Cote d'Azur: The land of ice and snow

Officially, we live in the Var administrative department of the Provence / Alpes / Cote d'Azur region of southern France. Now, I don't know about you, but whenever I've heard the words "Provence" and "Cote d'Azur," it has conjured up images of bright sun-baked landscapes shimmering under balmy Mediterranean breezes. Warm. Sunny. Dry.

Well, if you were looking out our windows this past weekend, you might have thought that it was North Dakota out there. Snow on the ground. More snow falling from a gloomy sky. People hunched against an icy wind as they attempted to navigate the slippery streets.

Of course, if you look past the frigid wind and whipping snow, it's pretty darn prototypically and picturesquely Provencal. Underneath the dusting of snow are the pleasing planes of red-tiled rooftops joining each other at odd angles astride stucco homes painted pastel shades of yellow and orange and brown. The houses are packed into tight terraces that march up a steep hillside that stops suddenly against the spectacular backdrop of a huge undulating face of a curving cliff. The cliff face is punctuated by holes and folds in the eroding rock, and abandoned caves, and an ancient fortress of some sort. And at the very top of the cliff, standing like sentinels at the edge of the looming plateau, are two large towers, hundreds of years old, slowly crumbling, but still an imposing sight to see every time I look out our living room windows.


It's sunny today, actually, but it's still freezing cold. So it's a bit of a relief that a man – wearing a beret, by the way – arrived today to pump 1000 liters of heating oil from his truck into the holding tank for our furnace.

Actually, I'll count that as a significant personal achievement. Not only am I more confident that we can keep this drafty house warm until more appropriate weather returns, but I'm practically giddy with delight that I was able to actually arrange for this fuel delivery, entirely in French, without the whole event going off the rails in some cascade of erroneous assumptions and linguistic faux pas. Quincy and I had a similar moment of emotional uplift late last week, simply as a consequence of walking out of a local Allianz insurance office, having successfully employed our limited command of French to buy some "l'assurance scolaire" for Jasper that, apparently, schoolchildren in France all must have. It's this sort of thing – somehow accomplishing in French something that I've never actually had to in my native language nor was anticipating at all when we moved here just over a week ago – that makes me think that, yes, we will manage.

My favorite part of that whole insurance episode was when we paid for the policy. Credit card? No, not an option. And so I pulled some cash out of my wallet, while the insurance agent reached under her desk to retrieve some battered-looking little metal box from which she made change. A crummy little cash box. That cracked me up. I mean, here we are dealing with one of the largest financial companies in all of Europe, and it's like we're buying a couple of cucumbers at a roadside stand.