Brest And Its Environs

I totally just realized that the word "environs" clearly comes straight from French. ("Environ" means "about" or "around".) I'm observant.

Now for some nice things about Brest.

For one thing, Brest has an interesting atmosphere in that it's a big city that sometimes feels like a small town. I'm actually not a hundred percent sure just how big Brest is, because I have heard several conflicting population estimates, but I know that in Brittany, it's second only to Rennes, which definitely qualifies as a major French city. I also know that geographically speaking, it's a pretty big place. I've never literally walked from one side to the other, but I live near the middle and I know that it takes me a solid hour or more to get out if I try to head for the coast in either direction. I'm always a little surprised when I arrive from somewhere else on a bus, because we cross the city limits and I think, "Oh, we're back," and then it actually takes another fifteen or twenty or thirty minutes (depending on the route) to actually reach the city center. And yet, it's very concentrated. It's divided up into official neighborhoods with their own names and and markets and parish churches and mairies*, but the heart and the life of the city are very much in the city centre, along the two main streets stretching away from the Place de la Liberté and in the surrounding neighborhoods. Running into people you know, and into the same people over and over again (including our students, some of whom don't even live in Brest full-time), is incredibly common. Finding out that people you met in different settings already know each other from somewhere else or discovering half a dozen mutual acquaintances with someone you've never spoken to before is also common. (Being an expat no doubt exacerbates the frequency of this phenomenon, but I assure you it also happens with locals!) When one of the other assistants left her camera behind at a bar a few weeks ago, it was returned to her by the bouncer in a chance encounter at the Sunday market the very next day. So we laugh about how small Brest is, when in fact, it's actually not that small, objectively speaking.

Brest is, for a port city and for any city that tends to feel so much smaller than it is, very cultured. I don't mean that in a snobby way, just that it doesn't seem big enough to support a thriving arts scene while also being built primarily on commerce and industry and the military. But it has, to begin, a surprising number of cinemas, playing French films and American films (sometimes dubbed, sometimes just subtitled) and other foreign films, lowbrow comedies and award-winning dramas and documentaries. Several of them play operas and ballets as well as traditional films, and there are film festivals, including the big short film festival I went to last fall. At least one of the cinemas doubles as a theatre, and I don't know much about the theatre scene here but at least there is one. There are also several local choirs, and probably some instrumental ensembles, too. There are concerts--big well, publicized acts and also smaller performances by local and/or lesser known groups that take place in various bars on practically a nightly basis. I've already mentioned the extensive library system (which is vastly superior to the public libraries where I come from, and I often compare Brest to the Allentown/Bethlehem area), which is excellent and well-used. Bulletin boards in the libraries advertise assorted opportunities for music lessons and language classes. All of this is, again, nothing out of the ordinary, but more than I might have expected for a city this size and especially a city that doesn't even feel as big as it is sometimes.

Sports, especially football/soccer and rugby and assorted water sports (obviously), are also big, and I can see the lights of the football stadium from my room at night. And of course, there are lots and lots of bars and cafés. All kinds of bars and cafés. Also a couple of crummy nightclubs, and at least one nightclub I rather like.

Brest has several suburbs, which I'm just now beginning to really explore. I've been to Guipavas, which is to the northeast and is the one closest to where I live, several times, but to the really suburby area between its downtown and Brest, never to the center of the town yet. I've skirted Le Relecq-Kerhuon (just east of Brest) along the coast, but haven't really seen its center yet, either. I have been to Plougastel-Daoulas (southeast of Brest, on the next peninsula down) a few times; it's the home of the Musée de la fraise et de la patrimoine (the Strawberry and Patrimony Museum), which was more interesting than it sounds. The Plougastel peninsula is well-known for its strawberries, and the museum included the history of strawberry production in the area but was also about its customs and material culture and fishing/maritime traditions, etc. And just last week I spent a few hours in the area of Bohars, which is north of Brest and is the home of a sixteenth century chapel and fountain, several still-functioning watermills, and my personal favorite [thing ever], the remains of a MEDIEVAL MOTTE. I'm not sure it had ever even occurred to me that there were surviving mottes in France, but there ARE, and I've been half an hour away from one for the last six months without even knowing it!

There are beaches just outside of Brest in either direction.

As far as Things To See In Brest, there's not that much. I think that's partly because it was bombed and partly just because its importance has always been as a port city, and there just isn't much here for the tourist industry.** There is Oceanopolis, a huge aquarium near the port that I haven't yet been to. Then there's the castle, located right where the river flows into the harbor, which mostly survived the war and has parts from pretty much all periods of Brest's history dating back to the Roman Empire. It's now a national museum about naval and maritime history. Around the castle and extending along harbor in both directions, as well as some distance up the river, are some surviving seventeenth and eighteenth century fortification walls. (At least I think they're surviving, and not rebuilt.) Just across the river from the castle is the Tour Tanguy, a three or four story round tower, which is medieval and older than most of the remaining parts of the castle. Once a prison, it's now a museum about the history of Brest, mostly full of dioramas depicting the city at various times. It's actually pretty neat if you're into that kind of thing (which I admit I am).

The main street leading down to the castle is the pedestrians-only Rue de Siam, which is lined with expensive shops and has a cluster of bars and restaurants at its base, near the harbor. It connects to the other main street, Rue Jean Jaurès, at the Place de la Liberté, which is for all intents and purposes the center of Brest. It's a big plaza, mostly below street level, running downhill from the mairie. There's a very modern-style fountain just in front of the mairie, and futher down the plaza goes under an overpass, beyond which is another big phallic monument to various war dead, with small gardens on either side.

