Nyasha's in trouble

Thank the Lord, she's saved by geography!

Chubby tadpole

What happened to this chubby child? This picture must be from 1974/1975, am not sure, the original color of the sweater is orange, the hair is gone and the chubbiness remains in spite of super skinny years between age 4 and 30.
This is a meme I found on Chuck's site (one hilarious guy, I tell ya!). The mission: post a picture of yourself on your blog of a time in your life when you were "bright eyed and clueless" to what lay ahead in your life. Bright-eyed I've never been, clueless: I still am.

My sweater is still orange and so is the future.

Part 2: We never went to Morocco either

Yesterday night I quickly cooked some pasta filled with cheese. The cheap version of ravioli. 89 cents per pack. Good deal. I added cream and extra cheese. I really like cheese, you see.

Then My friend J. called and said we should have a drink. So I ran down and had a drink. I left my pasta on the stove after having eaten it and before going for a drink. I turned off the stove before I left, don't worry. I also left it on the stove all night. Oh and my apartment was just elected warmest place in France (I'm under the roof, exposed to the south and have no aircon, just a fan. I think it's the only fan I'll ever have so I named him Stan. Stan the Fan.
This morning, I woke up late and was so happy to discover the rest of my pasta waiting for me on the stove. I had forgotten to put it in the fridge, but what the hell, a little bacteria has never hurt anybody, I thought.
I have been hating myself everytime I've sat on the damn toilet today, having several Niagara-like explosions, rolling myself on the floor with stomach pains and throwing up like... Have you seen the movie The Exorcist? You know when the girl vomits green liquid? Well then you get the picture.

So I'm feeling a bit weak today and a bit sorry for myself too. I went to the Pharmacy and the lady who works there laughed at me when I told her my story. She took a step back to talk to me. I'm sure she could feel the cheese left in my nostrils.

This is how I'm feeling today.

Lesson of the day: Use Fridge.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes, we never made it to Morocco either. That's it...
We never made it to Morocco because we thought it would be too hot there in July plus none of us 5 could agree on the final destination in Morocco. Should it be the north with Fes, Tangiers, Meknes, Chefchaouen, Rabat etc... or should it be the south: Marrakech, Agadir, Essaouira? We bought 5 different guidebooks and in the end, the 5 of us wanted to go to 5 different places.
I should also say that my friends and I met every Wednesday during the past 4 months to plan our summer trip. Every Wednesday, we would change destination. It was becoming tiring and scary. The more we met, the more north the destination went. Soon we would be spending our vacation in Belgium, or God forbid, England. Oh dear!

So after having planned trips that would take us to luxurious cabins in the Algerian desert, exquisite ornate and lush Riads in Morocco, houses carved in caves in Southern Spain, fancy hotels along the breeze of the Atlantic in Portugal, a mini-mansion in Northern Italy, we ended up renting a trailer in Corsica.
Why a trailer (le camping-car in French) you are asking? Well, it's the perfect combination between a hotel and a car, duh! It's fun, it's like we're suddenly hippies on the road, just staying over anywhere we want for the night. Yes! we knew we were going to be so cool and sooo free. We even knew exactly what kind of music we would play while driving. We had the whole picture in our heads, it was going to be one excellent road movie.

Coming soon: Part 3, How Mickelino fell into a ravine trying to empty the trailer's chemical toilet.

Part 1: We never made it to Algeria

I’m sitting here, with a glass of cheap chilled white in one hand (it’s too warm to drink red) and a cigarette in the other. I occasionally type a word ot two, I can only type with one finger as the cigarette occupies two of my fingers. It’s taken me 5 minutes to type the first sentence of this post.

I re-read what I’ve written so far and find it plain and an uninteresting start to a post. Maybe it’s not a good idea to start posting at 2 am.

I’m completely jet-lagged, not because I’ve travelled to some exotic and remote place lately but because since my vacation started 2 and a half weeks ago I’ve gone to bed even later than usual. And then, there’s the heat. This heat has been unbearable. I can’t move, I speak even slower than usual and my brain is so switched off that it makes my eyes look as vacant as as cheap motel in Nebraska. Where is Nebraska anyway? Probably as far as my inspiration.

However, it’s not like nothing has happened to me lately. On the contrary, I’ve been fortunate enough to go on vacation to wonderful places with great people. Everything went smoothly, and the only one who suffered from it was my wallet.

Where should I start? Oh yes, it all began with Algeria. Well actually we never went to Algeria. It wasn’t safe enough. The official website said: Algeria is entirely safe. However tourists should not travel in the north-east, the south and some areas of the north-west, tourists have been reported to be kidnapped in markets in the big cities, these should therefore be avoided as well. Algeria is a large country but these instructions didn’t leave much space left for a relaxing vacation. Which is sad because I really wanted to go there.

So a few months ago, 4 friends and I decided we would go to Algeria this summer. Well, let’s put it this way. A few months ago I managed to brainwash 4 friends and convinced them to go to Algeria although they all told me what a crazy idea it was. Why Algeria, you’re asking. Well, it’s a long story and there are many reasons for it.
Firstly there’s the “I’ve been there before everyone else factor” it had made me quite popular in the 90’s when I entertained crowds at expats’ parties as I had just returned from Cambodia at the time when Polpot was still alive and when Khmer Rouges were still roaming the woods outside of Angkor Wat.
Then, as you know, Algeria is not the place one would choose to go to on vacation. Algeria belongs to the no-no-places-for-a-holiday-list together with Kabul, Bagdad, Beyrouth and Pyongyang. Still how cool is it to discover a place before everyone else and where there’s sun, friendly and good-looking people who speak my favorite language (Arabic), who cook the most delicious food and who have an amazing Roman, Arab, Berber, French history all of that mixed with a little bit of danger? I don’t know what you’d say but to me, it sounded like the perfect destination.

