Amsterdam marathon runners under the bridge

And low lands they really are. We watched the Amsterdam marathon for a bit on Sunday at the top of a "hill" after the bridge, one that even I, after running 36k, could have summitted in less than a minute. No Heartbreak Hill for sure. Participants were almost solely men, and had first names on their bibs which allowed for sprightly personalized encouragement. Seeing the front runners, who have dedicated so much of themselves to this, ankles the width of a child's wrist, yet so strong, graceful and sure, never fail to bring tears to my eyes. 

Still can't sort this out

The marathon was one of many things seen over four days with my favorite Dutch tour guide, who is currently living safely away from Centraal, magnet to bridal parties, drug seekers and tulip devotees. She's closer to Oosterpark, which is quite beautiful in the fall with different color leaves on a variety of trees and graceful lines otherwise. There's a red tennis court that is fenced two feet back from the baseline, another indication of the shortage of space in the Netherlands, I suppose. We watched players with big forehands who had seemed to have adapted fine.  As well, it's a community shaped by immigrants that has a cozy, village feeling with many produce shops, boulangeries and general places such as shoe repair, curtain stores and stationery stores that we used to have in the US.

Another little park nearby

Having become something of the snowbird I used to roll my eyes about, I'd not been looking forward to the suffocating embrace of the North Sea, but with the exception of half an hour on the last day, the air was dry and the sun was often out, though it was significantly cooler than my protected nest in Provence. Both Nat and I happen to be living temporarily with clothes in storage, which in both of our cases, includes coats. So on the first day, I found myself regularly pulled in to racks of €10 plastic sweaters until finally we scratched the itch at the nicest vintage store I've ever been to, Penny Lane, where we both scored quilted coats of the perfect weight. ​

Because I know we walked 45 miles, we must have done other things besides eat, but am not sure what they were. And yes, we did eventually approach Nine Bridges and Albert Cuyp market, but early or late when it was easy to see the charm that made them the overrun tourist hubs they've become. 

There's a stall at Albert Cuyp that I have insisted on visiting every time since our first visit in 2017. They sell gozleme, something I had been transfixed by when staying on a beach in Samsara, Turkey many years ago. Women in many flowered layers and scarves (while we waited in our bathing suits) adeptly rolled out dough with something that looked like a shortened broomstick, then put this very thin layer of dough on a stone placed in hot ashes on the sand. They'd scatter parsley and feta, then let it cook, folding it in a way similar to a crêpe. So the first time I had one at Albert Cuyp, where they are made with spinach rather than parsley, it was both delicious and reminiscent. We were served by a teenage woman whom, every time we've been back, rain or shine, any day of the week, continues to be there. She has become more than a gozleme vendor, rather a person who was young when we first encountered her and has grown up with her mother, the roller and sprinkler, and grandmother, the dough ball maker, in the stall. There is often a line for their fine product, keeping the young woman focused on what she needs to do, so we usually get little from her but politeness. This time, perhaps because it was 11 in the morning and we were the only customers, we got a smile. I think of her often.

The photo

​These few days together made me look starkly at the arc of life. For years it was I who planned trips, packed too many things in, oh so gently nudging people who'd rather "chill" to carpe the diem in a new place. At first there were small changes; me not being the first to figure out where on the map we were going, which coins to use, or how to navigate a foreign subway system. As the young got older and the old got even older, we're now at the stage of me being egged along to do one more thing while I'm begging for a café stop. I know I could fight it for a while, but there's an inevitability that's hard to ignored. I have known enough people who posses an exceeding doggedness, modeling a commitment to sucking it up, for which I'm grateful. But there's an unpleasantness of character that can come with too much pushing oneself, an anger or bitterness. So, as I continue to age, one of my many jobs will be to figure out when to push through and when to beg for mercy and a cappuccino.. 

Sunrise on the construction site

Back in Aix, I'm living across from a construction site, which has increased by two storeys since I arrived four weeks ago, so that I can no longer see the mountains in the photograph above. There are double paned windows so it's not too noisy and I confess to finding it interesting to watch them. The crane is used a lot and there aren't that many of them, working really hard all day long. The only time I've seen them "idle", is when they open up their storage container, bring out a folding long table, light up a barbecue, cook a lunch and then all sit down together. Civilized enough that the crane operator climbs down, then goes back up after, no small ascent.

The house hunt goes on, no luck yet. The challenge is that I have a clear image in my mind of what I want and with the exception of the apartment below, nothing comes close to it. While the agency representing this dream apartment doesn't take applications from foreigners, I sent a begging letter yesterday, and am hoping it might yield some results. In the meantime, I'm lucky enough to rattle around in this temporary airy and uninteresting three bedroom, enjoying my walks up and down the pretty lane that smells sometimes like decaying plane tree leaves that remind me of the smell of human bodies, and sometimes if I'm lucky, burnt eucalyptus.

