon) that is planted in my space. It screams out at me like a banshee when I am just centimetres from backing into it. (This is one of the twelve different multi-frequency alarms our 2017 high-tech Peugeot car is equipped with).

It takes me five or six maneuvers to inch my way into a parking spot that is really only meant for the growing room of Napolean’s tree.

When we are finally out of the car, a guy on a scooter zips right into the non parking spot beside the tree with his front wheel tucked in, a thumb’s width from my bumper.

He is running off, with both helmet and baguette, into a building before I can yell, “MERDE/SHIT!”

I know there is no way I will be able to extricate my car when it is time to leave.

3. The Parking Angel, 
or The Little Old Lady on the 3rd Floor Balcony

Just up the street we find the payment kiosk, the robot,  where you buy your ticket. Another adventure.

With less than a clear head, because we are very unrelaxed from the way things have been going, we find that this French machine is yet another variation from all the others we have figured out how to use.

Our fumbling, fidgeting, and fighting with each other is interrupted from a voice on high. We are both looking up now, and there, leaning out of her third floor window, is a little old lady speaking to us in her Provençal French about how to use the robot ticket machine. 

She has not a word of English, but her body language, gesticulations, facial expressions, and tone of voice are encouraging, and enlightening. But then we came to an impasse, regarding which final buttons to press. 

I ask her, “Un peu plus lentement?” 

She speaks slower, and we get it.

Then there is clapping. Two people are sitting on a bench just a couple of metres away, waiting for a bus. We have not noticed them watching our exchange with the parking angel. But they have been attentive to how the translation is going, assessing the foreigners’ progress on the learning curve of life in France. The sound of the coins clinking and the ticket printing, brings them to their feet, clapping as if for an encore. The parking angel up above claps. Joanne and I are clapping our hands too.

Three euros for three hours, but because our time will span the standard 2-hour lunch period in France, we get a total of five hours on the ticket, more than enough for our mission for the day, some lunch and exploring the city - or so we think.

4. Agence Voyagers
or The Travel Agency

We soon find an Agence Voyager.  There is a client ahead of us, an elderly woman (the parking angel’s sister, maybe) taking forever to arrange a holiday somewhere exotic. After a very long wait in a very short office, well read now in copious amounts of travel brochures, we sit across the desk from lovely, friendly Christianne, whose “just a leetle Eenglish” is at least as good as my petit peu de français. 

After about an hour, we are good to go:

for lunch that is, because it will take two hours for the tickets to be ready. Hmmm, why will a Travel Agent’s online transaction take two hours longer than a non Travel Agent’s online transaction? Because we are charged $30 more for the tickets?

5. Maxi-Bazar
or Entrée et Sortie Can Really Mess With Your Mind

After a nice lunch in the old town, time to write a couple of postcards for mom and sister back home who don’t use the Internet, buy stamps at a Tabac, and mail the cards, we have fifteen minutes to spare (parking is soon timing out) to stop at a mini department store - the Maxi Bazar - on my endless search for a yoga mat. (See Ch 2 Menton).

The Maxi Bazar is on the unlikely corner of Hope and Smiles, two doors down from our Agence Voyager. 




Mais Non, never heard of a yoga mat or any suggestible facsimile, of course, but Joanne buys a box of mouchoirs/tissue - you know, like Kleenex.

The exit to the store is at the end of a maze. We accept that this is something to do with security. We think the French are obsessed with Sécurité. 

Now we are on an entirely different street, on the corner of Brain-Dead and Tears. 

After much head-scratching, jay-walking, horn-honking, and spousal-abuse we find the Travel Agency, exactly where it always is, two doors from the entrance to the Bizarre Mart,

"Or whatever the F it’s called."

6. Ending with Good News, Bad News, 
Good News … Good News

The good news is that we have one minute left on the ticket and baguette-man has buggered off on his mock-motorcycle, giving me the extra few inches I desperately need to extricate our car from the wee box I’m parked in. The bad news is that there are now two Renault delivery vans double parked beside me. But good news overcomes that bad because I am now really pissed off-determined, and I squeeze through.






The really good news is that, now, back in our apartment we restore the loss of body fluids from all the sweat of the day with beaucoup de vin.

Dinner Recommendation: L'Auberge Fleurie, Villeneuve Loubet Village 

For more travel and other photography visit my website 
at

Fine Art America

Chapter 2wo: Menton

Menton

The train ride from Nice was a delight - an early morning ride with only a few locals commuting between Nice and Menton. This gave us lots of space to choose almost any seat we wanted, both of us selecting a window so we could watch the azure blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea just below the tracks.


Whoa! All of a sudden we were in the dark, snaking through one of the longest tunnels on the Mediterranean—for both cars and trains—bored through the mountain that is the rock on which Monte Carlo (in the Principality of Monaco) is perched. Money, money, money. The half dozen or so train stations on the Riviera between Nice and Menton are rather grungy by comparison to the subterranean upscale train station in Monaco. 

March in Menton on the Med, the Baie du Soliel

Train arrival in Menton with lots of luggage was not fun. 'Lots of luggage' is a relative term, I suppose. How does one pack lightly for a 4 1/2 month trip in France, spanning cool, wet spring and hot summer, much of which is with a car and longish stays at places; then Paris. I could write a new reality chapter for Rick Steves.


The super-organized SCNF did not include escalators in the Menton train station. The several flights of escaliers (stairs) are formidable.


Short cab ride to a terrific, newly renovated 2nd-floor apartment on Rue de la Piéta, a short pedestrian-only street in the centre of the old town, 2 streets from the Med. We were greeted by Candice, and so started our first full week in France.


