Travel funnies 2014 – Le Mont-Dore, Massif Central, Auvergne, France

Torrey Orton

June 13, 2014

The cuckoo and the cow bell called to us…

Travel funnies* – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Le Mont-Dore in the Massif Central of the Auvergne, where rises the Dordogne River in the Puy de Sancy. We were here for the first time in 1993, so the return is long awaited, though not consciously so over the intervening years before our deciding this revisit.

 

The cuckoo and the cowbell called to us as we were climbing through the forest which clothes the steep slope of the Capuchin at the end of the funicular ride from Mont-Dore to its foot around 1200 metres up…a slightest semblance of the cuckoo which I thought at first was my wishing it to be there as it had been 20 years ago when I heard the first cuckoo in my life in this place. As is often so, I did not then recognise that what it was, was it: a cuckoo. By the time we had emerged from the forested rise at the tree line, the cuckoo was undeniably itself, not my aural phantasm.

The cow bell on the other hand was a decidedly unproven reality and remained agreed so between us until we started our return an hour later. At which point some 100 metres back down the path, I heard the plangent ping of the Reine de la Troupeau, at first a solo note and then the burst of them which means the Reine is moving and munching at the same time. She can sound like a herd when in high move and munch mode. Apart from the joy of a tone recovered, there was the reassurance that not all location has been subsumed by GPS plugins to every being with a bloodstream**.

And the violas and strawberries flowered at us

Being early summer, many of the trees were still just coming into leaf and the earliest ground flowers were about in abandon. I had forgotten strawberries, the wild ones which give the cultivated types we’re accustomed to their deserved repute mostly experienced in its absence in the Coles or Casino pretenders. Jane pointed them out in the midst of other small-flowered upland delicates. Way too early for consumption…and I’m wondering that I forgot them as an opportunity of this trip, which of course they cannot be because the season is too late or dry or something.

I noticed today on another hillside that I have much too good an eye for the small virtues of nature – the obscure bloom or unexpected one in a certain microclimate – to have never cared for bucolic poetry or music, though as I thought it I remembered that there’s a particular poem about the humble bumblebee whose provenance I cannot recall yet it is with me in some vaguely accessible memory recess…strange ways, the mind. A 19^th century English poet? But then, I didn’t know what poetry was verbal music) until I read Gerard Manley Hopkins aged around 20 as an undergraduate. No teacher bothered to mention it. Since when was iambic pentameter music??? Any more than the number one was a convenient fiction of mathematics?

 And a field of daffodils…

…filled the plain of the grassed slopes the cows were yet to munch…striking little natural daffs more delicate than the garden prepared varieties I’m used to at home, yet still briefly, leading me to wonder aloud where the peasants went who had set them out so numerously and successfully as city workers had been doing in soaring numbers in the grounds of Versailles a week ago…leaving trails of little forcing boxes around the place. Nature beats a worker most times in the beauty game.

But the hotel room engineering has a weird hanging space…

At last a traditional funny! The Hotel du Parc in Mont Dore has been recently renovated to good effect, leading the space to bed ratio and bath room swinging a wet towel ratio to desirable levels, but as seen elsewhere in French renovations there’s a glitch. There’s a built-in robe with a foot’s worth of long hanging space – enough for three shirts, a jacket or so and a couple of trousers.

 Now someone created a short-drop hanging space good for hanging pressed shirts and similar, but not trousers or long skirts; neck to belly hanging space. However, whoever did the measures on this had early adolescent sizing in mind, if anything, and so a serious shortage of adult hanging space. I suspect it wasn’t even measured other than to divide the space equally into four levels for some reason of construction simplicity rather than customer need fulfilment. Well, it obviously met the needs of the hotel chain purchasing division’s need for the renovation at best price or whatever, but the end-user?

And the shower starts in reverse…

Discovering new ways to mix cold and warm water in taps is probably one of the most useless endeavours of the plumbing engineer fraternity and here we had another variant which stumped us for 15 minutes. Intuitive it wasn’t. We couldn’t get anything from it for a while, not merely just cold or hot. Once in hand, it was obvious as the newly disclosed often is, but also purposeless. What’s the added value, as the econometricians like to wonder?

 Expectations and experience revisited…

As in Paris, Mont-Dore started out a slight disappointment for me, it never having a hope of measuring up to Alps or Pyrenees, its top most reach being the mere 1889 metres of the Puy de Sancy. But as the days have rolled by and we’ve patrolled the region with persistence the pleasures of very long views over totally green landscapes, rolling up and down many hundreds of metres never failed the danger of repetition …rather gained from it as the same sights were viewed from many perspectives and in many lights, occasionally seasoned by the soft shadows of emerging thunderheads (which threatened but never performed up to their promise, fortunately.)

And we drank about four different local wines we’d never heard of (wines of Auvergne, huh?). Between our traditional port-a-bottle approach to walking lunches for years in Europe and numerous dinners, we never had a bad one and always had viable ones for about 15 Euro or less across the selections, backed by true local delicacies in the sausage and cheese domains supported by bread of reliable consistency.

 The black shower and wash basin material

Not at all funny – amazing! It wasn’t until my third shower that I realised the slightly soft, ambient temperature-neutral material under me was also totally slip proof … as good as slip proof boat shoes of which I have a couple pair. At my age a slip is as good as a broken something which may take months to recover from. Thanks water proof room engineers. I may refloor a bathroom for safety’s sake.

*I am realising that the purpose of Funnies is to describe various arising realities in my life in concrete ways that render them truly for me and maybe so for others. Enjoy, as our culture challenges us to do.

 

**It just occurs to me that probably I can be tracked by my pacemaker if I’m in the right company. I know I can feel its speed up response to an electromagnetic source too near to its hiding place in my shoulder.

Travel funnies 2014 - Paris

Torrey Orton

June 8, 2014

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Paris which I am visiting for the first time in 5 years or so and with the advance knowledge of recovering 100 pgs. of stuff I wrote in 1972 during the last four months of our 16 month tenure here.

However this expectation was skewered by a repeat of the Charles De Gaulle airport record holding performance in the race for slowest luggage delivery in most incompetently designed baggage carousel. They didn’t get as high as the previous 1 hour wait 15 years ago, but it was 45 minutes including trying to get through the crowd squeezed in by two carousels opposing each other across a 50 metre space handling 450 folks off the full A380 we had arrived on from Dubai.

This had been preceded by a definitely record breaking taxi of 29 minutes from touch down to arrival gate, none of which was spent waiting for others to get out of the way as happens at JFK in New York with regularity. We had the Grand Tour of the airport as far as I could tell…all over the place to get to the arrival from what appeared to be behind it!

