I can see clearly now the rain is gone

So yesterday I got a job and I got into a school for woodworking/carpentry! Just as my doubts started to outweigh my hopes, It starts to pour. What can I do but go with it? I have no fear now, today. I just finished my first shift of work, window washing. Done it before, enjoy it, worked up a few sweats. My school, which was looking to fill up its roster, starts on June 14th: less than 3 weeks from now! It ends sometime in March. Before it starts I will figure out a place to live, get government aid for lodging and food, go and check out the campus two hours north of here in the department Deux Sevres, finish planting the garden, save as much money as I can working, and train myself to read and write better in French, as well as study Carpentry. Time to kick it into high gear. Thankfully, I can take advantage of the French government social aid (before it crashes) and go to school for free and get reimbursed for most if not all of my living expenses during my studies.

My dad keeps telling me Europe is falling, that I should go back to Canada, where the future is more certainly successful with the huge natural resource base and the distance from the Middle East and Africa (don't call him racist, the problem is illegal immigration from these places into especially Spain and Italy, but also France, where it just takes a short boatride.) We will see.

Camping in the Pyrenees was sublime, snow capped mountains, green forests, grey rock, cold streams. And, believe it or not, I didn't encounter a single mosquito! It was 25 degrees warm, minimum 10 degrees at night, in the thick forests and along the water's edge, 1000 meters from sea level, and no mosquitoes! And the Pyrenees has this sort of weather for six months of the year! A few hours hike up and there is cold and snow, a few hours drive and there is the coast of the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, also world-class cities of Bordeaux and Toulouse, and Spain, for inexpensive shopping and practicing Spanish. To top it all, inexpensive housing and living. Hmmm.....

Anyway, gotta go wash this body thoroughly and eat some fruit.

Cheers,
Maurizio

Pyrenees look at these!

Started the heavy garden work. Digging, dragging a poorly designed plastic wheelbarrow full of forest soil 300 meters up a hill and down a hill to the house, rototilling all afternoon, Making beds. Gotta get those tomatoes in the ground, and all the rest too. Feels good. Making plans to build a solar dehydrator. Feels good too.

Going to go camping near Bagneres de Bigorre, the Pyrenees Mountains, on the weekend. Excited to finally meet the mountains which I may someday call home.

No luck yet finding a temp job, but have good chances to get a 3 week job with a local apple orchard starting in June.

It is getting nice and warm here now, and I have the chance to accompany Stephanie to the farmer's market at Chatellayon, at the beach, tomorrow! Going to enjoy the beach. Market too.

Not feeling particularly creative or humorous right now, so this is a 'Straightforward Factual Blog Post'.

Still unsure about where to go to school, if I can go to school, and my appointment with the councillor has been postponed to next week. It is getting late in the season of applying to schools.

Had a strong emotional bout of homesickness and instability monday night, but next day we started working in the garden and I felt better. I think the sense of ungroundedness can be cured by soil, not particularily Canadian soil. Also moving my body helps (helps everyone really, doesn't it?).

My future actions depend on Stephanie and her actions, my stoicism and emotional endurance, the prejudices of people who might otherwise help me if I had a good French accent, the French economy, and the unexpected limitation of living in the region of Poitou Charentes, when concerning carpentry school.

What will happen next? Stay tuned...

Cheers,
Maurizio

D

Driving all around Department seventeen
Digesting red wine, rabbit and white bread
Drifting into sleep and out of it
Depannage house-to-house
Determined to focus and learn
Digging a trench to lay cable
Dreaming of a place untouched, unplanned
Discipline myself to manage my imbalance
Drawing on my emotional strength reserves
Damn well fighting
Doing what feels right, sometimes
Dreading the wrong path
Drink coffee no more
Drying out my bank account
Droughts we threaten the world with
Drifting along without accumulating wealth
Dark future ahead
Diving deeper for oil
Doors open
Doubting which one
Draped in anxiety
Dumbed fields dressed in pesticides
Dividing land for fragmented people
Dinner party distractions from dying systems
Drizzle for the honest, drowning for the damaged rich
Do-it-yourself Dollar-dodgers
Disappointed with their inherited ways
Deciding to distill
Daring to detatch and make a dash
Dancing to the beat of my own drum
Dripping hardly distinguishable from the downpour
Dear friends...

Cheers,
Maurizio

Rolling

Hi guys and gals! Sorry for being so quiet, I came back to France and no longer had internet access. I am writing you from a cyber cafe in Saint Georges des Coteaux.

