Nice Guy

Generally I think of myself as a nice person, opting out of controversy and those topics that make my ears turn red. Of course when certain issues come up, it's easy to be opinionated. Baby seals in the arctic, for example, just should not be clubbed to death to make fur hats for vodka swilling Russian aristocrats. They are hunted like one would hunt a garden snail, a hammer and a good eye are all you need. Plus they are an important part of a fragile ecosystem, one doesn't club baby seals. Beavers are the better choice (according to my former fur-selling sister) because they have caused (and will cause again!) the mass desertification of the great north, literally damned the place. Then there's the thrill of the hunt, beavers are clever buggers, or at least they have legs and they can run away from your swinging death-club, y'know, or rifle. Here the argument is as easy as a seal hunt. The boundaries are clear, the moral standpoints are easy to identify and there is little grey area. Perhaps the bit about beavers is less obvious, but still, better wear a beaver than a baby seal in by book.

I come from a family where it is important to get along. Conflict is internalized and any outward manifestation is understood to be an act of aggression. I don't know where this comes from, but I remember long ago there was a family polemic about the new video for Michael and Janet Jackson's duet Scream. Mom wanted it recorded, sister couldn't get the recorder to work and tensions rose. It all ended in a climactic shout from my sister, "It's a music video, they'll play it again!" of which the logic could not be denied and the argument was over. For days afterward I felt like I could take a stand like my admirable sister. "Popcorn is fine for lunch! Gaaawwwd!" I would plead with my mom in the car on the way home from a playdate at the movies. I tried feeble logic, "I can't practice piano today, the humidity makes the piano sound weird and it throws. Me. Off." She just didn't seem to buy my excuses. Maybe that was the problem, these were excuses, not arguments.

Whatever the reason, favored dinner table conversation was light, funny, and always searching for agreement. Even the Dalai Lama would sound contentious for defending the right to life of the bucktoothed manace of the North, but around the table with the Wilsons, it is much more common to hear with a slight tone of acquience, "Ok, then, I can see why we should be killing and skinning beavers, suuuure." To this day my mother ports proudly a beaver's pelt that's been cut to ribbons and knit into a fuzzy vest. Seal free and without a qualm from a family member. After 23 years of agreement and peace-making, I feel bit like China emerging from the middle ages up against a scrappy and belligerent Europe. Though the orient had all the expertise and know-how, it was the constant fighting of those smelly and imbred Europeans that primed them for a European age of empire. We may be cultivated and mutlticultured, we may be from a beautiful place, we may be well travelled and educated, we may be open minded, but we are not primed for battle.

Chez les Shabtai, the family that has been hosting me in St-Remy, things are entirely different. Every time I utter the phrases je suis d'accord or j'aime ça or c'est bon, I have the distinct impression that I'm letting them down. Expression of agreement or admiration is not always welcome as they are at home. Here, harmony is for the piano, not conversation. It was Christmas day and we had been sitting around the table for three hours, counting the aperitif we had been eating and drinking for four. At exactly the moment when the alcohol mixed with the fatigue of trying to keep the pace in French when David's mother turned to me with purpose.

"Alors, on sait que tu aimes la france, mais qu'est-ce qu'il y a que tu n'en aimes pas?" So, we know you like France, but what is there that you don't like about it?

I could have said one of many things, like I hate the way that the bank, the police station, and the post office are only open when you are guaranteed not to have the time to pay a visit. Perhaps I could have railed on about the bizarre things that the french like to eat like spreadable meats, or the liver of force-fed ducks and geese, or the tiny whole raw shrimp we were presently pretending to enjoy with homemade mayo. Or I could have picked on the the way that every frog is a licensed expert on everything from sheep shearing the subduction zone of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Or what really irks me is the way that only girls get to wear high boots, and fashion victims like me are left out of the trend.

