Where to start with Antibes and why do I have two long weekends here?
1. A hoped-for meeting with a Marseilles writer acquaintance falls through due to miscommunication
2. A last-minute, middle-of-the-night request to a Couchsurfing host comes through
3. As that host and I get on famously I'm welcome to return in order to:
1. Hang out again
2. Catch up with a second acquaintance living thereabouts who's out of town the first weekend
Antibes is:
1. a fishing port
2. a resort in south-east France with a population of 75,000
According to one of my friends, here on the Cote d'Azur, you are either:
1. "serving", or
2. "being served"...
As I am in the land which claims:
1. equality
2. fraternity, and
3. liberty, I choose both.
And ∞ (infinity), this wordy, occasionally worldly, humanimal loves the beach
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| Look carefully (click on to enlarge), a letterary figure, not numbers, Antibes waterfront |
Let's start with the train, because for me as a Permaterrailean, that's where it starts. Both my grandfathers worked on the Aotearoa New Zealand railways. When I was four I was given an electric train set for Christmas. My love affair with trains is deeply embedded, and it's generally the most comfortable way to travel. To get from Menton to Antibes, in spite of my first class Interrail ticket, I have to ignore my privilege, get to the root of things, and take the regional TER (transport express régional).
As befits my basic constitutional status as 'often hungry', and because in Menton I have been constantly on the go, before I embark on my gruelling one hour journey I am looking for something to take on the train to eat. Having just said goodbye to Sophie, in a perfect life moment I run into her flatmate and my other Couchsurfing host, Anna, on the street, and get to say goodbye again. She recommends somewhere with good snacks close to the station. Sadly I can't find the quality food stop and am forced to settle for a pain o'chocolat (choose to be 1. literal or 2. figurative in interpretation) from the little hole in the wall 'sells-everything' at the station. As an 'often hungry' I am truly missing Italy, where, in my experience, pretty much every station has minimum one place where you can get good food and good coffee, including the ritual, alcohol-laced, bon voyage variety of the latter. You never leave hungry and you always leave in a good mood. I suspect when Dante wrote of the descent into hell and purgatory he was thinking of train station food in France.
For while according to historical legends of good French food and drink, at the Cote d'Azur rail portals to the country, I can only say, "Au contraire!" Compared to the train station cafeterias paradise I have recently departed, a lot of places this side of the invisible line in the clifftop rocks and sand still can't spell espresso, the price of said liquid is double, and the quality halved. e.g. the awful Relay chain 'cafes' whose coffee lacks human touch, the vital elixir extruded from a... dispenser machine. Sacré bleu! I admit it, I am a food and coffee wanker.
I hunker down in my second class seat and bite into the (not so) terrible French pastry, saving the chocolate bits for last. I'm disappointed about not managing to better arrange the informal writer's colloquium in Marseille, but the coastal views are softening the blow. The train is empty, I start to relax. And then the suffering hordes embark.
Suddenly I discover a TER is more or less a commuter train. To give one gentleman a seat, I start moving my giant backpack from the seat beside me. TERs have, pretty much, no luggage storage space. No decent backpack-size racks, not even overhead shelves. The gentleman, seeing how it is with the luggage and being a gentleman, shakes his head, it's ok. But a wee way down the line some woman standing in the aisle starts bitching at me to move my bag to give the man a seat. I say to her in English - because I can't vociferously bitch back in voluble French - that he was ok with it. She continues nagging for quite some time. One is in France. One must complain about something. She gets off.
I move my Rollkoffer under my legs and the backpack onto the floor. Someone else can at least sit down and swivel their legs out into the aisle. A woman sits down and complains about where she can't put her legs. I apologise and say there is no storage space on the TER train. She sneezes. I say "Bless you". An uncomfortable truce ensues. We both get off at Antibes.
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| Not me with either of the remonstrative women on the TER |
Once again, Couchsurfing is marvellous and generous humanity in action. My new host, Rodrigo, a Colombian IT/engineering ace, is mega-organised. He's sent me a PDF complete with maps, phone, reasonable house rules, address, and wi-fi access codes for his place, and he has a 'welcome to Antibes' bottle of rose (sic. Blogspot won't accept the wine's French accent) in the fridge. As the sun sets we drink it on his balcony and talk tech, music and life, segue onto Japanese whiskey, and he offers to take me out for dinner to a great place he knows. My host likes showing off his town and thinks I need to be spoiled. If somebody must be sacrificed, let me be the lamb...
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| Large nocturnal cats stalk Antibes alleys, hunting for prey |
Unfortunately the chosen restaurant can't take us till later so we're forced to go a short way down the road, round a corner, and descend into a cellar, entering the unworldly bardo state of the Absinthe Bar, a.k.a. tourist-packed-hell. (All very nice people of course.) As water drips from tapped carafes through large sugar cubes on slotted spoons into hallucinatory substances at the bottom of their glasses, patrons wearing an odd assortment of hats - which have emanated with lives of their own from a large trunk - sing along with a lyrical consummate piano pro whose soul must surely be entirely drained by the end of every night.
