See you soon!

Life changes.

Macumba!

Last Thursday I went to the Champion for groceries. I was looking in one of the aisles when I saw a very petite woman trying to reach a container of saffron on the very top shelf. She turned to me and asked, in French, if I could reach it for her. I never felt so tall… tip-toed and zap, there it was, the jar with specs of the precious spice in my hands. She then complained that it was hard for her to reach to the tallest shelves (and I thought, observing, yes, they build these for tall people, probably a tall man’s perspective.) I recognized her accent and asked, “Ête-vous brésilienne?” And she answered yes, and I said “moi aussi” – me too, sou brasileira, switching immediately into Portuguese.

She explained she was cooking manioc she got from the African vendor at the Saturday street market and she liked to give it some color. Her husband knew which spice to get and she thought this one would do the job. I told her it probably wouldn’t, but by then we moved on to how had she--Denise--ended up in Ferney-Voltaire with two daughters now teenagers, Simone and Nathalia. We exchanged phone numbers.

The next day we met at the Gare Cornavin in Geneva and went to the Brasseur, a bar across the busy train station. I had the best beer I had ever tasted there, I am not kidding, something with agave and lemon, light, with a delicious flavor. Denise connected with the young Englishman across the table and the three of us moved later to Mr. Picwick, an English bar along Lausanne Street, at her invitation, “They always have music there!”

That’s how I indulged my new frequent activity--bar hoping with an English accountant on assignment and a bubbly Brazilian woman. “My husband and I are taking some time off and I need to go out so I do not get depressed,” she explained. She wanted to stay longer at the Pickwick. I wanted to come home on the 11 p.m. bus and have time to call my brother in Brazil for news about my father. But I had had a good time. The Swiss blues band was quite good. Even if the players were a bit stiff, they did a good American impersonation. I also got to dance.

The next day, Saturday, I met Denise at the street market. It was a beautiful sunny day, many vendors came out, I loved walking and seeing everything and bought some hot olives in a stall where they had all manner of olives from around Europe and Africa. Diversity is really, really a blessing… it is taking us human to long to really accept and enjoy that. Long live olives of all colors and shapes!

Denise invited me to meet her daughter Nathalia (Simone lives with her boyfriend and was not home). She got manioc and cooked for us. Nathalia of course was lovely, with an impeccable French and French demeanor on her beautiful petite Brazilian self. I asked her many questions about school and encouraged her to keep on studying because she would have so many opportunities to work internationally in this region.

I left after lunch to write but I took another break later and went for a great swim. I worked some more and at 9:30 p.m. I was picked up by Denise and her Italian friend, Angelo, whose wife does not go out, to go to another part of France on the other side of Geneva. After the border, we passed a Cassino and then we arrived to Macumba.

Macumba is a popular name for Umbanda, one of the branches of Brazilian African religion people know as Voodoo. So, technically, this nightclub was named Voodoo in Brazilian Portuguese. This was not your run of the mill nightclub (I speak as I have known many, far from the truth—I have never been a “clubber”, though it looks like from these two days that I might soon…) Well, let’s put it this way, I do not think Macumba is a run of the mill because it was a club “plex”. I certainly had never been in one!

It is a huge building like a casino. There are all manner of bar, restaurants nightclubs inside. You pay a couvert fee on regular days (10 euros, ay!) The price of drinks and food let’s put it mildly… exorbitant (15 euros for a small beer and a coke!!!!) But the fun… worth it.

We visited all of the rooms first; we were early by being there before midnight, so the place was empty. We settled in the rock-&-roll room, a dancing room where they played classic rock, oldies. There were quite a few couples on the floor. They were excellent. My dorky self complimented each of my favorites, telling how beautifully they danced. My dorky self also danced by herself after observing a man doing the same. It was a weird feeling, something like autistic dancers… more women joined later… Fun, fun.

We got tired and went next door, the Karaoke English pub, manned by gay boys! (Cyn, I thought of you! You would be in heaven! The equipment was excellent! When they ran out of romantic French tunes they play Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean or “I will survive!”)

Meanwhile, downstairs the techno room started filling with thousands of youth dressed to the T, both girls and boys, a diversity of hairstyles and outrageous outfits, expensive sneakers, high boots and high heels, lots of sparkling jewelry. The room was smoky—not cigarettes, some machine pumped smoke so that besides not being able to hear but the beats and the sounds-gone-mad of electronic music, they could not see anything or at the very least think they were in a fire. On second thought, they were on fire, jumping and moving, moving against each other. On one side of the dance floor there was a bird jail with a lot of young people inside moving orgiastically. On the opposite side there was a boxing ring but nobody was in it. Aggression, control and surveillance all over the place, one of my images of hell… We were out of there to go back to old rock…

By 12:30 Angelo was pooped out, afraid of going home too late, so Denise told me. Denise told me she had put the wrong pair of boots on, this one hurt her feet. I could have waited for the salsa that was about to start, and perhaps gone home at 5 a.m. when Macumba closes. Oh, well, back to Ferney we went.

