Sud de France 1.2 Leaving on a Jet Plane.

Our bags are packed we’re ready to go. Our house is just about completely empty and in 24 hours we are in the air to France. We’ve been saying goodbye to friends and family and it is all pretty bittersweet.

Closing one door and opening another is what some people say but life isn’t about doors. It is about knowing you have a time limited ticket. You use it or lose it.

People say that we are brave to live out our dream, our adventure. But I look at it as trading one normality for another. Within a few weeks the South of France will be as normal and ordinary as Seattle is to us now.

France is a first world nation, fully electrified, fully modern and with the world’s best health care system. We will be fifteen minutes from the Med and a five minute walk to the boulangerie and the supermarket. We are not going to the Amazon River basin or to an island off the coast of Fiji.

All the adventure talk is embarrassing.

And despite any thoughts of having a lot of quiet time we are already cranking up our lives. Thursday we land in France and we already a social life happening. On the 4^th October as a favor to our landlord, we are meeting an American couple and escorting them to their rental. On the 10^th I’m shooting a video for the “One Day on Earth’ project about the big antiques fair in Pezenas. Having just given away, sold or shipped over thirty years of furniture I wanted to make a video about how memory adheres to objects. Then on the 15^th we have the opening of a friend’s photo show.

The big adventure will be getting new cell phones or as the French call them “mobiles” and in a month a car and in four months a house.

I don’t know what to expect as a writer/photographer. Okay, I am a certified by the French state to work as an “Artiste.” But who knows where that will lead?

Perhaps there is a part of this journey that might be called a dream. All my life I’ve been a worker. My photography was commercial work that was made to sell or was paid for. While I had my personal images I never thought of myself as an artist. On good days I was a photojournalist, on bad days I was just a mess.

Freelancing means you are always unemployed until the phone rings or the email arrives. I’ve done it for thirty-five years and have survived the ups and downs, now comes a big change.

Now I’m working through the Internet, inventing jobs, making movies. And maybe even getting that novel finished. That’s the exciting part. 

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer

Sud de France 1.3 : Mr. Scaramouche Goes To France

He’s young, he’s big and a total pussy. Yup, our cat Scaramouche, known familiarly as Mouche or at time “Doodles” is one big tough young cat who jumps at every loud noise and hides from newcomers.

In deciding to move we had to figure out his future. Should we haul him to France or leave him with friends. That was a no brainer and so he’s packed and ready to fly--sort of. 

Many countries and several US states have long animal quarantines and even if Mr. M was up to date on his shots, he’d be sent to the cold, gray kennel in some airport hanger, an animal Stalag 13. Had we faced a multi-month quarantine, Mr. M would not have been able to be with us.

But France recently dropped its quarantine and so he’s coming along. Yeah there will be one long lousy day of travel but it will be followed by years of basking in the Mediterranean sunshine nibbling baguettes and croissants.

Our visit to the vet was momentous. Mr. M is a house cat in the truest sense of the word. He never leaves  the house. Open a door and he watches to see what comes in but will not venture over the threshold to go out. So when it came time to go to the vet he was experiencing one of his first trips into the big, bad world. 

After an obligatory 30 second freak out over being confined and a lot of kitty cursing, he settled down. By the time we got to the vet he was very Stoic. Cool and calm, no hissing or fighting. What a guy. Didn’t flinch when his microchip ID went in--now he’s a cat with a record and a number!  He was weighed and in his bare paws topped the scale at 14.3 pounds. That’s well over the 6 kilo (13.2lb) limit for cabin flying so he is going to have to go cargo. Er… below deck with all the other pirate pet animals. 

After a moment of panic at the idea of our baby being in a cold dark cargo hold, we realized that it would be best and Air France seemed very concerned about his welfare. Also we thought that stuck under a cabin seat he wouldn’t be able to move and that would be cruel. At least in his high end International Airline approved carrier he has room to stand up and move about, play solitaire and check his email.

There’s always a question about drugs and animals in transit. After talking to a lot of people and our vet we decided to give Mouche a little dose of sleepy-time powder. It won’t put him out it will just make it easier for him to sleep.

We’ve got a couple of small cans of food in our luggage and we’ll get kitty litter at the first Intermarche supermarket we see.

That should get us through that travel day and help him get settled in.

Then best of all we have to go to the local prefecture (mayor/police station) and get him a passport. Yup, a kitty passport so that he when he’s caught in some police raid of the local salmon bistro he can show his papers and be sent home with only a reprimand. 

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer

Sud de France 1.1: My Life in a Flash

The new digital universe is one of the main the reasons that I can move to the South of France in the first place. Eight years ago when we had thought of moving but it seemed then very, very far away. 

My stock photo agencies, for instance, were all in the U.S. and still asking for color slides and transparencies. Whenever I visited France I had had trouble getting film processed and I was also worried about the expense of shipping large packages of slides halfway across the planet. It would put a crimp in my stock shooting to say the least. 

Back then the magazines I worked with were still asking for film. A few were getting comfortable with digital images only IF I shot them with my 2MP Nikon. Today, of course, magazines only want stuff uploaded to their websites making it very easy. Now I can write and shoot and upload stories at the click of a mouse.

