Hello, dear readers, and sorry for the gap in our posts! So much has happened over the last week, and we've hardly had a second to sit down and record it all. We really only get an hour or two of total free time each day because we stop work around 5:30-6 and dinner (and the following conversations and games) can last from 7:30 pm until midnight! Here goes nothing:
1) Saint Lô - Last Wednesday, Will, Ana, Ben, Olivier, Roseanne and I went to Saint Lô to attend a festival names Les Hétéroclites. Wednesday hosted all kinds of kids activities ranging from acrobatics workshops to face painting to drum lessons to sing-alongs. The activities were really geared for kids only (adults got admission for free on Wednesday) so we didn't get to try much, but we did sneak a turn at plate spinning. It was wayyy harder than it looked. The following Friday, we went back to Saint Lô for the grown-up festivities which consisted of live music, a beer/wine tent, and a food tent. The music was pretty eclectic (we caught a reggae group and a Balkan Flamenco group) but fun! It was really interesting to see so many French people jamming along to reggae songs without any real idea of what was actually being said. Some of the mellowest beats were actually violent calls to fight against Babylon, and I'd be interested to know their reaction if they knew what they were actually singing. The Balkan Flamenco group sang primarily in Spanish, so there was a similar thing going on there as well. Will took on the challenge of driving in France for our Saint Lô expeditions as he is the oldest one with a driver's license. People do drive on the right side of the road here as they do at home, but the car we're driving is English so he sits on the right side of the car!
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| Will driving on the right |
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| Church missing part of its facade? |
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| Acrobats at Les Heteroclites |
2) We ran out of sand to make mortar on Friday, so we took a much needed break from paving and did other things. Will and I got the veggie patch started for the summer which consisted of wrangling a wild rototiller, taking down and reconstructing a fence, and planting corn, potatoes, and sunflower seeds. I'm a little worried that all the corn plants may just die because the seeds seemed a little rotted (they were pre-started inside since it's still pretty cool here), but the potatoes are already taking off. I've had to recover the shoots once already and they'll be in proper mounds in no time! The sunflowers are already sending up their first sprouts as well. In terms of other flowers at Le Hoc, we've got roses, a faux orange blossom, and tons of this beautiful purple flower whose name I don't know. This one grows wild everywhere! I also found some moneyplant growing wild at the ramparts of Saint Lô. In terms of not so friendly plants, we've got to keep an eye out for nettles and other generally prickly plants whenever we wander through the field. It's tricky because neither of the prickliest plants look as if they'd hurt to touch until you're right up on (or amongst) them.
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| Pretty flowers at the top of St Lo's ramparts |
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| Corn seedlings! |
3) On Sunday, we took advantage of the nice weather and access to a car and all the workawayers went to Mont Saint Michel. This is the second most popular tourist attraction in France, and rightfully so. Mont St Michel started as an isolated abbey way out on an island, reachable only by boat or by crossing the quicksand land bridge at low tides. Like Maine, the tide comes in VERY quickly here and one can only imagine being stuck in between land and Mont St Michel. The island is entirely covered by the walled town which slopes upwards towards the abbey. This abbey is HUGE and sprawls over the entire crest of the island hill with three different naves (that we saw), courtyards, and complex pulley/elevator systems to bring provisions up during the period that the abbey was actually a prison. After exploring the sprawling, winding town and the abbey, we treated ourselves to a traditional French lunch. We chose the menu which started with a salad topped with prosciutto followed by the famous Mont Saint Michel omelettes with frites (French fries) and closed with a dessert. I chose a tarte Normande which is essentially very French apple and pear pie and will went for a triple chocolate cake, which also looked more like a pie. Ben, who is a vegetarian, ordered an "assiette des fruits de mer" which means a giant seafood platter full of escargot, shrimp, crawfish, a crab, and three oysters. After Saint Michel, we went a little further to Saint Malo. This is a coastal town, and the old part (called Ville Intramuros) is totally walled. We accidentally wound up inside the walled part which made driving pretty dang difficult, but Will handled the pressure with grace and panache and got us out of there and on our way to a parking lot in no time. We then wandered through the town, ate ice cream and explored chocolate shops, and then sat on the beach for an hour or so. It is still pretty chilly here, so no one changed into their bathing suits, but it was nice to see the blue sea and watch all the interesting people. Apparently the French are very particular about dressing for the right occasion and they don't often mix and match functionality, so we saw several couples dressed for a day spent on the town shopping striding gingerly (we're talking high heels and everything) across the sandy beach. Lucky for them, the tides here have a huge swing and most of the sand was very well packed.
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High tide! This boat was sitting
in a sea of sand when we arrived. |
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Giant fireplaces in the
"Welcoming Room" of the Abbey |
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| A windy day at Mont St Michel! |
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| Beach at Saint Malo |
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| Giant omelettes at MSM |
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| Spiral staircases for dayz |
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| More windy hugs |
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| Silly poses at the base of the Mont |
4) The end of our section of the paving is quickly growing closer! We just have one tile left to cut and then lay before we move on to the last remaining section. Will got his finger smashed pretty bad today, but he's a trooper and we don't think he'll lose the fingernail. As you may have picked up earlier, I am quite ready to be done laying tiles and move on to a new project.
Speaking of moving on, we have decided where we will be going next week: Villefranche sur Mer. It's very close to Nice and has the same beautiful pebble beaches, but we're hoping it's a little bit quieter. Relaxing tourist days, here we come! Other fun things you may want to know: we play cards quite often (500 is the game we've learned here), it's cold and windy most days (cold as in 60 F), Will's sweet tooth is in full force and he's ridden to town for sweets three times in our three weeks here, Ana's cat Bootsy comes outside and explores on her harness while we work, Olivier won a gold medal at his karate competition on Sunday, I'll be attempting to cook cherry pie tomorrow and Ana is making traditional Slovenian goulash, we listen to a lot of Queen while we work, and Will and I will have been dating for two years tomorrow!
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We folded little circles of crepe paper into papillons
(butterflies) to glue onto a float for the local
parade. |
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| Here we are in our cool oilskins. |
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