Piece by piece...

Walking around in an abandoned house is creepy. The places where people used to live their lives now contains junk, the walls are peeling and the scent of decay and stone marks the air. The garden is overgrown and where the swimming pool was is now a murky swamp, all shadows of a past without a future. It makes me a bit sad, goes against my personal creed of Nothing May Be Wasted.

And the place where they live now is an abandoned restaurant and sport facility, with the former dining room partitioned into rooms, old furniture moved into new places, the tennis courts overgrown, the squash court and the woman's bathrooms as storage for unknown and unused curiosities. It's an odd feeling, a bit of temporariness and decay mixed with someone's (actually quite lovely) home.

We visited Monaco yesterday, which is the cleaned up bit of the Riviera with an air of 5th Avenue or PArk AVenue in NYC, clean, pretty, full of money, the parking garages full of Ferraris and more exotic. Yet it is its own country, with a history and a royal family, crowds of tourists, luxury hotels and license plates all its own.

Italy, in contrast to the French side, does not have the huge massive quantity of apartment buildings, factories, and development that completely cover the French coastline from Monaco to past Cannes. It is dirtier, poorer, emptier, more natural, in many respects more beautiful, and in my view more 'authentic', whatever that means. The French side has beautiful cities but the place is simply full, with autoroutes and cities and development and appartments and factories and huge giant stores like Carrefour everywhere, with tiny bits of park squeezed in between. Reminds me of what I have heard of California.

I'm learning French as fast as I can, and though I am at the point where I can get by with only French most of the time, I am just starting and have just reached the point of being comprehended and far from speaking well. Il faut habiter en France. But I enjoy it, and though I can't capture the slipping rhythm I hear it and know I will some day get that far, if I keep on keepin' on.

We leave tonight for Germany. I will be sad to leave France, and sad that this part of our vacation is over, though I am looking forward to the next one. Wish us a good flight.