Brest has many bridges. My favorite is the Pont d'Iroise, which crosses the eastern end of the harbor from the outskirts of Brest/Le Relecq-Kerhuon to Plougastel. The main one across the river, and the one on most postcards, is the Pont de Recouvrance, which I think is the kind that raises up to allow ships to pass under it. (Not a drawbridge that splits in the middle, but the kind where the whole thing moves up.) It goes from the end of the Rue de Siam to somewhere just uphill from the Tour Tanguy. Further north but still pretty much in the city centre is the Pont de l'Harteloire, which is absurdly long, less because the river gets really wide and more because the bridge itself is really high up and has to start pretty far back on the bluffs. I think I've mentioned the dramatic landscape around Brest before. Steep hills everywhere, and basically a cliff from the main city to the port. There are lots of stairs in Brest, and lots of places where the front entrances to buildings are on a different level than the back or the side entrances.

I've mentioned the American Monument, which is along the fortification walls overlooking the Port de Commerce. It and the castle, which is nearby, are surrounded by little gardens and walking paths. There are some other parks in the city, too, including a big one along the banks of the river with assorted walking paths and little footbridges. There's also one, the Jardin des Explorateurs, next to the walls opposite the castle. There's a raised walkway along part of the wall and then a formal garden tucked behind it. It's a really nice place to sit (I wrote postcards there once during the February holiday), or to stand on the wall looking out to sea.

Near the Jardin des Explorateurs is the Maison de le Fontaine, which I've mentioned before, and an eighteenth century church. A little bit north of there, close to the river, is the little Rue St. Malo, home to the one and only section of an old street to have survived the bombings. It's a short section, right at the river end of the street, but it's there. I went to find it two weekends ago. There are about ten or twelve stone houses in varying states of decay, all joined in a row and mostly without roofs or floors. (Some of them have been modified to hold, for example, restrooms and an office for the organization devoted to protecting what's left of the historic section of the street.) Most of them would have had two or three stories in their day. They face the high wall of what was once a convent across a narrow cobblestone street. There's a little fountain set into the wall that's still bubbling water. One of the bigger houses near the middle of the row has been turned into an enclosed garden, and inside it and some of the others that you can still peek into (some of them are locked tight and hung with signs proclaiming them dangerous to enter) you can still see the fireplaces and vestiges of steps or doorways. When I was there, on a drizzly weekend afternoon, it was utterly deserted except for me, and aside from being awesome, it was quiet and haunting. It's kind of a sad place, because it really is falling to pieces practically before your eyes, but it's also really amazing to find this secret little piece of the old city tucked away. I can just imagine it in 1944, a perfect little seventeenth and eighteenth century street, just standing there defiantly in the midst of destruction and chaos. It kind of surprises me that it is one of Brest's best-kept secrets, because it seems like it could be such a symbol of resilience.



* I actually can't think of how best to translate this right now. It basically means a town hall, but as I just said, there's more than one. There's the central town hall for the city, and then there are several others that serve specific parts of the city. I don't know what to call that in English. Somebody help me out.
** On a related note, I have absolutely no idea what to do about bringing my friends souvenirs... because there are none in the conventional sense.

Things That Suck About Brest

The other kind of gloomy thing about Brest is that it's just not a very nice city in a lot of ways.

For the most part, people are nice and friendly and generally helpful. Which is awesome, and kind of makes some of the rest of it hard for me to understand.

First of all, as if Brest is not little enough to look at already, people do not seem very interested in keeping it as pretty as possible. I've already mentioned that graffiti is everywhere and on everything. Walls, fences, sidewalks, mailboxes, utility poles, street signs--nothing is immune. And as far as I can tell, it rarely or never gets cleaned up or painted over. It's almost like someone once gave the entire teenage population free rein for the night and then the next day the city just shrugged and went on about its business.

But the vandalism doesn't stop there: Windows are frequently broken (one at the front of the laundromat I go to has had big spiderweb cracks since before Christmas and looks like it was kicked), and I have on several occasions waited at bus shelters that had been literally smashed to bits. I've never seen any of this happening, but somebody's doing it, and it's not just a once-in-a-while problem.

Second of all, Brest is gross. All big cities are dirty to some extent, but some make more of an effort to clean up than others. Here, the sidewalks are carpeted in cigarette butts and crushed cigarette packs and empty candy and snack wrappers. Also with dog poop, although that seems to be France in general and not specifically Brest. People just don't seem to feel the need to clean up after their pets. Then again, men openly peeing in public is also not seen as a social problem, so it's hard to expect that dog poop would be.

Broken bottles and squashed beer cans also abound, which brings us to the next point (and may also be related to all the vandalism): There is so much alcohol.

