Get them while they're hot - buns buns buns

I have just come out of 14 days' quarantine after having managed to get onto one of the last flights from France into China!

To protect the covid-free health status of the capital city, international flights bound for Beijing all land in Tianjin, around 110 km farther away to the East. And all travellers have to go through 14 days of quarantine in a hotel room assigned by the local government. We do not get to choose the hotel, nor the room, nor the view, nor the food. And of course, we are not allowed out of our bedroom and there is no room service.

I think I can consider myself lucky to have had pretty good quarantine conditions at the Society Hill Hotel. My hotel room was suitably spacious at around 25m²; it was comfortable; I had a view on the sister conference hotel across the avenue, a large wooded park and the high speed railway with trains zooming past every 15 minutes.

The room was equiped with essentials to last the 14 days alone: soap, shampoo, conditioner, toilet paper, tea bags, kettle, 8 litres of drinking water, a bar of soap to wash clothes, broom and dustpan, even a mop and bucket. I was lucky to be alone in a twin-bed room. I was therefore able to switch beds and towels half way through the quarantine.

The Internet connection was rather patchy but good enough to be able to telework on my new job. I am now one of the three counselors for agricultural affairs at the French embassy in Beijing, to cover China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mongolia. It is likely that I will not be able to blog about my work because of its classified nature. However, I will keep posting blogs on my travels, musical and culinary adventures.

So back to my quarantine: the few people I crossed during 14 days starting from the airplane door until I got out of quarantine were all clad in full protective equipment, masks, goggles and extra transparent face screen. Outside in the streets, people were strolling together unmasked, at least during the first week. The feeling was quite surreal.

 Thanks to my teleworking during the day, I did not get bored. I had a Kindle stocked full of books for the evening and the weekends and could also download and listen to radio podcasts. The past 14 days have been like a restful moment to get over jet lag, observe the people on the streets outside, listen carefully and intently to the radio broadcast.  

My food was served at set hours: 7.30am breakfast, 11.30am lunch and 5.30pm dinner. Somebody would deposit my food box on the console outside my bedroom and knock on the door. When I opened the door, the long corridor was already empty...

The food was of good quality and varied. Always Chinese food; there were no other options. Other quarantined guests were complaining bitterly on the chat group we were all on, or requesting exotic items like lemon or even croissants. I was quite content with the food served. We had our five fruits or - especially - vegetables per day, some meat or fish, rice or dumplings, soup or porridge. After insisting over two days, I was given a large box of chili preserve to spice up the food.

The only meal that was rather boring was breakfast. It invariably consisted of millet or rice porridge, some kind of raw vegetable salad, preserved turnip or carrot, slices of ham, a hard-boiled egg, and buns. The only variety came with: 

1) the vegetables, which changed every day;

2) the preserved turnip, which was either just salted or spiced;

3) the buns.

I was actually quite surprised by the variety of colour and form of the buns that appeared each morning in my breakfast box: steamed buns coming in all sorts of colourful patterns and shapes, oven-baked buns, plain or filled with red bean, coconut or other sweet paste.  

On the morning of day 13, when I opened the breakfast tray to find a pack of warm sterilised milk, 4 slices of very plain white bread, a cold fried egg, two slices of ham, a bunch of sliced iceberg lettuce and a tablespoon of mayonnaise, I even came to regret the Chinese breafast.

My quarantine ended on a high note of beautiful sunny weather and the expected thrill of visiting the old city centre of Tianjin where I had booked a colonial style bedroom at the upmarket Astor Hotel, to celebrate my renewed freedom with style.

The taxi ride from the quarantine hotel to the city centre was slow through the evening traffic jam. I was definitely very relaxed upon arriving at the Astor. And that is when the reality of modern China suddenly struck me a very hard blow.

To be continued... here.

Hot cross buns, hot cross buns

Traditional nursery rhyme, The tick tock boys, The children's favourites collection - the teddy bear's picnic and many others 

Passing through, sometimes happy, sometimes blue

I have left Pau yesterday. The autumn weather has been cold and wet lately and the mountains were already snowclad when I left my empty apartment.

After over three years in charge of the administration of subsidy requests from local farmers, I have seized a new job opportunity.

From my time in the Southwest of France, I will particularly miss: 

My parents' country house only 1 hour and 40 minutes' drive away. It was particularly easy to pop over for the weekend and enjoy their company, my mother's home-cooked food and the ocean nearby.

