After a bit of chaos and stress disembarking the ferry—but all around a pleasant, well-executed experience and would highly recommend with the caveat that one needs time and space for discombobulating oneself. There’s the hurry-up-and-wait aspect we’ve experienced with other ferry lines in the past and being locked in queue after check-in, but it was especially difficult this time around to see either port city—and we would not get any better about planning on the return voyage. After a mad scramble to grab our go-bags and get ourselves and the dog back in the car and disembark, we navigated quickly through the capital of Ajaccio (Aiacciu in Corsican, a regional continuum of Tuscan dialects but with distinctive lingual features frozen from medieval times developed under Pisan and Genovese occupations but now almost wholly taken over by French) which according to some is the eponym of its founder, the semi-legendary hero Ajax of the Iliad—or more likely derived from a forgotten term meaning a sheep enclosure. The former lore is likely an invention by the city’s most famous son, Napoleon Bonaparte, as a legitimising myth for the child of a provincial lawyer and former independence advocate to become emperor of France. We traveled along a portion of the winding coastal route, the D81, proclaimed the most beautiful in France—with the UNESCO sites of the gulf of Porto and the cliffs of Piana, called les calanche (il calanques) as geologically unique fjord-like features caused by glacial erosion and resulting in bizarre and fantastic formations, inscribed in the registry as a group in 1983.
synchronoptica
one year ago: an exploration of Kowloon Walled City (with synchronopticรฆ), a treasury of obscure words plus US Food and Drug Administration restricts access to vaccines
fifteen years ago: promoting electro mobility
sixteen years ago: unsolicited budgetary advice for the eurozone