Dog drenching disgrace

One of these historical knowledges was the great Parisian dog drenching disgrace. To quote a 41 year old perception:

“Where else in the world can a dog piss on so much history with so little effort? Paris - a city of great stone losing its nature under the impact of innumerable streams of piss. Paris – the animals’ pissing post. Paris – city of sidewalks paved in dog shit….Impression of a city with an unending wealth of little yellow springs …”

So I walked up (from the Seine) to our old stamping grounds in 117, Rue du Cherche Midi this morning (June 2) and found the sidewalks paved in old dog turds with a sprinkling of recent contributions and drying rivulets of piss running off the 17^th to 19^th century 6 story apartment buildings, much as 40 years ago. Pleasantly enough I tried a local croissant just from the oven and found it typical of the genre in the best sense of both words. And our old café – Le Chien Qui Fume – was still there on the corner of the Boulevard de Montparnasse and Cherche Midi but the neighbouring once best patisserie (“artisanale” variety) has declined into banality. On the other hand, much of the length of the Cherche Midi has been transformed into high end boutiques, in no obvious way impeded by the dog doings, and nor contributing to their cleaning up. The same is the case at Versailles and the more pretentious reaches of the Boulevard St. Germain, of which more later.

Aux Deux Garcons

Last night we revisited a favoured eatery known until recently as Aux Fins Gourmets. This was our favourite not-famous Parisian eatery from back in the days when a Fr750/month salary was totally consumed by rent (6^th floor walk-up at Cherche Midi glorified by having both a loo and shower within).  Much later that year (’72) we discovered that 750Fr was the legislated salary for all foreign contract teachers at the time, which just happened to be the salary of the lowest paid workers on the Renault production line with the marvellously spun name of ouvriers specialise.

 The other Fr 750, provided by whoever was not paying the rent, was eats, cigs, papers and the occasional trip to Chez Hamadi for grilled chops and polenta at about 6.5Fr a head. Aux Fins Gourmets brought us into stratospheric reaches of 25+Euro dishes and similar priced wine (for balance’s sake, the wine we regularly drank was max. 2.5 Fr at which rate you just got a miniscule vdqs notification, and a glass bottle (or was that VOC – vin d’origine controlee? It’s been a while.). Doing this review reminds me that one of the skills in those days for drinkers of local plonk was to check for the notification of Algerian wine being used to get more mileage out of French labels (focussed on the 1Fr a litre wine market which was sustained by workers’ 1 litre a day, mostly at lunch, wine consumption in plastic bottles, so claimed an article in Le Nouvel Observateur at the time).

The Garcons of the name did a good job, but didn’t have cassoulet on - wrong season! Nor the remarkable collection of 50plus year old Armagnacs, each hand bottled, etc. Nor the overall uppermid priceyness of the precursors…which allowed an investment in a very credible Graves of recent vintage.

 Homeless Paris

Café Flore and Les Deux Magots, two of the flashiest coffee spots on the Boulevard Saint Germain were home to a homeless family (mum, dad and at least two kids, looking pre-school ) sleeping up against the Flore street awnings still at 6:45am when I walked by looking for a quiet side street to conduct some phone business with home. A small variety of clochards were wandering around my walk path the next day, leavened by a guy my age making way on a child’s mini-scooter. Not something I’ve seen in Melbourne.

 Paris unknown, and yet not

We both noticed in the first three days here that it looks and feels different from ever before and that this was an effect of the great French uniformity, the Napoleonic achievement of integrating the late medieval with the 19th century and a set of regulations which have kept the proportions that way (6 stories, etc.) and the facades indistinguishable, mostly. This ruler over every structure is then amplified by the sandy colour of the local stone and concrete look-a-likes. We have a fourth floor view up the Rue Des Saints Peres which displays the look-a-likeness of this area and contrasts it with one of the glaring modernist events of the last hundred years in old Paris – the Tour Montparnasse in its grey, near blackness of 50+ stories on the horizon, overwhelming in its confirmation that the anything at a right price part of capitalism doesn’t always win. Montparnasse is a show off. This uniformity occurs in every town of any historical substance which is part of the greatness of the country. Go anywhere and see Paris in miniature.

 I’ll take the historical over the modernist most days, but for once I am appreciating that the historical was often a bit colourless. Unless, you were among the great Louisian kings who produced the wondrous Versailles over a few hundred years and went bananas for colour on the interiors, at least the regal ones. Reminded me more of a baroque cathedral but for the bed rooms. Not a presentation I’ve ever liked but the expense is commanding.

 

How’s your day been…

There we were at door opening time (10am sharp) of Sephora on the Champs Elysees accompanied by 5 minutes of clapping and twerking or something to a noisy piece of pop by all the staff (around 25 I’d guess). After 5 minutes to find a particular brand of perfume we ambled up to the cashier, presented the item and as the cashier was turning on all systems I heard “How’s your day been…” in French, which I roughly understood, though not quickly enough not to be taken for foreign. As I seldom am, I was struck dumb that for all their linguistic preciousness (not an unworthy pre-occupation), cash and brand had deprived the staff of their standard French manners and replaced them with the faux intimacy of the Anglo world. I want to say “pathetic” but I so often encounter occasions when that seems appropriate I’m no longer sure of expressing anything by it other than my own irritated wonder.

 

Limbs may fall and such

Another piece of formulaic public language is that of warnings against this or that danger – usually the stuff of which a lawsuit can be made, or has been often enough to warrant the printing required to pre-empt suits of not warning, etc. I was ambling along Boulevard St Germain this morning before the Sephora incident and came by a miniscule public park planted next to the church St. Germain des Pres with a historical notification of its relatively recent origin in the work of an architect you won’t have known. A few metres along from the placard came another warning as follows: “In case of storm this garden will be closed” roughly translated, do not stay in this park if there is a storm but we aren’t exactly saying that. Immediately I was connected with two of my Australian favourites of the genre – “Limbs may fall” and “Overhanging limbs”– to be found on country roads carrying the unaware to notable destinations like Wilson’s Prom. At St Severin a version of the ‘overhanging limbs’ one popped up and it was hard to see the danger, as is usually the case in Oz, too.

 

Rectifications (30)…CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES

Torrey Orton
Dec. 24, 2013

On the road again…slow vehicles

“CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES” the bright black on blue sign says along the Great Ocean Road. Then another sign says (in stark black on white) “SLOW VEHICLE TURNOUT” about 300 metres down the road, another few metres beyond which is the turnout. Having taken it or not, you are then greeted with SLOW VEHICLES THANK YOU in the black on blue idiom of the initial challenge. If you are a native born Ozzie, you know what a turnout is, but no amount of nativity will gloss the other two messages, even given the contextual background birth has given you. This is bureaucratic English of a high order, aggravated by the fact that the actual targets are non-native English speakers – tourists who rock up and down the famous Road, presumed to be without our inbuilt (though increasingly corrupted) regard for civility on the road.

