Never give your cat a marker.
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French Cats
France the third time
I am counting my visits to France. I have visited France three times. The first time in the 1980s as an archetypal tourist, only for three days and I don’t remember much except Monet’s Water Lilies and a room in Paris.
My second visit was for three weeks in 2015 which in hindsight feels more like three months because I saw many places. I had become interested in history and in particular in Amboise, 16 kilometers from Tours in Central France and I stayed in a studio nestled into the ramparts of the Château d’Amboise. The weather was nice, late Spring and I needed only a cardigan to walk. Bliss. I began building virtual models of chateaux of the Loire region with a friend using photography from this visit. Le Château de Chenonceau, like every chateau, tells some of the story of the history of France and was a highlight. At the end of an afternoon at Chenonceaux we sat on the remote train station bench and took more photos with the phone, as the camera battery had been depleted. I wanted to live in France at this moment. In fact, it is Centre-Val de Loire where I would like to live, in central France. My third and present visit has been for nine months and has convinced me of this fact.
I’ll keep you posted ..
From la gare de Chenonceaux
About the author ..
France in Summer..
I have lived in Nantes for several months, and hope to return to Tours. Tours in central France is located where access to the chateaux along the Loire is generally closer, not simpler but closer. It is true that France is never simple. During these first months my education which had been provided by postcards, film, and painting studies from afar, tends to have shifted to a more nuanced version of life in France, at a very intimate distance and though less glamorous perhaps, my experiences have been vivid, giving meaning to these shallow preconceptions.
I will say now though that before I arrived from Australia I had a vague notion that I could operate reasonably well, albeit on a superficial level, after a couple of years here. I have to admit that I am not so brave now and after eight months, though I follow my dream, it is in a somewhat isolated state .. though is not altogether a bad thing. I say this as I have never traveled independently. I have accepted though that I’ll never be able to go to a bar and be fully engaged in conversation with locals or never be French when I go to the supermarket or the post office or the doctor. I will always be an ‘other’, but I will follow this path nonetheless. That’s my personal commitment, and hopefully I’ll pick up any self esteem lost on the way by acquiring an education about a different country and its society, and by seeing and doing things I have only ever heard stories about.
I love the French language but feel pompous when I try to speak it such is its grace, but I am hoping it will come to me suddenly, even overnight in my sleep would be great. I’ll make this a post if it does happen. In the meantime I will use both languages here where it seems natural .. and hopefully there will be more occurrences of French as time goes by.
This space is where thoughts are gathered about life in France and I hope you enjoy my pages as much as I have enjoyed making them.
Yours
Kerrie B.
Generally all images in sliders are © Sembleue.
Nantes Parks – Parc De La Morinière
I won’t ever forget the exhilaration during my first Summer in France as I discovered the manor and its Japanese garden reached via a park which shared an overgrown boundary with the rear of our garden. I came to it unexpectedly under the huge Japanese elm at the end of three kilometers of cow paddocks and shady riverbank paths, somewhere between lazy suburbia and heaven. We sat and ate cake from an old painted cake tin and I knew there and then, I was in France. The soft shadows of the glades give way to remnants of an industrial past.