Another factor working against moving to France back at the turn of the 21^st century was gear. I do a lot of studio photography and that means big electronic studio flashes that all use 110-125 VAC 60 Hz power. Europe is all 220 VAC at 50Hz making my lights incompatible. You needed studio flashes because film was very color sensitive and needed precise, color accurate strobes to get true color. Remember kids this was the time long ago, before Photoshop color adjustment. Film was relatively slow with speeds of ISO 400 or slower. That called for a lot of light. 

Well between Photoshop and high ISO capable camera you can do a lot more with a lot less light. So I took my big old strobes to a local photo shop and sold them. When I get to Europe I’ll invest in some of the new generation of cool fluorescent and LED lights for studio setting.

Once we decided to move I spent weeks going through thousands of 35mm slides and medium format transparencies. It is both exhilarating and heart breaking. The images stirred up memories of the kings and queens, presidents and artists, the rich people and the poor I have photographed over the years. People like Ronald Reagen, Jimmy Carter, Queen Elizabeth II, The King of Sweden, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Spinal Tap, Annie Lennox, Deng Xio-Ping, Clint Eastwood, Luiciano Pavoratti and others. 

But I have had to edit my pictures ruthlessly because they are physically too much to ship. So I sat in the middle of a dozen plastic file boxes editing my pictures and my past.When I found something I really wanted to hold on to, I scanned it and saved it as a digital file. In the end I loaded all my digital images into three 16 GB flash drives along with my favorite CDs and copies of articles and books I’ve written. 

Nearly five thousand images and whole copies of two books are stored in devices the size of a cigarette lighter.

Holding those three tiny flash drives in my hand I realized the truth of what Arthur C. Clarke, author of “2001”, had written,

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. “

Being able to hold one's life’s work in a couple of tiny flash drives is truly magic.

Actually scary magic.... 

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer

Sud de France 1.0

Introduction:

In June of 2010 my wife Diane and I decided to pack up our lives and our cat and move to the South of France. I'm a writer and photographer and so I can do my work from anywhere. Then soon after we decided to move, in the middle of our packing, up an exciting new website started www.PIXIQ.com and I was asked become one of their contributors.

Although I've been a writer for over thirty years I've been reluctant to blog but when friends suggested I write about moving to France I realized that actually what we are doing is perhaps as the expression goes “ahead of the curve. Many of the issues we're dealing with will soon be the very ones that my younger boomer compatriots will be facing.

So sharing about our move and our new life made sense. These blogs will be a diary of our changes seen through a photographer's. And I’ll be posting lots of images so you'll be able to see the world we are going to. 

“Sud de France” is the new name the French tourism agency has given the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France because they think it is easier for English speakers, i.e. Americans, to remember. The region sits on the Mediterranean coast and has a warm climate with they say, about 300 days of sunshine a year. Although not as well known as Bordeaux and Burgundy it is one of the world’s largest wine producing regions. That’s our destination. 

1.0 --The beginning:  Paper, paper, and well, more paper.


Bureaucracy is a French word and going to France you need to understand it and learn to overwhelm it. To stay in France for any length of time you need a Long Stay Visa which gives one permission to remain in the country. To get one you need to provide the nearest French consulate with lots of paper. Proof of birth, marriage, citizenship and so on and on. Most importantly you need proof that you have enough money to help France overcome its economic woes.
Besides the Long Stay Visa I also wanted a Talent et Competences card which would let me legal sort of work in France. Note however that if you moved to someplace like Paris where you didn't have a car and you rented an apartment you might never ever have to show anyone a document much less a Long Stay Visa--no matter how long you lived there. 

But heading for the lovely small towns of the South we decided that 'rules is rules' and we would do our best to follow them, just to be on the safe side.
So we went down to San Francisco carrying five thick stacks of papers. Each was in a color coded folder and had a large ribbon holding it together. Diane put the ribbons on as a little French flourish.

We had rehearsed our presentation to the officials. I had a huge portfolio of photos and copies of books to amaze them with. We were ready for our close-ups!

But when we arrived at the Consulate we entered a small room with a dozen chairs and a long glass window behind which two guys were sitting. A TV in the room was set to TV5Monde and a show about Finnish deer roundups. The place felt like a dentist's waiting room more than the setting for an interrogation.
We sat down and waited nervously, keyed up after weeks of organizing and copying papers. Finally we were called we handed the guy behind the glass our papers. He looked them over and without saying much told us to put our fingers on the digital fingerprint device. Next to us a college age young woman was going through the same procedure and when asked to put her fingers on the device winced and said, "Ohhhh, eeecckkk, can I get a tissue to clean this?"
The room filled with gentle laughter. She cleaned the screen and then after getting her fingerprints taken we did ours. 


Then the guy behind the glass asked us the most important question of the day, "Visa or Mastercard?"


We flew back home later that day (the photo above is of Puget Sound where we live). A week later Fedex brought our Visas and a letter saying that I would be granted my Talent card and be an official "artist."

Of course there was one hitch to the card and that was that when we arrive I have to go to the Police for the card. I have to have a blood test to prove that I am not one of those disease ridden "La Boheme/Rent" artists.

And after the blood test I am sure that they will ask me that most important question for any visiting artist.

"Visa or Mastercard to pay the 275 Euros for the card?"

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer