This
morning, the sun is shining over Paris. Blue skies. Spring-like
weather. It feels definitely strange, abnormal even. It should be dark
and raining, shouldn’t it? Because our hearts are heavy and in despair.
Because we are all grieving, seriously grieving.
Popeye and I had
planned to spend this week-end in Paris staying at Swee’Pea’s apartment
since Niruj, our friend from India (and Swee’Pea’s) would be in Paris.
I had missed him so much for several years that I was really looking
forward to meeting him again.
On Friday night, Popeye and I
decided not to go out for dinner and stay home instead. We were
expecting a message from Swee’Pea who was on his way to Montreal. We
were peacefully reading on the couch.
My phone rang around 10:30
p.m. SP from Boston airport. Which was very strange and could only spell
trouble. We mainly communicate through WhatsApp messages and Skype if
we need to talk.
“Mom,” he said. “I am at the airport waiting
for my plane. I am watching CNN right now. Horrible things are happening
in Paris right in the Oberkampf area.”
We don’t watch tv and the
district where we were staying is quite far away from the 10th and the
11th districts where hell was breaking loose, unknown to us. We were in a
very quiet area. We only started hearing the sirens of the ambulances
that were bringing a lot of casualties from the Bataclan to the nearby
hospital around 1 a.m. And by then we knew a lot about what had happened
even though we did not fully grasp the extent of the devastation we
would awaken to.
While I was talking with my son who was really
worried about his friends in Paris (some of them live right where the
attacks were happening), I started getting messages from Niruj. “saw the
news? attacks in Paris… am seeing the news in a bar .. sounds really
grave”
We turned the radio on. The newsmen were so confused that
it was very hard to understand what was going on. There were talks about
shootings and explosions and the President being ‘exfiltrated’ from the
Stade de France where he was attending a football game. They then
started having those “man on the street” interviews. “Well, no, I did
not see anything. I heard firecrackers and my neighbour said…” You know,
those highly emotional and mainly false accounts they are keen to use
to stay on the air just in case…
So we turned the radio off and turned our computers on, browsing hopefully reliable newspapers websites.
What
we were reading was terrible. And the accounts were still quite
incomplete of course. But it sounded so horrible. Last January, when
terror hit Paris twice, almost all of us in France became “Charlie” and
we did believe this would never happen again. Not in Paris.
Of
course it had happened again and again in Irak and Lebanon and
Afghanistan and Syria of course but it all seemed so far away and in
such unstable places that French people kept feeling safe in Paris
because it is so easy to live blindfolded.
But
we did keep busy arguing about refugees who were fleeing from the very
dark forces that would attack and try to destroy our very complacent
quietude a few days/weeks/months later. Because it was so much easier for so many people in Europe to turn against innocent victims than to think that one day, monsters were amongst us, as European as we are, born in Europe and raised and schooled in Europe. European citizens.
Early
last night, someone tweeted that it only took a few hours of mayhem in
Paris to get us to start understanding why thousands of refugees were
willing to jump aboard an inflatable dinghy and risk their lives to live
safely.
I am not even sure that this is going to happen. A story
was already going around as early as Saturday morning. A kamikaze had
supposedly lost his passport which had supposedly been issued to one of
the refugees in Greece. This may be true or untrue. They tend to think
right now that the passport was stolen. Anyway, who is going to remember
what Gandhi said about the dirty drop in the ocean?
“You must
not loose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the
ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”
But in
France, voices are already being heard asking for refugees to be sent
back to Syria or elsewhere. Right at the moment when we should feel a
lot of empathy because suddenly we feel pain and hurt and it is ghastly.
You know, feeling insecure and in peril.
Yesterday, Paris was
totally empty. Vacant. Everything was closed. The news were still quite
imprecise. State of emergency had been solemly declared. Fear and ache
were so tangible and yet it was still so unreal. You hear that Paris is
under heavy fire and that there are a few casualties and during the
night (nobody slept much last night), you learn that there are at least
129 dead plus more than 300 wounded persons, 99 of them between life and
death, all of them because they had been shot.
