Beyond the Postcard
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Dinan, a medieval village in Brittany. It looks like it’s straight out of a fairytale. I can’t even with all this cuteness.
Beyond the Postcard
When I was in high school, we lived in a small North Carolina town—my parents still live there. It’s fairly small-town typical: there’s the cute central southern bit, then there’s just random neighborhoods that grew up over the years, hodge-podge. There’s a commercial district that is completely distinct from the old-fashioned Main Street.
The doctor’s office is not on that cutesy Main Street. Nor is the grocery store, or the liquor store, or the McDonald’s. If you passed through town on your way to the beach (caveat: nowadays you’d stay on the Interstate, which passes on the far side of the next town over, so you’d never even get close to my parents’ town) you’d see the old-fashioned little central bit, but not the ‘newer’ commercial bit. You might think, based on Main Street, that my parents live in the fictional Mayberry, but they don’t. They live in a perfectly normal, small southern town, with all the predictable problems of a small southern town in the 21st century.
The French town Lee and I are in right now—Dinan—is similar, except for being about a thousand years older. We have an apartment on the top floor of a house smack in the middle of the old part of the city, almost at the top of the hill, within the 14th-century city walls. I can see the cathedral from one window, and a half-timbered 15th century building from another. I keep saying we live in Hogsmeade now.
It’s adorable. Like, possibly the cutest quaint little village I’ve ever seen. Tudor-style buildings lean against each other, charmingly crooked; roses are trellised against many of the plainer facades. Shop signs are all hand-lettered, in calligraphy of course. The city ramparts—thick, turreted stone walls, broken only by a 13th-century castle—surround the historic district. The steep, higgledy-piggledy, cobbled streets are mostly pedestrian-only, and tourists stroll through all day long. We’ve seen quite a few stopping to gaze up at our little aerie, or take photos of the building.
There’s even a shop that sells suits of armor, in case you happen to need one while you’re on holiday.
What there’s not is a pharmacy. Or a supermarket, or a hardware store, or a veterinarian, or an insurance sales office. I have to walk out of the historic district if I want to buy a box of tissues or a tube of toothpaste.
A couple of days ago, Lee and I went to the next town up the road, Saint-Malo. We found a place to park just outside the historic city walls and walked in through the grand ceremonial gate. Then we spent the day ambling around the town—also adorable (although I have to say—not quite as adorable as our village).
But the proper stocking-up grocery run that I wanted had to wait until we got back in the car and headed for the highway. No developer in their right mind is going to put a big-box supermarket in the middle of a beautifully preserved historic district.
So that’s all tourists see when they visit a town like Dinan or Saint-Malo—or London or Paris or even Ho Chi Minh City. It’s all Lee and I see, unless we’re deliberately staying in a ‘normal’ neighborhood, or we go searching for the places where ‘normal’ people, ie residents, live and work and shop.
I realize that not everyone wants to go on vacation and see the normal suburb that looks more-or-less like their own neighborhood back home. And that’s fine—after all, I just spent two long paragraphs waxing on about how adorable our current village is. Do I feel the tiniest bit smug when I see all those tourists gazing up at our apartment, wishing they lived somewhere this charming? Possibly.
But—and here’s my long-winded point—I think it’s important to realize that what we see when we’re tourists is never the whole story. Paris, as an example, is beautiful in the parts tourists see, but it also has all the problems of any other big city: marginalized suburbs, food deserts, overcrowded transit, homelessness, housing shortages, and on and on. Lee and I have a bad habit of rocking into a city, spending five days or a week, and departing with a sense that we somehow ‘understand’ what we’ve seen. I try very hard to remember that being a tourist is always, without exception, a surface-level experience.
Nothing is ever as perfect as it appears through rose-tinted vacation glasses.
Take care,
Lisa
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