a relative world

Receiving this old photo on my email yesterday morning made me fold my worries in 4, stuffed them in a small box pushed under the bed. 11 years doesn't seem so long but when you're living life, you hardly notice the changes. We wouldn't have imagined how we got to where we are right now 11 years ago.

But sometimes, there are changes that are impossible not to notice. In more than a month, we'll be moving to a new place, restarting a new phase in our life. Everything will be fresh & more discoveries are in order. Although I have always believed that it's just a matter of geography, as when I arrived France 8 years ago, every place is unique. You just can't help but begin anew.

When I wondered about "being home" & being somewhere else, I just can't help having that twinge in my heart for leaving this little space we grew to love for 7 years. It's not only the four corners of our apartment. It's the morning & afternoon sun. The tree by our balcony & the happy plants that adorn it. The little unnoticeable conveniences like having a parking just beside, the mailbox just in front, and having everything you need within walking distance. The sea just a few meters away. And certainly Marseille, in a weird way, is something my husband & I (especially him) just fell in love with.

Although we're moving only 2 hours away, Spéracèdes is a whole new different landscape. It is a town in the border of the Var & Alps Maritimes region, still in the Provénce-Alps-Côte d'Azur department in the south of France. Instead of the sea, we'll have a lake. Our view of the sea is replaced by the verdant mountains of the Alps, the city of Cannes & part of the sea from afar. Our apartment will become a maison de village (a typical old French house village) with 3 floors - living room on the ground floor, kitchen on the second & 2 bedrooms on the third. Rather than a hyped touristic place, we'll only have children laughing & crying from the school just beside or the sound of silence of this arriere pays, loosely translated as backcountry. When the movement is not the same as from Manila to France, it still reminded me of how it felt.

When all that is changing for us, we're also moving to another phase in my "subfertility." When I received the results of a relatively new bloodwork, the Anti-Mullerian hormone, I'm in waiting to exactly know what it really means. Even if my research gave me a rather bleak explanation of my results, I will wait for confirmation in 2 weeks for my OB appointment to exactly know where I stand. This is another realization in my life that needs more growing up to do.

11 years is long. My friends & I have gone through a lot of changes in our lives. But yesterday brought us even after almost 30 years now to come together & say "we're not doing bad at all." Because there is always good in change.

manks, thanks for this wonderful surpise

France is known for so many things. The great wines, the smelly cheeses & the Eiffel Tower. But where there's an abundance of tourists, there is somewhat a lack of courtesy when it comes to client service. I bet anybody who set foot in France experienced some kind of harsh encounter may it be in the restaurant or in the little shop of souvenirs. During my training in 2004, France was voted the worse in client service in the hotellerie sector for Europe. But to actually live here made me see that isolated moments of kindness do exist in some corners of France.

But not today.
It's August. The last leg of the holiday craze & probably half of the workforce in France is still relishing the summer heat. At 10.30, I called the real estate agency & I was answered by a woman, obviously in a hurry because she speaks a mile a minute & as if without any interest, she asks me to call back before noon. And so I did, the same woman, the same words: call back in 20 minutes, as if not giving me a chance to at least ask her some questions. I told myself that this woman will never get my name & number. The third time I called, nobody was still available to speak with me & I started to get pissed.

"Is there anybody else I can speak to?" I asked with a firmer voice. "I don't know how else I can get a hold of your colleague who handles the rents." Then in a more precise tone of impatience than the last two calls, she started to ennumerate the reasons. A lot of her colleagues are on vacation & that they are drowning with phonecalls. And still, there was no courtesy to actually tell me this nicely & ask my contacts. Isn't it afterall her job? When I started to explain that I just wanted to know if the ad was still good, she cut me by telling me to wait on the line. Now that I am fuming mad, it was another woman who apparently went back on the line. And since I was already raging mad, I was saying that it's been the third time I call, I can't get anybody that maybe it's because of my accent.

To which she replied, "Are you insinuating that we are racists? We don't really like this kind of free comments. You should first know what kind of company we are. We have employees with different nationalities ...." I stopped her by telling her that's not what I think. I explained, containing my burst of anger tears, that it's been the third time I call, there was no interest in what I need since she didn't ask for my contacts & that since they are so busy, there was no patience to give me service due to my accent, on which the other woman might have difficulty to understand, as I have difficulty to explain what I needed when the person on the other end is like tapping her fingers on the table, sighing, waiting for that pause to tell you to just call back. In the end, I did say sorry that she thinks of it that way after all her power speech.

In the first place, she even had the nerve to accuse me of calling them racist when it is not really about racism. Real estate agencies here have very little interest for rentings. We experienced this when we moved from Paris to Marseille, and in the Var region recently where agencies will give you a list of other agencies. So when a voice with an accent is inquiring about renting, there's even less interest for them. She made it sound that their company is with good standing while one of them cannot do a simple job of phone courtesy. The problem with dealing with the French in the service sector is that you are the customer, giving money but you have to beg for their simple attention to give you the service you actually do need. There's always a struggle for courtesy around here. The other day at the lab, when I asked the woman about my payment, she didn't budge a strand of her hair, as if she was lost in her own world. And I asked her twice & got a response on the third when I firmy said, "Madame!" What's worse is that you get used to it & you get all teary eyed for the very few simple courtesies extended to you, to which everybody deserves.

Believe me, I am not a difficult client at all. A difficult patient for doctors, yes but not as a client. I can even end up buying something I really don't want or need if the client service is good. You'd think that in between the bonjours & au revoirs would come a simple courtesy with their jobs. Do tell me, is France's lack of courtesy not alone?

*Thanks Kala for the great title for this post :)

"Ok, first find your exit buddy." Dory grabs on to Marlin, Crush reconfirms, "Do you have your exit buddy?" After Squirt gave out the proper exiting technique to the swirling vortex of terror, I thought I was lucky to have a buddy to go through the whirl of life's eddies. I know I am capable to extract sentimental crap from cartoons. Believe me I could cry buckets of my inner child's tears from these talking animals. I guess a lot of it comes from the gratitude of having a handful of really great friends. But today, it's about one particular buddy, going a long way back, who loves the sunsets as much as I do, while we listen to Edie singing about being by the sea.

We reach a certain age where it's sort of difficult to create the kind of friendship we have with our old friends. Some friendships take years to build, some will take petty disputes but will turn out to be one of the greatest people and some you know it's for a lifetime from the very instant you meet. But friendship is not about whom you've known the longest, it's about who came & never left.

Then through the years, you realize that great friendships are not made with being the same, or by having the constant presence of each other. Nor is it by being in total agreement all the time. In life, we'll have different friends who will be there for different reasons. Friends who will laugh your troubles away. The ones who listen with empathy even if you're breaking their ears off. Those who you are comfortable telling almost anything from the most mundane to the most classified. Friends who you know would totally support you even in craziness. Some would be the ones who are totally the opposite which could enlighten you. You have your bitching buddies. Then if you're lucky, you can have friends who can be all that. And as we grow older, we manage to mix a new world of characters, as we bumped into life, facing our own worlds. And for a moment, when you reach out, there are those who you will always pick up where you left off.

There will always be 20 toes in the sand while you watch the sunsets.
Happy birthday, dear mankie. I talked about friendship like a 6 year old.

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