I know that
numbers do not mean much when read out of context. I read a post today
written by a famous American travel agent who was trying to convince his
countrymen that it would be safe to travel to Europe anyway since in
the States, some 30.000 people die every year (just about 100 persons by
day) because of gun violence. (I am brief there…)
The very high
death toll on French roads cannot be compared to what happened on Friday
night. My brother died in a car accident with a very, very high
alcohol level in the blood. People whose family members and friends
died last night while they were peacefully dining out or listening to a
concert won’t most certainly mourn them the way I grieved.
Because
whenever I travel by car, I hope that I won’t meet with some drunk
driver who felt perfectly fine to take the wheel like my brother did.
Even though he was the only casualty.
We are talking about
accidental deaths which should be treated like manslaughter. In the
States, there are a lot of first-degree and second-degree murders
because of guns.
On Friday night in Paris, it was terrorism at
work. Ugly and deadly terrorism. People shot at random, not even because
of religious bigotry (Muslims killing non-believers. Because a few
faithful Muslims were also killed at random that night). People shot at
random because this kind of shooting is aimed at creating terror, hence
the terms used to define the killers: they were first and foremost
terrorists.
I still remember Paris in 1982 and 1983 and 1986 and
1995. Sometimes up to 6 terrorist bombings in one month. This was truly
terrifying. We all kept on living rather normally because first there
was no other choice for Parisians and second there was only one way to
fight terrorism: we refused consciously and maybe sometimes
unconsciously to show that we were afraid. At least we tried to. We were
probably showing off mostly but it was very effective.
The
hardest thing was hearing on the radio that a bomb had exploded
somewhere you knew that one of your friends might have been during the
day. There were no social networks then. We did not have cell phones
either. I remember calling my friends: “Oh, great. You’re home. You
allright? Your family?” And then life started anew again until the next
bombing.
Last night Facebook was overflowing with messages. Lots were filled with pain and sorrow.
We
have been warned that there may be replicas. Brussels too is under
siege now since a few terrorists lived there before going on the rampage
in Paris. The Belgian police has made quite a few arrests today and we
know that there are nests of potentially dangerous fundamentalists in
Brussels. This is where we’ll be heading tomorrow morning. Then we’ll be
back to Paris because Popeye has meetings there and I need to go to the
hospital. And then back to Brussels by train and back to Paris again,
etc. Life must go on.
We have to keep living normally, at least
the Parisians who came out of this terror rather unharmed. I mean, those
who haven’t lost friends or family members. Those who haven’t been
hurt. Those who haven’t lived through those horrible moments when their
life was plunged into chaos and terror just because they happened to be
at the wrong place at the wrong time (except that it was totally the
right place and the right time until the terrorists arrived).
We
have to keep on living normally on their behalf. Yesterday, we went to
the restaurant with our friend as planned. We were "happy" because it
was full of people. Parisians were indeed showing they were not afraid.
Well, maybe a little bit though. Cafés were totally empty outside but chairs and tables had been put up there as usual.
Anyway, don’t we keep flying all over the world when terrorists keep blowing planes up?
All
my life I’ve been impressed by the Londoners’ tremendous courage during
the “Blitz” (the Battle of Britain). The way they kept on working and
living and loving while their homes were bombed at random and their
neighbours, friends and loved ones were buried beneath the ruins.
Were Churchill still alive, he’d say again: “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”
This morning, the sun is shining over Paris. Blue skies. Spring-like weather. It feels definitely strange, abnormal even. It should be dark and raining, shouldn’t it? Because our hearts are heavy and in despair. Because we are all grieving, seriously grieving.
Popeye and I had planned to spend this week-end in Paris staying at Swee’Pea’s apartment since Niruj, our friend from India (and Swee’Pea’s) would be in Paris. I had missed him so much for several years that I was really looking forward to meeting him again.
On Friday night, Popeye and I decided not to go out for dinner and stay home instead. We were expecting a message from Swee’Pea who was on his way to Montreal. We were peacefully reading on the couch.
