My Favorite Pic I've Taken So Far (On This Trip)

From a hike up above Grenoble's Bastille, somewhere between the monument to fallen Mountaineers and Mont Jalla.


(Click to view slightly larger.)

As you may have noticed, the last few posts jumped around in time considerably, switching from the present to the past and so forth, and repeatedly abusing the word "now." (This post ends up doing so as well, unfortunately...) The reason is that I have a hard time making myself sit down and write when I'm somewhere with Wifi, especially when that place is a McDonald's. With email and skype to deal with, blogging sorta falls to the bottom of my online priorities, so I end up writing almost exclusively in my free time on trains -- which never have Wifi. To make matters worse, oftentimes before I have an opportunity to post what I've written, I do more stuff, which I then want to add to the blog, so I write more, etc. And of course the chronology is the first victim of all this, followed closely by stuff I just never get around to writing about.

Anyway, at the time that I'm writing this (6:35 PM, French time on 5 June 2010), I'm on another train, as alluded to above. This one is from Grenoble to Annecy, where I'll be until the 8th. (On a random note, Annecy is the fifth city in a row I'm visiting that's bisected by a river, and I didn't even plan it that way.) By now I'm familiar with the palindrome trajectory of these regional trains: city center, suburbs, countryside, suburbs, city center. At the moment I'm somewhere near where the Grenoblois suburbs meet the countryside, a valley protected on both sides by the green hills and, behind them, the Alps. This same scenery is what made my four-and-a-half days in Grenoble (part of the same valley, I think) so lovely: you can go from small French metropolis to lush Alpish hiking in under an hour on foot.

The city itself isn't half-bad, much warmer and more culturally lively than its smaller counterparts that I saw last week, Vichy and Roanne, where I actually felt a little hard-pressed for things to do. My three CouchSurfing hosts, Mathilde, Henning, and Emilie, even had a bike for me to tear around the amply bike-pathed streets on. I'm definitely coming back to Grenoble next time I'm in France. (A friend of my Roannais host had actually tipped me off that the Rhone Alpes region is much prettier to the south, as a comparison of Roanne and Grenoble readily confirms. That suggestion, along with the Quartiers Libres -- open/free neighborhoods -- festival that I read about in a newspaper outside Roanne, helped me pick Grenoble as my destination between Geneva and Annecy.)

Wednesday I tagged along for grocery shopping with Henning and ended up doing a short tour of Grenoble's farmers' markets and organic shops. In the afternoon Henning's friend Hanna joined us to watch the Quartiers Libres kickoff parade, headed up by a elementary school orchestra whose goal was to make as much noise as possible, children tottering on stilts, paper maché floats, and errant drummers. Afterward there was some youth-oriented storytelling and burlesque street theatre, presented in the two courtyards on opposite sides of a Cathedral. At one point some churchgoers exited exactly as the two actors were stripping down to sequined G-strings. Before the end of the show I found the event organizer and asked to join the technical/sound team for the following day's events, which were set to start at 2:30 in the afternoon. Surprisingly, he told me to arrive at 8AM! On vacation! I agreed to go anyway.

So the next day, or at least from the early morning to mid-afternoon, I helped set up a stage, risers, line arrays, subwoofers, monitors, lights, microphones, stands, a console, and more and more and more. The skillset of a roadie and that of a journalism school AV/radio/TV tech aren't exactly the same, but they overlapped enough for me to feel comfortable and useful in my role. When everything was installed and checked, I headed out on the bike to follow the Isere river and then climb its banks into the shady nearby villages until the combination of an almost-flat tire and gravely road surface forced me to turn around. In the evening I returned to the park with my hosts, a few of their local friends, and four of Henning's German, stereotypically beer-loving-and-toting pals to watch a concert on the stage I had helped mount. The first band was mostly instrumental folky swing clad in flanel and overalls with bluegrass flare, thanks to a lone banjo; they would've fit in well at the Sierra-Nevada music festival, for example. The second group was a self-styled 'Rock Cabaret', totally burlesque and over the top, full of genderplay -- I mean an outfit+makeup literally split down the middle, with breeches and 'stache on one side and foundation and dress on hte other -- and soaked in synth organ reminiscent of Dracula movies. (For the music geeks: the keys player had a Nord Electro and Nord Stage. I gawked while breaking down the stage until 2AM.)

Friday I was supposed to help out again but really didn't feel like working, so I ditched and hiked up to the Bastille instead. Sitting around 400m above sea level (I don't know how much higher than Grenoble that is), the Bastille is Grenoble's only real tourist attraction, though it fortunately wasn't that crowded. There's an awesome glass-bottomed gondola that rises from the base of the hill, above your head as you ascend seemingly endless switchbacks up to the castle. (The alternate route is a zillion jagged stairs that looked like murder.) The Bastille itself features incredible 360-degree views of Grenoble and the still-snow-capped alps, over the top of which sailed some intrepid paragliders. Behind the fortress there's a long, drippy, dark cave that General something-or-other built in 1844 to allow French troops to mount sneaky rear attacks on approaching enemy troops, at the other end of which is a parking lot with more views and then the ominous trailhead. From there I climbed to the top of Mont Jalla (641m according to the signpost though I haven't been able to locate this on a googlemap).
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Here we go again: I just got to Lyon. I arrived in Annecy Saturday night and hung out in the beautiful, though crowded, Jardin de l'Europe for a few hours until my host, Max, arrived to take me to his friend's apartment. (A fire in his building had made his apartment temporarily inhospitable, and his friends fortunately had some free beds.) Monday morning he, his roomates, and I drove out to the foothills of the surrounding Alps with a ton of harnesses, carabiners, rope, and other technical climbing doodads. We also brought a bunch of groovy French climber jargon: apparently, "grimper" means "to climb" in French, "sec" means "hold tight", "mou" means "give me some slack", "un bac" is a handhold that you can get all five fingers around. I hadn't climbed for a long while, so they gave me a quick refresher on belaying -- the English word for holding onto someone's rope as they climb, sorta like a spotter -- and then put their lives into my hands five minutes later. Reciprocally, I trusted them enough to take their advice: "il faut voir tes limites." (You gotta find your limits, i.e., attempt holds you won't be able to maintain.). All of the routes we did were between 5b and 6b, though I'm not sure if this rating system is particular to France or universal.