Today I am sitting out going to the market in Montbrun Bocage. Not really because I wanted to, but because I'm lazy and didn't wake up until 9am and Marie leaves at 7am to get there with plenty of time to set up. It's a really fun market to go to. Lots of different people from all over Europe go to it. There are always lots of hippies from the area that are either doing their weekly produce shopping or selling whatever they have to sell. Also, there are always lots of bourgeois tourists from the UK on holiday that come I guess just to check out a different way of shopping from what they're used to, i.e. supermarkets. So it goes from one end of the spectrum all the way to the other. From hippies in jalopies to well off tourists in Land Rovers. I like to think I lie somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I've been called a hippie by lots of people in my life, but no, no. Not a hippie. I like to shower too much.
Last Sunday when I was there I had a very interesting conversation with two guys, one of whom was British and the other was from Nicaragua. Byron was the guy from Nicaragua and I forget the British guy's name so we'll just call him Jasper, because he reminded me a lot of the character Jasper Willis from Doris Lessing's novel, The Good Terrorist, a squatter who was trying to revolutionize the world and an avid believer in the ideas of Marx and Lenin. Byron was a very easy going guy who sounded more like he was Jamaican, and was very friendly. Jasper, on the other hand, was very outspoken on his views of the bourgeoisie tourist who flocked to Montbrun Bocage. He was very articulate on why he didn't like Americans and the British (he, being British). He talked about overconsumption and the unimportance of money. He grouped me in the category of over consumers based on the fact that I had taken a plane from America to France and the amount of gas that planes, cars, and trains use is disgusting. While I agree with him somewhat on that statement, I didn't understand him excluding himself from that category after taking a plane to France based on the fact that he had been in France for four years… So, according to him, if I were to stay here for a certain amount of time without flying anywhere I could possibly be excused as well… Hmmm…
He also complained about the majority of the British and Americans being mono-linguistic. So I brought up the question of, if we are to only travel as far as we can walk or bike, how the hell are we going to learn other languages??? That made Byron laugh and Jasper just reexplain the importance of stopping over consumption. It was fun to find holes in his theory of a new, better life that everyone should follow and watch him get flustered and make Byron laugh again. It's not that I didn't agree with him, because I do. It's just his ideas were just a tad extreme. On the topic of the unimportance of money, he didn't need money and had gone a long time with hardly any of it. He didn't even have to pay rent. Because he was a squatter and lived in an old building illegally. He may have even lived in the ruins of the castle that I would go up to every time I was there. I didn't ask about what he ate. He just talked about people growing their own food for sustenance. I had a feeling he himself did not grow his own food. Oh, and with him you had to grow your food a certain way. No gas using machines could be involved. To say the least, it was a very interesting conversation that lasted quite a long while. Byron, being the friendly one, even offered a few drags off of whatever it was he was smoking… And since I didn't want to be rude…
So we three, a Brit, a Nicaraguan, and an over consuming American, sat there on the steps of a church that was built thousands of years ago in the south of France smoking and discussing the woes of the modern times. I'm not exactly positive what we were smoking since everyone here rolls their own cigarettes, but I was feeling very relaxed for the remainder of the afternoon.
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