Once again, Sarah of Bringing up Baby Bilingual and I will be offering a French immersion class for preschool-aged children! Our classes are fun, interactive, and immersive. Tuition includes admission to Play! at Grandrabbit’s (a $10 value per class), and sibling discounts are also offered. Come join us for the fun! Sign up here.
My husband likes to joke that they kicked him out of France because he knows nothing about wine. This is not entirely true – he knows more about wine than the average male, but perhaps not the average French male. He enjoys a glass of wine and can comment intelligently on the parfum and the subtleties of the flavors.
Truthfully, though, he’s a beer guy. He loves beer. Especially IPAs – which makes sense because San Diego, where he developed his taste for beer, has made a name for itself in the world of brew in large part through IPAs. Me – I can’t stand them. Just thinking about hops results in bitter beer face for me. But give me a good Belgian Trippel and I’m in heaven.
My Frenchie hubby loves the freedom that beer is allowed. Wine making in France follows strict rules: for example, fields cannot be irrigated – they must rely on the weather, the wines that have a “good” reputation tend to come from a single grape, and the land the grape comes from is often more important than the grape itself – it’s all about the “terroir.”
But with beer, if someone feels like throwing in banana or coriander, it’s fair game. Beer is a place where creativity is admired, sought after.
We got lucky this year – we got to go to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. For those who don’t know, GABF is an annual, three day event that draws over 50,000 people from around the world to sample the thousands of beers offered. When tickets go on sale online, they are gone in about 30 minutes. It all started with Charlie Papazian, nuclear engineer, teacher, founder of the Brewers’ Association, writer of The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, and overall awesome guy. With an equally awesome family who we’re lucky to be friends with.
Both San Diego and Colorado are meccas for beer, which works out well for us, as beer fans. I tasted the best beer I’ve ever had at GABF, and it was in the amateur section where home brewers pair with a brewery to develop their own home brew. This one was a Trippel, aged in a barrel that had hosted port wine and bourbon. Heaven.
So – here’s a few photos:
The line around the back of the convention center to get in
So psyched to have tickets!
The crush at the entrance
Going up the stairs … so exciting…
We’re in!
Cheers!
Random…
Next year we need pretzel necklaces, like this guy!
Before we left for San Diego this summer, I completed my first triathlon. Apparently, that’s what you must do to assimilate in Boulder. Either that or grow dreadlocks and walk around barefoot, maybe topless. I chose triathlon.
Time magazine recently published a “Healthiest Places to Live” issue. Winner of Best Place for Keeping Fit: Boulder, CO. I’ve lived in some athletic cities, but this place tops them all. Seriously: the guy next to me at Starbucks, right now as I work on this post, he’s on some app working on his Activity Log and totalling his Calorie Count. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a cyclist. Trails around town are covered with runners and mountain bikers. Olympic and professional athletes abound.
I’ve always been active, and for a long time toyed with the idea of trying a triathlon. Now that I’m living in triathlon central, I thought: why not? Naive, perhaps, as I gave up running years ago because of back pain, I just bought my first bike that didn’t have a basket or streamers on it, and the only swimming I do tends to be a snorkeling trip every few years. But I’m not one to be deterred by details.
The biggest hurdle for me, as it is for most people, was the swim. I took lessons, got up at 5:00 a.m. twice a week to go to a pool workout, and when the Boulder Aquatic Masters began their open water swim sessions at the Boulder Reservoir, I showed up thinking – I so totally have this.
Then I spent the first few sessions dog paddling around the short course, completely panicked, assuring the lifeguards that no, I don’t need a boat ride back to the shore, I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much (I can be a stubborn beast when I want to be. Sometimes even when I don’t want to be. I just can’t help myself). Eventually, with much help from the talented BAM coaches, I overcame my fear and got to a place where I felt relaxed, confident even, in the swim.
After one of the open water swim sessions, I stood on the shore watching the 150 or so swimmers and feeling like, well, an idiot for signing up for a triathlon and more than mildly embarrassed at how awkward I was in the water. A triathlete friend came over to me and said, “Carol, this is no ordinary open water swim. This is BOULDER. There are pros out there, even Olympians, plus experienced athletes who win their age groups in the big races. Don’t compare yourself to them.” She then asked me, “Do you know who that is? The coach you were talking to?” One of the coaches – Jane – had been giving me great and very calming advice after the swim. “That’s Jane Scott. One of the best swim coaches in the country. Her brother is Dave Scott.”