Not really wanting to play into her game of argument baiting, I chose a banal topic: work. I told her that most of the teachers whose classes I give English lessons are stress cases. I chalk this up to the fact that unlike a great mass of the French functionary workforce, teachers are held responsible, not by their employers so much, but by twenty to thirty little bosses every day, their students. Teachers are influentual people and by osmosis, students pick up on their high concentrations of stress. When I give a simple direction in class like, "Color the Christmas tree green," I am confronted with twenty-five pairs of worried eyes. "Vert clair ou vert foncé !?" Light green or dark green!? Lequel! They look at me with their big eyes, worried to death that a Christmas Tree colored the wrong shade of green will mean the difference between a "well-done" and a tirade and lecture on the proper greeness of a particular domestic-festive conifer. I tell them dark-green to assuage their fears, but I can't help cringing as their maitresse berates them for hesitating to sound out the words to their explanation of the festival of Epiphany. Many six year olds are getting a better education in coping with stress and fear than they are in experiencing the reality that. I wonder if the little ones see the significance in the stuffed toy witch sitting behind their teacher's desk, I wonder if their teacher sees it.

After I gave my feeble attempt of criticism, I got a simple, "Je suis d'accord, parfois les enseignantsmettent trop de pression sur les eleves." Agreement. What a bummer. I tried to make up for my obvious French-less response by proclaiming my appreciation for the paring of the wine with the possibly rancid cheese we were devouring. It seemed to allay some of the disappointment. Tant mieux.

This has been a common experience of mine in France. This is a culture where strangers will jump down each other's throats in order to let them know they pronounced to-mah-to and not to-may-to. In the place where streets are paved with gold, do we fear to dig down to find some real dirt? At the expense of sounding like a meanie, I have decided to be more honest and let you in on some of my harsher views on life's controversies.

For one thing, I don't like Hemmingway. Also, a part of me feels that gay marriage shouldn't be a big issue since marriage shouldn't be a part of the government's business anway. The treatment of Palestine by Israel is an insult to the memory of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Don't go out of your way to make a baby if you have to, adopt one. I think the world is on a pathway to become a lot more like Delhi's Chandni Chowk neighborhood so we should all learn to deal with less stuff and more hardship. Finally, make love, art, and seek to grow the consciousness of the human race instead of all the other stuff, but while your at it, don't quit your day job, the place still needs someone to sweep the floors.

La Pastorale

Jesus, contrary to popular belief, was born in Bethlehem in Provence. Or at least according to the writer Yvan Audouard and actors of St-Rémy de Provence. In fact, much of the story of the Baby Jee you think you might know is completely wrong. Mel Gibson might have liked to know that the angels and the inhabitants of Bethlehem didn't speak Aramaic, but French with a Provençal accent.

The spectacle recounting the birth of Jesus was orignially scheduled to be played out in the ancient Roman ruins of Glanum nearby. Safety regulations, however (they do have safety regulations here!) stated that the stage erected in the ruins was not strong enough and might collapse under the wait of the good Christian audience. The thought of the miracle of Jesus' birth accompanied by a disasterous and possibly deadly catastrophy is deliciously sacreligious, but unfortunately, the scene was moved from Glanum to a square inside of town. The decidedly less dangerous Place Favier stood in for the ancient ruins and you might have even said that the Frenchy quaintness of it all was a bit charming. After a plump rendition of the angel Gabriel had ascended her way up a tree, the stage was set. Suddenly, the entire scene was plunged into a hellish fiery red by exploding flash powder set about the square. Surely the fireworks were meant to convey to us the audience a sense of divinity to the scene but to me red flames are less sent from above than below. I actually caught myself, good English major that I am, looking for significance in the director's choice to start out the story of the good shepherd in flames of an inferno. Apparently I was alone in my dark interpretation of the scene, the rest of the audience found it beautiful, I still hold that it was a sinister mise en scene.