Vide-Grenier going on the other day

Yup, so there I was, standing in the middle of Place de Prêcheurs at a Vide-Grenier, or city-wide garage sale, overwhelmed and wondering how I got  there. But as at Brimfield, the only thing to do is narrow the vision and be content to let things pass by. Not a lot of details, but I can tell you there was in abundance black clothes, children's plastic things and used tomato sauce jars. I was pumped to score a good quality white button down shirt that turns out is too tight for me and likely will be too short for the girl. Bargain shopper extraordinaire! But the olive wood mortar and pestle will bring me years of joy. 

​So back in Aix, yes, and this time committed. The summer in Boston, filled with work and fun and friends and tennis, was made complicated only by deliberations about what of my things would be shipped to France, ending with a resounding crescendo of commitment to two Le Creusets, winterish clothes I'd no longer need there, books and items so random that I'm told explain how my brain works. They're in the big box below and their contents will be shared when they arrive, hopefully beginning of November. 

You can't really tell, but this bag is big enough for me to get in and be zippered up. Small le Creuset safely wrapped inside, big one in the middle box above, with a straw hat and a new down pillow.

There was also the precarious task of renting out my furnished place for half the year, which took until the 11th hour.  I had become desperate enough to work with a local rental realtor that I'll call Fetro to protect their reputation, who brought me a couple who happened to be friends of the agent's, both 26, with backgrounds that made me nervous. As well as not flexing on the rent (in their defense, foreign student attendance is down by 15% in Boston thanks to new visa requirements, depressing the one and two bedroom market by an average of 25%, a first since I purchased in 1995) or timing, as well as insisting I give up my locked storage closet so that she could have somewhere to put her Christmas decorations. Bad bad vibes. Ready to sign with them, in the nick of time, Philippe, a French Harvard professor showed up with Einstein hair, an expensive bike, a violin and a suitcase. When I passed on the original couple, the agency sent me an email with so many profanities that I was physically scared to pick up the set of keys I had loaned them.  Tampis pour moi, as they say.

Now I'm not one for logistics, as anyone can attest, so the thought of coordinating this move, and then dealing with French bureaucracy, had been sitting heavy since last April, when I began researching long-term rentals. To rent an apartment, I needed a bank account, and to get a bank account, I needed a permanent address....  Some people are good at dealing with this sort of thing, but my way of dealing with it was to being looking into Bulgaria's reputation as a welcoming place for digital nomads.  Realizing that might not be a good Lon-term solution, I instead ponied up some cash early this summer to hire a well-recommended-by-Aix-ex-pats relocation expert, who would find me a place to live and handle all the logistics. And to make a long and not very interesting story short, I'll just say that I'm in an airbnb for a month with fingers crossed that  it will all be over soon. 

Apparently I will have to beg someone to let me give them money to live in their otherwise empty place, and some will still not take it, despite being tenantless.  So when I was at the grocery store two days ago, laden with items, and got a text saying "Can you be in Centreville in 20 minutes?" I dropped everything, did my best to aggressively shuffle home in Birkenstocks that are a size too big, changed into my sneakers and literally ran up the hill, only to wait for half an hour, heheheh, jokes on me. Oh, these French are so funny, they are. My real estate lady had been sending me potential apartments that were not at all what I was looking for; new with low ceilings and small windows, so when Jean-Luc finally arrived and showed me the apartment, I warmed to the ancient stone stairs and balustrade that winded gracefully, the high ceilings with a medallion, old glass in the tall windows. But the apartment itself was an odd configuration that seemed to only make sense in its iteration,  a doctor's office with three examining rooms.  When I expressed my confusion (in French, I'll have you know) about ways to lay things out to make the space livable, Jean-Luc agreed and shrugged, which made it all worthwhile.

Doctors office with a face lift, examining rooms lined up on the left

​After, we stood outside for about 45 minutes so that he could tell me about his son who had studied Russian and been there 40 or 50 times. This led to him sharing his unsolicited opinion of why Putin was actually a good leader whose people appreciated his strong oversight, which of course led to the scary "Ah, Americaine, Trump" blah blah blah (which according to google translate, is bla, bla, bla in French). I learned that Trump had been right to have berated the French for abandoning the manufacture of gas-powered cars. On and on. But here's the thing. While Jean-Luc may have been talking at me and doing his best to bait me, he was playful, with a sparkle in his eye, and handsome. For the most part I didn't bite, rather employed skeptical facial expressions and taught him a new expression. "Even a blind squirrel can find an acorn every once in a while." He laughed.