As promised, it is shortly after five o'clock when my phone begins to ring. When I answer it, I am surprised to detect a seriousness in his voice that I had not anticipated from the picture on his Couchsurfing profile. Jean asks me if I can meet him on the steps of the Amphithéâtre in five minutes. I step outside the Internet café, where I have been updating my parents on my on my safe arrival in Arles, and I am already there.
I approach the Roman arena just in time to see a tall, blond man take a seat on one of the steps and begin fiddling with his mobile phone. I walk up and say, "Jean?" When he gazes up at me, his eyes are a shockingly crisp blue. Though my observations of Southern French people have been limited thusfar, I have noticed that most of the people I've encountered have been generally darker complexioned and more Latin in appearance than their Gaulishly fair-toned countrymen in Paris. Jean, however, looks like he could be Scandinavian. He greets me in heavily accented yet fluid and easy-to-understand English. Rather than offering the traditional three-kiss greeting of the South of France, he shakes my hand.
As evening falls we walk up the hill, down a boulevard straight out of a Van Gogh painting, to a bar where he says he and his friends often congregate. Conversation flows naturally. He apologizes again, quite unnecessarily, that he cannot host me tonight, explaining that his new roommates are less keen on the whole CouchSurfing concept than he, but that he at least wanted to meet me for a drink to be sure I felt welcome in Arles. He tells me a bit about his travels in New Zealand, and I share with him a few details of my life in Japan. We somberly acknowledge the strange coincidence that we should both have a strong personal connexion to two countries that had just suffered catastrophic earthquakes, and then allow the discussion to move on to lighter matters.
Jean is unmistakably good looking, and I fight back a tinge of disappointment when he promptly lets slip a mention of his girlfriend in New Zealand. Throughout my travels in France, I am repeatedly surprised to find myself falling in love with every French man I meet. Back home, I'm never so quick to bestow affections on a stranger. It's not that I necessarily have anything against American men. It's just that, in relation to their French counterparts, they are noticeably less adept at dressing themselves and comparatively poor at speaking French.
Some of Jean's friends enter the bar and, at my insistence, we go to join them at their table. They are very friendly and as the evening progresses and additional rounds of drinks are ordered, they become even friendlier. More friends trickle through the doors, in pairs or on their own, and tables are pushed together and more chairs pulled up to accommodate them. Some of Jean's friends speak some English, but most of them don't. Still, it's no matter, since once I've finished my third beer I find that my French is much better than I had previously surmised.
Jean says, "Meghan, I have to go now but you can call me if you need anything. And," he gestures around the table, "now you have many friends." I glance around the room and I know he is right. Whoever warned me before this trip that the French were rude and standoffish had no clue what he was talking about. The spell has be cast: I am deeply and head-over-heels in love with the South of France.