After the fires of hell abated, the actors began their dumb-show as a CD recounted the story of the birth of l'enfant Jésus. As Saint Joseph chatted with the bull and the ass, Mary played midwife for herself on a bale of hay and suddenly a doll was born. Bulls and Assess make dangerous bedmates who despite their best intentions to warm the newborn, knocked the messiah from his humble cradle onto the more humble floor of the manger. Soon after, the happy family in the manger, the fires of hell keeping us all warm and the Virgin tending to the new wounds of the baby from his first fall, a veritable soap opera of miracles took place that blessed night. The lazy miller whose wife ran off with a dastardly Spaniard is suddenly taken with the urge to work hard. The fish lady, having nightmares of only having bad fish to sell the next day, finds some miraculous fish in her basket that smell practically alive! and her husband the hunter with a limp who never gets a good shot ends up with a plump stuffed rabbit, yum! The fun doesn't stop there for the police officer finally catches the serial poultry thief and all the little angels dance in joy around the happy, productive, and thankful people.

Suddenly, to the a melody of Bizet's Carmen, the three wise men arrive, draped in robes that any tasteful drag queen would covet and followed by a troop of children in minstrel show blackface. Everyone deposits their gifts, Mary obviously content to stay with the bulls and asses turns down some better lodgement and they all celebrate with a Madonna-worthy round of vogueing in the flashing disco lights of (thank God) white flash powder going gangbusters.

And that my friends, is the true story of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Merry Christmas!

A Night (or five) in Tunisia Part 1

Orientations are always odious things full of awkward "get-to-know-you" games and nametags, especially when they involve early morning travel to a gigantic 2nd world city known as Marseille. But they are unavoidable and often yield welcome encounters.

Waking up early one September morning I was in no state to travel but more in a condition to hug the toilet. Missing my appointments with French immigration authorities, however, would be to risk Sisyphean mountains of bureaucracy, so I did my best to hold myself together and limp to Marseille powered by naught but apple juice.

Thankfully, my flu didn't bar me from a passing grade on my medical exam and with a fresh tuberculosis-free x-ray in hand, I met up with Annette and a slew of newly arrived Americans for some time with our hostess of honor: the consulate general of the United States. After some minutes of introduction to being an American in France we piled into a bus and headed over to her (well, on loan to her from the State Department) fabulous mansion on the Corniche of Marseille to enjoy some "Provençal specialties" and drink Napa Valley wine. Feasting on taxpayer dollars and drinking the sunset of Fitzgerald's opulent French Riviera, I noticed that Annette had disappeared and I went to seek her out. As I had expected, she was interrogating the consulate about her life in the Foreign Service, the conversation was going something like this when I arrived:

"Well, I'm not allowed to say if I've met them but let me tell you that Brad and Angelina are small potatoes compared to Saudi princes and their wives."
"Wow, how often do you have parties like that?"
"Well it's not always champagne and parties, much of my work has to do with helping travelers who have run into legal problems where I have to mediate communications between the states. Though, I do feel like they gave me this post to make up for two tours in Haiti and time in Saudi Arabia."
"Ooh! What's it like to be a woman working in a Muslim nation?"
"It's different, it depends on which nation it is, sometimes its a dress code, sometimes its how you communicate with the people you have, but it never really got in the way of me doing my job because I mostly worked with Americans anyway."
"Interesting. Tell me, I want to go to Tunisia, have you been there?"
Where is Tunisia, I caught myself thinking. Let's play a little random association: Tunisia, Indonesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, ooh, tropical islands!
"I have. If I were you I'd go to Morocco. Tunisia's like 'Arab-lite'."

Who knew? Tunisia is part of North Africa.

Fast forward about three weeks and one of many French holidays. Annette has a former professor in Tunisia who was willing to welcome us and although "Arab-lite" was its prognosis, we to the trip across the Med.

One word of advice: Don't take the ferry from Marsille to Tunis. If you do, bring toilet paper with you.