The owners are making a killing. We are saved from this nightmare by a summons to go back up to the restaurant. Pass through a portal to paradise...
Rodrigo claims the Italian chef Davide Bolzoni to be "a shadow dancer". He's looking pretty solid in the open kitchen to me, though he is solo, cooking up amazing culinary acts (while his charming partner runs front of house). This is his spectral menu http://www.cafemilano-antibes.com/menu/ A lot of fresh foodstuffs and a good few crushed grapes et al. fall into the abyss of my stomach in here. My head is reeling and I cannot hear them scream. In spite of a monstrous sleep deficit I am also forced to stroll the painfully picturesque waterfront afterwards. Everywhere along the town walls there are images forbidding one from flying from them into the sea. The soft, seductive beating of the waves upon the shore is torment.
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| Read the signs: Absinthe and amazing food may turn you into a shadow dancer |
It is all I can do the next day to go swimming, be treated to lunch (more Italians talented in the kitchen), eat ice-cream, walk insufferably around the old town, etc. The day after, too overcome with ennui to walk one short block down to the waterfront to take photographs of the historic fortifications, the cliffs, the palm trees, or the little stone houses with foundations built directly onto giant rocks...
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| Big stone houses with foundations built directly onto giant rocks |
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| Proof of overcoming seaside ennui |
... I at least do some work then head out to visit the Irish fish shop man across the road from the waterfront to gather up mussels, oysters, king prawns and salmon. I finally manage to summon up the energy to prepare them and treat my host back.
Before too much more dolour ensues, fortunately it is time to jump on a first class TGV the next morning and leave. Damn electric-powered train doesn't even emit sulphur.
ANTIBES: PART/WEEKEND TWO
I like small towns. I've lived in several big cities - Seoul, Moscow, London, Berlin - but in spite of all that is on offer in such places, the air quality is terrible, in large part due to not enough greenery, bad design, too many roads, and the fossil-fuel burning vehicles upon them. There are cars in Antibes, but both my friends here (like many others) walk and use buses, and in spite of way too much air traffic emitting non-taxed fuel particulates over the beaches, the air is fairly good. Perhaps many big city dwellers wouldn't like living here - except in July when the big international Jazz à Juan festival happens - as it's a bit culturally quiet. But because I do like it I'm visiting again, just like Picasso did. Unlike Picasso, who returned for six months 20-odd years after his first visit, I don't get invited to stay in the castle, which used to be known as Château Grimaldi. Mainly that's because it is now the Musée Picasso (Picasso Museum) http://www.antibes-juanlespins.com/culture/musee-picasso and numerous of his works are held here, taking up far too much room to accommodate poets.
Reinstalled at Rodrigo's, and still recovering from Marseilles/Montpellier's leek sprout heartburn sleep deficit I catch up with some work and sleep. The next evening I catch up with another friend, Alexandre, who lives a wee way along the coast. We prologue and epilogue the evening in two excellent, albeit empty except for us, Antibes wine-bars. In between we go to Café Des Chineurs, a really busy restaurant on a market square where he's a regular, and get spoiled with Gwen's cheeky and excellent service, and aperitif-digestif treats. Local knowledge wins the day, and this place saves France's reputation for good food and wine in spite of its lack of trains. Looking around the outside dining area and deeper into the restaurant, I notice (strictly as an outsider) that the grey hair and grey hair dyed blonde quotient of patrons is pretty high. Yes, the Côte d'Azur is a bit of a retirement village.
During another soporific postprandial stroll along the waterfront I surveil the large number of lit-up yachts... apparently the marina is so full that a lot of really big boats - think little floating villages - have been forced to moor just offshore. One, quite far out, has disco lights flashing the full length of its lower deck...
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| Not a large yacht with disco lights but a massive metal bear staring into a happy disco-lights-like accident. SCULPTOR: Davide Rivalta |
The next afternoon Alexandre and I jump on one of the one euro Envibus buses and go to a beach on the peninsula so I can do my ritual last Permaterrailean swim of summer. The beach is in a mansion-packed area packed full of rich Russians, the free beach is covered in Russians, and although their conversations don't carry that far, I suspect the private beach's deck adjacent is even more bedecked with them. Another thing noticeable about the Côte d'Azur these days, is there are a lot of 'property for sale' signs that read something like this: продается. There is even a Russian Railways return train service that runs between Nice and Moscow every week http://pass.rzd.ru/static/public/en?STRUCTURE_ID=5125&layer_id=3290&refererLayerId=162&id=2039#nice Please note your dogs, other small animals and birds travel for free. I guess if I decide to forgo the five hour TGV to Paris, and instead opt to take 84 hours to travel there via my old haunt Moscow I can't smuggle on my bears...
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| Gratuitous ice cream consumption. The only way to do bear back |
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Seeing double again: Daylight-bear-on-a-dodgy-cellphone-camera PHOTOS: Rodrigo Merchán
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