The farmers' market in Pau and all its delicious fresh food at very competitive producer prices.

The Pyrenees mountains just one hour away. In winter I could be on the ski slopes in just over an hour from leaving home. In all other seasons I wandered through the network of footpaths crossing only a few human beings, but lots of free-grazing cows and sheep. I might even have been spied upon by a lone wild wolf on the Rey mountain one August day in 2019. Overall, I managed never to come back on a path I had already walked on during these past three years. Walking through the hills and mountains has been a rejuvenating experience, especially for my mind - very often absorbed by my job's responsibilities.

I start my new job tomorrow teleworking from my parents' country house while I wait for a visa and a plane ticket to reach my next destination...

Passing through

Leonard Cohen, Live songs, Columbia

The sleepless nights I've had about the boy

In my second year in Pau, I met Guillaume. He had joined the symphonic choir of the local Pau and Bearn Country Orchestra (OPPB) where I already sang. A barytone, Guillaume was of my age group. Within the large symphonic choir, I only had few interactions with him during rehearsals and concerts.

Then in the summer of last year, Guillaume and I were both invited to join the smaller Ensemble vocal émergence (Evé), which needed experienced singers to beef up the chamber choir for Brahms' German Requiem. With the intensive programme of rehearsals for this project, I got to know Guillaume better. Not only did he have a beautiful barytone voice, but he was also particularly friendly and easygoing, eager to give his time and energy to the musical projects of the symphonic and chamber choirs we were both in.

I happened to queue up for a jazz concert organised by a local association one night. Guillaume was there again, selling tickets and drinks during the interval for Tonnerre de Jazz. He was all smiles, still full of energy and mingling freely among the audience and the artists. At another memorable concert this past March, Guillaume had driven his SUV to fetch a Spanish jazz group who had been stranded by a rare snow blizzard while attempting to cross the Pyrenees for their gig. The audience waited patiently while Guillaume sped down from the mountain with the players. That concert was all the more emotional afterwards.

Getting to know Guillaume better, we discovered we both practiced long-distance running and started running together. It helped that we lived close by in town so it was easy to meet up in the evening to run around and out of town. Guillaume showed me all the small alleys snaking up and down the plateau at the edge of the city. This knowledge of the city centre's pedestrian shortcuts and staircases he generously transferred came in particularly handy during the covid-19 lockdown when I could run up to the regulatory 1 hour within a distance of 4 km from my house but still avoid running around in circles. While running together, we would always cross people that seem to know Guillaume and who would greet him warmly. This guy had a large network.

Recently I discovered Guillaume was also very active within Pau à vélo, another local association promoting the use of bicyles within town. Indeed, I had seen him drive two bicycles: a cross-country bike when we met one morning to run together in the city's woods; and one of the dashing yellow electrified bicycles on rental by the city council on which he elegantly cruised through the city from work to various social events.

During the covid-19 lockdown we only glimpsed each other once or twice along the streets and only greeted each other from afar: me on my bike or on a solo run; Guillaume walking his terrier dog. When the lockdown was lifted we had agreed to start running together again and had made plans to meet the last week of May.

On 27 May, Guillaume and his bicycle were run over by a car at a city intersection. Broken spine. Unconscious for one month and a half. He did not wake up and died on 13 July. All his energy, generosity and warmth lost. What a waste!

Mad about the boy
Dinah Washington, Queen of the blues, Mis

Lonely, you don't have to be lonely

Finally out of lockdown!

The last time I had felt really lonely was in 2016 during a 10-day solo road trip in Western Australia. Back then I had experienced loneliness being alone without any sound or company although in a limitless and grandiose scenery. I had driven for two days up North and then two days back down South across the bush, with only scarce FM radio signal and no music recordings with me.

During the covid-19 lockdown I experienced loneliness again for a full month. I was not bored. On the contrary, my time at work was extended to cope with the new working conditions: my whole team of 35 civil servants were suddenly all teleworking without the proper equipment or IT infrastructure. Though purely administrative, our mission had been declared "essential" by the government. So we had to find ways of ensuring we could keep servicing our clients remotely. I kept going to the office every day to make sure IT was working for all of my colleagues, sending by email the files on the server they no longer had access to, scanning incoming mail to them so that they could service our clients' requests. The office was deserted: we were usually 5 or 6 people in a building normally meant to hold 200. Anyway, we had to avoid each other for fear of spreading the virus. Lonely at work.