My phone rang around 10:30 p.m. SP from Boston airport. Which was very strange and could only spell trouble. We mainly communicate through WhatsApp messages and Skype if we need to talk.
“Mom,” he said. “I am at the airport waiting for my plane. I am watching CNN right now. Horrible things are happening in Paris right in the Oberkampf area.”
We don’t watch tv and the district where we were staying is quite far away from the 10th and the 11th districts where hell was breaking loose, unknown to us. We were in a very quiet area. We only started hearing the sirens of the ambulances that were bringing a lot of casualties from the Bataclan to the nearby hospital around 1 a.m. And by then we knew a lot about what had happened even though we did not fully grasp the extent of the devastation we would awaken to.
While I was talking with my son who was really worried about his friends in Paris (some of them live right where the attacks were happening), I started getting messages from Niruj. “saw the news? attacks in Paris… am seeing the news in a bar .. sounds really grave”
We turned the radio on. The newsmen were so confused that it was very hard to understand what was going on. There were talks about shootings and explosions and the President being ‘exfiltrated’ from the Stade de France where he was attending a football game. They then started having those “man on the street” interviews. “Well, no, I did not see anything. I heard firecrackers and my neighbour said…” You know, those highly emotional and mainly false accounts they are keen to use to stay on the air just in case…
So we turned the radio off and turned our computers on, browsing hopefully reliable newspapers websites.
What we were reading was terrible. And the accounts were still quite incomplete of course. But it sounded so horrible. Last January, when terror hit Paris twice, almost all of us in France became “Charlie” and we did believe this would never happen again. Not in Paris.
Of course it had happened again and again in Irak and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Syria of course but it all seemed so far away and in such unstable places that French people kept feeling safe in Paris because it is so easy to live blindfolded.
But we did keep busy arguing about refugees who were fleeing from the very dark forces that would attack and try to destroy our very complacent quietude a few days/weeks/months later. Because it was so much easier for so many people in Europe to turn against innocent victims than to think that one day, monsters were amongst us, as European as we are, born in Europe and raised and schooled in Europe. European citizens.
Early last night, someone tweeted that it only took a few hours of mayhem in Paris to get us to start understanding why thousands of refugees were willing to jump aboard an inflatable dinghy and risk their lives to live safely.
I am not even sure that this is going to happen. A story was already going around as early as Saturday morning. A kamikaze had supposedly lost his passport which had supposedly been issued to one of the refugees in Greece. This may be true or untrue. They tend to think right now that the passport was stolen. Anyway, who is going to remember what Gandhi said about the dirty drop in the ocean?
“You must not loose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”
But in France, voices are already being heard asking for refugees to be sent back to Syria or elsewhere. Right at the moment when we should feel a lot of empathy because suddenly we feel pain and hurt and it is ghastly. You know, feeling insecure and in peril.
Yesterday, Paris was totally empty. Vacant. Everything was closed. The news were still quite imprecise. State of emergency had been solemly declared. Fear and ache were so tangible and yet it was still so unreal. You hear that Paris is under heavy fire and that there are a few casualties and during the night (nobody slept much last night), you learn that there are at least 129 dead plus more than 300 wounded persons, 99 of them between life and death, all of them because they had been shot.
I know that numbers do not mean much when read out of context. I read a post today written by a famous American travel agent who was trying to convince his countrymen that it would be safe to travel to Europe anyway since in the States, some 30.000 people die every year (just about 100 persons by day) because of gun violence. (I am brief there…)
The very high death toll on French roads cannot be compared to what happened on Friday night. My brother died in a car accident with a very, very high alcohol level in the blood. People whose family members and friends died last night while they were peacefully dining out or listening to a concert won’t most certainly mourn them the way I grieved.
Because whenever I travel by car, I hope that I won’t meet with some drunk driver who felt perfectly fine to take the wheel like my brother did. Even though he was the only casualty.
We are talking about accidental deaths which should be treated like manslaughter. In the States, there are a lot of first-degree and second-degree murders because of guns.