Moreover, parts of my family used to live there back when Algeria was part of France. It was more than a colony, it was a region, an intrisic part of the French territory. French had a tough time letting go of Algeria. The country reached its independence through a nasty and bloody war and unlike neighboring Morocco and Tunisia (which had become independent in 1956), Algeria finally became a state in 1962. France never really recovered from this and like the USA with Vietnam, the French are not too eager to talk about this defeat, especially not about the various massacres of Algerians that took place because of the French during this period.

My grandparents were born and raised there, my mother was born in Morocco on the other side of the border but they lived in Algeria. They are Pieds-Noirs as we call them. The Black Feet. That’s how the French who lived in Northern Africa are called. This name has throughout the years become a bad word as these Black Feet had to go back to metropolitan France upon Algeria’s independence and nobody really knew what to do with this million of French citizens who suddenly reapeared in the picture after having lived glorious days in the sun being served by underpaid locals. So they thought.
Culturally the Pieds-Noirs had become very different from the Metropolitan French and the latter would make sure this would be understood by the former. Unemployment and racism were not rare towards the Pieds-Noirs at that time and most of these families had lost everything they owned and suddenly ended up in the misery of Parisian or southern French suburbs.
Fortunately, my grandfather was employed by the state and could get a job as he returned with his whole family. But it’s always with a tear in his eye that he would mention Algeria and all the places they had lived in. Algeria was his country. He never went back.
Therefore, going to Algeria felt like the natural thing to do for me. For a long time, I’ve wanted to see the streets they lived in, where they went to school, the square in Tlemcen where my grandparents met 70 years ago. Rest assured, my goal was not to go there out of tacky post-colonial nostalgia, for I do think Algeria should have never been colonized in the first place, but this country is somehow part of my history. It was therefore high time I compared the blurry black and white pictures with today’s reality.

So, I’m afraid I’ll have to wait until it becomes a bit safer there. So in the meantime, Morocco seemed like a better option...

Coming soon: Part 2: We never made it to Morocco.

Monitor Chain

Photograph this blog post (including your monitor and its immediate surroundings), and post the resulting pic on your blog. Then, the next person photographs your blog post and posts it, and so on. Leave your post URL in the comments so people will be able to follow the chain, and link your image to the post you photographed… this way people will be able to zoom into the monitors by clicking.

In & Out

One day in Paris to recover from good food, wine and heat at my parents' place in Bordeaux and swooosh, gone again. This time to the German capital. Berlin! This vacation is a bliss...
Have always dreamt of going there. Can't wait.

I'll be thinking of you. I promise.
PS: Rob, Bitch is the adequate description, I agree...

Hi and bye!

I came back from Corsica this morning and things have already been completely hectic since noon. Met with my friend Miss Lizzy, then coffee with Miss African beauty and her adorable daughters, then picnic in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with good friends in the evening. Wonderful sunset over Paris and here I am packing again, off to Bordeaux tomorrow to visit my family for a few days and relax from such a stressful vacation...

Will of course update you soon about my week in Corsica which was pure hell, hard work and constant suffering on white sand beaches and picturesque restaurants.

I hope you had a nice week too. (read this last sentence using a very sarcastic tone of voice and a big teasing laughter at the end).

Ouch...

News #1: I'm going to Corsica for a week this coming Friday. Going there with my sporty friends again. So as I've been abundantly munching on cookies and sipping wine and beer lately, feeling stuffed each time, I decided to go back to the gym on Saturday in order to not look too scary on the beach among my sporty friends. I worked out for about 30 minutes and I haven't been able to move since.

News #2: I've joined a theater group again. It's a bilingual group, French and Italian. The director is Italian and doesn't speak French. By the way, I don't speak a word of Italian. WTF?
News #3: I'm having an open blog next week so I'd like you to write my posts while I'm away and imagine what I'm doing on hols. I'll give you a temporary password by email to access my dashboard. Who's interested?... thought I'd ask before I force you to do it.

Till then I'm praying that the current hot weather can make me perspire a kilo or two.

Nyasha, now it's you and me, baby...

First, we had to deal with our Latin brothers' (Portugal) victory over England and now France's victory over Brazil just took the biscuit. I'm not crazy about football, but it's hard not to get excited about it today. France beat the world champion and are now meeting Portugal in semi-final. Oooh, it's going to be good, really good!
I've just been down to Bastille square and the whole of Paris is partying, screaming, escalading the Bastille Monument, waving flags, North African, Western African and pale French are hugging, old grannies are waving their walking-sticks and on my way back home I even saw Jews and Arabs hugging and jumping together outside a synagogue! As I'm writing this, I can still hear people shouting.
All of this is puzzling, I don't know if I dare to be happy about it but in this country where the economy is crap, where people have recently been very depressed and demotivated, where racism has never been higher, I guess there's a little hope and it doesn't require much (a bunch of men with a blue T-shirts and a ball) to be happy to live together again.
So Nyasha, it's France against Portugal now! It's you and me, baby! See you on Wednesday for the big game et que le meilleur gagne...

And that's how excited I was this afternoon before the game!