1979- Trip to the USA to see Frédéric
104
Easter 1979
Claude, YVes and Renaud's trip to California, visiting Frédéric
and first our 2 passports that will serve 3 years later for Morocco
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the cat of the house in Berkeley
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San Francisco trams called "cable car"
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Renaud and the cactus of the Mojave desert
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Yosemity National Park
Fred's in Berkeley
Fred in the kitchen
(details)Transamerican building
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Each has its own oil well in its field - the owner of the field owns the basement and its contents.
Renaud and Fred in front of a tree in Judea in the desert of Mojave
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Berkeley's wood house where Fred lives with 3 student friends
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Fred's motorcycle
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Rocking flesh
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Golden Gate and San Francisco Bridge
Bear, California emblem
a bison in a park of "Frisco"
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Berkeley University, "Naval Architecture"
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an old abandoned mine
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Renaud and Claude in front of a tree in Judea
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Fred and the desert wind
Claude, in the dunes, as in the Sahara, used extensively by Hollywood filmmakers
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California irrigation canals
the weekend home of a couple of Americans from San Francisco, completely isolated, lost in the mountain and the great forest of redwood
Trappers and Bucherons Tradition on the Pacific Coast
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Jim and his family
Renaud and a young American are practicing with a shotgun
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the good wind of the return, Fred, Renaud, Yves
Death Valley, Death Valley
Borax transport, 100 years ago
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the Hoover Dam large dam on Colorado, built in the 1930s
A city abandoned by gold seekers
a former gold mining
seals on the Pacific coast
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The Calfornie poppies, reported in France to St Avertin and Vierville. They lasted no more than a few years
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A chic motel in the American West
Letter from Frédéric (in Los Angeles, 1746 Robin Road, Orange CA 92668) to Granie (in Dampierre, 51330 Givry in Argonne), September 4, 1979
Dear Granie
Here are some news from the faraway America. In fifteen days, around July 15, all my projects changed. The move to France was already gone, when I had the opportunity to work as a trainee in Los Angeles on Fluor's computers. So here I am in Los Angeles for 3 months. After San Francisco, it is another aspect of California that appears. San Francisco was impressive because it is a city that gathers all those who want to remake themselves and who discovered that they were not adapting in the part of the world where they were born. So there were many artists, originals, deviants, crazy people and losers, but still people who want to make their lives, rather than have to let themselves be carried by it.
In Los Angeles people migrate for money. It's the city of highways, built on a desert. When you go from north to south, or from west to east, on highways, in a big American car and the soundtrack full of water, without leaving Los Angeles, you don't just get a glimpse of the area, you understand what it is. The beaches are nice, but it's not the little calanques of Marseille, it's rather the beaches of the type of Nice. My work is not very interesting and would be quite boring if I didn't learn much. There's not enough work, I wonder why they decided to hire an engineer.
J-kick everyone in DampierreF.
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Letter from Frédéric (posted to Oakland, near San Francisco) to Granie (53 Maréchal Foch Street in Versailles), circa November 1979
My dear Granie.
It was a bit like in Dampierre in the house where I lived in Los Angeles. There was a vegetable garden in front of the house with carrots, beets, peas, tomatoes and roses. The two Americans with whom I lived were very nice and were consciously (or almost) stewed the garden.
But finally Los Angeles is not as good as San Francisco. In Los Angeles everyone lives at the rhythm of modern man, running after money to pay for what they bought on credit without thinking. And yet they are rich. San Francisco is much better, and people are less spoiled by the climate and more energetic.
So I've been on vacation for 1 month with a lot of savings after working 3 months as a naval architect. I get used to the holidays and I don't know if it's happy or unhappy. But I'm soon ready to travel to South America.
I hope that everything is going well in our old France, that politics is always the great subject of conversation, that "morosity" does not win everyone and that we always pick plums by shaking plums. I say this last point because I was with a friend in a Californian ecological community. But the return to land was not quite at the point there because he picked plums like cherries, one by one!! L-Europe can still learn something from America.
I kiss you very much.
Frédéric in Ecuador, early 1980