last night in Montpellier

Final treats in Montpellier: went to a movie called Love, Sex and Mobylettes, from Burkino Faso, a docu-drama about love. It's a loose exploration of various kinds of love in a small town in Africa, with debates, people talking to each other and to an interviewer about Valentine's Day. Heartening to see that even very small children know about condoms. There was a scene at a free public film in the village square, in which an educator taught the crowd how to put on condoms, using a live subject who was, shall we say, raring to go. Anyway, it was a lovely film, lively and moving.

Then I took myself out to dinner - L'Entrecote, next door to the cinema, where Lynn and I ate lo these many months. It serves one menu: salad and bread, then extremely tender steak in a fantastic sauce and a mountain of delectable fries, which is replenished at least once. When this vast platter arrived, I thought, I'll never finish that, but by God, I did. All for 16 Euros, plus the cost of a glass or two of wine. At home, steakhouses are expensive and pretentious. This is the exact opposite - a perfect piece of meat, perfect fries, friendly service, for a very reasonable price.

And then I walked along the Place de l'Opera to the very end, where you can climb the outside staircase of a building there and see the sky. A magnificent panorama of one side of the city and the sunset, dark clouds gathering, streaks of black, grey, red across the dome of our earth.

Farewell to Montpellier. I'll be back.

Only eight more days in France. I have timed this well, in that I am tired of France and want to go home. I know once I'm back in Toronto, I'll miss so many things. But I'm ready to go back. Beam me up, to T dot.

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One last word on the Palestine/Israel issue and film: I've just read another interview with Suleiman, who says, "Israel is in permanent denial. I don't compare the situation of the Palestinians with the Holocaust, of course, there's no comparison, but is there a difference between a denial of the Holocaust and a denial of the Palestinians?"

St. Roch

It's 9.45 a.m. and I've just come back from a more than hour-long morning walk in the breeze, which is still here. At night, central Montpellier is extremely noisy, not only because of the ubiquitous bars and restaurants and the talk of people returning home resounding in the echo chambers of the narrow streets, but because we are all dwelling cheek by jowl with the neighbours beside and opposite us. I can smell their cooking, hear how they are raising their children and certainly celebrate with them every nuance of their taste in music. (Someone close by loves the mindless banging of techno; I would like to have a little chat with him sometime.)

But in the morning, especially, I can now say, Sunday morning, it's a different world out there - tranquil and still, except for the church bells and an occasional mass emanating from a church. As I walked around at 8, there were only a few stray tourists eating breakfast in a sunny square and a few stray cats stalking the streets. Later, I went into a church - the massive space inside lit up joyfully, sun pouring through the stained glass windows, the priest amplified as he chanted the prayer, and in the pews which could hold hundreds, there were nine people huddled at the front.

In the "lest we forget" department, I stopped as always to read the signs on the wall - in one house lived both a 15th century pope and Paul Valéry, a 20th century poet raised in Montpellier. The signs often commemorate heroes of the wars. There was one about Jean Moulin, hero of the Resistance, who was tortured and executed in 1943; several noting that the inhabitant of this house was deported and died at Auschwitz. Many kinds of past are kept alive in the streets here.

It's the Festival of St. Roch this weekend. St. Roch was a young priest from fourteenth century Montpellier who studied medicine, then gave away his worldly goods to go on a pilgrimage to Rome. On the way he stopped again and again to take care of those afflicted with the Black Death, which killed 25 million people in Europe at around this time. He eventually caught the disease himself and went to a wood to die. It's said that he was kept alive by a dog which every day brought him bread, and he recovered. There are masses and events in his honour all day; a table has been set up on the main shopping street, to give out free water from St. Roch's well. I hope it's good luck; I drank two glasses, and others were getting big bottles filled. We were shown where the actual well is situated - at the back of a shoe store.

The trains station here, scene of my recent devastation, is called Montpellier-St. Roch, and now I know why.