We arrived four hours late of a twenty hour trip on our 1980's pleasure cruise after snacking for dinner and lunch and sleeping on four seat cushions in a room the stank powerfully of feet and cigarette smoke. We made it through customs (despite having possibly cheated the rules of our French residency applications) and were met by Annette's professor Laura and her husband Karim, always excited to share the littlest slice of his country.

They took us to the Avenue Bourguiba, an interpretation of the Champs-Elysées, for mint tea with pine nuts floating in the mixture. Sitting there among the vestiges of a French colonial government, watching the people promenade down the boulevard, I felt like I had been launched into the future, global warming now an artifact of history, the economy of the world now changed, and the people still living to impress each other as they strut down the street. Paris sidewalks 75 years from now, "Have a little care exhaust and Islam with your coffee?"

After an excellent sleep, we went the next day to the Musée du Bardo in the former palace of the Bey (king) of Tunisia. The place looks like a bunker from the outside but the guilded and arabesque interiors are so spectacular that much of museum is the building itself. The true focus of the museum, however, is on the mosaics from the African reaches of the Roman empire. The expressions and subtle tones that are created from such an unweildy medium as squares of stone are truly amazing. A million little rocks put together in the right way take on a beauty far beyond the individual parts. The example here, intended for the Tunisisan villa of a wealthy Roman provincial, spent a millenium at the bottom of the sea.

I'll write the rest of the trip later, but for now take a look at this clip I found of a song that brings me back to my high school jazz band days and a close friend. It was playing through my head all through the week.

Watch Where You Step

You might not think of this as an appropriate subject for reflection, analysis, introspection, what have you, but I would like to talk about some shit. Yes, excrement. Walking to class one day (my "tackle the subjunctive tense class"), pain au chocolat in hand and basking in the sweet savor of those buttery trans-fats, I nearly stepped in a neatly arranged pile of merde. Like a gag vinyl prop it looked perfect, like from a dog with well-balanced diet. Planted in the pile, erect like a little ivory tower, stood a plastic fork, gleaming in the famous sunlight of Provence. The streaks of chocolate in my chocolate croissant now disgusting, I stuffed it in my backpack and pondered the turd before me.

My tastes in art of all genres tends toward the florid and romantic side. Chopin instead of Bach, Caravaggio, not Mondrian, Britney with drug problems, not Britney the virgin. This little shit before my feet though, has vaulted itself to one of the most fabulous pieces d'art I have ever beheld. I laughed instantly then fell immediatly after into introspection on the qualities and universal appeal of this piece. Not some overwrought controversy or pickled Hirst horror, but an urban Monalisa; Rodin never sculped something so real and so 'art' as did the anonymous genius that crafted "Merde with Fork". Sublime, really.

I stood enraptured perhaps too long when I noticed a baguette bearing madame greeting me awkwardly, as good folks do when they see someone weird and want to politely dislodge him from the neighborhood. Discovered as I were, gazing at poo in the street, I lost my wit to banter and returned a sheepish "Bonjour" and headed on my way to class. Looking back, there she stood, head bowed, reluctantly snacking on the butt end of her baguette and pondering the meaning of the merde. We were d'accord. Had it not stank so badly, as the medium tends to do, one of us would have scooped it in a to-go container to appreciate later.

The quantity of art-history major claptrap that could come out of this piece is immense, and what is most impressive is the very meaningful and appropriate quality of such analysis. Who doesn't shit? Who has stepped in a pile of dog-poo in the street, carrying for the rest of the day the scarlet letter of shame, stink, and frustration like someone wrongfully accused of murder? The piece has universal, deep appeal. What's more, the object stuck in the steaming pile was not some derived object, something obviously "deep" like a flag or, let's say, a headless barbie-doll, but a simple tool that we use every day to perform a necessary action in order to live (and produce more of this base medium), that is. . . eat. In this way, "Merde with Fork" is a fully contained comment on a basic instinct of survival, less "you are what you eat," more "ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

