Hive Mind Travels

Michelle and I frolicked in the Musee d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain in Nice today. We so prefer museums where they let you take photos (no flash, bien sur), and this one was perfect for it, because they had a huge exhibit by Michelangelo Pistoletto, who worked with mirrors. Mirros + Michelle + Jordan = Crazy Delicious.

If the slideshow below isn't working, try clicking on the title of this blog post, which will load just this post in a new window. I think IE / Firefox bog down when they try to load all the slideshows in all the posts...

Quick guide to the pictures:

• Michelle's awesome lunch: Pistou, a kind of white bean minestrone. Super yum.
• Michelle in front of the famous "LOVE" painting by Robert Indiana
• blah blah blah
• The blue dress is made entirely of the bottoms of plastic bottles tied together with used plastic bags
• The red Venus is made of fake fingernail samples
• The last 10 or so photos are by Michelangelo Pistoletto, painted on mirrors. Michelle and I played

Oh, and check it out. Who's got a green wall? The hostel we're staying does!

We fly to Barcelona tomorrow. Au revoir, France, hola Spain!

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Brief break from our travelogue for a bit of geekery. Two new technologies that I'm psyched to try out:

• My peeps back at Microsoft have released some of the features that I was working on when I was there, so I'm psyched to try it out for reals!
• I've been carrying a pocket GPS recorder that logs everywhere I go so it can generate exact maps of all of our movements each day and (this is the cool part) it can tag each photo with the exact location it was taken so they can all be viewed on a map.

OK, OK, quick travelogue for the day: we visited Nice. It's a beautiful city, much nicer than Marseille (OK, had to get that pun out of the way). We spent the day visiting it's absolutely gorgeous, clean, pebbled beach, wandering the winding little streets of its old section (Vieux Nice) and dining on its sumptuous fare. Nice day. Oops, guess I didn't get the pun out of the way. Look, it's hard to avoid.

On to geekery!

First, nice job DMX! With the latest release of the Windows Live Photo Gallery (a photo organization and editing tool) and Windows Live Spaces (a photo sharing service, kind of like Facebook or Flickr), you can:

• Upload your photos to Flickr with all the tags you set in the gallery intact
• Embed your photo albums in your blog as a Flash slideshow
• Set the permissions on your albums so only certain people can see certain albums
• Order prints right from the web site (of you or your friends' photos)
• View slideshows full screen, not just tiny versions like Flickr
• Upload videos and embed them in blogs, too

With the simple, editing the photo gallery offers (crop, red-eye removal, lighten / darken, create panoramics, etc.), the quick viewing and organization, I really, honestly believe this sets up the Windows Live photo offering as the first class option in the field, because it's got everything, end-to-end. The only other service that has both a local program for editing and organization and and on-line service for sharing is Picasa / Google, and I frankly think Windows Live offering is better (it's easier / more intuitive to use, and it pushes the metadata into the file, where everyone can access it, instead of locking it up in a proprietary database).

And of course, if you're a Flickr user, you can use the Windows Live Photo Gallery to edit and organize your photos, then use it to upload to Flickr.

And to be clear, I quit Microsoft, so I don't have to say any of this. Nice work, y'all.

Here's the same photo album as a Flickr slideshow and as a Windows Live slideshow. You decide which looks better.

And here's a little video of the Nice beach, uploaded using the Windows Live Photo Gallery.

If you need a good program to edit, organize and share your photos, download the Windows Live Photo Gallery.

And, seriously, nice work y'all.

For the second bit of geekery, I used Locr to take my GPS log and assign locations to all my photos. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a pain to go back and retroactively apply the tags to photos I've already uploaded, so I'll just show the photos from today on a map.

Also unfortunately, the GPS seems to lose the satellite signal every once in a while, so not all of my photos from today got geotaggeed, so I cheated and manually placed a few on the map. Here's the map, as generated by Flickr.