There are some folks in America right now rolling their eyes and saying, "Yeah, it's Europe." But you don't understand. Most of continental Europe, despite its casualness about alcohol, has a very different attitude towards drinking from that found in Anglophone countries. It's geared more towards enjoyment (of the drink, that is, not the drunkenness) than abuse. That's not to say that people from anywhere alcohol is consumed won't go on a binge now and then, just that that's not necessarily alcohol's only or primary social function. My German/Austrian/Belgian/Spanish/Italian/whatever else friends all certainly know how to party when called upon, but Americans and Brits and Irish and Australians are more likely to habitually drink for the drinking rather than for the drinks, if you get what I mean. There's more of an attitude that drinking is a means to an end, whereas in continental Europe that's sometimes true but not inherently. Have a beer at eleven a.m. is acceptable because there's no assumption that one drink will lead to another, and therefore no assumption that day-drinking indicates a problem.

Brittany, however, forms a crossroads where the idea of drinking to get drunk (a lot, and often) meets the very French/European idea of having alcohol be incredibly cheap and prevalent to the point of ubiquity. It's asking for trouble. It's like American college kids with Keystone, only here the alcohol is better and stronger and no one cares if you have an ID.

I think I've described Brest before as "a city with a drinking problem"; it's true, and I don't think it's just Brest, I think it's the whole region.

So drunk people are a common sight. Drunk men in particular: Brest obviously has many sailors, and seems to have a higher than normal concentration of young men in general, I suppose because of the higher education options available here and what's left of the industrial jobs. (Or maybe the women just don't go out as much or travel in packs as often, and my perception is not totally in sync with reality.)

Also, the drunks in Brest do not merely haunt dark alleys and deserted midnight streets. They can be found anywhere at any hour of the day or night. I have more than once encountered drunk guys (or crazy guys, or both) hanging around bus stops in the middle of the afternoon.

My older students answer every "What did you do over the holiday?" type question with "drink" or "go out" or "make a party". They think it's okay to drive drunk.

Bar fights happen. Soccer brawls happen. I've seen at least two big fights on the street here, one of which we were actually present at, right outside a bar as it was closing. It was a few months ago now, but I remember lots of shouting and big plastic traffic barriers being thrown around and the bartender running outside to intervene, and apparently somebody got stabby with a broken bottle, although I somehow missed that part.

On New Year's Eve, while I was waiting at the bus stop with Jimena and Neala on our way downtown, a car pulled up beside us and someone inside chucked a lit firecracker at us--yes, AT us--before driving off again. It rolled off to the side, and I realized what it was and turned around and kind of shooed the other two a few steps away before it went off, and nobody got hurt. But what the hell.*

It's not often that I've actually felt unsafe walking around Brest, even by myself and even at night. But there are places I avoid, and especially avoid loitering. (I've gotten unwanted attention from men in the Place de la Liberté on two occasions, one of which was before it even got dark.) And it's also not often that I see other women walking around by themselves after dark. In fact, I don't even see women walking in groups without any men nearly as often as I see the opposite. Maybe that's just a French thing because of the gendered culture and maybe it's a Brest-specific thing because of the seemingly skewed sex ratio, I don't know, but it is what it is.

In any case, one last thing is the construction. Maybe this is nitpicky, because it doesn't actually say anything about the atmosphere in Brest, but it's had a big impact on my time here nonetheless. Brest is filled with construction work. They are putting in a new tram line across the city (to be operational more or less right after I leave), and so half the main streets have been blocked off and torn up and full of gravel and cement and barriers and construction vehicles at any given time since before I arrived. It's ugly and noisy and dusty and, quite frankly, a safety hazard a lot of the time. I'm amazed I haven't seen anyone fall into a hole yet. The whole future tram line is one giant death trap.

In addition to the tram, there are also always minor construction projects happening all over the place, with holes in the middle of streets or sidewalks torn up and barricaded, or blocked by scaffolding. Obviously, that could be anywhere, not just Brest, but it doesn't exactly earn Brest any extra attractiveness or liveability points. Meanwhile, much of the port area is rundown or abandoned or totally demolished, and also littered with construction equipment. It looks ugly even from above, and seriously sketchy when you're walking through it.

So that's where I live. (I swear I'm safe here, Mom.) I do have to say I'm somewhat glad to have grown up where I did instead of in the suburbs or some cute little town, because despite everything I just said, I don't dislike Brest and its rougher side doesn't really faze me. So now that I've spent this entire post more or less hating on Brest for no real reason, I promise a more positive update next.


* I know a few people who got egged in Cork, which is definitely mean, but at least the risk of serious injury is pretty minimal compared to freaking explosives.

Strategically Important Port City

I wrote the first take on this a few days ago, and it got swallowed up
by a computer malfunction. (You're probably seeing a pattern by now.
My computer actually doesn't crash as often as it might seem, but when
it does, it pretty much always takes something unsaved down with it.)
Take two.

I've written before about how for me, and I think for many, if not
most, Americans, one of the big things about Europe is the constant
proximity to the past.

I've actually had to try to explain to students before that just
because American history is shorter doesn't mean it's somehow
inherently less interesting, but that's beside the point.*

The point is, the depth of history here is something it's actually
possible to lose sight of in Brest. I'm always thinking about how
almost everything around me is so very recent, but I don't always
really THINK about it. If that makes sense. What I'm trying to say is
that if I'm not actively thinking about it, I don't notice. It doesn't
strike me as odd. I walk downtown to marvel at the castle, the old
fortification walls, the Maison de la Fontaine, the eighteenth-century
church across the river, but it doesn't always register that those
things should not seem so unique and exciting at this point in my
stay. A glimpse of old stone walls or crooked doorframes should not be
enough to draw me out of my path, but it is. And I suppose, coming
from where I do, that's not that surprising, but now that I live in
France, it is. There should be more than a handful of
things-that-might-be-old scattered throughout this city. I should be
surrounded by them. Buildings older than my entire country should be
commonplace.