The anonymous Avignonnais work has a parallel in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy in the lotus flower, transcending the muck into a pure, beautiful blossom. In our Clorox obsessed, domestically sterilized culture, we have very little idea of how much we owe to the excrement of all the beasts that are digesting and recycling the stuff of life that the earth pushes up to sustain us. In many traditional cultures, much of India for example, dung is a very prevalent and important part of life. Not only does it line the roads, leftovers from the millions of cows that calmly masticate in urban pastures, but it fuels cooking fires for the masses that cannot buy fossil fuels. It helps them build walls where they cannot get building materials like bricks and concrete. For the rest of us, it fertilizes (in a permaculture fashion) the fields that give us the bounty we just celebrated this Thanksgiving.

"Dirt made my lunch" sings the very Santa Cruz Banana Slug String Band. To go a step further, poop made my lunch. I applaud the efforts of the artist in the street for making me think of how low brow life really is and how s/he has risen above the muck into transcendent thought just by stirring it up a bit with a plastic fork.

Rock!

Bad writer! I've not been keeping up. To keep you entertained check out the latest, greatest rock sensation from deep in the countryside of Provence, land of lumière extroadinaire. . .

Stranger

I have been taking a French class at the University of Avignon for a couple weeks now, hammering out the finer points of using the subjunctive tense (far be it from me to use it in an English sentence) but most importantly, finding people that I can call my own group of friends in this new (and very old) place. Over the past few years I have traveled to a number of countries foreign to my own, trying my best to meet people and get immersed in cultures that can open my eyes to different ways of life. Nearly without fail, though, I find myself surrounded with strangers from all over the globe, though not from the country where we all have chosen to install ourselves.

In India two years ago while walking through a market, my roommate Alicia overheard a group of Mexicans speaking her mother tongue. Instantly, we were surrounded by more Mexicans than Indians, sampling the nightlife with the rest of their international community. Americans training engineers, Germans working in NGOs, and a whole host of other nations plying their trades in the developing hotspot that is Hyderabad.

Today when I'm not surrounded by David's family and friends, how lucky I am to have been welcomed by all of them, I find myself in a French world made up of a bunch of Americans, Brits, Germans, Spaniards, South Africans, Canadians, and South Koreans, and many of the minute variations within those worldly classifications. I am picking myself through a foreign language riddled with accents from the four corners. Amid the explosive laughter of our Korean classmate and the Andalucian French of another (on parle franthais), not to forget the underarticulating American English speakers, somehow we manage to communicate and get along.

No matter where, we are all seeking how to get along with a place that is totally strange to us, our common bond. In India we discussed bartering tactics, “What is a good first offer?” and “I’m always better at bartering for underwear than pretty things that I really want, try practicing on underwear,” and we sought to become local, understanding the different neighborhoods and all they had to offer. Banjara Hills is a beautiful neighborhood with no reason to visit, Charminar is crowded and dangerous but follow your nose through the flower market to the alleyways of glittering bangles and you’ll forget about time and have to hire a rickshaw back to your rural apartment (a situation that usually ends in a shouting match because now he can’t find a fare to take back to town). Here in France we discuss the completely arbitrary opening and closing hours of administrative offices so as not to look like tourists, waiting outside a closed office all afternoon. We carry baguettes under our arms like they were flags proclaiming to the people we pass in the city, “Look! I’m like you!” Though we can’t help but consume too many pains au chocolate and speak too loud, our voices echoing off the walls of narrow streets when we conglomerate in herds of Americans.