On first encounter a couple of years ago, it took me a while to work out the syntax of CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES. ‘Consider’ cut a few ways at once, none of which easily self-selected out of the sign. Should I care for those vehicles if they are following me or notice more clearly that I was following them or should I be following them? The more I worried this linguistic bone the more the initial confusions returned. The attention to the possibilities lifts them all off the solid ground of shared realities which give easy meaning to most of life. The formulations take on their own life, unanchored, floating into a mildly paranoid verbal ether. Even my wife who is no mean linguist and a native Australian English speaking one to boot couldn’t provide definitive help with these options.

A XXL slow offense without intent

In the course of 9 days at the beach I traversed a handful of these linguistic suites a day, barely noticing their offer of driverly civic-mindedness. They were only brought sharply back into my awareness by a new set of them appearing on one of the inland approaches to the coast road. And then my awareness was tightened another notch by having the desired behaviour (in both my mind, and the presumptive sign writers I guess) demonstrated by a slow vehicle (a size XXL self-propelled accommodation variety vehicle) which appeared in front of me along one curvy stretch between Eastern View and Lorne.

Said XXL suddenly pulled off into an unmarked turnout (on other days it would just be a wide shoulder), no indicator of intent given. I was pleased for the release and irritated by the surprise move which required a bit of preventive braking on my part. Wife Jane thought I should have offered an acknowledging toot in passing, as one offers an acknowledging wave to someone coming who makes way for one on a single lane street. I thought not because no indication of intent had been given, implying to me that the turnout was gratuitous and not considered. It was a moment of that low grade moral conflict which makes marriage memorable for the often equal spread of justice between both our perspectives.

Another what’s normal now challenge?

As often, a linguistic detour turns into a challenge for action. For example, I haven’t even gotten to the question of what “slow” means. The practical implications of this potential for differentiation will be apparent to anyone living in a family situation, not to say the “loving family” of death notices and similarly human newsworthinesses! Who would self-identify as “slow” to start with? Then, what’s “slow” to them if they do, or are badgered into doing so by caring others? And, then, what’s their slow got to do with the “SLOW” on the instructional sign set? This is, perhaps, why instruction leading to discretionary, self-designed performance outcomes often induces indulgences…

…and a very merry Xmas to y’all.

Travel funnies 2013 (4)

Torrey Orton

June 24, 2013

“Amber waves of grain…”

I grew up with this line incised in memory through a thousand singings of America the beautiful in primary school I imagine (because I can’t really remember) and finally in an unlikely place and time I saw amber grain waving in central France a few weeks ago!! And I’ve looked at a lot of grain in Australia in the last 40 years!! The waving grain struck me in two different settings: one, upland farmlets in the Parc Mercantour and, two, much larger broad acre plantings along the TGV pathway in Burgundy between Beaune and Lyon. I think the revelation of this obvious experience has escaped me in Oz all these years because the grain growing season is winter when we almost never go to grain growing areas and the grain grown in our neck of Oz is thinner on the ground per hectare than the dense covering of early summer French grain growth. It really did wave and look like waves as it did so…high enough to have peaks and troughs but not to break. There were no green or amber horses to be seen.

Seen, and then again…

We went out for a bite on our first night in Montpellier to a central city area called La Comedie after the opera house which heads up one end of the Place which is the main public open space of the central city, fed by a tram line populated with recognisable versions of our imported trams in Melbourne, save for the better paint work, cleanliness (nil tagging) and overall state of repair of their French originals. As we wandered around a bit before settling for a beer and a bite we were passed by a guy of 50ish talking somewhat impressively to himself in those exclamatory bursts which suggest a thrashing of insight is assailing him but felt like it was assaulting us. This is not too unusual in cities these days, and judging from some 15^th century Dutch paintings we saw in a museum on the Place a couple of days later, may have been typical of any level of close human habitation over at most times in human history.

A day later we were back for a shopping tour of the Pentagon – a wholly inappropriate modernity attached to the Place – and there he was again. At hearing/seeing him I thought: some people’s lives are to keep reappearing as a bad dream in the lives of others, invasively demanding attention they need but can’t get, yet we cannot just tell the dream to go away.

“man section”…

..it said on the right hand front side of a wooden drawer whose left front side said “pen knives”. The whole sat under a glassed in display of various products of knives used correctly. I was attracted to the weird usage with its implication of something hairy beyond the handle. Turned out to be an offering of hunting knives around the size of the one I carry in my walking backpack thanks to a long ago gift from a Chinese friend who noticed during our living in china 30 years ago that I always carried a Swiss Army knife complex enough to live off the land with if necessary.

Of course, the “man section” in question was in the local handicrafts section of the Buda Pest public market, a mid-19^th century iron and brick barn of railway station proportions, light and airiness so my expectations were roused in that blank but irresistible way that a sudden touch of hominess (the man section in this case) came into view. Foreign places produce in me a disposition to search, to find the familiar in the foreign while thinking I’m looking for the foreign.

The Antigone…a star of failed grandiosity

Finally, two last takes on the grandiosity theme. One, the Antigone in Montpellier is a roughly 70’s production leading off from the above Place and competing with it for grandeur but failing miserably, so much so that the cafes which line parts of its 1.5 kilometre of fading 5 story mixed use living and business buildings are barely making it and the infrastructure is

scruffy and needing renewal it may never get. The thing never worked and so is grandiose??

Two, in reflecting during lunch (which was quite presentable, as usual) in one of said cafes it occurred to me that this business of judging grandeur, greatness and grandiosity is very much a matter of taste, which in turn is very much a matter of those two enduring sources of human potential – gifts of birth and the inherited social standards which accompany them, often enough incongruously. Similar observations can be made about ethical as aesthetic matters.

Travel funnies 2012-13 - Grand, great and grandiose?

Torrey Orton

June 23,  2013

Grand, great and grandiose...challenges of appreciation seeking grounds for interpretation

 

Mountains are grand and great, but never grandiose. They just are and have no purpose. They cannot over or under express themselves. They can be more or less visible, but through no fault of their own. It’s their fate to just be.

 

People can be great and grand, and in the eyes of others, grandiose. I remember the first time I was accused (actually it wasn’t an accusation; it was an observation; but, I hear it even now as disapproval) of being grandiose. Well, I can understand why that observation was made without assuming myself as either great or grand in the equation. I can also understand that cultures may be and/or appear grandiose, while clearly being great and grand in various ways. Architecture is the most materially enduring expression of greatness and grandeur, and it may feel grandiose – an experience of something over-expressed out of lack of clarity or confidence, as a child does appropriately in early life achievements where a hurdle passed is experienced with joy and even ecstasy if the effort has been protracted.