Dave Scott, of Ironman fame. Recognized as one of the top two triathletes of all time. Lives in, you guessed it, Boulder.
I love living in a place like this, where active, healthy lifestyles are so embraced. Where people think getting up at 5:00 am to get a workout in is a healthy choice, not a sign I should start seeing a psychotherapist. In comparison, it’s one of the aspects of French culture that is difficult for me. Exposed breasts aren’t given a second thought, but wearing running shorts in Paris (for a woman, anyway) is treated as an affront to civilized society. Many French people I know think that exercising more than a couple days a week is tantamount to an obsessive compulsive disorder. Walking here and there is exercise enough. As for French women? They don’t sweat. They don’t do things that might make them sweat. Exercise? Why bother, when you could just avoid eating? My most vivid memory of my super skinny host mom when I stayed in France is of her sitting at the breakfast table stirring, stirring, stirring a coffee mug half filled with Nestle chocolate milk, never eating or drinking, only stirring and always a cigarette clenched between her lips.
Here’s a picture I took in Nice a few years ago of athletes checking in for the next day’s Ironman. Notice anything missing?
Checking in at the Ironman in Nice, France
Yep. Women! Females made up less than 10% of that triathlon, which is the typical rate for Ironman events in Europe (in the US it’s 25% for Ironman and 30% for 70.3 events). Most of them were not French. Of course French female athletes do exist. It’s just not the norm, and not something French girls aspire to.
In Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, he talks about his experience trying to find a gym to join in Paris during the mid-1990s. He finds a “New York-style” gym, presented as a gym that would “bring the rigorous, uncompromising spirit of the New York health club to Paris: its discipline, its toughness, its regimental quality.” he describes the sales pitch given by a chic young woman in a red track suit: “They had organized a special ‘high-intensity’ program in which, for the annual sum of about two thousand francs (four hundred dollars), you could make an inexorable New York-style commitment to your physique and visit the gym as often as once a week.” When the author suggests that he might want to come more often and explained that it’s not unknown for New Yorkers to go to the gym almost daily, the chic saleswoman is perplexed and comments that it must be a “wearing regimen.”
I love being active and fit. I love the achy tingle of muscles pushed to their limits. I love that my kids cheered me on during my triathlon, ringing cowbells and shouting, “Go, Mommy!” I love that my daughter, after watching me, said, “Can I do a triathlon with you next time?” One of the big reasons we (and many others) choose to live in Colorado was for the active lifestyle we could have here, and so the norm for our kids, as my husband put it, is, “A girl riding her bike rather than walking around in stillettos.”
My husband didn’t grow up playing sports or participating in athletics. While most US high schools have sports teams of some kind, sports and school are completely dissociated in France. Kids who want to play a sport must join a private team. My husband, for the most part, has embraced the active lifestyle we’ve found first in San Diego, and now here. He doesn’t love getting out of bed early to get his exercise in, but he buys the idea that daily exercise is important to health. He even started riding his bike to work in addition to working out in the gym.
We’re becoming true Boulderites, both of us. All of us, really, with our kids hiking, climbing on rocks, and playing outside whenever they can. It’s a beautiful life, we think.
Me, happily approaching the finish line
Rock climbing kiddos
My friend and fellow blogger, Sarah at Bringing up Baby Bilingual, and I will be offering French lessons for the 0-5 age group starting Monday, October 20 at Grandrabbits Play!
So exciting!
Our mutual interest in blogging and raising our children bilingually led me to meet Sarah when I moved to Boulder last year. We’ve been talking for a while about restarting the French story time at the Lafayette library, as well as forming playgroups for French speaking children. In a classic case of right place at the right time, I happened to be at Play! one morning and found out they were hoping to start French classes. Sarah and I put together a proposal and Voila! We’re doing it!
We’re so excited to begin – we have lots of fun activities planned. So for those of you who live around here, Play! is running a promotion this Friday (tomorrow) where if you sign up for our class, you also get a free month of access to their indoor play area. What a great idea as the weather cools and the snow starts to fall!
Hope to see some fellow francophiles there!
Boulder is ruining my Frenchman’s fashion sense.
Boulder is a place where anything goes. Seriously. I saw a 20-something woman walking along a main street downtown wearing nothing from the waist up. Nothing. Boobs, swinging in the wind. Dreadlocks tossed behind shoulders. People go shoeless as a fashion/political statement, not because they can’t afford shoes. Stilettos and Keens sit next to each other in restaurants. Long flowy hippie skirts or biking shorts; yoga pants or business suits or sundresses and Uggs – it’s all fair game.