On Friday night in Paris, it was terrorism at work. Ugly and deadly terrorism. People shot at random, not even because of religious bigotry (Muslims killing non-believers. Because a few faithful Muslims were also killed at random that night). People shot at random because this kind of shooting is aimed at creating terror, hence the terms used to define the killers: they were first and foremost terrorists.
I still remember Paris in 1982 and 1983 and 1986 and 1995. Sometimes up to 6 terrorist bombings in one month. This was truly terrifying. We all kept on living rather normally because first there was no other choice for Parisians and second there was only one way to fight terrorism: we refused consciously and maybe sometimes unconsciously to show that we were afraid. At least we tried to. We were probably showing off mostly but it was very effective.
The hardest thing was hearing on the radio that a bomb had exploded somewhere you knew that one of your friends might have been during the day. There were no social networks then. We did not have cell phones either. I remember calling my friends: “Oh, great. You’re home. You allright? Your family?” And then life started anew again until the next bombing.
Last night Facebook was overflowing with messages. Lots were filled with pain and sorrow.
We have been warned that there may be replicas. Brussels too is under siege now since a few terrorists lived there before going on the rampage in Paris. The Belgian police has made quite a few arrests today and we know that there are nests of potentially dangerous fundamentalists in Brussels. This is where we’ll be heading tomorrow morning. Then we’ll be back to Paris because Popeye has meetings there and I need to go to the hospital. And then back to Brussels by train and back to Paris again, etc. Life must go on.
We have to keep living normally, at least the Parisians who came out of this terror rather unharmed. I mean, those who haven’t lost friends or family members. Those who haven’t been hurt. Those who haven’t lived through those horrible moments when their life was plunged into chaos and terror just because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time (except that it was totally the right place and the right time until the terrorists arrived).
We have to keep on living normally on their behalf. Yesterday, we went to the restaurant with our friend as planned. We were "happy" because it was full of people. Parisians were indeed showing they were not afraid.
Well, maybe a little bit though. Cafés were totally empty outside but chairs and tables had been put up there as usual.
Anyway, don’t we keep flying all over the world when terrorists keep blowing planes up?
All my life I’ve been impressed by the Londoners’ tremendous courage during the “Blitz” (the Battle of Britain). The way they kept on working and living and loving while their homes were bombed at random and their neighbours, friends and loved ones were buried beneath the ruins.
Were Churchill still alive, he’d say again: “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”
*Good Luck, and Good Night*
Our third morning in Cape Town.
We had spent the day before mainly assessing the condition of Swee’Pea’s appartment at Sea Point. Not really fit to live in yet. We had aired it and brought sheets and stuff to the cleaners. Not that they were dirty. A bit smelly and damp as could be expected after such a long absence and a vacant appartment by the seaside, all winter long. (Remember? Cape Town is in the southern hemisphere.)
As I got up to draw the drapes, I was feeling very excited since this was the morning we had chosen to go to Cape Point. We had spent a long time planning the day. We were to start having breakfast at a place called Hout Bay. I had been dreaming about this small café by the beach ever since Swee’Pea had sent us a picture of him and his friend Sebastian looking very happy facing a huge breakfast spread out on a white wooden table and looking at an incredibly beautiful bay.
It was quite early. What was this brownish cloud right in front of my eyes? Getting stronger by the minute. I am a Southerner and I am used to fires. I also knew that fires are quite common in South Africa, especially around Cape Town. The only puzzling thing was the lack of reddish glow, sure sign of flames.
I called Swee’Pea. “Fire,” I said. I imagine this woke him up quite swiftly. And then : “Not at all. Mom, this is fog coming up from the sea.”
“Fog?”
“Yup. Change of plans. We get breakfast at the hotel because we’ll have to go to Cape Point using the other road, across to False Bay, the one we were supposed to travel on on our way back to Cape Town. Sorry. No breakfast at Hout Bay.”
Breakfast at Hout Bay was to become a family joke. Because we tried three times to get breakfast there… Oh well!