 

I started writing this in July 2012 towards the end of that year’s Europe trip, late July.  Europe and its enduring cultures – Slavic, romance and Germanic, or Greco-Latin and Teutonic: the contrasts elaborate as reflection spreads across time and space. The contrast on my mind at the moment is the handling of public space in cultures,  brought to mind by spending 2 days in Besancon and amplified by realising that the historical juncture of the origins of these cultures lies where we were then, in Istanbul one morn having visited the Cisterns of the Basilica which collected the waters of a forest 10ks away in 500AD, delivered through a viaduct as were the waters of Rome to the famous baths and such 500+ years before that – the still visible beginnings of the terraforming of the world in the chasing of the waters to meet the needs of sedentary mankind, perhaps making sedentary a real possibility in numbers…

A day later and we’d spent a couple of hours in the Aya Sofya which dwarfs its neighbour the Blue Mosque both for volume and age, an impression amplified strangely by its comparative scruffiness, both in and out.

                                                         

…so, this is the basis of my great and grand wonders, and probably I haven’t gotten far enough back and should go to the first out-of-Africa migrants 50,000 years ago who went right at the nearest turn after the Red Sea. Their journeys eastwards along the ocean shores expressed among other things the mindless human devotion to looking around the next corner, not merely for something better but just wondering what’s there while able to find a consistently cheap bite of adequate substance to continue wandering. Wanderlust, perhaps, or wonderlust?

 

Besancon is home to the largest 16^th century fortifications in France (?), including a main central fort with a natural river moat on all sides built by the famous Vauban and supported by a circle of forts on four adjacent hilltops…all the more remarkable, when you think about it, for the fact that the fortifications were already superannuated by developments in cannonry…a line of development which still escaped military planners in France who built Verdun in the 19^th century and had a go again with the even more unlikely Maginot Line post WW1. The developments which outmoded them all before they were built were power and mobility, intensified with near factorial pace ever since – what’s a “hardened” site which cannot be blown by a bigger laser-guided missile?? Remember Big Bertha in WW1? And the siege mortars of the U S Civil War.? And the shift from sail to steam powered shipping and from wooden to steel…??  All bunker busters of their kinds.

 

Where has the idea of fortifications gone now?? Into legal fortifications and state boundaries, be they fluid (Australia comes to mind) or walled (Arizona and Israel come to mind). Even the Iron curtain failed in its heyday as the need to be seen to be in the world kept presenting inmates of the red world with opportunities to get out as representatives of their incarcerated perfection (Olympics from 1956 on).

 

So what? Well, all of the built history of great, grand and grandiose is a history…an attempt to preserve an original insight (include religions here, pls.) …and the effort to preserve sustains the image of the insight as irreplaceably great, which it had been when it replaced the previously great insight…and so on and so. But our need to believe that the newest insight is also the final one bonds us to them with an almost unbreakable strength…the kind which sends tens of thousands to their deaths in the face of machine guns…and resists its own demise with blind fervour (all those generals then; all our leaders now in the face of the failure of natural markets to ‘work’…)

 

June 2013 –and here we are in Besancon again with much more time to wander around and find it almost totally as it was 200 years ago within the barriers of its built and natural fortification, some of which go back 400 years or so and were built on the back of originally Roman ones still in view in the usual Roman forms: triumphal arches (Marcus Aurelius 175 AD) and theatres, baths and normal living stuff of similar origin. Much less fortified to exclude than dressed to attract.

 

And the place is grand, coherent, human scaled and liveable…though close to losing it all in the industrial turnaround from 1970 on (almost all of its large scale employment decimated; it had been home to the production of 1/3 of watches in France up til then!!). About 1/3 of the inner city is pedestrianized and the whole is so small (about 1.5 square kilometres) that parking outside the center is easily adequate to the mixed demands of shopping and promenading. The whole thing is four stories high, with a couple of cathedral steeples in excess of the four stories. This gives a humanly appropriate scale mix of enclosure by wall and openness to sky at once, plus the street level density of commercial and service offerings that only cities can provide at footpace.

 

Much of the building stock is grand even though hundreds of years old either because its origins were religious or public service – from schools to hospitals to local / regional governance with a broad spread of the ecclesiastical some of which was turned over to public sector use as church control was compromised by church/state separation in 1905. Building material consistency helps the impression of integrity and scale - a local stone which has elements of blue and yellow/grey in it whose original colour has been resurrected by a cleaning operation some years ago which recalled the original from the blackening of years of coal and wood fired heating, cooking and power. What it looked like before the unveiling is still on view in a couple of escapees from the great cleaning (one of which is a branch of an educational facility of some kind now defunct). Black is pretty much what it is…/

 

This is a line of report which keeps extending as we travel… a week later in Montpellier being appalled by a state sponsored excrescence called Antigone launched off the shoulder of the original Place de la Comedie with its 19^th century grandeur in tact. The 1970’s offshoot models grandiose to a T, with clear evidence of its failure to meet whatever public usage was imagined in its design and execution….lack of upkeep, etc.

 

Closing now with a visit to Nimes’s quite preserved little arena  modelled on the colossal Roman original but built for 24,000 public gore appreciators rather than the 60K its namesake supported. Grand and great but not grandiose it feels to us.

 

Travel funnies 2013 (3)
Torrey Orton
June 15, 2013

 

There’s always more bits… ‘You will be remembered…’


Ambling down a street in the old city part of Gap, France, a spot literally in a gap between two 2000 metre plateaus on the edge of the Parc des Ecrins to the east and the Vannoise to the west, I noticed a delivery truck pull into a two-car (two little European city cars, that is) space carved into the pathway of what was otherwise a one-way one lane road between 18^th century buildings.

 

No big deal, until I noticed that the 1.2 metre high pole next to the space had turned green at the top and a countdown had started from 15:00 on a visual display about 10 cm down the pole. So, I thought, this is what Melbourne City Council is threatening us with their ‘you will be remembered from the moment you park your car’ in the streets of Carlton, East Melbourne and so on. That is, they can tell when you arrived. However the Gap treatment was even more sophisticated because the broadcast timekeeper is visible from 200 metres away down the road to the next cross street so the touring forces of parking order can detect an overstay in a flash (and I bet the touring forces can do the entire inner city circuit of such short term stopspots in about 15 minutes guaranteeing the best rate of return for investment on two counts: more money and better access to short term parking for those needing it).

A clear social boundary drawn?

