An untested hypothesis...

If one gets a good head of steam going early enough in the morning, I suspect one can get a lot more done, overall, during the day than if one leaves the house at 11:15 am and runs headlong smack into the national habit of taking from one to three hours off for lunch starting shortly after noon. (Of course, it's a good bet this "early bird" philosophy is equally applicable in countries where nobody takes any time off for lunch, either.)

The first stop today was in Cavaillon, to find a bank. Before I could find the one I needed, I got sidetracked by a storefront for SFR, which sells cell phones and connectivity. Unlike Moscow, where there are probably six or seven sellers of cell phones and services per hundred meters of commercial storefront, I was hard-pressed to find more than the occasional vendor in Paris, and a good number of those were for Orange, which I've gathered—from my Web research—isn't terribly interested in hawking pay-as-you-go services. I'm not aware that, before today, I've actually seen a single such store in these parts, but to be fair, I've been keeping my eyes pasted to the asphalt in front of me while out and about.

It turns out SFR sells a miniSIM card and service for the iPad, so I signed up (which involved showing an ID). I'm running on the French cellular network now, with four bars of reception, but the acid test of the system will occur when I go out of WiFi range. Considering I used less than 30 MB of bandwidth during my most recent month with AT&T, 100 MB ought to last me until I get home.

Galina and I walked around Cavaillon for a while, but the center of town pretty much closes down and empties out for lunch, and we didn't want to stick around until people got back to do our bank business.

From Cavaillon, we headed west, with the idea of visiting Les-Baux-de-Provence, an old settlement built on top of a mountain, with a schedule of public demonstations of medieval arms and armor, including the firing of a full-size seige catapult. I imagine Mathew would enjoy this kind of thing once his current interest in cartoon characters ebbs somewhat.

Along the way, we decided to make a quick stop at a not-all-that-fancy-looking place in St.-Rémy-de-Provence for a quick snack. We ordered a plat du jour, which turned out to be a magret of duck, and a "Four Seasons" pizza (topped with mushrooms, ham, artichoke heart, and cheese). While we waitied, I wandered over to where a bunch of fellows were playing boules, just in time for the game to end and for everyone to climb back into their cars and disperse, presumably back to work.

The duck dish was quite good, and the sauce expertly blended the sharpness of horseradish with the sweetness of peaches. The pizza was typical for what I've seen in Europe: tasty enough, but a pain to eat using a knife and fork, which is what one does in these parts if one wishes to appear civilized.

Les-Baux-de-Provence was easy enough to find—although the turnoff came so quickly, I missed it on the first pass—and all the twists and turns up the mountain road were a little bit too exciting. Galina and I walked around, took a look inside the church and chapel, and explored the less-well-traveled paths.

Rather than g back the way we came, I decided to loop south and east, but first I had to get out of the parking lot. As in Avignon, the protocol calls for sticking your parking ticket in a machine, paying the fee, and then feeding the now-authorized ticket into a machine at the physical exit to raise the gate.

The machine refused to make change for my 20-euro note, so the police officer on duty pressed a button, retrieved my ticket from the machine, then disappeared into his office to make change. But when I inserted the ticket into the machine at the exit, it suggested I go pay my fee first and spat the ticket back out. A few seconds later, an official vehicle pulled op, a fellow got out and came over, looked at the machine, took my ticket, looked at it, and then suggested I fork over the 5-euro parking fee so I could leave.

I explained what had happened up at the payment machine, whereupon the fellow pulled out his radio and spoke for a few seconds. He listened for a moment, then turned around and handed the ticket back to me. "Un souvenir," he said, and smiled. He spoke again on the radio and a few seconds later, the gate went up and I drove away.

I must say that folks have generally been really friendly whenever we have gone.

The guy who sold me the SIM card this morning was very friendly and helpful. When we passed a postman doing his rounds along the main drag in Cavaillon, Galina pulled out a letter I had written to Mathew and before I could ask where the closest mailbox was, he had taken the letter, given us an "I'll take care of it" look, and smiled.

And then yesterday in Aix, a local came over to me as I stood in front of the machine that prints paid-parking slips, trying to figure out how it operates, and informed me that pay-for parking was actually free between noon and two. Today, as we pulled into the parking lot outside the pizzeria, a woman who was leaving the lot rolled down her window and encouraged us to take and use her paid-parking slip, which was valid until 4 pm, thus saving us the trouble of forking over an extra couple of euros to let the car sit while we ate lunch.

And my French is improving, despite the reduced opportunity to use it here as compared with Paris.

Cheers...

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.