All my social singing and sports activities were of course cancelled because of lockdown. Lonely after work.

To make things worse, during the second week of March, my parents were still travelling in Australia and their flight back to France was meant to go through Singapore and Hong Kong to arrive in Paris, all three locations where the covid-19 virus was actively circulating. I was not sure they would be able to fly back safely. If they did fly back to Paris, would they have to self-isolate in a hotel full of other potentially sick people? In the French context of very strict lockdown enforced by police, would they be able to travel from Paris back to the much isolated -and thus safer- country house in Southwest France? Although the sanitary conditions in Pau were under control, all this uncertainty was very stressful for me.

At home, radio and internet worked fine. I had the radio going on most of the time to listen to soothing music. However, because working conditions were deteriorated, I would come back at home rather late in the evening and only had time to eat, wash and go to bed before going back to the office the next morning. I managed to keep myself occupied during normal weekends for the first month of lockdown in my small apartment. However, I reached my limit during the three-day Easter weekend. I felt really lonely all alone at home.

By then, my parents had safely come back to their country house from Paris and had passed their 14 days of self-isolation. I could go see them. My Director had suggested I go telework from my parents' house rather than be lonely at home and lonely at work. I gladly took his offer to issue me a special travel authorisation to leave Pau.

My second month of lockdown with my parents was much more pleasant. Gratned: very slow internet access in the countryside hampered my teleworking. However, I had space, diverse home-cooked food, and company. I was no longer lonely.

After the lockdown ended the three of us had a fresh haircut.

My name is Tallulah
From the original motion picture Bugsy Malone, Paramount Pictures

I take a breath of air

I have just come back from a short but restful stay in the Alentejo region of Portugal. It was citrus flowering season. Everywhere I went, I could smell the lovely scent of citrus blossoms.

In the morning wafting up from the cloister of Evora cathedral

In the afternoon along the streets of Vila Viçosa

At night flowing down from over the walls hiding inner courtyards

Staying at the wonderful Convento do Espinheiro Hotel outside of Evora, lemons, sweet and bitter oranges were hanging from their trees in the courtyard. With the authorisation of the staff, I picked some fruits to bring back home. I now have my own citrus marmelade to remember the scent of Portuguese orange blossoms.


Orange trees
Marina, Love + Fear, Atlantic records

J'aurais voulu être un chanteur !

The last time I was involved in a very large production in 2012, I was overwhelmed by the 2000-strong teenage crowd rising to their feet and giving us a long standing ovation in the Parisian Théâtre du Chatelet.

This year I sang in front of an even larger crowd in the Pau Zenith arena for a public dress rehearsal followed by three shows for the New Year's concert of the Orchestre de Pau Pays de Béarn and its choir.

The repertoire was mainly classical: Wagner, Verdi, Tchaïkovski, Brahms, Dvorak. However, the atmosphere felt more like that of a rock concert with artificial carbon mist, traveling colourful lights and more than 3 000 people in the audience nearly filling up the large arena hall. The organisers counted that close to 12 000 people came to listen to us over the three shows and dress rehearsal.

The one migiving I have from this project was that the sound return for the choir from the microphones did not provide a good idea of the whole sound given by the orchestra and choir. I sometimes felt that I was singing only with my close neighbours and just the strings, brass and percussions. Nevertheless, the crowd must have had a better overall sound because everybody I met afterwards was delighted.

Le blues du businessman
Michel Berger and Luc Plamondon, Starmania, La Gagneraie

A small house and an olive tree

I have spent my last two holidays in Mediterranean countries. I opted for short stints to get a quick feel of these places and their cuisine: just enough to want to return in future.

In September I visited my friend Simon Bordenave in Rome and we both went for a few days in Tuscany. We drove through the hilly landscape between the vine and olive groves and sampled delicious local food. I carried on with a few days to visit Florence and its cultural highlights. I was overwhelmed by the crowds in the city, preferring the quiet country lanes at sunrise for a morning jog.

In October I flew further South to Crete. My goal was to wander through the mountains on this long narrow island although I stopped at Knossos to visit the remains and frescoes of this Minoan palace. The food was simple but delicious. The vistas in the Amari valley were stunning. The warm Mediterranean sea being only one hour's drive away from the island's central mountain range, I managed to take a dip every day.

Green fields, golden sands
An other cup, Yusuf, Cat-O-Log Records