sometimes life is idyllic

It's a pleasure watching Montmartre wake up this crisp morning, as the roaming portrait artists amble to work ahead of the tourists' arrival. A pleasant, still-sleepy calm still rules the cobbled streets here at 10-ish a.m.

A bit earlier as my friends and I vacated their Thanksgiving week Airbnb apartment, I waited on the sidewalk with their toddler son while they took care of parting details inside.

Covered in a bathrobe, the downstairs neighbor opened her shutters for the morning. Since I was nearly touching her window's bars while my toddler friend watched the antics of pigeons across the street, from the vantage point of his stroller, the neighbor-du-jour and I exchanged bonjours and then started chatting. She said she's lived in Montmartre for 38 years, but the neighborhood has changed a lot, and she's planning a return to her roots in Montpellier. This strikes me as both sad and happy. We didn't talk long enough for me to discern how she feels about the impending move.

Since then, I've ensconced myself in a Starbucks, from which a group of Asian tourists (sorry I can't distinguish their roots without asking) has recently departed. American import it may be, juxtaposed against the local treats of this morning, but here I'm free to fit in a few hours of work on a stubborn project before I head on to the next leg of this present escape from the isolation of my Pau apartment. I am hoping the creative vibe and lingering glow of a fun two days with old friends will work some magic on this long-in-process bit of writing.

May it be so.

the era of fixed things

If not for Air France's manhandling, my next suitcase purchase--whenever that day came--would have most likely been online or wherever I found the cheapest valise after hours and hours of research that would have included minimal opportunity to actually handle the bag I might buy. So while at first I was frustrated with another complicated-feeling thing to take care of in a place where I still don't know how everything works, I'm now a little grateful to Air France.

Because yesterday my unplanned suitcase purchase happened here at SPARBE, which turns out to be a family-owned business that's been operating in this same location for nearly 80 years. It was incredibly pleasing to walk in--at first just to see if they could repair my bag--and find that they knew exactly what needed to be done, knew exactly which forms the airline would ask for to prove the suitcase couldn't be repaired, knew exactly which form to submit to request reimbursement for the replacement carry-on, and were just all-around knowledgeable in helping find a bag that matched my damaged one as closely as possible in size (it was a larger-than-usual carryon that I wasn't eager to say good-bye to). It was really nice not to have to navigate another complication totally on my own.

This has turned into a sappy-sounding Yelp review of a mom and pop store from a bygone era, but because of them, a really frustrating experience turned into such an unexpectedly positive experience that, well, sappy-be-hanged, it was great enough to be worth recording for internet posterity. ;-)

A few of my broken things that are now fixed!

 The Fixing-Things Era

Perhaps because I've been here long now enough that belongings I owned before I came to France are getting old enough to be showing some wear, this summer began ushering me into a whole new era of life that involves fixing broken things. And it's turned into a lovely era for a few reasons:

1. It's nice to get to keep using belongings that I like a lot. No need to despair over discovering that something is damaged!
2. It's nice to avoid spending dollars or euros I don't have to replace things I hadn't prepared to replace.
3. It's nice to avoid shopping, which I really don't like. And to avoid having to figure out how to replace products I'm attached to but can't find exact replacements for here, only in the U.S.
4. It's given me a chance to get out into these lovely small shops and converse with people. When you're buying something, you don't necessarily have to talk much. But when you need something fixed, talking is much more necessary. No slinking into shops anonymously.

Becoming so nomadic has already changed my relationship with belongings--I try to mostly only own what I really need, not exactly the bare minimum, but close (as close as possible, given that I'm not a real minimalist...hence, my need for the very largest carry-on suitcase possible). I guess you could say that I keep pretty short accounts on my belongings these days, and I have to be pretty practical about things...if it's not useful, I don't keep it. This has even extended to the books in my life. You know it's serious when I ration how many of those I own at a time!

So in my long-ago, faraway American life, unless I or my parents could fix something fairly easily (and to be sure, I don't come from a family of cobblers, so shoes were not on the fix-it list), I assumed it had to be replaced. I never thought of going to a shoe shop to have my shoes fixed, for example. I didn't even really know where to go to have them fixed. Here, there are cordonniers in pretty much every town of reasonable size.

Thus, having things fixed is fairly easy to pull off...though I've taken to giving the cobblers and other fix-it people here magical powers in my mind, so then I'm disappointed to discover that not everything, said suitcase as an example, can be repaired.

I'm a New Woman

In short (I know, I know...after all those words...), this is just one of many only-sometimes-perceptible internal changes that has taken root inside me courtesy of changing cultures for a while. I suppose I knew those changes would come, except that when I came to France, I didn't know I'd stay so long, so I wasn't thinking about how four years and counting in this place might change my insides.

At any rate, I judge this change to be a good one.

strangers in bruges, belgium

As I walked into his shop to pay for postcards in Bruges, Belgium, at the end of a weekend visit a week and a half ago, I overheard the shopkeeper explaining to the Welsh couple standing before his back-of-the-store counter that Bruges was still seeing normal amounts of British tourists but that Americans had dropped off following the terrorist attacks in Brussels. Suspecting he was someone who enjoyed talking, I chimed in as I approached the counter, "We're Americans who aren't afraid." Or something to that effect. And then began a lovely conversation with this charming man while my friend browsed his shop for gifts.

We'd read in a guidebook that the Flemish aren't very friendly, but this man certainly didn't get that memo. He and his wife have had the shop for 30 years and love it, though retirement is near. Unlike other shopkeepers who keep strict hours, they get there when they get there and leave when the store empties out in the late afternoon. He lives 7 km outside Bruges in a home that includes the dream retirement garden he's created, where he plans to putter around once the shop closes.

When customers approach his cash register, he offers their choice of language: Dutch, French, English or Spanish. But then he mentioned the cheat sheet he's holding in the photo that's normally tacked to the wall beside the register and explained how much people appreciate it if you can say even a couple polite words in their language. The language menu then expands to Greek, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Czech, Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Ukranian, and Hebrew! We talked about the difference between the Flemish and Dutch languages, and I learned that it's the same language with some vocabulary differences, like American and British English. But he did note that the Dutch tend to be more direct in their communication, whereas the Flemish will take the long way to say something to try to make you feel good about what they're saying.

Talking with this shopkeeper was a highlight in a day filled with pleasant interactions with strangers, from our Airbnb hostess to a bus driver to helpful direction-givers in a restaurant. The world is a beautiful place!