Cote d’Azur no. 1 and Marseille no. 3
01/04/06

We have our first guests! Mayan’s parents, Berry and Ioana, have come to see us and perhaps a bit of France. We’re all cosily ensconced chez nous in Aix, and ready to see the sights.

In Aix, tourists come to see the old city. But since we live in it, we have to lift our game and find a few extra interesting spots. Like the cathedral, which is pretty big, and incredibly gothic. The markets are interesting, and the Cours Mirabeau is beautiful. There’s a huge Cezanne exhibition here in the city where he was born to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his death. There’s hundreds of old fountains scattered around the city. Half the shops are restaurants, cafés or salons de thé.

We saw all this, and a bit more. Then we really put on our sightseeing boots and made a few road-trips.

First, we went to the Cote d’Azur, our new Central Coast. Thanks to our hired car and the autoroute, we got there in 1.5 hrs and were some of the first to make our presence felt in Cannes, leaving our mark and strolling down the red carpet in style




































Soon we had to escape the fans, and ducked into a little party the city threw for us:














Soon that got tiresome and we left to see the sights around Cannes. We checked out the beach, cruised past the hotels, went up the hill for a high-flyer’s view,





























been down. It followed the coastline exactly, leaping from cliff to cliff, and charging around blind corners like a mouse in a maze. The water’s really beautiful, a dark blue, and contrasts well with the reddish rocks. Every now and then, nestled in a hairpin turn, is a small idyllic beach, and here and there a sprawling resort town, like the one at St. Tropez. We made a stop here and pulled out the new matelas gonflable for a road-test.















The road trip down the Cote d’Azur over, we then turned our headlights to Marseille, which the two of us can now find our way around map-less.

We had serious business in Marseille. As seasoned and ever-more salty sightseers, we were determined to have a thorough look around.














And with churches like the Notre Dame de la Garde, there’s a hell of a lot to see.















Oh damn, look who’s here, did I say hell? Oh shit I did it again! Merde! (does that count?)
We saw everything around the Vieux Port, the Cathedrals and la Ville Ancienne.

Then sampled the bouillabaisse at a portside resto.

With some of us unable to partake, we had to settle for just fish, or roasted duck.

Thus concluding our little excursions, and having opened pandora’s limitless box of traveling on, we returned to Aix to prepare for another invasion: we were off to shoot our way through Italy.

Hunting for an Apartment (1 Septembre 2006)

When we left for France, we had in mind that we would spend one week searching for an apartment, another organizing our long-stay visas, bank accounts, etc., and the rest of the time doing some traveling until we could meet some people, our friends arrived, and we could start our brand new year. We thought at the end of the first week, we could publish photos of our new place here. So where is it? The plan, as you can see, is not running smoothly. Finding an apartment here is a lot harder than anyone would think.

Firstly, as we have discovered, Aix-en-Provence apartments are famously difficult to find. They are as expensive as Paris, but a lot older, and as competitive as a sculling competition in Munich.

Secondly, there are a lot of crazy rules and procedures to follow to rent an apartment that we didn’t know about, which make it hard for any foreigner to rent a place of their own. This makes colocation (sharing an apartment) choice A, which is really unpopular with estate agents, and for reasons explained later, now with us.

Thirdly, NONE of the estate agents here speak any English. And they NEVER return calls.

In our first week of Aix, we got a glimpse of what the insides of all the beautiful ancient buildings look like. They were great, if you’d like to live in a broom cupboard, or if you don’t mind your shower in the kitchen of a studio apartment, and no light in the tilted bathroom.

We quickly found ourselves stretching our budget in order to try and stretch our home-life to above sub-standard conditions. So, we started looking at two-bedroom apartments that we could try to share (though we did not yet have a flatmate). And we found one that we loved, and it was cheap!!!