Two last details: the women’s (girls’?) restroom—many real Barbie dolls and similar European doll models on the pink walls in plastic boxes. See the first picture above. Smoking is no longer allowed inside the nightclub. Tent like rooms were provided outside of the downstairs rooms where people would go to smoke but still be protected from the cold.

In your next trip to Geneva, 10 km away, or perhaps even to Paris, only 530 km from Macumba, stop by!

Spring/Printemps

Spring seems to come slowly
to Ferney-Voltaire where
there is still snow on Mount Jura.
The rains were plentiful this week
and cold.

Still, flowers have poked the ground
They shiver but stay put
growing a bit brighter
when the sun comes
out of hiding in the clouds.

Aspargus and strawberries
are in the street market.

Spring in
Ferney-Voltaire:
Are the birds
singing in French also,
delicately announcing
‘amour’ around the corner?
Clouds are
more elegant—can this be?
Passing over my head...
Au revoir!

I have so enjoyed
My journée en France
in the Pays de Gex.
I will never forget
this Spring
ce Printemps
d’espérance.



P.S. I took this photo in Teresinha Rey's beautiful old garden. Primroses are everywhere in the fields in this Swiss/French region.

"I hope I am wrong"

The writer of this blog was out of commission due to an earthquake in her life. She has survived the tsunami.

It was a beautiful morning today so I worked a bit and then went to the health food store beside the Champion in front of my apartment building but on the other street. (There is a parking lot, a green area, and a small stream in the area right in front of the building, which I cross to go to the other street. Big enough for the circus… gives us space to see the Alps at a distance.)

I needed oatmeal and soy milk. I came home with these plus a stash of raw almond butter which is not available in London… organic fat free yogurt, organic Chiapas coffee, and some kind of “bio” red wine made by priests…( It sounded good, I trust priests making wine. Usually communion wine, when served as it is at least during the Anglican masses I have attended, is quite good.) There were also the most beautiful whole wheat breads at the check out. The check out lady was serving morsels of the enormous whole compacted wheat with nuts and raisins bread (at least half a meter by 30 centimeters in size). She offered me a thin slice and that was my breakfast for the morning. (Here I am talking about food again!)

Had some coffee and worked a bit more until 11:30 when I went swimming at the local public pool. The building is simple, attractive and all of the materials carefully chosen to last. I take the card to the desk; the attendant gives me a magnetic key and a card. I use one Euro for the locker and close it with the card and take out the key. I take a shower and go into the seven lane pool, two of which are reserved for school kids who come all throughout the day to swim or for classes. I am up to 21 laps, not bad for someone who sort of learned to (inefficiently) how to swim at age 50 and has not swam regularly for a couple of years. My next project is skiing. I WILL conquer that one…

After swimming I went into the hammas. That is the steam room. I absolutely love being in a steamy room. The more steam the better. I smuggled eucalyptus oil in and was in total heaven, sweating and smelling the scent of Australian forests. After 5 minutes I leave, shower and rest outside on wooden beds, using the time for yoga positions. After some of that, another shower and more steam.

During the second time around I met a Frenchman who I had talked with in the hammas before. He speaks fluent English and as a young man taught swimming at Jewish summer camps in the Catskills. The conversation first started when he was doing yoga positions in the hammas. I asked if he practiced yoga and observed that his twists and back relaxation poses were excellent. He said he had an inflammation on his side, so he used the steam and the poses to help the condition. Of course I found out that his 18 year old daughter was coming to NYC to study and we became best friends.

This time around I asked how his pain was, and then used the opportunity to ask about the medical insurance issue. He said that (horrors!) with the new changes he only can go to one GP, not to as many as he could go before. Some people have to pay a small co-pay to go to the doctor. The whole French social security is being overhauled. He thinks it needs to be but it needs to be done correctly (I almost wrote right instead of correctly, but I fear the Right handling SS.)

Two more people entered the hammas and got involved in the conversation. One very nice older woman, retired from UN peace keeping missions, doesn’t trust the SS changes. She thinks that now many people cannot see doctors who say they are full, or have the lower paying patients wait for months. She blames the infiltration of insurance companies for the medical insurance issues and of American TV into France for idiocy among youth.

Like every person I have talked to, this woman is hopeful that the US will change with the election of Obama or Hillary. To everyone who says that, I reply, “Do not bet on it! I hope I am totally wrong, but I do not think that either is electable due to racism and sexism rampant in US society, not to mention election corruption... It is going to be the “good o’l White soldier boy” again…” The answer is usually a gasp and “Oh, No!” And I nod my head, upset at myself for being so cynical, and say, “I could be wrong…”

Politics in the hammas is steamy too.