So anytime I leave Brest, I'm suddenly reminded of what everywhere
else in France looks like. And I become that awkward girl with the
camera taking dozens of pictures of everything in sight, even things
that must be totally mundane to people who live there, because they're
still super exciting to me.

When you tell people outside of Brest that you live in Brest, they
become sympathetic, even pitying. "Oh, well," they say apologetically.
"It was destroyed in the war, you know."

Yes, we know. It's the first thing most of us learned about Brest. It
had the crap bombed out of it--something like 80% of the city was
flattened. Tons of civilians died, and most of the rest were
presumably made homeless. It was the Allies that did it.

And that's why we don't have nice things.

And that brings me to another place where I think being American skews
my perspective.

With the notable exception of Hawaii, the United States has for the
most part been comfortably far removed from modern war. We ship our
soldiers elsewhere to do the fighting. Nowadays, most of the country
goes about its daily business while barely noticing what's happening
in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it was different in the World Wars; I
don't believe things were so easy on the homefront then. But it also
wasn't Europe. We have landscapes dotted with battlefields, and we
have our fair share of historic monuments that no longer stand because
they were burned or otherwise destroyed by war--but these things
happened many, many years ago, long out of living memory.
Twentieth-century wars happened far away, too far away to pose an
immediate threat to Americans at home, and life in the U.S. could
return to normal relatively quickly after the treaties were signed. We
are not surrounded by physical reminders, and I think we do not always
realize that other places were not so lucky.

Here? It's inescapable. I live now in a city that is not only marked
by war, but totally altered. Hardly anything is left from before
besides those things I've mentioned. One of the few pre-WWII houses
still standing is near my neighborhood, and is marked by a plaque
claiming it as the home of a member of the French Resistance. The
"American Monument" overlooking the port, a memorial to the American
and French forces of WWI, bears a plaque explaining that it is a
reproduction of the original monument destroyed in the Battle for
Brest in WWII. Meanwhile, I walk every day down streets that less than
seventy years ago were nothing but rubble and blood. Streets where at
least one of my great-uncles once walked in uniform and robbed the
corpse of a dead German soldier or two.

Even outside of Brest, it's inescapable. The coast, to the west and
the south, is lined with fortifications protecting the harbor. Some of
them date to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries and were later
altered and used by the Nazis. But these are outnumbered by the
crumbling remains of twentieth century bunkers, piles of broken
concrete and twisted metal and man-made burrows now littered with
empty bottles and covered in graffiti. They are everywhere, and they
are unmistakable. They are as unavoidable and as ugly as war itself.

It's very sad, to see the landscape marred like this and to think
about why. And it's very strange to me, having never had to think
about what it must be like to live always in the shadow of WWII. It's
easy to see why it's still such a sensitive subject for so many in
Europe. Even if you were to ignore the changes in government policies
and social attitudes that still linger today, the physical traces of
war are still everywhere. "Out of sight, out of mind" is something of
a luxury, if you think about it.

Brest doesn't look damaged today. That much is out of sight. It just
looks new. But when you remember WHY it's new--then it becomes tragic.

* I am of course referring here just to the history of Europeans in
America, i.e. written history.

Whoa, March?!

I'm still behind on blogging, but I'm no longer so far behind that I feel like I can't keep up with my life, so that's nice. I'm also back at work, and this has been a pretty easy week so far. It's really hard to believe I have just a few weeks left before my contract is up. One thing about the French school calendar is that all the breaks really make the time fly.

The biggest development this week is that I FINALLY have a working bank card again, after an entire month and one final setback in which it turned out my card was still blocked from the ATM incident in
Quimper and I had to go to the bank and say "My card doesn't work and I don't understand why because it's brand new" and wait for the woman there for figure out the problem and give me a lecture while she fixed
it.

In other news, we've had some gorgeous weather lately. Yesterday was a bit like the foggy, gloomy last week of vacation, but Wednesday was like summer. In February. It was amazing. I walked around without a
jacket, and my friends and I had an afternoon drink outside on the terrace of a café near the castle. It's funny how this strangely nonwintery winter has kept me from even realizing how much I missed spring!

Also on Wednesday, I finally spent some quality time with that keyboard in the music library. It was a little terrible, since I hadn't touched a piano in months and have never exactly been a virtuoso, but it felt so good. I've been missing music a lot for the last couple of years, especially since I left college, and I'm looking
forward to getting back in the game once I'm settled somewhere else for a while. (I actually briefly looked into the possibility of joining a choir in Brest, but by the time I did so it was a little late in the year.)

On that note, most of my spare energy in the last week or so has been taken up with job hunting. I've found at least two and possibly three positions that I'm applying for for now, but they're all just for the summer. I'm still not sure what's going to happen in after August even if one of these works out, but we'll see. I do know that at this point, it looks like it's likely to be back in the U.S. I have mixed feelings about that, but the EU does not seem to have terribly mixed feelings about [not] hiring Americans for not-super-skilled jobs.