My trip back to France was easy and relatively cheap. Harassed by a big black prostitute within 5 minutes of breathing Parisian air. I knew the routine, been to Kenya. Got rid of her in 3 minutes. Bought mediocre strawberries and laid down in a nearby park. Observed ancient Middle-Eastern men sit on benches and speak at 1 word per minute.

Back in Charente Maritimes. Waiting to see if I get the thousand Euros towards driving school/licence. Nope, I lose. I do paperwork just in the nick of time to start my second two week volunteer period one week later.

The skinny, nervous, unshaven plumber manoeuvers through a roundabout while rolling his cigarette changing gears in a manual van. We eat at restaurants sometimes, appetizers, red wine, bread, main plates, cheese plates, desserts, coffee. The enterprise pays for that. Two hour lunches. Get at the shop at 8am, leave at 8:45, spend fifteen minutes drinking coffee and chatting with the guys at the plumber store. They don't have what we are looking for. Go to a second plumber store. Have a coffee, chat, look at newspaper, buy the part. Go to the electrician store, have a coffee, chat, buy a part. Get in van and drive 45 minutes. Work 90 minutes at the job site, have two hour lunch at restaurant.

Hubert, aka 'putain mierde' drank 3 coffees in less than an hour. He likes to swear to encourage his successful work. Actually, it doesn't seem like he has a choice, it is a habit that has become somewhat subconscious. He started working at 14 years of age. Maried at 19, child at 21. He once said the longest 'ooh la la' I have ever heard. I try hard not to laugh when he swears in frustration. It pours from his throat steadily and melodically: 'ooh la la la la la la la la la la la!' (the 'la's' alternate between high tones and low tones).

I don't do a whole lot, in fact my calf muscles get a great workout from standing for hours and hours watching. I try not to fall asleep while I watch the whole department pass by as we roll along here there and everywhere. We once drove 75 minutes one way to do a 10 minute job, and then 75 minutes back, and then 2 hour lunch.

Look into Compagnons de Tour de France, a world-renown school for tradeskills, but looks like I landed in the wrong region of France to learn Carpentry. Educational funding has become regionalized, and all the carpentry schools are elsewhere. Stephanie has family in Brittany, perhaps I can move there and go to school there...

Well I am not going to tidal wave you to try and make up for all the time lost, so I will leave it at that for now.

Cheers,
Maurizio

In Antwerpen

What a trip. Left Saint Georges des Coteaux at six am. Boarded train to La Rochelle at six thirty. Because of the great storm that hit the Atlantic coast, the train could no longer go to La Rochelle, so we stop in Rochefort. Wait for a bus. Bus arrives in La Rochelle a bit past seven fifteen. wait. Get a coffee and croissant, three dollars equivalent. Get a newspaper. Montpelier, number one city in France to live in. Polish President is mourned over. Walk around a bit, read Gravity's Rainbow a bit. Text message my carpool ride, no idea what car she is driving. Smoke a cigarette with a fellow carpooler who is going to Bordeaux. My carpool host pulls up, we wait for everyone, get in the car. I drift in and out of sleep half of the drive until we get out for a pee pee break. Then I am more awake, talk a bit with another passenger, snack, read newspaper.

Arrive in Paris after approximately four and a half hours. Get out at the south end of the city, go and eat Vietnamese. Walk brisquely towards Cathedral Notre Dame, rapidly taking in the sights and sounds. The city reminds me of Rome, full of tourists, similar architecture. Enter the Cathedral with my backpack even though there are signs in six languages saying backpacks are forbidden. I decide to just act normal and do it anyways. As a result of my time limit in the city and my general state of mind, I can't bring myself to slow down and see if there is something to soak in in the Cathedral. By now, sorry, all these Catholic Churches seem the same, candles, donation boxes, holy water basins for crossing yourself when you enter, most people there just to see the art and architecture superficially, probably more just to tell others they were there, take a few pictures. I look for where I can climb the tower to the top, but don't find it. Exit. Ok, let us find the Eiffel Tower. Two hours or so left. Walk fast, keep checking map. Hungry, lets find a bakery on the way. Walk along the river, keep going east, east east. Finally I see the tower in the distance, behind countless buildings. Find a bakery, get a loaf of bread. Find the park surrounding the Eiffel Tower, sit and eat. Ask the man beside me where the nearest subway station is. Head for it, get a ticket, find out I have to go to another station 400 meters away. I go, make my way to the rendezvous station for my next carpool ride. Find him. We wait for almost an hour for another passenger, who went to the wrong station. Finally he makes it, and then we are stuck in traffic for fourty five minutes.