Now, my husband was never on the cutting edge of fashion, and I’m a physical therapist – not a profession renowned for our fashion sense. But he’s French, so that meant button up shirts, a nice pair of slacks, maybe a polo on a more casual day. I admit there were a few items in his closet that succumbed to “Operation: Lost in the Move.” (Don’t even get me started on the pea soup-colored polo with the denim collar). But I never had to tell him: “Honey, we’re going out to dinner with my parents. Perhaps the Corona tank top isn’t the best choice….”He’s always dressed up for our dates. I’m one of those girls that is crazy about a sharply dressed man. Not too sharp – if he’s more into fashion than me, I grow suspicious. But my husband, like most Frenchmen, had just the right amount of sharpness.
So, the other day, he started out the door for work wearing a beat up pair of cargo shorts, a worn grey workout shirt, white socks (on a Frenchman!) and sneakers. Before I even stopped to think what I would sound like, I blurted, “Are you wearing that to work?”
He once-overed himself and then said, “Um, yeah?” in the form of a question.
“It’s just… really?”
“Carol, you should see what some of the guys wear to the office. This is dressing up.”
There is truth to that. A Google dress code doesn’t exist. Googlers take workplace casual to a level unheard of in most other corporations. Just drive by the office around lunchtime and watch the parade of engineers heading to the cafeteria dressed down – way down – and check out the hats a few of the more brilliant engineers wear. The other day, a guy crossed the street in front of me wearing a tophat made of white fur with a pig sticking out the top.
I get it, kind of. Google is a casual place stocked with geniuses where what’s between their ears matters a whole lot more than what’s on their backs.
But, still. I’ve always loved that even after years in the U.S., my husband’s wardrobe choices remained … French.
So, I said, “But, you’re French. French dudes don’t dress like that.”
He smirked. “French dudes, huh?”
“Yeah. That’s too much dude, not enough French. Seriously. Boulder is getting to you.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
I had to think about that. Truth is, I’m one of those people that believe the impression we make on others matters, and that what we wear has something to do with that. It’s not like I never grocery shop in my workout gear, or that I’m diligently following the latest trends, but I still think… work is a place where impressions matter. Dates with my husband are worth dressing up for. Putting on a dress and heels for a night on the town is fun.
A recent article in our local newspaper labeled Colorado as a state full of fashion offenders, and Boulder as the worst of the lot. Is that a bad thing? Maybe. Maybe not.
In the end, he changed his work clothes. No longer verging on slob genius, but instead coiffed genius, he left for work.
And I spent the day asking myself existential questions about the importance, or lack thereof, of fashion and what we wear, whether it should affect how others view us or how we feel about ourselves, are we or are we not expressing ourselves through our choice of clothing, and why can Google geniuses get away with anything.
How very French of me.
It’s official! We are moving to Colorado, the Boulder area. My hubby found his dream job with Google and we are heading east very soon!
We’ve often questioned whether we belong in San Diego. We like it here, there’s so much to like. Yet despite both of us being here more than a decade, we’ve never felt rooted. It’s never become home. For me, my heart belongs in the mountains; I need to be able to get to a place where I hear wind through trees rather than rushing cars, where I see something towering far over me that isn’t a building but rather nature’s majesty. For my husband, he’s ready for a new adventure.
If our experience with Google so far is any indication, this is going to be an amazing company to be a part of. We feel like a dream is coming true.
Yet parting can be such sweet sorrow. We’ve spent the last few weeks saying goodbye to friends and our favorite San Diego spots. It hits me with intensity, the strangeness of moving. Places and people that have been a part of my everyday life for years will soon be places and people I won’t see at all.
Here is what I will miss the most:
My friends. We know some great people in San Diego. Some are friends I met soon after I moved here who became and remained an important part of my life, some are friends we’ve only known a short while but who have been dear to us, each goodbye has, well, sucked. I really hate goodbyes.
My writer’s group. We’ve been together for eight years. Eight. Writing, sharing our writing, sharing our hopes and dreams and frustrations around writing, and getting to know each other in a way that is so intimately close and so unlike any other relationship. We are an eclectic group – each one of us very different from the others – yet it works. It’s worked for years. I love these people. They are family to me. Saying goodbye to them was so strange; it felt as if I would see them again in two weeks, just as it’s always been. But it was goodbye.