Having a place with cooking facilities and being partners who know how to buy locally and cook well in a foreign tongue on strange appliances saves some money and adds to the mystery of being here.

Quai Napoléon lll

A couple of windy and wet days and we were in the perfect temperature for travellers—the low to mid-20s (Celsius).

Place Georges Clemence

Louis Laurent, Republican Mayor (1885 -96), stands forever tall 
in front of the Marie  (City Hall)

The rain and wind kept the boats in the marina for our first two days ...

 

... and patrons, from the cafe terraces.

March is noticeably off-season, and because of this, we find many places are not yet open or are short-staffed with less than full menus or services available. The upside of being here now is there are so few tourists around that there are no lineups, everything is discounted, we are treated more special, and there are no crowds in front of my camera lens.

Menton is known for many things, particularly, the citrus festival, which we missed by one week. Too bad, it is quite spectacular. All we got to see was a headless Elvis during cleanup.

France's easternmost city on the Mediterranean also has some stunning architecture—everything from the medieval to art deco, to avant-garde.

 

the covered market ...

 the winter palaces.

On one of our daily walkabouts, while taking a photo in the old city, I was stopped by a woman who suggested the next old doorway was much more interesting. She asked Joanne and me in for a coffee, and to meet her husband. We accepted and were given wonderful hospitality by these complete strangers. This well-maintained old building was once the winter home of King Leopold of Belgium and Queen Victoria, with her retinue of 100 staff.

  

Our hostess had just completed the painting of a trompe l'oeil inside their apartment doorway.

what my lens saw on the street passageway of the Jean Cocteau Museum 

The weather improved and we began to walk 'till we dropped. This is always healthy, and in our case, a necessity in order to walk off the extra calories from all the great new French foods, and wines that we've been enjoying.

The huge botanical garden, Val Rahmeh east of the city, was an exercise in marathon hillside walking brought on largely by navigational errors, due partly to the lost in translation phenomenon. 

On the one hand, we took a wrong turn; on the other, the old lady who sold us tickets for the excursion directed us to tour the vast—almost 3-hectare—preserve, rather than the shortest route through it back to the city, like we had asked. At the end of the day, we were in need of a greater-than-ever intake of rich food and an abundance of red wine.

The next day we were ready to tackle the vieux ville with its steep, narrow, and rough-surfaced streets.

Basilica St Michel towers above the old town, dwarfing the shrines around it

Next posting on Menton, some spirits, and the market at Ventimiglia, Italy.

For more travel and other photography visit my website 

Fine Art America

Chapter 1ne: Back Again

Back Again

On the first of March, 2017, we returned again to France: terminally married - Happy, Healthy, and Hurting a little more. We do not practice agism, so on the other-side-of-the-mid-sixties, walking on old world streets and roads, up and down rocky and root-entangled trails, and ancient stairs - many and steep, often bearing the weight of luggage or supplies from the market, we forge ahead.


My last Blog on France, In France with Friends, posted in 2012, is still getting a lot of hits.

We returned to France for a short stay in 2015, but 2017 is the year of the big one - one hundred thirty days. 

That's just over a third of a year! Actually, we will interrupt le grand voyage with a week or so in the lands of our ancestors - Norway and Germany. Some space will be reserved in the near future for a little saga and Geschichte, respectively.

not the Hotel Trocadero

NICE

Nice, as always, is nice, especially at the end of a long travel day from Vancouver via Paris without sleep. Air France was really good to fly with - better than average in-flight cuisine, good looks and smiles from the staff. 






The bus from the Nice airport dropped us at the train station which is a five-minute luggage haul to our stay (2 nts) at Hotel Trocadero. A good, clean 3-Star, could-not-swing-a-cat in-the-salle de bain-size, accommodation, but we are on a budget, after all.


We highly recommend a product to stave off jet lag. It really helps us when we fly across several time zones. In fact, it is called No Jet Lag, a chewable tablet, every two hours. Odd though, I don't know why it works so well because you have to stay awake to get the dosage every 2 hrs, then another 20 min. to chew it down???

Maybe that's why I had no jet lag in Nice. But I stumbled around the old town a lot, not very clear-headed, just taking photos with abandonment.

A lot of people-watching - addicted as always by the wealth of images of regional France. 

 

We have been accused of being foodies. Guilty as charged. This journey is most definitely about eating, and drinking too. I will share some wine likes and maybe dislikes, and some other special cullinary finds in the weeks ahead.

In Nice, we chose not to eat at the Pasta Bastard, tried to eat at Chez Juliette, one of our favourite restaurants, but alas, they were closed - holidaying in Canada, huh.

We settled on a superb restaurant, a few blocks northeast of the old town, the VINGT4.

I expect to have enough material for every blog posting, to give special attention to what I will call Lost In Translation. Here is my first one. Did the T-shirt designer mean BITCH I'M THE BOSS?

credit for this photo goes to the brilliant photographer whose name is bottom right, 
if you can read it

The day we left Nice, we just followed our noses, and some of the other travellers in life, to the train station, where the SNCF hangs out, bought a couple of cheap tickets for the 40 minute train ride to Menton, a quiet, regal city on the Mediterranean, so close to the Italian border that one could almost spit Prosecco at it (swishing it around in my mouth as I write, actually), unravel a couple of kilometres of spaghetti to the Franco/Italiano frontier, or just yell really loudly, "Cement is here!" and you'd stop a church wedding.

Okay, maybe the Italian Riviera was not that close, but from any beach in Menton you can see Ventemiglia, the city on the other side of the border.


See next posting about Menton and environs ...

For more travel and other photography visit my website