Every time I go out on a sortie, I am grateful for my wallet, and every time I come home, I am grateful for my key. Just recently, I'd said to myself that I had to get over my extreme nervousness when travelling - the day of a departure, my stomach heaves, I'm speedy and anxious. I wonder, now that the worst has happened, at least in the travelling department, if I will be calm. I wonder, if I am ever left penniless again, if a dog will bring me bread.

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1 p.m. I just picked a book out of Julie's bookcase: Hold Everything Dear, by the much-admired John Berger, the extraordinary British intellectual and artist who's lived in rural France for decades. By the second chapter, he's writing about Palestine and Israel from a 100% pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli point-of-view. I Googled him, to find that he's part of a coalition that wrote a petition to the Beatles (I guess Paul McCartney) urging him not to play in Israel because of Israeli human-rights violations and various horrific abuses.

Perhaps I should not have walked out of the film last night.

The issue for me is this: if we admit that Israeli Jews, immediately after WW2 as their state was being created, began a campaign of intolerance and annihilation, we are admitting a most heartbreaking fact about human nature, that we are incapable of understanding, tolerance or empathy; that human nature relishes power and domination far more than any common humanity. That's why I and so many others are struggling. And also because yes, unrealistically, I call Jews to a higher humanity than others, because of what they have endured, because of who they are. Who we are.

The Globe columnist Margaret Wente, whose conservatism either drives me into a frothing rage or else sounds remarkably sensible, wrote recently of the world's propensity to blame Israel, to focus disproportionately on Israeli misdeeds when the planet is overrun with countries and leaders committing terrible acts. She's right. And yet, there's another side to the story, one which I didn't see last night because I walked out of the cinema.

I'm talking so often to you because I have no one to talk to. Many thanks for listening.

a good wind, a bad time

A breeze! I awoke to a breeze and thinking it might vanish, rushed out to walk around town with the soft wind on my face. Oh, the narrow interweaving streets of the zone pietonne of central Montpellier, that take you back hundreds of years in an instant. Around each corner, a new medieval vista, signs on the wall: this house in 1644, this building in 1582 ... And with the blessing of a breeze, the walk is sheer pleasure. Yesterday and the day before, walking was hard under the blistering sky, no matter how hard you tried to shrink into the shade.

On the Place de l'Opera at 9.30 a.m., where last night thousands were dancing, eating and drinking, there was nothing. Not a scrap of garbage, everything tidied away miraculously in the night.

A day of walking and working, sitting at the desk at Julie's with that playful breeze on my face - for the blessed little wind went on all day and is still there now, at 9.30 p.m. Today I walked around the city in the morning, then at midday to do some shopping - buying some good bottles of wine for Julie, as thanks - and again tonight. As ever, the Place is hosting some very good street performers and the streets are jammed with diners. Does anyone here eat at home? It doesn't seem so on a hot Montpellier night.

I walked tonight because I had to get my thoughts straight. The film Le Temps Qu'il Reste - the time that remains - has been very well reviewed here and was a Cannes selection. One review said it's a "chef d'oeuvre," perfect, "precious and essential." It's a Palestinian film, made by Elia Suleiman, and is apparently the story of his life. Not a single French review that I've read mentioned the fact that the Israelis in the film are, one and all, vicious annihilating brutes; that the hero of the film spends his life gun-running against them and raises his son, Elia Suleiman, in the same spirit.

It's unbelievably painful for me, even as a half-Jew with so little connection to my Jewish side, to acknowledge that the state of Israel is now a giant bully in the world. But this film is saying that it has always been so, that Israelis are without a single redeeming feature. It was intercut with weird bits of slapstick Buster Keaton-type attempts at humour, violent jumps in time, and interminable, very French moments where nothing happens at all. The audience sat there lapping it up. I writhed.

I thought, the man is bitter about what happened to his homeland. He has a right to express his views in his art. But I don't have to watch it, especially because it's not a very good film.

So I walked out, banging the door behind me.

international date night

Three posts today! This is becoming obsessive. As I do things, I am taking mental notes, or even jotting things in my notebook like a detective, so I can report back to you.