My book club. A fabulous group of strong, intelligent women who I have enjoyed reading with and discussing ideas with. Plus, they are also all fabulous cooks, and our book club meetings were always accompanied by fantastic meals.
San Diego French American School. Our daughter, and we by extension, had such a great experience here for her PK0 year. The teachers were talented and caring, the school fostered a wonderful sense of community, and our daughter’s French showed great progress. I wish there could be a French immersion school like this everywhere, but alas. There is not. We’re going to have to work harder to find French connections in Colorado. I know they are there, but they won’t likely land in our laps the easy way they did here.
Diversity. There is so much in San Diego. People, food, cultures, things to do. I love it. I take it for granted that my social circle comes in all colors, celebrates a variety of holidays, and has opened my mind and made me a better person.
On a sunny day, San Diego, with its Mediterranean climate and vegetation, fabulous food everywhere (this town is becoming a real foodie town and we love that), tons of things to do, it’s like being on vacation, only it’s all right there, accessible every time. I’ll miss the ocean views, the bougainvillea, the red tile roofs, and the palm trees towering high overhead.
What I won’t miss:
The cost of living. This is our main driver. We don’t want to kill ourselves to afford a home. And over half of San Diegans send their kids to either private or charter schools. That leads to suffering public schools and expensive living.
And on that note, I won’t miss the ducks. Not the bird. I wish I could claim this analogy was my own making, but it’s not. Someone I knew once said that San Diego is full of ducks. They glide across the water, looking so smooth, so controlled, they’ve got their beemers, their jags, their feathers are slicked back, they are wearing the right clothes and the right accessories… but underneath, their little feet are paddling like crazy, trying to keep up the show, trying to keep the water from pushing them where they don’t want to go. Keeping up with the Joneses can be hard to avoid here. I don’t want to keep up. I don’t want to be thinking about whether my make up is fresh when I go to the grocery store, I want to be kicking back with a microbrew and my bare feet curled under me.
I will not miss my frizzy hair. Given even a tiny bit of humidity, my hair adopts a style that was popular only in 1973. It isn’t pretty. Product, straightening irons, straightening treatments, you name it; I’ve tried it. A ponytail works best. Two months after I moved to San Diego, I called my mom. “I’m going to have to leave. This place is terrible for my hair.” So now, I’ll go to a dry climate similar to what I grew up in, and my hair and I might get along. Cracked, dry knuckles vs. frizzy hair… I’m now investing the money I spent on straightening treatments into hand lotion.
May Grays and June Gloom that spread their arms into April, July, and August. “Sunny” southern California isn’t nearly as sunny as Colorado. I’m an Arizona girl. If I go 2, 3 days without sunlight and blue skies, seasonal affective disorder kicks in. My husband laughs at me; after the gray Paris weather, San Diego is great for him. I remind him that one May we had a total of three days where we saw the sun. Three. I want blue skies. And when the skies fill up with clouds, I want something to happen. Thunderstorm, snow…. Anything is better than gray clouds that just sit there, doing nothing but being gray clouds blocking the sun.
I won’t miss the density. I realize San Diego isn’t a true “city” by the standards of many, but it’s much denser than the places I spent my formative years. In my twenties, I craved density. I wanted people surrounding me, something going on and something to do on any day at any hour. I wanted to walk out my door and be where things were happening. Now, I crave wide open spaces. For my husband, after growing up in Paris, a few trees qualifies as getting out into nature. We tried an urban hike here recently. Well, he called it a hike, and was delighted to be “getting out, away from it all.” I just grumbled. “The freeway is right there,” and I pointed to where, less than a football field length away, cars were flying by. I need more.
We’re excited about Colorado. Boulder is beautiful, and the Rocky Mountains have been beckoning for a long time. We have some good friends in Colorado, which will make for a softer landing. We are excited about the life we envision having there. But we aren’t leaving San Diego blasting Tom Petty’s “Last Dance With Mary Jane,” the part that says, “Tired of myself, tired of this town!” I’ve done that one before, with other places I’ve left. I’m older now. I hope wiser. Certainly my views are more nuanced. This time, it’s subdued. Bittersweet.
To San Diego: Thank you for these past 12 years. They’ve been mostly fantastic, sometimes sucky, and never dull. To Colorado: we’re on our way. Hope you are ready for us. Hope we are ready for you.
A French American Life 