Culture shock does not come from without, it is what happens when you get to a different place and realize you have lost all of your survival skills... or rather, that those you brought with you are no longer compatible. What is left is a big, ambulatory, and capable baby wandering around frustrated, but not powerless thanks to other people just the same. It is an experience shared by, I think, all the travelers I have met as we seek to glean understanding and experience from each other. How do I? Where do I? Why is it? We are flooded with questions like kids again, trying to understand a world that, though it has welcomed and cared for us, still gives no answers as to what it is or why. As we grow up in these new places, perhaps we get cynical, or perhaps we grow to love these new places even more. Already, my disdain for French office hours has taken a new turn, two hours for lunch is something I can get used to. It’s nice to be able to experience the people you are eating with, not the work you’ve gotten food stains all over because you are in a hurry to do it all at once. No matter what we learn or how we value our experiences I feel like I have experienced many times what it was like to be a child, to form my ideas about the world. The more this happens, the more I find myself in a twentysomething’s conundrum of “Gee! What do I know for sure? Do I only know what I don’t know!?” While this question could fascinate for hours, here is one thing I know: The world has many vistas, some that are welcome, some that are horrifying, some that spoil, and some that illuminate. No one person can have them all, but we are blessed to be humans with the ability to consider these different regards, to hold and weigh my world against yours is a powerful tool of communication and understanding. However pidgin-creole it turns out, however accented, it can only help to see more of each other, to become better neighbors.

Danger: Manifestation Taurine en Ville

I've been reading Pico Iyer's book The Lady and the Monk where he encounters a character who "treats words as if they were thorny roses." I love this description and feel like it fits me pretty well. Sorry for the long pause, I'm working on a regular regimen to keep writing to get over the "thorny" part of my fascination with writing, so stay tuned.

“All festivals, of course, are acts of collective myth-making, chances for a nation to advertise its idealized image of itself,” writes Pico Iyer. It is interesting how a piece of writing can open up your mind to something that has been spinning around in there for a while.

When I arrived in St-Rémy de Provence in the middle of August, I was just in time to see the Féria, a week long local festival that brings together the late summer harvest, a Catholic celebration of the BVM, and the thrill of taureaumachia. The festival started on a Sunday as all the bells tolled the end of mass and the church spilled its congregation out onto the main square of town. A bomb was fired into the air and I stood behind the metal barrier with my heart beating hard from the explosion, waiting for the bulls to come thundering through the town. What first came by though, was a long progression of people in costume. Women with long dresses and shawls and hair twisted and piled on their heads like geishas, men in black suits in antique style towing their families, all dressed alike, in carriages the likes of which I’ve only seen in BBC movies. At the end of the Provençal parade came a bigger carriage towed by a dozen white horses and decorated with all the bounty of the summer harvest, including toddlers, dressed up in fancy dress just like their parents. The polite applause from the crowd congratulated the finish of this antique parade and I knew the people were waiting patiently for the real parade, the bulls.

As David tried to convince me to taste some locally raised snails that were ground up crackers, “They really have no taste though,” another bomb exploded above our heads and the crowd pressed toward the barrier again to see the abrivado. Soon, a phalanx of horseback riders, cavaliers armed with tridents came galloping by with half a dozen bulls herded behind them. The bulls, tractionless on the paved road slipped and scraped through the town as gangs of young men and boys chased after them and tried to grab them by the tail, or even jumping in front of the charging line of horses to disturb their tight flank. Once they trapped the bull, it took six or seven full sized adults to separate him from the herd and steer it around by the horns as the crowd cheered them on and cried, “Ils ont attrapé un! Ils ont attrapé un!” They got one! They got one! Shaking his horns, grunting, and bucking, the bull finally escaped the clutches of the gang and charged around after the people inside the barriers, titillating the crowd until a herder arrived with his horse and long trident to herd him back to the rest. All the excitement came not from the horses and bulls galloping through town, but from the possibility of chaos that presented when the chasers tested the tight control of the herders over their charges. What surprised me most was the calm, dutiful acceptance of the cavaliers in the face of such wild interference. This was not just a tradition, born from the need to transfer the bulls from one field to another, it was a game between control and chaos.