Actually, this is one of the reasons why I like the Western Cape so much. Not missing having breakfast in Hout Bay but because just like in Brittany, you have to adapt to atmospheric conditions without hesitating and enjoy your day to the fullest no matter what.
We had (some great) breakfast at the hotel and we left.
The fog was extremely dense for a while but it would probably clear out in the afternoon. And we drove towards False Bay. First stop: Muizenberg on our way to Cape Point.
I love South African names. Most of them are puzzling mainly because I do not speak Dutch (Afrikaans?). A lot are British though and this summer in England and Wales, we went through a lot of places which sounded very familiar… Sounded familiar but did not look familiar at all!
False Bay is a strange name for a beautiful and huge bay, isn’t it. Those were times without Google Maps nor GPS system. No kidding. Who would nowadays mistake Cape Point for Cape Hangklip (“Hang-ing Rock” in Dutch)? Cape Hangklip being called Cabo Falso in Portuguese and False Cape in English… So easy then to call the bay in-between “False Bay” i.e. not being Table Bay which the sailors were trying to reach rather desperately sometimes!
As soon as we moved away from the seaside, the fog disappeared. Blue and sunny skies. Amazing. Great landscapes.
We did arrive on the other side of the Cape, by the sea. False Bay and Muizenberg (spelled mew-zin-burg). (From Sergeant Muys ("mouse") who was one of the earliest postholders. Hence the name Muys Zijn Bergh - Muys' mountain.)
I had heard so much about Muizenberg from Swee’Pea. We’d call him on a Sunday morning and he’d say: “Sorry. I’m leaving in two minutes. I’m going to Muizenberg. Surfing with some friends. I'll call you when I get back. Bye!”
I only learnt about the Great Whites much later. I can’t remember how. Swee’Pea probably mentioned one day that there were watchers at Muizenberg so it was really safe to go surfing there.
“Watchers? What for?” (In metropolitan France, you get watchers on the beaches to check on the swimmers.)
“Shark watchers, Mom, for… white sharks.”
Great! Well he surfed there a lot with a lot of friends… and he’s still alive. So are his friends who still keep on surfing in Muizenberg.
I was eager to go to Muizenberg. I am not too much into surfing but I wanted to see the beach, 20 kms long (more than twice as long as our beach in Brittany) and probably much more beautiful because of the mountains and steep cliffs that surround it.
I loved the stunning beach. White sands. Beautiful waves. Interesting brightly colored beach huts that reminded me so much of the Netherlands, except that they looked a little bit more battered… Sorry.
But when we got there, there was a flag waving in the wind.
A black flag with a white shark outline. “Well,” said Swee’Pea. “Murky waters. This means that they won’t see the sharks coming.”
“But…” There were surfers everywhere. People swimming. “Did you go surfing whenever there was a…?” Sometimes I am such a fool. Surfing is a lot about adrenalin. So imagine with sharks probably lurking about!
“Well, I’ve never seen a green flag here. Never ever.”
I did not even ask whether they went surfing anyway when the red flag was on.
Muizenberg looks quite run-down though and a perfect home for surfers!
Nowadays it is hard to imagine the once very elegant beach surroundings when Agatha Christie came to surf there in the 1920s. Yes. Agatha Christie used to surf in Muizenberg. I wonder if in those times, there were watchers and sirens wailing whenever a shark was spotted. But let’s not forget that Muizenberg is supposedly the birthplace of surfing in South Africa. A Mecca for surfers.
I missed a lot in Muizenberg though. We were in a hurry. Precious time lost because of the fog. So I did not get to walk along what is called the Historical Mile with the Posthuys (1673), the Casa Labia (1930) and Rhodes’ Cottage Museum. “We’ll be back,” said Swee’Pea.
But since my son is an astronomer well-versed in scientific outreach, I did not miss the AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) which is a very important African center for education and research in mathematical sciences.
We left Muizenberg with no regrets even though Swee’Pea had mixed feelings about not being able to go surfing, I’m sure…
Our next stop was to be Simon’s Town, home to the South African Navy and African penguins.
Guess what I was awaiting with keen anticipation…
*Good Luck, and Good Night*