So, we called a girl who said she would be interested in flatting with us, named Marion. We met her at the apartment, and later went out for dinner and drinks, keen to finally alleviate the homelessness and hotel bill situation we were currently in. And Marion was also in a rush to find a place. She spoke a bit of English, we speak more French by the day and Marion was about to study in the same place as Sam….it was like a match made in heaven.

The next day, we were keen to settle- so to speak. We kept trying to ring Marion, to no avail. When she texted us to say she wasn’t interested any more, Mayan had a premonition of what was to come. We found out later from the agent that not only had she lied to us about not being interested, but she had made a rendez-vous to see it again…with someone else!! (don’t forget that the two of us had found it in the first place)
It was a decisive moment in our house hunting saga: we were not going to share with anyone at the beginning of the year!!

At the same time as getting over the blow, we had to continue house hunting and also try to find someone who would be our financial guarantor. Note: they have to live in France and earn at least 4 times your rent per month.

A contact of a contact of a contact later, and we had the best guy ever as our guarantor. He was so supportive and helpful and totally reliable even though he was traveling overseas.

Almost every day, we revisited every single agent in the inner city (about 30) and a few outside. Finally, at the end of one day in the second week, with very little drive left, we found a newly reopened out-of-the-way agent with two flats that were exactly what we wanted. The next day, we chose one, checked with our guarantor, everything’s OK, fill in some forms, come back tomorrow. The next day, fill in more forms, pay the fees, waiting on one more, come back next week. The next week, got the form, got the flat? No no no, now we have to clean it, and paint it, and replace some things. Come back IN THREE WEEKS.

Now, the flat was supposed to be ready straight away. We had envisaged a quick move and finally the start of a bit of normality. We’d even bought a pot-plant.

So we were faced with a dilemma: start to search for a different apartment from scratch, stay in our hotel for two more weeks, or go traveling for two weeks. They were all either too depressing or way too expensive to be feasible, and we were pretty angry about the whole fiasco. We investigated our traveling options: Marseille, Cassis, Nice, Paris, Romania, Morocco; everything seemed possible and this is supposed to be the easiest part about Europe, the easy traveling, but it’s really expensive at short notice. Unless you befriend the train’s unpopular, slow cousin: the humble bus. We found two tickets to Spain on an overnight bus and teed up some quality time with Karina.

On our return, at 5am on the morning the cleaning/painting/time wasting would finish, we comforted ourselves while sitting in a freezing restaurant with the idea of getting a day’s worth of moving in before our first guests, Mayan’s parents, arrived that night. We were outside the agency’s door when it opened, with our little hearts just bursting with optimism.

Needless to say, there were dramas. One document was missing, their insurance guy was away, and we had to get thousands of euros together for a bond. Of course, we couldn’t withdraw it in one go, thanks to withdrawal limits, and banks and post offices here can’t give cash advances on credit cards since three years ago. Only one place, a currency exchange office, can do it in all of Aix, and their machine was broken. I tell you all this detail to give some feeling of the frustration we were feeling from the start of the search one month ago to when we finally moved in, at 5 o’clock that evening.

The apartment is great, spacious enough, with a terrace, nice kitchen, new furniture, French windows, and a tall shower. It’s central, secure, and has heating, but no sink plugs. It’s painted in blue and white, and has a red couch (like the French flag). There are two gay bars on the street, and it still smells strongly of paint. And we may be even fonder of it thanks to all the problems we had in finding it.
Our front doors

















Lunch time on the terrace















Our new bathroom




















Our terrace with new garden























Our bedroom (it’s not a single bed, don’t worry!!!)




















Mayan cooking in our kitchen

Add a dash of olive oil, a teaspoon of fresh basil, squeeze, and let fly. La Tomatina.
30/08/06
















What is La Tomatina?
It’s a festival held every year in Buñol, a town 45 minutes away from Valencia, and if you’ve ever loved tomatoes or hated your traveling buddy then it’s just your cup of juice. There is a lot of symbolism and tradition surrounding the fiesta, but it wasn’t satisfactorily explained to us.
Thus, we don’t know why people got dressed up in teams of fancy dress (eg. Pope with cardinals) and got drunk in the morning.