Watching the passing human parade is always interesting, especially when it is not too dense so that the manner of an individual’s or small group’s (couple, family , friends) passing can be observed clearly while also un-intrusively. Again in Gap, France, we were having our street café lunch (great fresh salads by the way) before entraining for Besancon via Grenoble and Lyon. I noticed a single woman encountering two other women, one of whom she knew well (broad smile and gestures from a reasonable distance before their paths actually crossed). The acquainted two did the three kisses greeting characteristic of French signs of greater (and, implicitly, lesser) expressions of intimacy. The accompanying, unacquainted, one was excluded, de facto, from the greater intimacy of three kisses and the lesser intimacy of two or even one. She got none, and when, almost as an afterthought, was introduced to the solo woman neither offered a hand nor was offered one in hello.

 

They were too far away for me to see if there was any non-verbal expression of rejection which constituted the determination of intimacy distance as total, apart from the fact that they were facing each other. And an implicit rejection was recognised by neither offering any acknowledgment of the traditional types to each other.

We do not have a word in English for someone whose role is to be excluded without being acknowledged by the players or observers in a specific social event at this level of simplicity and brevity. I don’t know whether French does or not. The fact was quite visible but difficult to describe because a number of relationship factors have to be captured without the relationship indictors to place all the actors.

 

I realised after writing this that I was attuned to such matters by the hostess of our Mercantour stay who insisted on two kisses on both meeting us for the first time and on our departure. For me this was inappropriate for two reasons. One, she isn’t French, and two I’m not inclined to kiss anyone I do not know, male or female, French or other, on first hellos anyway.  Probably something about the remaining edges of my Anglo upbringing where no one kissed anyone, in public anyway …?

 

Hotel de Police

Later the same day we were on the train again towards the north from Grenoble and closing on Lyon for a transfer to the TGV for the last step of our day’s travel. I like to keep loose count of the inactive business facilities visible from passing through the rail yards of cities. The industrial histories of the last couple hundred years are often to be read in their architectures and utilisation rates. One kind of utilisation is incarceration, often signalled by multiple levels and styles of razor wiring of the tops of walls, confirmed by lighting towers and guard posts in case the real use seems open to interpretation. Other semi-secure facilities make a pretence of looking like this but there’s always gaps in their razor wires.

I noted the real use before I read the title over the somewhat elaborate gate: “Hotel de Police” in large lettering. This confirmation was a bit much for my linguistic capacities again. I went for the implicit joke until Jane reminded me that ‘hotel’ in French has a seriously more diversified history than our adapted version of the same term, as in Hotel de Ville for a major local government establishment – certainly not an English usage but very French. Have a look at the Hotel de Ville in Paris for a reminder.

Still, the Lyon prison Hotel de Police! It looked in quite functioning shape, and had been for a century or so.

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2013 (2)

Torrey Orton

June 13, 2013

Rocks do fall – Squeezed, again!!

It is a source of endless entertainment to notice the various ways our route-masters attempt to preserve themselves from litigation in the name of preserving us from our emerging fates en route to whereva we’re going. Take “rocks may fall” for example, a geological salutation common to slightly hilly areas of our neck of the Australian woods running a tight race with its biological brethren “limbs may fall” and “overhanging limbs” for leadership in the fatalities by fate struggle. But I meander…

Along the switchbacks of the Mercantour there are no signs proclaiming imminent disaster by stone, though at the head of three valleys we passed up are signs looking dead ringers for Oz beach warnings to foreigners about the dangers of high surf symbolised by a stick figure swimmer about to be swamped or mouthed by a looming dumper. And sure enough, that’s what’s being warned in these three valleys only the prospect of seeing such a fate has to be a lot smaller than the Australian version. The sign warns us that local electricity supply authorities may decide to evacuate the local dam without warning. At one such spot, there was even one little permanent statuette of a religious type cemented to the bordering rock just above normal stream flow levels (with permanent plastic flowers attached) memorialising one loser to the watery maw. Death by car mementos abound on Australian roads and a couple of mountain ones we’ve recently travelled here. No implications here for the relative death prospects of the two settings.  It seems the overall road toll in France is similar to Oz. Still, I meander…

Much more reliable in the Mercantour is the appearance of a recently fallen rock in the high roads of the region. They seem to fall cleanly into the middle of the quite constricted driving lanes, often enough just around one of the blind curves provided by walls of rock rising beyond sight (mountains) along the path. Some of the fallen rocks look a lot like they’ve been intentionally placed by hand, being often quite well shaped and cubic and just big enough to shock a steering system into irrecoverable disarray. Scared me, too. Hence my feeling squeezed by the prospect of encountering a fallen rock.

Of course that’s a paranoid foreign fantasy, but I’m not meandering here. That’s how they look. Someone must have put them there, they are so neat and neatly poised so often.

Lacets.

We got to know these well in their command of mountain driving.  A lacet is a switchback or hairpin turn. After days of responding to warnings of their imminence, often in multiples specified on warning signs – e.g. 3 lacets or 4 lacets – one of us wondered at the obvious: lacets = laces?? No??  Yes! And laces on shoes or corsets are switchbacks aren’t they. Once again a true linguistic friend not recognised, because it didn’t need to be. A lacet is so obviously a switchback it needn’t be thought!!

Heinz Dijon mustard?? Really…

Over the last two weeks I’ve increasingly thought there’s been an Americanisation of French (and other European??) public cuisine in two respects. One, the emergence of American marques in the retail food sector, of which Heinz Dijon mustard in single serve plastic sachets (think any American burger bar of pre-Mac days).Did the source the Dijon marque from Dijon? I guess not cuz the sachets don’t even say where the product they contain is sourced, despite the marque!!! Of course, these were very local eateries not salons of grand cuisine. Keep posted. We’re getting near to that next week and I suspect we won’t see Heinz there.

The second respect: shopping in Casino or Carrefour here is increasingly like Coles or Woollies in Oz, where the great maestros of food marketing are endlessly seeking ways to constrain us to less choice – that’s what house brands are about. Smart FMCG folks will tell me that the Oz retail maestros actually are learning from the French. Noticeably for us the varieties of muesli which not long ago adorned the shelves of these two providers have all but disappeared, relegate to “Bio” shelves. We’ve been in metropolitan and country France pretty much every year over the last 8 or so, preceded by multiple times going back to the early70’s.

Travel funnies 2013

Torrey Orton

June 9, 2013

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, unexpected…in short, a threat to my normal preconceptions, understandings and values. The shock of the new is often a laugh of surprise, which isn’t what people are talking about when thy say they are just having a laugh. Now, here we go again…overseas that is, to France quite a lot, with a closing glance at Budapest, if it doesn’t get rained out, which it currently is on the flooding reports for this week.

“… verbalisation par camera..”