When we are on the road, the driver and late passenger, both Maghreb Arabs, one from Morrocco, the other Algerian, enter animated, rapid conversation about the issues between their countries, the difficulties of life in France for Arab immigrants, racism, Paternal pressure and strictness. I find it very interesting, and try my hardest to understand the rapid, accented French, often sounding like a FAMAS (The standard French sub-machine gun used in the military). Start to realize I am going to be late. Will there still be a train from Brussels, our destination, to Antwerp, after midnight? I desperately fire off text messages to everyone I have the number for to ask if they can check the internet.

We arrive, and one passenger who I had amiable conversations with inbetween the machine gun fire, a fellow organic agriculture enthusiast, accompanied me to discover that I missed the last train by half an hour. What am I going to do now? I don't know, but I need internet access to tell my uncle not to worry about me and not to wait at the Antwerp station for me. Vivien, the fellow passenger, invites me to stay at his cohouse, where I could sleep on a couch. We make our way there, and I meet a bunch of his roommates. Everyone smokes tobacco and marijuana mixed spliffs at a rate of one every fourty five minutes, munching on junk food and downing tiny coca cola cans. We talk, joke, I speak lots of French. I notice how tiring it is for them to listen to me when I try to articulate myself in French. They are nice and polite. Finally I sleep at 4pm, and wake up at nine. Going to sleep late doesn't feel good. Coffee, breakfast, conversation, where I learn of the various ways these guys avoid taxes and get paid for unworked hours and get money from the government when they shouldn't and how they religiously watch the simpsons until eleven thirty am. I get their contact info. Who knows? Then Vivien and two of his roommates accompany me to the station, and I wait in line with various foreigners to get a ticket.

Take the train, with a smooching couple sitting behind me. They smooch in a terribly irritating way the whole ride to Antwerpen. My pet peeve is when people eat with their mouth open, making sucking noises. The kissing was very similar. I even start to curse softly under my breath. Not that bad, don't sweat the small stuff. We arrive in the first station of Antwerp, but I need to wait to get off at the second. The doors open briefly and then close. The train doesn't move. Everyone assumes it will go to the next station, and there are no announcements. We discover that the train is going to go back to Brussels. All these African ladies in exotic clothing start panicking and making a big fuss. The doors don't open. Increased panic. I decide to let them get me out of this mess ("bordell" in French, I am frequently reminded by an elderly French lady). They catch the attention of a train conductor, who doesn't know how to speak French, or, considering what I have heard of the Flemish from the Francophones so far, chooses not to. He is bombarded by aggressive, nervous African female energy and feebly responds by opening the door. He looks like he wishes he was at home watching TV drinking good beer.

We wait for the proper train, and board it. I sit down, and three of the loudest African ladies sit in the surrounding seats. I try to listen to what they say, but it is a sort of pidgin French. I wonder where they are from. I like them. We arrive in Antwerp, and I see my family in the distance up a hundred steps waving at me.

Antwerpen is quite similar to Toronto. Multicultural, cold weather, efficient, social aid actually aids. I am here with my uncle, Stefano, working his butt off to support his baby boy Phillip and wife Sophie. They made a big risk and moved here from Pescara, Italy, where there was no future for them. Here, they are closer to Stefano's other kids, Alessio and Roxanne, who are both in their early twenties and live in and outside of Amsterdam.

A tiny country Belgium, few hours from one end to the other. Famous for beers, actually probably has the most beers in comparison to any other country in the world. In the south French is spoken, in the north Dutch and Flemish, quite proudly. In Brussels, the capital of Europe and of Belgium, French is dominant, although it is surrounded by Flemish country. So far, all the Brusselites I have spoken to consider the Flemish proud of their language and identity distinct from the Francophones, in some ways like the Quebeckers are in comparison to Anglophone Canada.

A country with an average of perhaps 300 days a year of rainfall. Apparently the only wild spot left is in the south near the French frontier. I asked Sophie, a native Kenyan from Kisumu, if she missed Kenya. She said she misses it right now, so much, in a way she can't express. Then I asked if it is worth it to live in a cold, foreign country without nice beaches and wild spaces and animals, which has good schooling, health care, social services, economy, in comparison with Kenya, where it is warm, beautiful, wild, but with limited infrastructure, health care, opportunities. She said to me the health care is the most important factor. If you lived in Kenya but had enough money that if you needed to you could immediately hop on a plane to Europe for medical attention, it would be worth it. But otherwise, it is worth it to live in Belgium, or other northern European countries similar, for that matter. Kenya is nice to vacation in. She perhaps almost died of a persistent pneumonia which infected her right lung and was not properly treated for a long time until she went to the doctor in Antwerp. He obliged her to take strong antibiotics immediately, and now she can breathe well, is starting to regain her appetite, and is heading from darkness to light. Phillip has asthma. This is where she is coming from with her perspective of the importance of good health care.