In any case, I just want to take a moment to give a shout-out to the internet. I can't imagine living abroad without it. (I can't imagine a lot of things without it, but that's the magic of the moment.) Thanks to email and instant messaging, I correspond not just with my family and close friends back home, but with a lifetime's worth of friends and acquaintances all over the world, including some in developing countries. I sometimes lament my failure to send more letters and postcards, but the truth is I'm just as in touch with friends via email. (Or at least, I could be. I also lament my failure to send emails with any regularity...) Facebook lets me stay at least nominally in touch with people I'd have lost contact with years ago even without leaving the country if it weren't for Facebook--I'm better connected to my friends there than I would be being pen pals
the old-fashioned way. Meanwhile, I call each of my parents about once a week, give or take, and my sister only slightly less often. And that's because I'm busy; if I want to talk to them more often, there's absolutely nothing stopping me, because do you know how much those calls cost? $0.01 per minute if I use Google Voice. Something like $0.02 or $0.03 per minute if I use Skype. (Compare to upwards of a dollar a minute on either my French phone or my international phone.) And of course, if we plan ahead, we can voice or even video chat using either of those mediums completely for free. It's an amazing world we live in.

Not that we can't still imagine more amazing worlds: My friends and I watched Midnight In Paris the other night (which means I've now seen all of about three of this year's Oscar nominees), and it's now
officially one of my favorite films.

It does make walking around Brest at night even more sad by comparison, though.

Living in Brittany

Background: France is divided into a bunch of administrative regions, of which Brittany (Bretagne in French) is one*. Each region is subdivided into departments. Brittany has four departments: Ille-et-Vilaine in the east, Côtes d'Armor in the north, Morbihan in the south, and Finistère, where Brest is located, in the west. (And let's not even get into the various unofficial cultural regions, which I'm only beginning to figure out. Just look how confusing it is: MAP.)

The Breton name for Finistère is Penn-ar-Bed, which means "the end of the earth". I don't know for sure, but that seems like a legitimate origin for the French name, too; in modern French the translation would be something like "Fin de la Terre", which is pretty similar. It actually sounds like it might even be a Frenchification** of the Latin.

In any case, in theory, Finistère (along with the western part of Côtes d'Armor) is where one is most likely to hear Breton spoken. I suppose it's a similar phenomenon to that in Ireland; the original Celtic language survived mainly in the westernmost regions because they were the ones furthest from the encroaching influence of what was to become the dominant language. That said, Breton is an endangered language, spoken by only a fraction of the population, most of whom are old. (The immersion and bilingual schools scattered throughout Brittany are not funded by the state, because French historically does not play well with other languages, and so they only reach a tiny percentage of children.) So in practice, I have never actually heard it used. I'm sure that's partly because I live in the city, where it's less likely than in rural areas, but I've never encountered it in my short forays into smaller towns, either. The exceptions, of course, are Breton words that have been adopted into French (names of traditional foods being the most obvious example) and Breton words used in the names of businesses and products. Place names are also commonly Breton, or at least Frenchified Breton, which makes them exceptionally difficult for me to figure out how to pronounce.

Sometimes in classes where I'm lucky enough to have the class roster in front of me, I study it while I'm waiting for students to complete some individual or group task without my interference. Sometimes I'm just trying to figure out who's who, but other times I'm studying the names themselves and trying to guess which are French and which are Breton. Classically French names are common: All of the Marions and Laurines and Elodies, the Valentins and Lucs and Cléments, leave no doubt. And sometimes the Breton names--Riwan, Aziliz, Killian, Nolwenn--are just as obvious. Others I'm less sure about. They sound like they could go either way. Last names can be especially difficult, but there are plenty of first names I still can't identify.

Then I start to wonder about the students with the Breton names. Do their siblings also have Breton names? Do their parents speak Breton, or did they just like the name? Do they themselves speak Breton? It's not likely. But... are they among those who still identify as Breton more than, or even instead of, French? That's more common than you might think. The people of Brittany are extremely proud of their heritage and their traditions (the Breton flag is everywhere), but more than that, there are people who claim Brittany is not France and aren't speaking figuratively or trying to make a point. "I've never been to France," they'll say. The "BZH LIBRE" graffiti I sometimes see would even suggest there is still a movement (how big, and how politically serious, I wouldn't know) for Breton independence.

When I think about it, that makes it seem a little strange that I don't have more of a sense of there being a culture clash here. The fact that I don't know which names are Breton and which are French, that I don't think twice about Brittany-specific targeted advertising, that a lack of bilingual signage strikes me as odd... it's just funny how normal things like that seem. I've spent very little time outside of Brittany, comparatively, and it occurs to me now that I don't really know what life in the rest of France is like. The differences must be so much more than drinking wine instead of cider and beer and eating white-flour crêpes instead of buckwheat. It must be more, even, then being away from the megaliths and the pervasiveness of fishing and sailing culture. They say, for example, that Brittany is by far the most Catholic part of France, and while I haven't seen much evidence that people are especially religious today, there are churches and abbeys and religious sculptures around every bend. Everything is named after St. Anne and St. Yves. Meanwhile, the region is full of festivals, festivals of all kinds, but especially ones celebrating traditional music and dance and storytelling, not to mention maritime traditions. Some of my students have told me they play traditional instruments, and often some of the street musicians at the Sunday market are playing Breton music. The market itself is a smorgasbord of local foods I take for granted that I imagine my friends elsewhere in France may have never seen. The libraries and bookstores have huge sections on Breton tales and proverbs and history. Every other car I see has a triskell sticker or one of a little cartoon person in Breton dress. Women carry shopping bags and men wear scarves that have the Breton flag on them--and here I thought putting your flag on everything was an American thing. Most people may not speak Breton, but it's printed everywhere.