Later that night we went back to the main square, normally a parking lot presided over by a lacy looking crucifix, to watch the Encierro. The town square was barricaded and heaped with islands of hay bales to give some refuge to those inside the barriers. The whole place had a sense of lawlessness; police sat on the church steps eating ice cream, flawlessly made up girls tottered into harm’s way to impress their boyfriends, and brave boys dangled from trees and lamp posts, and perched on the barricades to tempt the bulls that would run loose through town. As I climbed up on the announcer’s booth to get a better view, the bomb exploded above the town and the crowd cheered to welcome the first bull into the crowd. Waves of excitement followed wherever the bull charged. Perturbed and angry, the bull became more reckless, charging in every direction as the people slipped away through the barriers like phantoms passing through walls. As the bull became tired and annoyed, his handlers would take him out of the square and give the crowd another dangerous animal to play with. Finally, a particularly fiery bull stepped into the arena, grunting as a warning to all the audience. Unlike the other bulls, he avoided the people who wanted to be chased and charged straight at a stack of hay bales where a dozen people sat, supposedly safe. They were suddenly launched from their perches by the shockwave of his charge into the hay bales and they quickly tried to regain their safety. Running to the other side, the bull grunted in frustration as they all climbed out of reach.

The amazing thing about a one ton, beefcake of a bull running around a town square at nighttime is how it can disappear for minutes at a time, leaving only traces of excitement at the other side of the square. The bull had deserted our side of the square by the church, tormenting the crowds on the other side of the carousel in the center. With the bull so far away, the less daring but still anxious to test themselves crossed the square away from the bull’s horns, then there came one girl. She walked sanssouci, looking only where she was going, perhaps she was even on her phone. Like the signs say when entering the center of St-Rémy de Provence, “Danger: Manifestation Taurine”, the taureau suddenly appeared, charging down on the girl who was walking like she was in the mall. The crowd exploded in shouts as the bull lowered his head to the ground. She turned and saw, tried to run from the bull but before she took another step, she was between his horns like a doll, then tumbling through the air. She hit the ground, bringing a hush to the crowd and the bull, satisfied, walked back to the trailer that would take him back to the pasture.

As the crowd engulfed the girl, surrounding her with metal barriers for protection, I thought what would happen if my hometown, Capitola, let bulls run through the streets after its citizens. Oh the city council meetings that would ensue, how many people would try to mount the bull, rodeo style? How many people would file lawsuits? Would we all stand back and look on from afar not daring to touch something foreign like a bull on our doorstep? Southern France takes its bull games seriously, awarding even the bulls for their outstanding rage and bravery. Apart from the corrida in Nîmes, no bulls are killed in the sport, though some have truly and sadly been annoyed to death. The games with the bulls at once celebrate the beauty of the wild animal (of which there are hardly any left in thoroughly settled, cultivated, and hunted France) and the danger it presents. It proved to me that this is a culture that cares more for self reliance than America, which preaches it so loudly. If you get gored by the bull, it is only your fault for crossing the barrier into danger, yet an American in the same position would seek to place the blame on somebody else. The city put me in danger, how could they plan such a dangerous sport? The police didn’t protect me! Are we a nursery nation, incapable of protecting ourselves?

To circle back on my opening thought, what is the myth that is born from the bull games? There is of course some bravado in messing around with a dangerous animal, but there is more behind it. A bull can be a juggernaut, unstoppable in its charge through the town and beautiful to watch from behind the barriers, but when you tug on the tail of danger and invite chaos right into town, it is a good reminder that things can change quickly and dangerously. Are we responsible enough to handle the storm when it is charging for us? The people here tend to honor human ability and talent, I am nor sure if more or less than any other place, but the great works of art and historical relics on nearly every corner are testament to that. Yet, at the same time there is a consciousness of the world and its movements. Here people are not simply dreamers, Disney children who can wish upon a star and watch their dreams come true. To really impress the crowd, to impress yourself on the world, you have to challenge what might be unpredictable and dangerous.

And on one final note, thank god France has socialized health care, because that girl got scooped up right away for medical treatment… she didn’t even have bull goring insurance.