Kind of lame. I'm going to keep experimenting with it. Hopefully, it will be more interesting when it's not just a few shots of a shopping area.

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We spent a tactical night in Grenoble (laundry, boiling eggs for the road, early to bed) and rose early for a quick sprint through the foothills of the Alps to the Southern coast of France, la Cote D'Azur. Our first day and night was spent slightly bewildered in a grimy, noisy and oddly shuttered Marseille (the first set of photos below are from that town), but that night we got a lesson in the coast from our couchsurfing host, Didier (a very sweet, very friendly, very animated, slightly bohemian brain tumor researcher who regularly punctuated his speech with a wild exaggeration of the  common "poof" sound, such that it sounded like he was expelling an olive pit, and with the mysterious adjective "boewrf") and set out the next day in search of Mediterranean paradise.

Paradise found.

Our first stop was to be an hour or so in the little town of Cassis, but the next morning, we were still there.

Check it out on the map.

We rolled into town to find them setting up their weekly farmer's market, chock full of bright, fresh fruit, stinky cheese, mysterious "artisanal" meats, fresh baked breads and all the other wonders you'd expect of Europe.

Finally, a good meal!

Michelle and I practically skipped from stall to stall, picking up a little of this and a little of that to fill our larder: two kinds of sausage, a bit of prosciutto, figs, dates, two kinds of cheese, two kinds of bread, some tapanade, even a bit of mead (or hydromiel, as they apparently call it), everything but spinach (which is another story, the short of which is, yes, some French live up to their reputation for rudeness).

We spread our goodies out by the crashing blue Mediterranean waves, and feasted. The festive meal was followed by an inaugural swim in the Mediterranean, which was chilly but not cold, and absolutely, stunningly crystal clear blue. I was ecstatic bobbing in the surf.

Lunch was followed by a hike through les Calanques, American Southwest-esque white and ochre craggy rock formations fingered through with sinuous inlets of aqua blue Mediterranean water. The rock underfoot was sharp and our footwear wildly inadequate, but each crest drew us a little deeper and a little deeper, each new view outdoing the last, rewarding our effort.

Our long, hot hike was capped with a jump into one such finger, absolutely the best way to end any hike. Michelle enjoyed her baptismal dip into the Mediterranean thusly.

Back into the town of Cassis, where we found ourselves a port-side hotel with a sliver of water view from a cozy, private little veranda, enjoyed a bit of chartreuse (and tonic) and local Chablis by the water and and finally refueled with a bit of duck and lamb from a little back-street bistro. A cozy night's sleep was followed by leftovers from the previous day's market on our veranda and a double espresso long (with hot water) by the water.

Ah, paradise. Who would leave such a place?

We would, apparently.

Yep, when faced with paradise, what else would a reasonable human being do but pack up the car and head to Hell?

Our plan was to return our car on Sunday in Marseille and then to head to Barcelona, so, it being on Thursday, we had some days to spend on the south coast. Our guidebook (Lonely Planet, boewrf) promised that right on the Italian border was a cozy little seaside town, Menton, that was "more laid back and relaxed" than other towns on the Cote d'Azur, and cheaper to boot, and a bit of an artist's haven.

They lied.

We hopped in the car, took a beautiful drive over the la route de la crete, a gorgeous, gorgeous drive past sea cliffs, and then sped past St. Tropez, Cannes, and Nice in search of our second paradise and found...

absolute tourist hell.

Thousands of transplants from Florida packed into some Disney-like maze of kitschy tourist shops wrapped in a grimy, overpopulated, traffic choked city.

We were stunned. We left Cassis...for this?!

We re-read the guidebook. We must have taken a wrong turn. This could not be the town it was talking about.

It was.

OK, change of plan. We found a McDonald's (the European equivalent of Starbucks, in the sense that they all have free wifi (pronounced weefee)) and scoured the Net for options.