I realize that no country's culture is uniform and that what it means to be French varies from region to region elsewhere. There are probably traditions everywhere that are region-specific. (They say the middle of the country, away from the influence of bordering nations, is the most "French".) But here, where some people still insist they are not French at all, where most of the population was bilingual until fifty years ago and many still wore traditional costumes up until WWII, there's truly a dual culture. Brittany remained very distinct from the rest of France until astonishingly recently, and it still shows. It shows in ways I think I must not even realize, since I have nothing to which to compare what I see here. And that's just really interesting to me.

I wonder what other ways my experience of France hasn't been typical...

* Not to be confused with the cultural region of Brittany or the historical duchy of Brittany, of which the modern administrative region only contains about 80%.
** That's a real word, I swear.

The Saga of the Wallet, Continued

So, I wrote about how my wallet got stolen, and about the trauma I went through over the next couple of days trying to get everything sorted out, and about how my wallet was eventually returned to me, sans cash but otherwise intact.

Last Tuesday, I picked up my new bank card (for which I was charged a five euro replacement fee, by the way), and thought that was more or less the end of the saga, other than figuring out when and how to get my new American cards, which are currently in my parents' possession.

Then last Wednesday, I took a day trip to Quimper to visit the museums there. The first thing I did upon getting off the bus was walk across the street to an ATM to get some cash.

CODE INCORRECT. (Or whatever it says when that happens.)

I looked at it for a minute in astonishment. I was pretty darn sure I hadn't screwed it up. I tried again.

CODE INCORRECT.

At that point I started to panic, realizing that my new card must also have a new PIN, even though no one at the bank had bothered to mention this to me. I hit "cancel" and got the card back. For a second I freaked out about the fact that I was no an hour from home with no access to money, before I remembered the bus home costs three euros and I definitely had at least that much on me.

Then I thought, "Wait a second, this is ridiculous." I put the card back in the machine and tried again.

I think I was hoping that the three strikes and out rule did not apply if you started over entirely, but obviously modern technology is too smart for that, and, predictably, the machine ate my card.

At that point I was seriously pissed off. I went inside the bank (which fortunately was a branch of the one that holds my account). I explained to the woman that the machine outside had taken my card, which was confusing to me because I had thought I was using the correct code. "That's strange," she said. No kidding. I gave her my passport so she could look up my account, and then explained that I had just gotten a replacement card, but that since no one had said anything to me about a new code, I had assumed it was still the same. (I left out the part about how they had specifically asked me the week before about whether the code had been lost along with the card, a question whose purpose I do not understand if they were going to change the code regardless of the answer.) She then explained that the new code would have been sent to me by mail, at which point I must have looked horrorstruck, because she said something like, "Does that not sound familiar?" I explained that I live at the school where I work and it's closed for the holiday. No mail. I think I then tried to reiterate the fact that NOBODY FREAKING TOLD ME I was going to have a new code in the first place.

She said she would go try to get my card out of the ATM, and then she could withdraw some cash for me if I wanted.

"There's no other way to get the code?"

"No. It can only be sent to your home address. It's for your security."

Seriously? I'm standing right in front of you in person, passport in hand (a passport which contains not just one, but two photos of me, I might add). What's more secure than that? Send me back to my own branch if you must, but surely that would at least be enough for them? I even understand if bank employees aren't allowed to access PINs, but the original letter was generated somehow and handled by some person, so there's got to be a way to print a new one and hand it to me.

Needless to say, that little discovery blighted my whole day. But more than that, I had plans for my vacation: At the very least, I was going to spend a couple more days in Paris, I was going to check out Saint Malo, and, most importantly, I was going to spend four days in Barcelona with my friends. I had put off buying tickets until I had my trip to Senegal sorted out, and then until I got my new bank card, but I had intended to go home from Quimper that very day and book my trains and flights and hostel. But try as I might, I couldn't think of any way to do any of that without using my bank card at all. Even if I went back to the bank and withdraw a huge sum of cash, that would still be all I had. If something happened to it, or I ran out, in a place where my bank doesn't exist, I'd be screwed. If I somehow found myself in a situation where I couldn't use cash, I'd be screwed. There is no way to use a French bank card without the code (except online, which would get me my plane tickets and maybe my hostel, if I was lucky--some hostels prefer cash--but nothing else). And of course, I didn't even have my American cards, which are a pain to use anyway, to back me up, so I couldn't even pay for my whole trip with a credit card to be paid off when I got back.

So, wallet thief, I hope that twelve euros + however much Czech kroner was really worth it, because you ruined the next three weeks of my life. I may not get another chance to go to Barcelona, which we'd been planning since last fall, and I certainly won't get another chance to go with these people.

It's not really so bad, in the end. I think I needed some time at home to work on stuff like powering through my TESOL course and looking for jobs for the summer and next year. I'm getting some reading done. I'm working on blog posts. I'm getting some hiking in (though transportation continues to be an issue), because what better time to explore my immediate surroundings than when I'm stuck here anyway, especially since I've so far proved to be insufficiently motivated to go out and do such things during my free time when I'm not on vacation. And of course, I'm saving a lot of money; there's nothing better than lack of easy access to money to keep one from spending it. But it still sucks, because the things I WOULD have done were things I won't have time to do otherwise. I'm not looking forward to hearing about what I missed in Barcelona, and I'm not looking forward to the inevitable questions about what I did during the holidays when I go back to work. (Some of the teachers already knew about Barcelona, which will make for especially awkward conversations.) I'm trying to be as productive as possible so I can feel like the time off wasn't wasted, but I'm not sure how well that's going to work for someone like me.