Having barely escaped the car rental company parking lot (learning to drive again – see below!) and started to navigate our way out of Nice we came to a series of traffic lights working more or less successfully to keep French drivers and foreign pretenders in line. Our attention was on the third ahead at which we needed to turn left. In the near distance an illuminated panel about 1 meter square next to the traffic lights blinked with neon intensity  –“ …verbalisation par camera…” I love the little wonders of our twinned languages and here was one. I haven’t checked yet whether “verbalisation” here means what being verballed means in Oz, but I’m guessing yes. That is, you can’t argue with this camera. Its sight is its word and the word is good…and you’re fined!!

 

Is this a case of French being eroded by English (a borrowing unauthorised by the Academie Francaise), by English usage (a real friend which turns out to have a bad family background) or just some unnoteworthy linguistic coincidence? Notice I haven’t considered that we borrowed the usage from French…. Ah, linguistic hegemony.

 

For the third trip in a row we are starting with a week in a rented car. The first two trips were outstanding successes, though the second of the two, a Skoda station wagon from their premier range, provided, on reflection, a forewarning of the vicissitudes late modernity has for me. It was a start by touch not by key machine.  Like many IT-innovated products the main usage processes were somewhat counter-intuitive. The rental company had no reasons to assume there was anything to warn me about. I’d obviously been driving a long time in a lot of places. While there was an on-board instruction module with screen (not touch screen and don’t wait for it) and all, I still thought driving a car was to be done by driving the car, not driving secondary screen-based systems enabling driving the car. Which brings me to now…

We have a Citroen D5 diesel 6 speed manual, four door plus hatch semi-RV with danger sensors all around and a rear looking reversing management system providing live video to aforesaid screen.  Whoever designed the thing clearly never drove on mountain roads like those of the Parc Mercantour in the French Alpes Maritimes just across the hill from eastern Italy. They are almost without exception, if we are off the local inter-village routes in the valleys, a constant opportunity for life threatening encounters either with other drivers who zing around as if we’re on an autoroute  and/or with falling off the side of a mountain with 200-300 shear metres drop available just to the right or left. Much of this opportunity occurs with switchbacks as mentioned.  And much of the opportunity is on roads which really fit about 1 and ½ cars with a mocking dividing line signalling passing allowed down the middle!!

 

The Bren gun carrier school of design

 

Now here’s the design glitch. The D5 is out of the Bren gun carrier school of vehicle configuration – squat and heavy – with the added complication of a pretence to tank-lite slits for windows, aggravated by the blockages to all around vision which occur when these characteristics are joined in one vehicle.  The roof beaming is also squashed, especially in the driver’s line of sight around the squeezed sharp turns of switchbacks. The turns can’t be seen around. Fortunately we have a flexible driver assist system in the passenger’s seat who can see around, sometimes. Meanwhile I’m trying to gauge the sharpness of the turn and the turn space the road builders happened to manage on this particular switchback (highly variable!) while changing down to first gear and not end up under a cement truck which has appeared from the next switchback driven at local driver’s speed, a competence for which I have yet to receive my probationer’s license…but then, that’s a self-administered qualification. How will I know I’m deserving? By not succumbing??

 

The origin of this gun carriage design I think is the Chrysler 300C of about ten years ago when scrunching the roof down on the body got its first life, with a net reduction in visibility for drivers and observability for others. Maybe the Lexus 4WD four door station wagon / RV of the late 90’s was an unintended contributor with its scrunched down rear section detracting from a clear view though providing a notionally aesthetic marketing edge at the time.

Over the last 5 years the feature has spread across the motoring marques from the Subaru XV last year back thru the BMW and Range Rover, with less pronounced versions all around suggesting aggressive cool for your driving buck. It seems to be an offshoot of the muscle machines which have increased in availability in direct proportion to the unreliability of everyday life. In our Citroen version the crunching of vision is such that it is almost impossible for the driver to get any rear view except through the rear vision screen!! And the slight bit available is squeezed by reduced rear window size and shape and oversized anti-whiplash headrests.

A stray left arm, or the return of the phantom limb

 

I’m always learning, sometimes by force of choice, as with unlearning my automatic driving responses to make the shift from right to left hand drive. I’ve on the whole done better this time than earlier when I had nearly irrepressible tendencies to turn into the left hand lane given any chance to do so. Not that unlearning here. Now it’s the one about shifting gears right-handed.

 

When a gear shifting need comes to mind, even after four days driving here and dozens of the switchback turns that dominate the mountain landscape demands to shift up or down to make the needed turns without having to stop hallway through and back up to gain the curve, my left hand starts lightly waving towards the non-existent shift lever in the direction of the car door close on my left. This happens before I am aware of the need thought which drives it. And the countermanding order arrives almost in tune with the phantom limb’s gesture at controlling the car, but consciously telling my right hand to reach for the shift lever which is, correctly for a left hand drive car, to my right!

 

I haven’t driven a manual car for 7 years, except that first drive in France three years ago. Not an excuse. Rather, perspective on the embedded habits I am dealing with. Plus, while I’m at it, here’s an acknowledgement of relevant prior experience in these matters. I grew up in a right hand drive world and spent my first 14 years as a driver driving in it.

 

The feeling of being here - Squeezed

“Squeezed” was the word that came to mind reflecting on the events and scenes above. Driving is an endless squeeze to pass by any other vehicle, to resist the temptation to speed up to local rates and to stay on the roads when the vertiginous attraction of the deeps just off them are at their strongest.

 

 The countryside is actually squeezing in a way different from the other alpine areas we’ve visited in the last 10 years. Though only averaging around 3000 metres at the highest, the Alpes Maritime of the Mercantour are a dense impression sustained by the depth and narrowness of the array of valleys between them. Another take on the feeling of being here is embraced… on an easily accessible walk yesterday we got closer to the highest peaks than we ever did in the Pyrenees or other French Alpes and so giving the experience of being surrounded by them. I took a video sweep of them which covered about 270 degrees.

 

Travel funnies 2012 (5) – Cat City, Jetonsmatik and such…

Travel funnies 2012 (5) –
Cat City, Jetonsmatik and such…
Torrey Orton
Aug.1, 2012

 
One thing of note – Istanbul is cat city

 
Just outside our hotel – the slightly overstated Ottoman Imperial at the side wall of the Hagia Sophia mosque/church – a squad of local cats of various ages from 4 months to indeterminate, but nothing looking over 5 years, hangs out. They are not alone in feeling they own the place, have no fear of humans or anything else and no obvious reason to. Their only possible natural enemy, us, are at worst indifferent and best vigorously supportive, running feeding campaigns on the mosque enclosure wall tops or from concerned local eateries around town. There's only been three dogs in sight and they were moving on thru the square between the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia at a moderate pace. Cats, on the other hand, snooze pretty much anywhere including a stool almost obstructing the passage of mosque visitors ambling into the Blue Mosque yesterday. And given a small chance they'll schmooze up to passers-by, when awake and feeling needy, with normal head-butting moves. Cat heaven or haven?