Tonight - it's 11.30 p.m. and downtown Montpellier is jammin'. There are thousands of people only a few blocks away on the Place, drinking their 4 euro glasses of wine and listening to Sticky Fingers, an old time rock and roll band playing exclusively old American rock - Blue Suede Shoes, Johnny B. Goode - though no one in the group speaks English. The female singer was like Janis Joplin poured into a pair of size zero jeans. They were fun, but it took the crowd a long time to warm up and boogie. At the end there was a big group line-dancing. I flashed back to when I first line-danced, in my mother-in-law's car port in Vernon, B.C. in the mid-eighties. Connie was the leader of a line-dancing troupe of women who wore cowboy hats and boots and did lots of different dances. And here was one of them, in Montpellier on a steamy Friday night, more than 20 years later.

The food vendors were still piling out the plates, including oysters, tandoori chicken, crepes - many people were just arriving as I tired and started to leave. But it was hard to go, because there were also street performers everywhere, including a fabulous jazz combo of seven people, with piano and bass, set up on the edge of the square, with about a hundred people gathered around tapping their feet.

Now, that's a downtown Friday night. Let's go, Toronto. I'm ready for more.

Friday night in Montpellier

An open letter to my friends who find themselves in the fundraising business: a report on tonight. It's easy in a Mediterranean culture that lives outside, it's true, which Canada is not. There is no forecast of rain to worry about. But still, I wonder if something alone these lines might not work in Canada ...

I've just come from the first part of the regular Friday night festival on the Place de l'Opera here. There are always market vendors lined up, but tonight, there are many more, including old books. The main event - for 4 Euros, I bought a wine glass and a ticket for 3 glasses of wine. The vintners are lined up further down the plane-treed boulevard, along with many different kinds of food vendors. So I got to choose, one after the other, 3 different glasses of wine and then go and buy myself some food, while listening to music - canned at first, though they're getting ready for a live band. There are tables so groups and singles can sit down. I ate some Greek delicacies and a giant cheese platter and yes, 3 glasses of wine, all of which cost about 10 Euros. I went shopping while I munched and bought a few trinkets as presents. And most importantly, as a single woman wandering about, I was absolutely comfortable and unbothered.

There were also the usual street performance groups - black kids doing amazing dances and fire breathers and jugglers - and about a million people sitting at sidewalk cafés. The air smells of the sea and also, as it does so often here, of urine and worse. But it's all rich and delicious, and tonight, almost everything is free.

As I sat drinking my third glass of wine and eating hummus, a couple walked by hand in hand who looked so like Ben and Sarah that I burst into tears. Luckily I was wearing sunglasses and could weep unembarrassed, missing and mourning my beloved friend, here in the most unlikely of spots.

At one end, there was a marvellous exhibit of huge photographs taken from a helicopter by Jann Arthus-Bertrand, in the interests of ecological enlightenment and preservation. As I walked around looking at the panels, I became aware of the problems of : irrigation in Lebanon; coal mines in South Africa; cotton production in Syria; fishing in Senegal; civil war in Sudan; flooding in Bangladesh; cattle production in the U.S., and the melting snows of Kilimanjaro. And on the plus side, the miraculous dromedaries in Mauritania, the miraculous flamingos of Kenya, the solar panels of Seville, Spain and the metal swirls of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, designed by the "Californian architect Frank Gehry." There was one Canadian shot, the melting ice of Resolute Bay, Nunavut.

At the end, it informed us that 20% of the world has no source of clean drinking water, 25% has no electricity and 40% no sanitary installations. 820 million people are underfed and half of humanity lives on less than $2 a day. On the plus side, since 1980, 80 countries have undertaken a democraticisation process, 47 have reached that goal and 33 are in transition. And on the other side of these panels, vendors from Africa and other third world countries were trying to sell their wares.

Ah well. I've had 3 glasses of wine and will not carry the world's burdens tonight. I'm going to go back out and listen to the band "Sticky Fingers." The air smells of the sea, and I'm ripe for the music.