I seem to be stuck on a few fantasies about the GG escape (less than 2 weeks!). Some of what I'd like to do in France especially is pretty turisto. Since we've not been to France before, I'm willing to accept more main-track, the first time. You don't know what you like until you've been, and then you go back and do things you don't necessarily find in Frommers (not to diss them, I like their x$ a day stuff, and they've helped me find hotels especially).
I always find it interesting that part of being a tourist is fighting with the idea that you're a tourist. Or, trying to be a less tourist-y tourist. If one travels in a mob by bus, with a group and a director, one is a more touristy tourist, it is commonly thought. So it must be the more independent you are in your tourism, the less touristy a tourist you are. But that's preposterous in a way. Maybe it's the level of insulation from "real life" where you tour that counts. But then again, when "real life" is heavily touristed--say one lives in Venice--well, where's the line? All of this of course has been hugely worked out by the branch of inquiry known as Tourism Studies, and I have a colleague who does incredible insightful work in this area. suffice it to say there are well-known (yet no less deeply felt for being so well-known) paradoxes that attend the practice of tourism.
So here I go, plotting our tourism, which I imagine as a series of events, and I take some pleasure in projecting myself forward into them. If the reality doesn't match up with the expectation, that's okay, we adapt. And I don't have detailed fantasies for everywhere we're going--there's plenty of "whatever happens" and just hanging out time built in. But this part of it, imagining forward, is so much darn fun.
Fantasy 1 is Cassis. I've already imposed this on others. For some reason the idea of boating to calanques, then eating mussels with crisp white wine, chased by the namesake Cassis, has grabbed my my imagination, so I'm sort of organizing an excursion with the folks on our conference panel. I even researched the restaurant and have decided on de Bonaparte. I hope it's really hot outside, so the boat ride and the briny mussels and the crisp white wine converge in a kind of dizzy southern France ecstasy.
Fantasy 2 is more general: Speaking French.
My French is coming back to me. We got the Pimsleur's conversational French and the Italian (on sale for 15 bucks at Daedalus) and the Italian challenges me--I just can't speak it quickly enough, my mouth feels gluey somehow--but the French is tediously too novice. I skipped the first 4 lessons. I need vocabulary drills! It's been a long time. The Cajun French here sounds so different--I kind of like it, it's kind of sloppy French, not too picky about the trills and vowels and dipthongs and such. Cajuns speak more slowly, and more distinctly. It's not quite as pretty, but I can follow it. Anyway in this fantasy my rusty French improves, and the citizens of our host country are more generous because at least I'm trying.
Fantasy 3 concerns the Cinematheque Française. What I'd really like to see there, if anything is on exhibit, is anything in connection with the Lumiere Brothers. I'd like to see any of their works on real film, although I doubt very much this is possible. At any rate, we don't have their entire catalogue on video in the US, but perhaps I can find a copy there.
Lesquelles de ces personnes sont des touristes ?