Background note: my understanding is that dogs are conceived as impure in Islam, hence the cat heaven milieu in Istanbul, perhaps! Google says: there's a history of cats in Istanbul. Even Obama scratched one on the Hagia Sophia pathways a year ago. That I would discourage, but then I'm probably an emerging animal disease vector kook…And, on the other hand, cats have a more promising history in Islam. Google "Aya Sophia Cats" for a sample of who we saw daily, including the mosque enclosure feeding grounds. We saw at least three dead ringers for members of our historical cat menagerie. Now that's genetic constancy for ya.


Jetonsmatik
There's a quite well done tram network which joins the tourist centre of town with neighbouring touristy areas. It looks a bit French, an impression amplified yesterday on the other touristy side of the water (the Golden Horn) as we were gearing up for a return from an arvo at a Sufi "Whirling Dervishes" event. There in the access path to the tram stop was a large cabinet boldly labelled Jetonsmatik, which clanged my French bell with authority. A jeton is a token. So, our hosts have a token-mediated payment system, as did NYC for years in its massively less salubrious subway system
.
However, as you've been expecting, there's a hitch. The jeton cost is Turkish Lira 2 for a ride to anywhere on the line. TL come in 1 and 2 TL denominations. But, the TL2 jeton can only be bought with TL1 coins. As I was trying to follow the obvious path of using my TL2 coins unsuccessfully a guy came along and said clearly "Nyet" when I held it up helplessly. Thank gods for other foreigners. They often have an intuitive understanding of gaps locals can never perceive.


"620 kgs gods"
A nice language twist. The Danes are just a few breaths away from English in many ways, and here's one. Looking at the guidelines for usage on the door of our hotel lift in Copenhagen I noted daily the limit of 8 persons but not the alternative 620kgs gods limit until the last day of 5. I'm still wondering about the weight of gods given the known weight of a soul (21 grams isn't it?). Or, how many gods does it take to make a good? Or goods to make a god? Eight guys or girls my size would sink the thing, being neither gods nor goods.
Stop it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again
Torrey Orton
May 18, 2011

Closed mind, open heart – a wonder about travel blindness(es)

Walking around LA a week ago, and driving a bit, too, I couldn't see much of wonder but a jumble of visuals of mildly disappointing grades. After a few hours my distress resolved into a recurring view of faux New England houses spread around varieties of Mission Revival. Mission Revival fit the environs. The faux did not for me. They reached out like an ugly stick in my eyes.


The faux had a number of features. There were the inappropriate window sizes and styles, as if they had been borrowed from a different genre. Their scale was wrong to my eye. Then there was the fault of interbreeding: colonial mixed with ranch – two regenerations from the post-war era. Again a travesty of proportions signalling a bungle, arising perhaps from architects mixing pages from two standard issue design playbooks. In a related, later discussion with the architect of my two friends, he mentioned a similar construct as the design process of another local travesty (in his view, which I shared).


I was in the in the hands of two aficionados of local architecture, hence cautious with airing my disappointments. Rather, I managed to enquire about what I was seeing – its sources, ages, and social implications. After a few more hours my automatic rejection of the offending mis-proportions retreated almost unnoticed from the front of my awareness. It then became easier to explore with them. What's going on with me and this?


A Kimberley experience.


A few years ago I spent two weeks driving and camping around the Kimberley. I had looked forward to the experience with a mountains-and-seas anticipation - that is, my normal expectation of pleasurable visuals which has applied to every trip in my adult life: local, interstate or international. I had forgotten those formative visual experiences like learning to love the Australian bush which opened me to previously unknowable things in the world. It's hard to spontaneously like the Australian bush from a Massachusetts bush background – almost no congruencies other than being bush.


The upshot of the first few days in the Kimberley was a lingering disappointment with its failure to be alps – Australian or European! Now, I had no excuse for this. I have travelled fairly broadly and sometimes deeply in Australia for 35 years at this point. I have done so with enjoyment from my first exposure to the flat lands between Melbourne and Geelong in 1971 (my closest priors being a few glimpses of the Connecticut River valley in the 1950's and a day driving in Ohio in 1967) and can champion the deserted regions with energy and commitment to newbie travellers down under.


So, in some sense I had lost contact with this openness in myself…amazing failing, even more so because I did not even know I had lost it!! I still cannot follow how this happened, but happen it did. I underwent a covert regression or created it somehow. As I am writing I begin to see how, maybe! I brought to the Kimberley an unintentional biased eye – the one that announces itself with an act of disapproval of its field of vision.


Maybe it worked this way. My experience of the European Alps over 35 years, but more intensely in the time before the Kimberley, had coloured my expectations about great visual and physical experiences. A moment ago I was about to write it had coloured my preferences in such experiences, but that is not what it was; it was my anticipations blending into my expectations: I was looking forward to more Alps because I was only getting a taste for them, and wanted more, but did not quite know that then. The Kimberley, by choice at that time, fell across the pathways to that acquisition. It required special organising of many others to do the Kimberley as we thought best to do it, and the others turned out to sometimes be an unexpected experience in their own right. Another disturbing distraction.


Like the LA experience, the Kimberley emerged from the overlay of my inappropriate anticipations and expectations as one of the most memorable of my travel experiences, marked by my continuing desire to return for another run under the cold night skies and warm day ones of early winter there. Maybe it will be on our grey nomad agenda one day.


So what?


This has been a long detour from faux colonials falsely accused. The explanation of my visceral resistance to what reality was presenting is adequate; the pathway to less resistance is not so clear; its implications are worrying for learning…or, just a naturally occurring stage/phase in learning?

More travel funnies…

More travel funnies…
Torrey Orton
May 11, 2011


We're off to my 50^th boarding school reunion, a family reunion and a France reunion for a month, with various interludes and postludes along the way. I start with preludes.

 "No record of reservation…"
Travel funnies started before the travel this time with the news by email that our reservation for the reunion had never been received by the Heritage Hotel…a discovery thanks to a query from classmates about the state of our accommodation and such since the school had no record of them (not that they should have since I'd never sent them and no one had asked for them!). I was rabid about the news, driven by the fact I was awake at 3am to receive it and had dopily turned on the email.

I fired off a note of complaint to the school's event manager with my reservation number and date of approval (Feb 10, '11). …. And somewhat later set off for a morning's therapy at 7am by train and tram, whence another unfunny chapter opened unexpectedly, disappointingly and totally unnecessarily.