Especially since there are now only a little over two months left before this is over...

Holiday Travels, Part 9: The Empire Of The Dead

"Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose." – Steve Jobs


The entrance to the Paris Catacombs is right next to a busy intersection in the heart of the Montparnasse neighborhood. It's nothing, really--a sort of shack next to a small garden. Signs listing the entrance fees (in English as well as French) also warn of the number of steps to be climbed, and that the catacombs are not a place for children or the overly sensitive.

The lines are long, and people are ushered in in groups, with long pauses between. (As a nominal preservation measure, there are strict limits on the number of people allowed inside the catacombs at any one time.) When you finally enter the shack, signs on the wall describe the geology underlying Paris, and show you a diagram of the location of the catacombs relative to various other layers. There is a ticket booth at which to pay the entrance fee and retrieve a pamphlet (in an assortment of languages). Just to the right, so close to the counter it seems ridiculous to have a second employee checking tickets, is a narrow, winding staircase that leads down, down, down into the depths. The noise of the city vanishes almost at once. When you reach the bottom, you are deeper inside the earth than even the Métro.

The first spaces are relatively open and brightly lit, hung with photographs and diagrams and various texts describing the history of the catacombs. They were dug first as quarries, and were the source of the stones used to build some of the most famous buildings in Paris. Later they were hideouts, for outlaws and refugees alike. In the late eighteenth century, a section of them was modified and consecrated and became the final resting place of hundreds of thousands of dead Parisians, some of them already centuries old, who were systematically exhumed from various cemeteries and churchyards over the course of the next hundred years.

You must walk through some distance of empty catacombs before reaching the crypt. They are narrow limestone tunnels, dark and damp. The walls are rough, carved or painted or hung with small plaques here and there, left from the quarry and construction days or commemorating something about them. The floors are uneven, but in places without gravel they are worn smooth. Today the passages are dimly lit with small bulbs every few meters, which provide enough light to see the black stripe painted down the middle of the ceiling, left from the days of candlelit tourism when visitors needed some way to make sure they were on the right path. Nowadays the path is unmistakable--locked iron gates stand in the way of any possible wrong turn. They detract from the feel of the place a bit, but if you're careful and can manage to be alone in a stretch of tunnel for a moment, you can feel the silence and isolation almost as surely as if you really were alone--remarkable when you remember that just meters above your head, cars are whizzing down a street lined with high-rises and crowds of pedestrians.

There are a few interesting sights along the route. The marks of quarrying tools. A deep well, far below the path. Some ornate 3D carvings, reminiscent of sand castles, worked by a prisoner, that seem completely surreal and out of place. But the highlight of the visit is the ossuary. Past the silent human guards and several signs warning visitors to be respectful (this section of the catacombs is not merely a repository; it is hallowed ground), a monumental doorway guards the entrance to the crypt, and its inscription reads: "Stop! It is here the empire of the dead."

Before I go any further, a quick tangent is necessary. I remember writing something while I was in Ireland about how—as ridiculous as it sounded and as pompous and douchebaggy as it made me feel—I feared I might actually be getting bored of castles. Not, of course, that I think anyone could ever actually be bored of castles, because some things never get old (so to speak), just that they didn't seem to have quite as much impact as they did at first. One of the pitfalls of travel is that sometimes, the more impressive things one sees, the more it takes to seem impressive. I have seen a lot of amazing and beautiful things, and I haven't even come close to ceasing to appreciate them, but they don't always strike quite as hard as they used to. The tenth castle, the twentieth medieval church, just can't make a heart race quite as easily as the first unless there's something else that's special about it--a special personal connection, perhaps. It's sad, but it's true. I still love seeing new things, and I still marvel at beauty and history, but I'm a little jaded, all the same.

I told you all of that not to make myself sound like an asshole (although I'm aware that that's a side effect), but in order to tell you this and have it carry the appropriate weight: When I stepped through the doorway into the ossuary, what I saw stopped me in my tracks. I mean actually. There was a pause to allow my eyes to adjust, and as I realized what I was looking at, I changed at once from paused to simply frozen.

Perhaps I should also point out here that I am not squeamish about bones (quite the opposite, in fact), nor are they exotic to me. Not only have I seen plenty of them in exhibit contexts, I've handled them and studied them in excavation and laboratory contexts. In fact, if and when I go back to school for my Master's in archaeology, there is a pretty good chance that I may decide to specialize in the study of human remains. So it wasn't just the presence of the bones, or the fact of being in a burial place, that did it. It was something else.

I think it was the scale. Imagine several million people all in one place. More than in all but the biggest U.S. cities. Now imagine that all you have of them are their bones, stacked neatly along either side of a narrow path in piles taller than a man and several yards deep, stretching farther than the eye can see away into the darkness.

I'd heard the numbers--roughly this many people, in a space covering roughly six or seven city blocks--but I was completely unprepared for the sight of that many bones. It defies imagination, let alone comprehension.