Us young, invincible, adventurous ones might have the opposite perspective (at least I have) about where to live, but in recent years I am starting to experience the limits to my invincibility, and starting to be more cautious.

Nonna is here too, fantastic nonna, seventy five or so years old, still like she was since I can remember, cooking like every nonna should, loving interacting with and caring for little Phillip.

Talk to you soon,

Maurizio

Vietnamese-Parisien:Italo-Canadian-Welsh-Antwerpen

I write from a cyber cafe. Shaj Mahal, something like that. Rue d'Italy. South Paris. Got time until my ride to Brussels. Ate Vietnamese for lunch. 4 different sorts of hot sauce. Went to town. Sorry stomache! Noodles. Peanuts. Runny nose. That omnipresent white cartoon kitty statue with Chinese writing along it on a vertical axis. A big bronze-coloured happy fat Buddha with arms raised in the air, holding bags of candy in each hand. An uncanny ecstatic smile on his face. Shrimps, chicken, nose really running, lips burning, tongue burning. Cafe to finish it off: for 'digestion'. I learned coffee, like hard liquor after a meal doesn't âctually help digestion, but pauses digestion in order to quickly digest the caffeine or alcohol, and then continues later on. Five hour car ride from La Rochelle. Drive reminded me of an ex-girlfriend, but has the name of my current one. Tanned, tattooed, dark hair, makeup, MTV top20 from the past five years playing the whole time. Meditated a bit, but man, i've really lost the willpower and motivation. When I finally get around to it, I will have a load to bring into balance. Reading Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. What a writing style. Very difficult to get into, to get accustomed to. Informal, psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness, dark comedy. Brilliant, I think.

Planning to hike up the Cathedral of Notre Dame, heard of a great view. Looking forward to nonna's cooking, little Phillip's sausage toes and fingers, Sophie's delightful Kenyan-English accent, and Stefano's sarcastic sense of humor. Antwerpen, I'm coming!

Weekend Update

Over the couse of the last seven days, I single-dug a good portion of the backyard garden, spread manure, and planted 30 strawberry plants, two rows of onions and two rows of shallots. Very satisfying work.

Sunday, Steph and I went to her friend’s baby’s baptism. It was my first baptism, as not even I was baptized. Cold church. Beautiful, tall arching ceiling. Vibrant stained-glass windows. A hundred people seated, singing together for Mass. Two babies will be baptized today. The priest speaks, and the audience respond on que at the right times with ‘amen’ or by manually crossing their chests, or breaking into choir. It was a bit chaotic, lots of people, not knowing where to sit (Steph and I and Maria, our friend, sat on the wrong side of the aisle. Both babies refused or misunderstood the command of the priest to put the holy water on their own foreheads, and both babies cried after their parents dipped their heads down to the water and the priest soaked their hair.

After there was the buffet and party, lots of fun, decent food. Lots of wine and bubbling wine going around. Met some older folks who were excited about various ecologically-friendly alternative initiatives springing up in their area concerning agriculture and construction. Met a couple who informed Steph and I about the various free schools which offer instruction in tradeskills, including ‘Les Compagnons’, a world-famous school of high quality. I will look into this last school.

When I return from Belgium I will do a two week volunteer stage with a local renewable energy installation company. After I will decide : carpentry (ecoconstruction) or electricity (renewable energy).

Today is Monday, and in less than twenty four hours I will embark on my trip to Antwerp, Belgium. Not much money in my pocket, but well-fed, and well-enough equipped with one of the two languages spoken in Belgium (French).

In the back of my mind, I consider the scenario of shit hitting the fan in the future, in terms of economic collapse, food-system collapse, social program-collapse, unemployment, rioting, etc. And so I subject every idea for my future to criticism from this collapse scenario point of view. Stephanie and I have agreed that if things get hairy, we will farm. Here or back in Ontario, where I already have a bit of a network. Learning electricity or carpentry will be very useful in almost any possible future scenario, for earning money with a stable job, and for learning DIY (do it yourself) skills for maintaining and repairing a house, or building a new one. I would like to learn both, but which one to pursue first, which one to make into a ‘career’ ?

What do you guys and girls think ?

Write to you from Belgium !

Cheers,
Maurizio