Back to the trams…where months ago I noticed that I often entertained myself with pre-work exercise in segments marked out by the train/tram route on the way there. There was a theoretical hitch at that time: that I occasionally almost got it wrong - "The almost is the lurking awareness that I could still mess up, or be messed up, by misjudgement plus fate" I noted at the time. Wait or walk, I wondered again this morning.

Well, this time, already angered by the accommodation screw up a few hours earlier, I walked and waited in vain. Arriving at one tram stop, I had five minutes to go to the next scheduled tram and was caught midway by an early arrival passing me by, stopping at the next stop and waiting for two minutes for its schedule to catch up with it, and then moving off just as I caught up with it!! This sequence was repeated two more times as my pre-work walk turned into a 40 minute, 3 kilometre quickstep to the clinic, arriving 12 minutes late. Fortunately, the expected client was s serial lateness offender and bore the wait well (forewarned by SMS of course). Still, I was smoking, but only wisps showed.

 (The accommodation bungle was recovered three days later, or so I was promised by email.)

 LA International Airport…incoming
There's a song which celebrates the West Coast entry to the US. Well, it was an undeserving entry this time. Apart from an eventual 1 hour wait in an incoherent and disorderly queuing system, we got a standing room only wait in the plane on arrival due to congestion in the entry hall. We were told there were a thousand just-arriveds standing in our way. I should have known we were really in for trouble when I sighted a sign saying something like: With our 140 years of customer service we know paying attention to customer needs counts! I read this as a line from the mouth of LA Tourism thinking they really have reached heights of self mockery. A few metres further up the passage I saw the words were an HSBC bank self-promotion, but then…

Joining their last members (maybe 500 folks or so) 15 minutes later, we started our passage in a hall with no toilets other than a pastel sign promising renovations of the previously available offerings were well under way…and this after 13 hours in the air.

The entry hall was itself quite new, with numbered ranks of passport control stations spread in a 150 meter array before us. Trouble was, they were less than half staffed, though they were armed with a terrific set of terrorist detection tools – both iris cameras and handprint capture machines. There was not even a hand-lettered sign telling us which line was for foreigners and which for returning natives, though there was a quite well-designed one for diplomatic and special business travellers, of course.

 LA …outgoing
A day later we got the AA treatment (no, not that AA; the American Airlines AA) on the way to our next stage. The boarding routine was a marvel of self-contradiction which seemed to work. There were stringent carryon bag limits clearly posted around the departure halls with explicit threats that oversized ones would be thrown into the hold (delicately by their experienced staff waiting hopefully below the plane to receive renegade bags from watchful cabin staff).

The warnings were enough to make me slightly antsy about the somewhat oversized backpack I was carrying. No need to worry. Others were carrying material for a beach party. Due to my abiding never-be-late phobia, we had arrived early and due to Jane's possessing a higher grade of Frequent Flyer, we boarded in the first rush scoring empty overheads for the effort. What came next was a scramble by the masses to grab space which was close to the unconscious meaning of unseemly…not quite pushing old ladies out of the way but an outbreak felt imminent.

Coaching from the sidelines was the chief speaker for the cabin staff - running through the outsized bag routine as a request for civil compliance rather than an order. She backed up the civility theme by encouraging the scramblers to "help each other" with the short, weak and maybe old as worthy targets for help (if they couldn't lift their overweight bags, couldn't get them to fit the compartments (quite a few), or just couldn't find space, though passing the weight and size reg's). After 20 minutes wrestling bags, jockeying for position and "helping" the place was cleared for take-off. Lots of bags disappeared under seats in front, to the point of leaving little foot space, but then whose fault was that.

Was I seeing another instance of a self-regulating system at work?? The last I remember was the response to the US Airways flight #5149 which crashed without loss of anything material but itself in the Hudson River in January '09 (just where we were heading!). Cameras monitoring the area of the crash (by chance) caught ferries and other boats turning to save passengers before formal rescue could have been organised. Local players had chosen to disregard their SOP's, city, state and federal regulations with probable risk to their licenses and captain's bars to do the obviously right thing. Perhaps an example of "giving forward", as my niece described an effort of hers to make a difference in some family matter. More another time.


Fly well, fly high.   

Funny things happen travelling - 2

Funny things happen travelling - 2
Torrey Orton
Home
June 18, 2010

 

…but wait, there's more.

I forgot about a couple of things along the way.


The case of the disappearing gate
Right near the start we had prize winner for travellers' misdirections. We thought we had it all figured out – how to get from the airport hotel to the right gate for an early flight from Paris to Pau. There's this little, gratuit, robot light rail which runs from the backdoor of the Charles De Gaulle airport hotel sector around most of the main terminals. Gate 2G was our target and clearly listed among the train's stops. We got on with an hour to spare and got off ten minutes later at the designated 2 series gates (A thru G)
That's where the trouble became apparent (it had started when we assumed that our gate was somewhere within the natural ambit of the robot train system). Our objective turned out not to be grouped with 2A thru F. There were arrows to 2G pointing up which lead us up to a bus stop above the terminal and no more 2G. The arrows disappeared and no explanatory placards or helpful; staff replaced them. It took 8 minutes of wandering around to find the bus stop and another 2 to discover that only one bus went to 2G and it came around every 20 mins. We didn't know when it last came thru and time was awasting. We had no boarding cards yet, either.
The next circuit came around in 5 minutes and we got to 2G in time, but no one ever said they'd moved 2G 5 ks away from the rest of 2 into a rehabbed cargo centre on the edge of CDG.


Up ain't up, always
This leads naturally on to another cultural foible – up doesn't always mean up; sometimes it means straight ahead. We had had some learning opportunities with this earlier in the Paris Metro the day before (and subsequently in other airports and train stations – slow learners!). We were getting misled by arrows pointing up which actually meant straight forward, not up, but in circumstances where there was an up to go to which was within view as much as the forward. Under a little time pressure this easily translated into mild local industrial disputes within the travel work team.


Many large black slugs
For something a lot different…back to the mountains. In three of the valleys we walked there was an intrusively prominent flat black slug of substantial proportions which slid out onto the paths, and in the greenery along them. We had never seen one before and as you'll see from the web link, they are not native to Australia, but some infestations have been sighted recently in similarly damp countryside in Victoria (one Victorian website relates a woman showing up at the Ag Dept. or similar with buckets of them collected in small patches of river flat in the Otways). The fourth valley seemed to have none of the black variety, but our Cauterets host suggested that there may have been brownish ones. As the link discloses, the black comes in a number of colour variations. But why the colour change in that valley? Well, wonders of nature?
I'm mildly disappointed to find now that the large black slug is even known commonly as just that, the "large black slug". Worse, I'm not the first person to see one, not by a long way. Not that I really harboured that fantasy, but…just a smidge of discovery desire.


Enjoy, again.