But you do imagine. I did, at least. Every single one of those bones once belonged to a person, to someone who walked and talked and worked and laughed. Someone who, at some point in the past, had a home, and a family. Someone who ate, and cried, and loved and was loved by someone. Now all of them are anonymous, lying in pieces and stacked up with their neighbors like firewood somewhere in the bowels of one of the world's greatest cities.

Most of the bones that are visible are long bones and skulls. Sometimes ribs, here and there. The lack of pelvises puzzled me a bit, but everything else I assume has fallen down among the cracks or is lying in heaps somewhere out of sight behind the walls of arms and legs, if it hasn't already rotted away. Everything is very neat*, but no one is intact. It would be impossible ever to try to match up what pieces go together.

Sometimes they are arranged into shapes. A bulging column is set apart from the stacks lining the walls. The stacks are decorated with a cross made of tibiae here, a heart-shaped ring of skulls there.

And they just go on and on. If the catacombs seemed endless before you reached the ossuary, that's nothing compared to being with the bones. You can only see a short distance at a time, between the dim lights and the twists and turns of the passages, and always the space that you can see is entirely lined with bones, sometimes with more piles of bones stacked up in columns in the middle of wider areas. It's cold and damp and dark, and silent except for the voices and muffled footsteps of fellow tourists, and the water dripping from above. You keep moving forward, and the stacks of bones keep extending out of sight, and you pass a gate and see more bones beyond it, and you round a corner and the stacks of bones continue ahead of you just as they did behind. Ad infinitum. You're surrounded, constantly. Everywhere, there are more skulls staring at you. You have no choice but to look death in the face. You have nowhere to go but past more former people. You have no idea when it's going to end. You don't know how far you've walked. You forget how long you've been walking. Time is irrelevant here.

Some people apparently think it's scary. Adults whisper, and even college-age men speak in hushed tones. Girls of ten or twelve complain loudly and theatrically about being creeped out. Teenagers laugh and joke--disrespect, or just discomfort?

Those of us walking alone snap pictures, many more pictures than people traveling in groups, even though groups are more likely to have a flashlight or two to aid the process. Partly it's the same morbid curiosity that drew us there in the first place, but also, even the underworld is smaller through a camera lens.

And it is the underworld literally as well as figuratively--above, the City of Light bustles with life, and in the catacombs, the people who were once that life themselves languish in the dark and the stillness.

Counterpoint. Yin and yang. The circle of life.

An article about the catacombs by Ted Gup that appeared in Smithsonian magazine years ago (I believe it was sometime in the late '90s, I found it when sorting through stacks of old magazines before my parents moved last summer) ends with this paragraph: "There is a strange irony about the catacombs. The stones that were removed from the early quarries went to make the great buildings of Paris—the Louvre and Notre Dame... But those who built and created the majesty of modern Paris—generations of architects, laborers, shopkeepers, soldiers and peasants—were destined to lose their individual identities, reduced to a kind of human landfill. They would occupy the same dark cavities from which the stones of Paris had been removed. They and the stones had traded places... The city of Paris, City of Light, city of gourmands and lovers, of Notre Dame and the Louvre—this is their legacy and the grand monument that is their due."

I didn't think it was scary. Eerie, perhaps. Intense. Powerful. But not frightening.

I did find it profoundly sad--and also weirdly inspirational. Someday, sooner or later, we will all be no more than they, and we may be just as anonymous, just as forgotten. Who was it who called death the great equalizer? It's true. Not just because we all come to the same thing, but because it becomes very clear in a place like Paris's catacombs that we are all just parts of the same whole. There is no one thing that everyone in the catacombs has in common except for where they ended up--and the fact that they no longer have any other identity. But together, they become the past, the fabric of a city. They are us, or we are them, or it doesn't matter, in the end, who any of us is. It matters what we do, all of us together, to lead to the next phase of history, and the next. It matters what we contribute to what will be left behind when everyone living now is nameless and faceless.

There is no greater motivator than mortality.

And mortality is inescapable in the catacombs. If the bones themselves are not reminder enough, or if you possess either the ability to block them out or the inability to think of them as people, there are also written reminders. Before each new section of stacked remains is a sign bearing the name of their original burial place and the date that they were moved to the catacombs. Also, scattered throughout the ossuary are dozens and dozens of signs bearing quotes. There are too many to read them all, and some are in shadow anyway, unreadable without a flashlight or candle. Most are about death, some about life. Some are in French, some in Latin, some are religious and some secular, and they draw on everything from Bible passages to lines from Homer and Virgil to Enlightenment philosophers. They are perhaps a strange tribute given that the population of the catacombs was probably largely illiterate in life, but they certainly set the mood for today's visitors.

"God is not the author of death."
"Believe that each day is for you the last."
"Come people of the world, come into these silent abodes and your soul so calm with be struck by the voice that rises from their interior. It is here that the greatest of masters, the Tomb, has his school of truth."
"Happy is he who has always before his eyes the hour of his death, and who readies himself all his days to die."
"Fool that you are, why do you promise to live a long time, you who cannot count on a single day."

[Forgive my terrible translations.]

When you finally emerge, back up another long, winding set of stairs, daylight feels strange and you feel out of place on the street among the living. The careless bustle of the city just doesn't look the same as it did before. Maybe it won't. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.


* In the parts that tourists see. In some of the off-limits parts of the catacombs, there really are just heaps of bones lying willy-nilly.