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We are going to visit our new sister. Would you like to come?
Tacoma delegates are setting off early next week for our newest Sister City – Biot, a medieval walled city not too far from Cannes and Nice in the South of France.
They will watch masters blow glass in studios built centuries ago from volcanic tufa. They will march in the living history of the Knights Templars Festival, “Biot et les Templiers, 2013.” They will dip their bread in fresh-pressed olive oil and their toes in the Mediterranean Sea. They will dine and sleep in the 500-year-old Hotel des Arcades.
And they have invited you to accompany them through Tacoma Weekly stories in the paper, on Tacomaweekly.com, on our Facebook page, and on Glass Sisters, the Tumblr blog (http://glasssisters.tumblr.com/) we have built to chronicle the cultural and economic exchange – and the fun.
Count on seeing Biot through the posts of Catherine Sarnat, Agnes Jensen, Bill Baarsma, Lauren Walker, Ben Cobb, Chris Porter, Gwen Porter and Sarah Gilbert.
Thanks to the non-profit Tacoma Sister Cities Committee, I will be going with the delegates as scribe, photographer and Internet wrangler.
(Yes, accountable Tacomans, you are wise to ask: No one on the trip is using city of Tacoma money.)
We will be packing lightly, except for goodwill, which is the point of Sister Cities internationally says Debbie Bingham, Sister Cities coordinator in Tacoma’s Community and Economic Development Department.
“After World War II, President (Dwight D.) Eisenhower had the idea that governments aren’t going to make peace. People are,” Bingham said. “Peace though people.”
Tacoman Sylvia Sass helped develop the national program in 1956, then served on Tacoma’s Sister City Committee when it entered an agreement with Kitakyushu, Japan, in 1959.
“It was a huge event to go to Japan in 1959,” Bingham said, referring to the war and the American occupation of Japan that followed.
Since then, Tacoma has established formal relationships with Aalesund, Norway; Cienfuegos, Cuba; Davao City, the Philippines; El Jajida, Morocco; Fuzhou, China; George, South Africa; Gunsan, South Korea; Kiryat-Motzkin, Israel; Taichung, Taiwan and Vladivostok, Russia.
Most are port cities with serious trade ties.
Biot, our 12th Sister City, has a brighter bond: glass. Biot’s dates to the last time a now-dormant volcano left a useful layer of fine clay, sand and manganese from which people have been making glass and pottery since the 12th century.
Tacoma’s goes all the way back to Dale Chihuly.
Biot claims its place as France’s capitol of glass art.
Ditto Tacoma and the U.S.A.
Each city has mountains on one side, salt water on the other and extra doses of natural beauty in the middle. Each city is wired, and not just on good coffee. We are hubs of high-tech and education.
Huguette Marsicano, who loves both cities, put all of that together and launched a campaign.
Bingham is still awed by Marsicano’s work.
“She e-mailed the mayor’s staff and when they met, she had this whole Powerpoint presentation on how we could be Sister Cities,” Bingham said.
Marsicano followed up with presentations and applications to the Sister City committees here and in Biot. On Dec. 8, 2011, Biot’s municipal council voted for the arrangement. On April 10, 2012, Tacoma City Council did the same. On Oct. 4, the first Biot delegation came to Tacoma and mayors Jean-Pierre Dermit and Marilyn Strickland signed the official paperwork, even with a slight variation in terms.
In Biot, they refer not to a Sister City relationship, but to a Jumelage, which translates roughly to “twinning.”
As Tammy Vince Cruz, Tacoma Weekly’s graphic artist and designer of our Glass Sisters blog, said, “Jumelage, that sounds delicious.”
It does. Expect food to be a happy element in Glass Sisters.
Biot is a couple of miles from the Mediterranean Sea, and the restaurants hosting the delegates are eager to demonstrate just how delicious their food its.
We were relieved to learn that, when they were here last October, the delegates from Biot photographed, and posted, the Northwest dishes they enjoyed.
I say relieved, because Bingham has sent us protocol guidelines. In France, good manners do not forbid shooting salmon. They do frown on leaving food on the plate and consider it gauche to request a doggie bag.
The residents of Biot dress with style, the protocol list says, and they enjoy excellent manners. That would be when they are not dressing in armor and knocking each other off horses. Here is a peek at the Knights Templars festival: http://www.biot.fr/modules/news/article.php?storyid=416.
Ready?
Good. As the 10th episode of Dr. Who would say, “Allons-y!”