EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALNovember 23, 1998
Ondres
Cote d’Argent
France is experiencing a cold snap. It has dropped to –3 degrees
Celsius. We spend the morning huddled with reading and the guitar. Brimborion is
cozy with electric heaters.
We defrost Alfi and drive a few kilometres down the road to Bayonne.
The city is picturesque with its ornate 18th Century architecture, ramparts and
quays. It’s a criss-cross of ponts connecting the banks of the River Adour and
the River Nives, which join at the Adour Basin. It’s where the bayonet was developed
by the Corporation of Ironworkers and Armourers and used for the first time by the French
Infantry in 1703.
The France Telecom Office is close to the centre-ville and near the
Office de Tourisme. The Eurochic man behind the desk is helpful with his clean accent and
patience. Rich explains that we are looking to set up an account for a Telephone
Telesejour (a metered phone designed for tourists and set up in most gites). The
Telecom man makes a few phone calls and we pick up some more colloquialisms. If you want
to say "okay, yeah, sure, I get it, yes, yes, right, fine, yup, okay" the
obvious expressions are, "d’accord and oui". But France Telecom man says
(with cool but emphatic inflection), "D’A. D’a….d’a-CORD,
oui okay, oui okay, oui okay, d’A". After a long conversation about
the Internet, that we are not Northern Europeans but rather from Canada ooh la la, how the
weather will get warmer and where we can buy phone cards (Les Tickets de Telephone),
we gratefully and happily exit the shop with a CD ROM Internet access kit. This kit is
designed to give us 2 months of unlimited access to the Internet via France Telecom’s
Telephone Telesejour.
We are pleased with our success. Telecom man was impressed with our
efforts and we set off to explore the Botanical Gardens and the Cathedrale Ste. Marie.
I want to touch the "sanctuary ring", a 13th Century sculpted knocker
affixed to the North door of the Cathedral. Any fugitive who could get to and grab the
knocker was assured of sanctuary inside the church.
Bayonne is iced with scaffolding and the Cathedral is no exception.
There’s a man teetering high atop one of the 19th C steeples. He’s
ten stories higher than the highest gargoyle.
La Musee Bonnat is a short walk across to the East Side of the
Nive. The three floors of the museum feature the works of Delacroix, Gericault, Degas,
Ingres, David, Rubens and Leon Bonnat, the artist who assembled the collection during his
lifetime (1833-1922) and bequeathed it to Bayonne, his home town. The collection
encompasses what looks like the whole of Bonnat’s paintings (some very sensitively
executed in the Realist style, and some not so goodies) along side those of his now much
more famous and critically acclaimed friends.
Rich sits across from me at the dining table desk. It’s covered
with books and papers, the laptops, maps, fruit and wine. Rich is navigating the rough and
roadblocked route to the Internet-via-the-France-Telecom–CDROM-kit. He’s now
dialing a technical service number. You have to dial a free number otherwise you
can’t dial at all. It’s the beauty of the European phone system; pay by the
minute even if it’s a local call, and it’s the reason for Telesejour for
gite visitors.
