November 8, 2009
How can another two weeks have passed so quickly?
Last time we checked in we were on the way to join 25,000 others at Joan Baez’s two-hour concert sponsored by the city of Montpellier marking the end of its annual International Guitar Festival. With her son drumming beside her, she gained the adoration of the French by first translating each song.
The last week in October starts a week of school vacation during Toussaint’s, or All Saints Day, when families carry chrysanthemums, the French funeral flower, to their families' graves.
As for other French customs and dishes...it is oyster season here and our landlady had us over for mussels, oysters, salmon appetizers, cheese and a rich lemon tart. Her mussels are absolutely fabulous but when I asked for the recipe she told me that next time we would make them together. Guess we better have them over here before they leave for India November 11!
We have mined the cultural terrain of Montpellier for all it is worth in order to replace the official book learning of the University with our self-designed exposure to learning French. Since Montpellier provides about one free book reading or scientific presentation a day, we are finding that the work is in the choosing, not the finding. The best lecture we attended in the last two weeks was Ma Vie a Contre-Coran by Djemila Benhabib, a Muslim Canadian woman whose professor parents fled Iran and Algeria, afraid for their lives, to Paris. Her passion is to provide more voice for the concerns of moderate Muslims who fear speaking out against the abuses of the less moderate Muslims. In addition to attending these lectures, Bob attends at least two lectures on science a week sponsored by the University for retired folks while I hang out speaking French with our French friends.
Films provide another learning venue. The French are fiercely proud of their films and with good reason. We went with French friends to see one of the films in the Mediterranean film festival, “Un baser s’il vous plait. ” I don’t recommend this Woody Allen-like film, in case you are about to add it to your Net flicks list, but I do recommend the experience of "meeting" the director, the producer and the stars as they answered the two questions from the 300 person audience and wished there were more. The 10-day festival has 172 or so films shown in venues all over the city. This one was shown in the Corum which is one of the homes for the opera and symphony.
Bob has fun with his photography club. His eyes sparkled when he told me that they clapped for him, this shy reserved guy as he pushed his bike into the room. They will take a number of all day picture-taking outings with an assignment in hand and then look at the differences in their photos at the next meeting. They are very social and at least three or four come up to Bob at the breaks to talk, often wanting to practice their English and always wanting to help Bob understand what is going on. Last meeting they focused on pictures of autumn color.
Bob now spends each Sunday morning with a bike club. He has always thought he liked to ride alone, but to his surprise, finds that riding with this group is convivial, supporting and a challenge since he rides harder with them than by himself. No one gets left behind, even in the rabbit group. There are 30 to 40 each week and the rides are between 90 and 100 km through the hills around Montpellier with the rabbits moving out at a pretty fast pace. The picture below is of some of the rabbits and is Bob's view for most of the day.
Every time we bike to the ocean, we see something different. The best time to bike is on the weekdays or early on a weekend morning, when this picture was taken.
As part of our learning program, we went to the auditorium at a new shopping mall for the reading of “8 Days Before Obama.” The image conjured by the word auditorium far exceeded this circular 30 person space, so we didn’t stay. (It is important for us to be able to leave gracefully if the speaker is completely incomprehensible to us.) 135,000 French people visited this open air mall in its first three days, about a month ago, a sign of the commercialization of France and the globalization of the world economy.
In line with its passion about ecology, Montpellier is increasing the pedestrian only section of town by a third by adding another 19 km of tram along the Jeu-de-Paume and putting solar panels on its new buildings. The present area look like this:
and the planned "new look" will be something like this:
It is a completely different effect, the present center city pedestrian area will get another 500 living spaces, a whole new living quarter called ZAC Pegezy, At the same time, it will rebuild the Gare Saint-Roch, the train station, along with Espace Frenay which will link the rail station with the downtown shopping area called the Polygone, and construct another whole new living, working, shopping area 10 minutes walk from here which will have as a keystone the new Hotel de Ville. The website for the new Hotel de Ville is:
Since 20% of all living spaces have to be “public” housing, the two new sections of town will mean 80% rather than 100% gentrification.
We are surprised that we enjoy the architectural models and images of what will be built in these spaces. Since the role of the public sector here is much stronger in requiring parks, public space and combined usage, perhaps it is because these projects become more exciting architectural and social large scale solutions.
Bob received word from the Marie (mayor's office) yesterday that the dossier he submitted for a two week show at Saint Ravy, an art gallery owned by the city, had been rejected. So for all of you who were planning to come to Bob's opening in Montpellier, you get to save your money for a different trip. Since they were more than two weeks late in telling him he hadn't made the final cut, I am sure that he was almost one of the finalists. One of his pictures , a Montpellier aqueduct built by Louis XIV, is shown below.
To keep our creative toe in the community, Sharon submitted an article to the local paper yesterday which compares the three best known outdoor Montpellier markets.
The first Saturday of the month, we joined another friend and 40 others for a local bike ride— Velorution— sponsored monthly by Velocity as part of its lobby for more bike lines in Montpellier. We got a taste for French conflict as the group chose to fill up all the lanes and slow traffic on a major arterial that already had bike lanes. It didn't seem very politic or fair, but it hard to make that argument in French! I first learned abut Velocity a year a go when they got newspaper coverage for painting bike lanes on a major arterial.
Just to round out the cultural scene and to have an excuse to speak more French, I went with a French friend to Puccini’s Turandot performed by the Metropolitan Opera of New York and transmitted to movie theaters all over the world. (Bob stayed home.) There were 300 to 500 gray heads in the audience, the most I have seen in Montpellier in one place, at 22 E per ticket , a price that certainly makes opera more accessible to the masses.