In the end, we decided to head to Nice and an awesome little hostel, which saved the day. Not only is it clean and comfortable, not only does it have good food and foolishly cheap drinks, not only does it have free wifi (on which I hungrily feed as I type this), but it came also with very knowledgeable hosts, who turned us on to skyscanner.com, a great site for booking flights in Europe, which netted us tickets to Barcelona on Sunday.

The only thing this hostel has going against it, honestly, is the very loud drinking game going on at the table next to me as I type.

Perhaps it's time for us old folks to retire to our chambers.

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"Gourmets, eat your heart out, Lyon is the gastronomic capital of France with a lavish table of piggy-driven dishes and delicacies to savour, and a fabulous bounty of eating spaces on which to do it." So says The Lonely Planet.

We wouldn't know.

Here's the thing: the French (or at least the Lyonaisse) are very particular about their eating hours. Lunch is over at 2 p.m. All the restaurants close at this time. All of them. If you're really, really hungry, and you get stuck in traffic coming in to a city (such as Lyon), which for some reason has so much traffic on a Saturday that you spend 45 minutes getting through a light such that it's no longer lunch time by the time you arrive, you're going to go hungry.

And by "you" I mean "we".

OK, not exactly true, we did, after much searching, finally find a little neighborhood bar in the Choix Rousse district where the barman made us some of the best food we've had since we've been in France (excepting the fine meals prepared by our couchsurfing hosts): Cuisse de Poulet Fermier for Michelle (a huge, meaty chicken leg with a delicious sauce), bauette oc "ilee" for me (beef with a red wine sauce) and a side of haricots beurre (butter beans) for both us.

Sated, we wandered the area a bit and poked our heads in shops, but were feeling lazy and wanted to connect with the folks we hoped to couchsurf with that night.

Unfortunately, our connection strategy was flawed: we were to meet them at a bar that turned out to be packed to the jowls with rugby-frenzied drunks without a clear picture of what they looked like (and we hadn't confirmed with them that we'd meet them there), so we ended up around 11 p.m. in the middle of Lyon with no place to sleep. All the hotels in the area were "complet", so, after enjoying a bit of art that we happened upon in the middle of town (below), we drove beyond the city limits in search of a Ibis (the Howard Johnson of Europe, best we can tell).

Having had a bit of a grumpy first try with Lyon, we decided to skip it the next day and head straight to Grenoble.

Well, not straight. Nothing's ever straight. We told our GPS to find us a way that would twist us and turn us and take us through farmer's fields and over mountain passes, and weren't disappointed.

Absolutely gorgeous to see how the terrain changed coming from the mid-country up to the foothills of the Alps and then into them. The country farm houses were set on amongst small stands of trees on hilltops, surrounded by their gardens, horses and fields. The architecture had transitioned from the stone, medieval style of the mid-North to a more Hansel and Gretel plaster and wood style construction.

In Grenoble, we went straight to the home of Gil (pronounced &quotjeel"), a first-time couchsurfing host and truly sweet man. Gil is the deputy manager of a youth hostel, and has been living in Grenoble for 15 or so years. We spent the night at his place just talking, made a meal, went through a couple bottles of wine and just relaxed.

Gil drew us a map to a hike we took the next day, past the monastery at St. Pierre-de-Chartreuse, where the monks originally made the spicy-hot liquor that took the region's name (bought a couple airplane-sized bottles: yum!). The drive and the hike were both lovely, autumn is painting the mountainside and the forest, different at different altitudes, reminds me a lot of New England: small and varied trees, moss covering glacial rocks, brown leaves crunching underfoot. It felt warm, but the air still had a lung clearing sharpness to it that left me feeling light and happy.

On our way back, we passed a small farm selling goat cheese, so we picked ourselves up a couple of rounds and enjoyed it on a thick bread we had bought back in Grenoble. The farm also sold honey, but when we explained in our broken French to the owner that we had hives of our own, she seemed disgusted with the idea of city honey: &quotmain les voitures!" (but the cars!) So much for the international bond of beekeepers.

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