Nor why dozens of young men and women risked life and limb to clamber up a pole greased with pig fat (and over each other), to grab a smoked ham at the top.





















Nor why tens of thousands of Spaniards and Australians are drawn to this spot for the world’s biggest food fight.



















But it’s so, so good.

What better way to get rid of a few (150 000kgs) stray tomatoes than to give them to a huge crowd at high speed?

After a little bit of gentle persuasion, Karina joined us on the morning train, dressed in left-behind clothes from Karina’s youth hostel, and our favourite sandals, pondering the forthcoming slaughter. We’d heard enough about it to be worried, but not enough to be concerned.
So there we were, bright-eyed and preening, and clean.















We watched the greasy-pole-climb, noticing that we were in the very centre of an enormous, and still swelling, crowd squeezed into a 300-year old avenue.
There were thousands of Aussies there, but the character of the day was an Asian backpacker, who early on got one of the best (ie only) seats in the house. The crowd noticed him, and cheered, and he waved back, glowing in the spotlight. He pulled out his camera. He took lots of photos. He showed off his new g-string…














…and then when the ham was won, so signaling the start of the main event, he very promptly got covered in tomato pulp. Because like every good bloody mary, this one had a bit of kick.




























By the end, we were swimming in tomato juice, and picking peel out of our hair. It took forty minutes to make it through the other forty thousand people there, and at one point the press was so great we all lost our thongs (we weren’t the only ones, notice all the bare feet?). Then it took four days to get the tomato out of our hair.














That shirt’s never been the same since.

While it seems tradition to end the day shirtless and shoe-less, noone was allowed back on the train unless in a fit state, which sent everyone back to search through the tomato juice in the gutters for any mismatched pair of shoes. A few days later, in Barcelona, we were happy to see some people still sporting their Spanish souvenirs.

I’m not sure we’ll ever buy tomato puree again, but we’ve just starting eating fresh tomatoes. And I’ve had a great idea of what to do with all the excess grapes we’ve been growing in Australia…

Valencia, freshly squeezed
21-31/08/06

Although tempted to spray-paint our backpacks and blend into Barcelona, we continued down the coast to Valencia, the new home-town of our good friend Karina. It sounds easy, but we managed to find ourselves stuck in Barcelona for four hours too long, as we missed three successive buses, despite being in the right bus station. But tardiness is not so unlike us, or Karina, who was four and a half hours late to pick us up.

Perhaps because of the late-ness, we felt we had to get up the next morning and do some serious sight-seeing.

Valencia (actually, its Valenthia) is a coastal city inhabited by about 800 000 people. It’s an old city that is only getting a face lift now, since the council realized tourists like clean, kept old cities.














Karina showed us basilicas, cathedrals, cafes, paella dish shops, the silk exchange, the op shop, the grocery store, the famous festival sites and the unique graffiti.

































Then she tested us to see if we had absorbed it all by linking it together with her favourite examples, such as her favourite fountain, which is behind the basilica, in view of the cathedral, which is one of the festival sites, but less frequented by tourists than the cafes, silk exchanges, etc…














By the end of the first day of sight-seeing, the three of us realized that sights were not the point of this trip. It had been almost one year since we had last seen Karina and we had come to Spain mostly to fix up that situation…and sights were not going to distract us.

From that day forth, we spent some great nights together drinking sangria and catching up.














We still went and saw the sights, like this awesome “City of Arts and Sciences”, built to keep Valenica on Spain’s cutting-edge-architecture bandwagon.




























And we also tried to go and see a bullfight, but while we turned up at the place, time and day they set it for, no bulls did. It was a bit of a disappointment, but hardly a blow: we were a little hesitant to go anyway.














But we did it all at a leisurely pace, and between long stints at the beach in El Saler.




























Thanks to some inside tips form our local guide, there were a few quirks about Valencia we started to notice.