No Nukes! At the Red Cross/Red Crescent Museum

Today was one of the saddest days of my entire life. I am not going into details. Those of you who are close friends know I am in a process of reviewing and revising my entire life and, at almost 62, this is certainly NOT EASY.

What do you do then when you mope so low that the floors never get dry from tears and dampness of abject thoughts? You go to Geneva’s Red Cross/Red Crescent Museum!

I took the bus into Geneva. This was my second time on the bus. Yesterday I went to visit a friend of a friend of my mother’s. Yes. That is a story in itself that I am not telling now. This woman is the widow of Andre Rey, a psychologist from the University of Geneva who was a contemporary and professional nemesis of Piaget himself. (“No one takes Piaget’s theories seriously now, at least not in Switzerland!” was one of the first things she told me yesterday, before she showed me the plaque commemorating the centennial of her husband’s birth on the front of her three hundred year old farm house.)

I took the bus today into Geneva. I knew where to get off, at the Croix Rouge stop. All the stops have names. They are within three zones. You buy the ticket for the zones you want to cross in a machine at the stop, with exact change or a card. You validate the ticket once in the bus to show the time—they last one hour you can travel with that ticket. It is unlikely anyone will ask to see your ticket. The company believes you do have one, with the right time, and you will not cheat. All of this knowledge I acquired in the last 24 hours.

I have visited the museum another time when in Switzerland almost ten years ago. I wanted to see a special exhibit, “Un-security”. This is about the dangers of nuclear power. The exhibit is short and to the point. It starts with the ideas and scientific discoveries related to radioactive materials. A documentary at the beginning shows the history of nuclear power and weapons and the men associated with them (Marie Curie, exception). They are entirely Western, European and Euro-American. They are what we call “White” civilization ideas and scientific discoveries.

Then there are pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors and objects photographed after the explosions. One watch, found years later in a river bed, shows the exact time of the bombing, 8:15 a.m. The US bombed these people. Almost 75 thousand instantly dead, some vaporized, and the same number of people horribly injured. We still want to do this to others. We may do it if we do not really change the minds of the people who grab power here.

Then there are pictures of Chernobyl’s disaster: those who died instantly, the ghost city that remains so contaminated; the children born mentally retarded or with physical deformities; the old people who returned to plow contaminated land because they preferred to stay in their homeland rather than to be nothing, feeling alienated somewhere else. The Russians are to blame for their carelessness towards people and the environment.

Then there were pictures contrasting ordinary activities going on around "monster" nuclear power plants in Europe. People swimming and sun bathing happily on the beach right beside a nuclear power plant, in France. Two old ladies talking to each other, overlooking a British nuclear power plant. Grapevines and fruits grown on land besides a nuclear power plant in Spain.

There were no pictures of Scriba. Or Oswego. I looked.

Germany is the first Western power to decommission all of its nuclear power plants by the year 2012. I did not know that. Do you know about it? Yeah!

The last part of the exhibit showed all manner of nuclear missiles that the US owns to deploy if the nuclear warmongers decide that it is time to experiment extinguishing human beings somewhere else to just show them who’s the boss. The photographer is an American who decided to visit silos to learn more about them and to document, at the time, the dawn of a new anti-nuclear era. He has concluded since that he was wrong thinking that things were about to change.

The biggest point of the exhibit is that there is a lot of talk again about nuclear energy and renewed effort to create even more potent nuclear weapons. It shows how the two efforts are related. It calls for us, from a Red Cross perspective, to think long and hard about these options. They are awfully destructive.

I almost stopped my personal whining after watching “Un-security” and revisiting the permanent Red Cross exhibit downstairs, documenting all of the wars that have taken place from 1863 to 1990, and the founding and efforts of the Red Cross/Red Crescent towards alleviating the plight of the wounded. Having lived in New Mexico, the cradle of nukes, however, I have become sort of immune to greater feelings about them. I feel only a little better after looking at the impact of real mushroom clouds outside of my very own, home grown inside my heart and soul.

Surprise!

I am leading a fairly quiet life mostly entirely alone. I welcome this opportunity daily. At the same time, I am in such a strange place that I am with all that surrounds me, the buildings, the places of commerce, the gardens, and the brook that gurgles by the building going in the direction of Lake Leman… My attention goes from the computer screen to the window and what lies beyond, the Geneva airport with its airplanes coming and going in the distance, as well as the oh blessed mountains.

Total silence. I am writing at the desk yesterday when there is unusual noise coming from the road. It is not quite the sound of horns, but it is too… just noisy, annoying like any racket that disturbs the peace, going on for a few minutes. I finally stand up, go to the window to see at the roundabout (I think that is what we call the circle where cars go around in different directions) a huge truck, actually a truck connected to several trailers. I think “How unusual to see such huge truck here in Europe; we see them in the US. It must be making noise to indicate that it wants to turn left without going around the circle.” Curiosity thus satisfied, I went back to work.

