It's 4:00pm and I'm sitting on the balcony of a fourth floor apartment in Nice overlooking the deep blue Mediterrranen Sea -- finally getting what all the fuss was about re the "south of France" -- probably as close to heaven as I'll ever get! The temperature is in the low seventies -- in the sun the heat is intense but I'm sitting in the shade of a huge patio umbrella -- a gentle warm breeze blowing -- almost perfectly quiet except for the sound of birds chirping and the occasional airplane taking off from the Nice airport -- munching on olive flavored potato chips (they have weird stuff here!) and drinking a good bottle of merlot -- hey, don't judge!!! With this journal entry I should be finally caught-up on my stories -- at least until tomorrow.
The last couple of days in Perpignan, I spent lazing around. Perpignan is actually a few kilometers from the coast and I wanted to actually "dip my toes" into the Mediterranean so I drove to a small fishing village called Collioure. With the fishing industry in decline sometime back, it turned into more of a tourist attraction -- but an absolutely beautiful one! Take any photo you've seen in a tour guide of a "small Mediterranean fishing village" -- that's Collioure! A horseshoe-shaped bay of deep blue water, surrounded by impossible green soaring mountains, interspersed with salmon colored villas clinging to the cliffs connected by winding, twisty one lane roads -- yep, that's it! Then, to top it off, there was a waterfront castle! Small piazzas ringing the bay with with people casually dining under brightly-colored beach umbrellas.
There wasn't anywhere to easily "dip my toes" -- beaches were quite rocky with areas of sharp shale sheets sticking up out ouf the water like a slightly opened book set on edge. Ended-up driving further down the coast along twisty roads, that actually hugged the coastline cliffs, to a place called Cerbere, an even smaller fishing village but without so much of the touristy-thing. Had lunch at a small cafe on a pier, sitting maybe thirty yards from the water -- a half-cooked hamburger and "frites" French-style (I might have tried something else but it was one of the only things that didn't have pork or anchovies in it). I've noticed two distinct things about much of French cooking : 1) things are not seasoned -- they prefer to say "the flavors are subtle"; and 2) they hate overcooking anything, pasta and vegetables are "al dente" and you're highly likely to get meat dishes that in the US, we would consider almost "raw". Just their preferences.
Finally went down to the water and swished my hand in it -- still way too rocky to walk in -- at least I can honestly say I've been in the Mediterranean!
Drove to Nice from Perpignan yesterday -- took about five hours -- Perpignan is on the western Mediterranean coast of France -- Nice is on the east. Stopped in a place called Grasse on the way -- it's the center of the perfume industry (at least in French eyes) -- took a tour through a perfume manufacturer by the name of Galimard -- been around since the 1700's. There are others in town but this one advertised a free tour.
It ended-up being a personalized tour with myself as the only guest (apparently perfume tours were not on most people's "to-do" lists yesterday).
The woman giving the tour explained the different techniques for making perfumes -- from boiling the petals, stems and roots of various flowers (and spices), then distilling the essential oils out like moonshiners making "white lighting" (gorgeous copper kettles and apparatus) -- or spreading a paste of animal fat in a glass-covered frame, lightly embedding the petals of flowers into the fat, leaving it for twenty four hours, replacing the petals, repeat for thirty days, then extracting the essential oils that had soaked into the fat with chemicals -- to the more modern approach of just using chemicals to extract the oils from the flowers' petals, stems and roots. Quite interesting!
Visited the lab where the extraction took place -- small time operation -- two workers doing it by hand. Then the perfumer or "nose's" office (the person who experiments and develops the perfumes produced -- these "noses" are like "superstars" to those working in the industry -- could see the eyes of my tour guide gloss-over as she talked about the guy who developed "Channel No. 5" (and a couple of other men and women who came up with other popular scents -- can't remember what -- perfumes are not my thing). Grasse, New York City and London are apparently the world's "perfume" hotspots.
Seems the perfume business started hand-in-hand with the leather tanners. Royalty liked wearing leather gloves for dress functions but didn't appreciate the leather "smell" -- as a result, the tanners started dosing their gloves with perfume. The perfumers figured out that there were quite a few people around who smelled (they weren't big on hygiene back then -- some people here still aren't) and might want to hide the smell by dosing themselves with perfume -- thus the birth of a multimillion dollar industry. They split from the tanners and started producing perfumes for the royalty and "upper crust" -- didn't take long for the practice to spread to all the classes of people. Interestingly enough, French cooks also developed sauces to hide the smells of rotting meat -- seems like we have a "theme" going here!
Today, I got up, took one look outside and decided it was too nice of a day to go "running around" so I just plopped myself down out on the patio and stared at the water. Eight hours later and all I can say is that "a person could get used to this"! I think I'm experiencing the "south of France" lifestyle and it's not bad! Maybe Monaco or Cannes or St Tropez tomorrow, we'll see.....
