Please fill in all fields and then click Submit.
Once submitted, your comment will be sent for approval by one of our editors.
The Parisians are Coming
I live in a tiny little village in the south of France: our population is 500 souls, and that is it. I’m about as “plouc” (French for “hick”) as you can get. We have one grocery store that is open half the day, and during the winter the shelves are half empty. One time, the cheese aisle had two lone packages of mozzarella and a jug of milk. I so badly wanted to take a photo of this bleakness. Our post office is only open from 9:30am until 11am, and all five hundred residents are there in line at 9:30 sharp.
So you can imagine when vacation starts and the invasion happens in our sleepy little beach town. Did I mention that we are on the Mediterranean, and have the best long sandy beach? Perfect for windsurfing, beach combing, shell collecting and cooling off in this hot heat wave that calls itself summer. That is why our township swells to 100,000 people in the height of the season, which is exactly right now. Come Bastille Day, carloads of foreigners from other parts of France install themselves in their second homes (which are closed up the rest of the year). All of a sudden the air is filled with children’s shrieks, laughter and occasional cries, car doors slam, flip flops slap the pavement in front of our house—and this is all in addition to the normal heartbeat of the cicadas. And the garbage man must now come once a day instead of once a week.
The French generally take
the month of August off. Stores close up and they make their way to grandma’s house in the country, or to their second residence next door to me or some other unsuspecting plouc. They look forward to it—I don’t. It’s great for commerce; the post office extends its hours and the stores fill up with bathing suits and beach towels. Local restaurants open their terraces, bands play at night, and the farmer’s market each morning bulges with vendors selling everything from artesian cheese to Indian saris.
But I am counting the days until the end of summer when they all will leave (including my in-laws who are spending most of the summer in an apartment under our house!) and I will have my private sandy beach back to myself. I won’t have to sleep with ear plugs because of that dang disco down the street and their drunk patrons taking up my parking spot in front of my house. Maybe I should go to Paris instead?!!
C. Riana Lagarde