During lunch, which I eat in front to the glass door to the veranda overlooking the mountains, I notice that the truck is now parked behind the Champion supermarket. “It must be making deliveries… Such a huge truck to bring the food…” I finish eating and go back to work.

Late in the afternoon I am ready to go swimming. I need it because I have been grumpy today and suffering from self-pity. I gather towel, goggles, cap, ear plugs, soap, shampoo, the entrance card all in my backpack and put the suit on, dressing myself warmly because it is about 33 degrees. I go down the elevator, to the trash bin, and then outside.

Here is what I see: camels, tiny ponies, and a strange bull with long, long pointy horns. Besides the menagerie are the many parts of the truck, more trailers and a tent going up. The Circus of Rome is in town and right behind my building. A big smile grows on my face, my heart beats a tiny bit faster, and I feel the rush of joy and expectation, surprised.

I have considered 1) Going to the performance today, Wednesday, at 6 p.m. as the loudspeaker on one of the circus’ vehicles announces all over Ferney-Voltaire. 2) Asking at the office if they need employees and volunteering, thus fulfilling a lifelong dream of running away with the circus and perhaps a strong vocation as a clown.

First day in Ferney-Voltaire, France

The first day in Ferney-Voltaire
Jorgen picked me up from the Geneva airport with his adult son visiting from Sweden. The two drove the five minute ride to Ferney-Voltaire, which from now on I will abbreviate as F-V. Très bien. I had a hand drawn map and it was not difficult, in the small town, to find the apartment building. We carried the stuff through the lobby and unthinkingly got into an elevator.

We got to the last, the seventh floor. “I thought Sachiko lived on the eight floor!” I said. We looked puzzled at each other. I took out the keys that the Portuguese concièrge, Mr. Carlos Martim, had given me in an envelope with “Ms. Tania Ramalho” in Sachiko’s handwriting. I tried to fit these keys in the seventh floor apartment while talking with the men. Jorgen’s son tried to read the names of residents on the other doors. Suddenly, the apartment door opened and I immediately saw my mistake—out of excitement and mindlessness. I did have the wrong floor. A tall French man came out and told us that there were two elevators, one for odd and another for even floors. I apologized, and we decided to walk up the stairs carrying the heavy suitcases.

There it was, “my” apartment for one month! The key to the security iron front door fit, opening all six of the protective locks at the same time with one simple turn. The first thing we noticed, to Jorgen's big, big laughs, were post-it notes all over the place and a long note “for Tania” on the back of the front door. While we had gone over many details about how the place worked, Sachiko decided to make sure that I had everything in writing. It was thoughtful of her. After all, as the first event of not finding the right door shows, I can be extremely absent minded. (I take a moment to beg the pardon from all who I have injured with annoying distractions and forgetfulness. I am working on this terrible habit because I do not want to go to hell for it.)

Ok. Just one of the notes on a cupboard over the stove, in neon green paper:

You may use salt & pepper here, but I prefer that you do not use the olive oil here (as it’s a very special one I bought in Italy & cannot buy it in Geneva or France). Thanks.

I laughed. Truthfully, I understand Sachiko very well. I have a thing for good olive oil. I hoard it too. Hands off her Italian oil…

After the men left I got one of Sachiko’s specially strong grocery bags everybody uses to avoid the environmental curse of plastic bags and went to the Champion, a store in front of the building but across from its parking lot and on the next street, so it is not like I live right in front of a supermarket. Still, it is convenient. As a diehard shopper of food (once I am, hopefully, a recovering… overeater…) I was in heaven. It must have taken me more than an hour and a half to go through the aisles of French food, examining everything, checking prices and converting Euro into dollars, trying not to feel overwhelmed. I bought salmon and turkey (dinde), bio (meaning organic) broccoli and cauliflower, onions and garlic, soy milk, oats and olive oil!

I had the first meal I cooked myself for a long time and was grateful for it. (In London, besides breakfast, lunch of peanut butter on rice cakes and apples, I was eating out once a day, with prices being twice as much…)

I started to establish a routine of exercise, meditation, journaling, reading and writing the next day. I also break for cooking; a walk, and now that I found the local public pool also to go swimming. My first walk in town led me to find a HEALTH FOOD STORE just beside the Champion! I got a French SIM card for my cell phone. I went to the Tourist Office for maps and schedules of the buses to Geneva and Gex, the next French town. I found the pool, the apartment complex where the poor—Africans and older French people—live, and a Moslem grocery store with reasonable prices and lots of spices.

I promise not to bother my readers anymore with meals and food details. I just meant to give a picture here of what is available in F-V.

Did I mention the view of the Alps?