First, while not exactly being in the middle of a rainforest (or any forest), nor being terribly natural at all, there is, in Valencia, a thriving colony of geckos, who cruise around the apartments with a gourmet’s eye for the best creepy-crawlies.














Also, while there’s usually a healthy flock of pigeons at most self-respecing places/placas/piazzas in Europe, in Valencia they’re a little unique. Rather than being mostly grey, Valencia’s birds are for the most part white doves, scurrying daintily in the dirt.














One thing that was introduced to us by Karina was the local arts scene. The graffiti was really interesting in both Barcelona and Valencia, but in Valencia there is one artist with whom the three of us shared a little fascination. Their work is everywhere in the district; throughout the city itself, and on many of the entrances and exits. Apparently it can even be seen in a few outlying villages. Although it is never signed, not even by an alias, the style is definitely recognizable, and has a recurring theme of…














…lemons. This symbol can be found on most dim streets and many main ones in the centre; usually on metal surfaces, and always colourful and enigmatic.

































I guess the secret to the best sangria is a hint of lemon in with the oranges.

One thing we noticed during our travels through Valencia was the use of tiles. There’s a bit of Berber in the buildings, and everywhere there are little details that are decorated with 15cm square tiles, of blue and white. They colour corners,














border windows,



















and cover the underside of the little balconies all the way to the top storey.














While it’s hardly a major part of the Valencia style, the blue and white tiles kept appearing the more we looked for them, like doing a sudoku puzzle.

While we were staying chez Karina we slept in her sunroom, 9 storeys up, with the Ayuntamiento (town hall) right in front of us. This gave us plenty of opportunities to get to know the ringing schedule intimately. There are five bells. At quarter past, they play the first 4 notes of a song. At half past, the first 8. At quarter to, the first 12, and on the hour, every hour, they play the whole 16-note song, with gusto, followed by the fifth bell counting the hours. Once we figured this out, we never needed a watch while in the city again.














One of our biggest collective concerns, and the most important consideration when it came to day-planning, was meal-times. We had become used to Spanish time (wake up at 10, lunch at 3, dinner at midnight, bed about 4) in terms of appetites, but found it harder to shake the habit of preparation times. Thus by lunch-time, we’d been mentally preparing it for 3 hours, and by dinner, about 4 hours. All this mental effort led to some serious meals being planned and executed. Food became such an important part of the holiday that Karina kept a special record of the dates and contents of our meals (athletes record great feats, we record great feasts). She made special notes about our banana pancakes,



















the shepherds pie and strudel,














the mountain of scones, the vege pizza, the Roquefort pasta…we designed every meal like it was our last, and ate like it was our first in a long time. Of course this didn’t stop us trying out the local specialities, like paella (d’origine valencienne) and sangria,














and some great tapas,














which inspired us to buy our own paella dish and promise to grow some of those olives with the red bits in (haven’t found one of those yet though).

We had the great fortune to be in the right place at the right time. Not only were we in time for la tomatina, but we were in town for a one night only free concert by the legendary flamenco singer, Carmen Linares. We lined up for an hour or so, surrounded by excited locals, and found ourselves squashed in front of a small stage. Accompanied by two guitarists and two foot-stampers, she sang some incredible songs, writhing with emotion, really dancing in her seat. While we couldn’t really understand any of the words, we could still follow the clutches and twists and grimaces. If we had any doubt, the olés from the crown set us straight: this was not pop.




























After the main event, they all came back for an encore, where the foot-stampers took to the stage to strut their stuff: singing, dancing, and improvising on the fly. It was really amazing, and while I didn’t learn much more Spanish, I damn well learned how to foot-stamp!





























It was really great to go and see Karina, where she lived, and try to fatten her up for Autumn. It was a little surreal. After all, we were staying with a friend from Sydney, while on holiday from our new home, in her new home, all happening in Europe.
We had a lot of fun, really relaxed, and learned a whole lot of new things. But most important of all, we learned never to wear thongs or sandals to a Spanish harvest festival.