Octopus a la Provencale

We have now spent almost a week in Provence, where my

head has been getting very confused with trying to translate

French into Greek and vice versa, resulting in a melange of

the two that leaves everyone baffled and me hitting my

forehead in despair.

In Marseille (the oldest city in France, founded by the Greeks

 2,600 years ago) we ate couscous in a Tunisian restaurant,

ogled fish stalls and African fruits and noticed that bakeries

sell newspapers alongside croissants so that Marseille folk

can arrive for their morning coffee fully equipped.

We ate a hot chicken-and-almond filo pie from a North

African market stall, and Tunisian sweets made with thin

pastry and almonds, and listened to North African music in a

bar where most of the guys were drinking coffee rather than

beer and used empty juice bottles as illegal ashtrays. After

coming from England, we felt like we’d almost arrived back

in Greece, in a place where smoking and coffee drinking are

taken seriously, and everyone has jet black hair and wears a

black leather jacket. And in fact, we almost arrived back in

Tilos: we stumbled upon a Greek café called Kalipita and I

dragged Tilos Man inside so he could do the talking for a

while as we drank a glass of his favourite Greek wine,

Nemea, and the video screen showed a cruise from Rhodes

to Symi…

In Isle sur la Sorgue, we ate local olives and tapenade and

honey, ultra-thin pizza with artichoke, fillet of trout, duck

breast and, at Café de France, a risotto made with foie gras

and truffle shavings for lunch on New Year’s Eve,

accompanied by heavenly white wine. But we have learnt

that Tilos Man, while he enjoys all of this, finds that Greek

cuisine is still sufficient to live on. We have also learnt that

according to him, French yoghurt is completely tasteless; I

tried in vain to find, in a whole supermarket aisle of finicky

French fat-free faiselles and fromage blancs, anything that

resembled a thick Greek yoghurt – except, of course, for all

the ones that were actually labelled Greek yoghurt. The

French oranges, which were actually from Spain, were also

tasteless (after eating Tilos oranges straight from the trees

down the road, I’m forced to agree).

We have learnt that many of the trees in Provence are the

same as in Tilos – pefka, elata and kiparissia, olives and oaks

 and calamia or bamboo canes. Stelios has spotted tiny

weeds and grasses that Provence also shares with Tilos, such

as radikia, and he stared at a grassy verge for some time

today before asking in confusion where the sparagia or wild

asparagus was – since so many plants are the same, there

should be sparagia.

We have walked in the sunshine almost every day, and often

saw the snow on top of Mont Ventoux, against a deep blue

sky; while back in Tilos, according to daily phone calls from

Megalo Horio, the rain it rained every day. Once we walked

along the crystal clear river at Fontaine de Vaucluse, where it

rises from a spring of unknown depths into a still pool below

tall cliffs, before gushing powerfully into white water over

boulders, and eventually calming into a fast-moving river

below the remains of a medieval castle. And there we found

‘the best kantina in France’, Snack The Big Fred, where we

sat in the sunshine and ate an excellent salad and fish with

cracked wheat, and a crepe with Nutella, and our own

Kantina Man had his photo taken with Monsieur Fred.

And after a long day of mixing up my words, there was

always rosé, and a sunset.