A Fine Time in France

One of the interesting things I've noticed over here in Europe, particularly in France, is the amount of politeness built into society. Everywhere you go, people are friendly and mannerly, and you are always greeted with a "Bon jour" in any store or restaurant. I suppose that in the service industry, a greeting is to be expected. But one place you wouldn't necessarily expect such politeness is on the buses. We've been greeted promptly by every bus driver, and when we exit the bus, a farewell is always called out. The most interesting thing is that the people getting on and off the bus respond in like manner. Even the surliest of people are transformed by simple politeness, and everyone calls out "Cheers" or "Thank you" (in England), or "Au revoir" or "Merci" (in France). You get into the habit immediately when you're here. I tripped my way out of crowded bus the other day and was unable to call out my farewell to the bus driver; I felt terrible about it for days afterwards. . . Another custom of politeness I've seen everywhere is the kissing of both cheeks when meeting a friend. You always see this in the movies, and until now, I'd thought it was more of an exaggeration than anything. But having been in France for 3 1/2 weeks, I can safely vouch for its authenticity. Everyone does it; I've even seen groups of teenagers perform this ritual with each other. If you can get teenage boys to engage in a particular custom, you know it's one that has taken firm hold in a society.

Some of you may have noticed that there is a sad lack of pictures gracing this blog; we fully expected to find download access in Europe by now. In fact, we did have one opportunity while in Colmar, France, and we were very close to bombarding you with thousands and thousands of pictures. There was a USB port, the connection was good, and best of all, internet access was free. The problem came when it was time to actually download the pictures; all of the instructions were in French. The connection was good, but not fast enough to have a translation website running simultaneously. I'm sure the computer savvy among you would have risen to the challenge of downloading pictures in French, but the only thing I took from the situation was to remove myself immediately, with all of my pictures still intact on my memory card. I wasn't crazy about the idea of accidentally leaving all of my pictures on a small, crashed computer in France. We'll keep looking, but it might be the case that the pictures get posted at the end of our trip (I know, I emailed a lot of you and said that wouldn't be the case, sorry about that. . .). In the meantime, we'll see if we can find internet pictures of the places we've been, and put them in our posts from time to time. You can use your imagination and think about how much better these pictures will look when we're in them. . .

My last post was a hodge-podge of information, written while completely exhausted. I've since re-read it, and the only thing I can say about such bad writing is that it should serve to confirm the truth of what I said about our night train experience. You will all be happy to know that we are now in much nicer surroundings, completely refreshed from sleep on mostly comfortable beds. Things have improved over the course of this past week. We weren't sure at first, because after leaving the interesting but freezing Carcassonne, we somehow took a wrong turn despite our careful itinerary planning and ended up in Texas. Now, there's nothing wrong with Texas, of course, but when you're expecting to be in France, it's really bizarre to encounter a Buffalo Grill restaurant with signs all in English, complete with buffalo steer horns on the roof. Our hotel in Avignon ended up being out in the middle of nowhere, far from the center of town, and we were dropped off by bus in the middle of the largest parking lot I've seen in a long time with no idea where to go. The only good thing is that our hotel was next to a huge supermarket, kind of like Costco, except you didn't have to buy 20 yogurts at a time, thankfully. We spent a lot of time in it, buying food to eat in our small hotel room, because buses to and from the town center stopped running after 7:30pm. After freezing in Avignon for a couple of days (and no scenery to speak of - this is NOT like Texas, the analogy ended with the parking lot), we headed over to Nice and the French Riviera with warm, pleasant weather that reminded us of home. The coastline is gorgeous, and we spent a day going up and down the coast, visiting Monaco and a couple of smaller villages on the sea. A fine reward for enduring a night train. . . We're now in Lyon where the food is excellent, and we feel like we're in Paris again, only on a smaller scale. Apparently Lyon is the real City of Lights; they've even pioneered floodlight technology and host conferences for it that are attended by cities from around the world. I wonder if Las Vegas has ever considered attending. . . We will be heading off to Italy tomorrow, arriving in Milan late in the day. I have enjoyed France (despite how it may sound); it's a great country to explore. The food and wine are superb, and the countryside (for the most part) has been lovely, especially at this time of year.