Villefranche sur Mer, Beaulieu, and Cap Ferrat

Sarah here!  I'm writing this post from my triple bunk bed on a night train from Nice Ville to Paris, and it's surprisingly way more comfortable than you'd imagine. This may be because I'm comparing it to the airline style chair in which I spent the night on the way South, but at least we can lay flat (and I can stretch out). The past week has been a dream and just what our lower backs needed to recover from tiling. Here's a recap of the week's adventures:

1) on Wednesday, we spent the whole day walking from beach to beach. Our hotel was situated right at the intersection of Villefranche sur mer, Beaulieu, and Cap Ferrat. We soon discovered that Cap Ferrat has the best (and most) beaches, villefranche has some of the best swimming, and Beaulieu has the friendliest people and best restaurants. After a full day of swimming and beach hopping, we ate dinner at La Chicorée in Beaulieu where I had the best pasta of my life. It was a combo of marinara and pesto sauce with little chunks of mozzarella and Italian thin ham mixed in. Will got the menu which came with summer sausage, chicken and fries+salad, and dessert. We paired our dinner with a rosé because that's just what you drink in the warm south of France. 

2) will woke up early on Thursday morning and went to the boulangerie for croissants and pastries. He conducted his whole transaction in French without any problems!  We then went to the Rothschild Villa on Cap Ferrat. The house itself is pink and magnificent, but what really stands out are the wonderful gardens. Ephrussi de Rothschild decided she effectively wanted the world brought to her and had different types of gardens built (7,9,11? We forget the actual number). It takes a couple of hours to wander through the magnificent estate which perches on the crest of cap Ferrat and offers views of the Mediterranean on both sides of the peninsula simultaneously in several places. After the villa, we went to Plage des Passables which is apparently where the rich and famous come to play. It seemed like all the rich yacht owners had parked in the bay, called the beachside restaurant for the boat shuttle in land, and parked their rich behinds at the restaurant which we also happened to pick for lunch. We didn't really realize how pricey this place was when we sat down, but we decided to splurge a little. For lunch, we ordered melone y prosciutto to start, Will got a pizza with the wonderful Italian ham that isn't quite prosciutto and I got ravioli with truffles. It was DIVINE!  The meal ended on somewhat of an awkward note because the guy (who spoke French with an Italian accent and didn't seem to have more than two minutes spread across the two+ hours we were there to speak to us) couldn't get the credit card to work. Nothing quite like thinking your card has bounced while surrounded by millionaires. The day was saved by our accidental discovery of an unmarked public beach that was so out of the way and off all maps that we only shared it with five other people. We went back to the ritzy beach after everyone had gone back to their boats for dinner to do some swimming with the cheap goggles we purchased at the Super U. We ended up skipping dinner because we were so dang full from lunch. 

Wifi is REALLY REALLY tricky here, but hopefully more to come and pictures later. 

Abbeys, Bikes, Trains and Beaches

Where to begin!?  The last week or so has been a non stop adventure between working with Mike and Roseann, playing in the pool and trampoline with Olivier, adventuring by bicycle all around Normandy and as of yesterday taking the train south to Villefranche sur mer (a little town next to Nice).

the abby near Roseanne and mike sans roof.

the entrance view to the abby

As we finished up our last week at Mike and Roseann's we did a little more exploring by bike and rode to a local Abbey that was in a somewhat state of ruins.  The bike ride was around 25 minutes to the old Abbey and included a bee flying down my shirt and stinging me but otherwise Sarah and I made it no problem! The Abbey was made in 1140 and after it closed down the government sold pieces of the property off.  One of the farmers who purchased the nave part of the property tried to tear it down to sell the stone but it was built so solidly that only the roof collapsed and all the other structures are still in very good states.  In 1940 a doctor and his family purchased the lot and ever since have been restoring it and having tours go through to learn all about the history.  It is still not a huge attraction so there was no tour in English but Sarah fearlessly translated for me as we strolled around looking at all the old cottages, kitchens etc.

That evening Olivier had some friends and their parents come over and Sarah and I were put on BBQ duty and attempted and successfully cooked so much meat we had leftovers for the rest of the time we were there.  The evening ended with a bonfire and then off to bed relatively early (midnight) so that we could wake up and go to the Agri-cyclo-cool, a crazy name for an even crazier event.

One of the agri-cyclo-cool participants
who greeted us at one of the stops

We heard about the ACC through Roseann as she had gotten a flyer but didn't really know what to expect, thinking that it may

one of the rentable lawn mowers
in the area, no joke!

be only the 4 workawayers and a few others partaking we loaded up the bikes and drove over to the start at 9:30 where we were greeted by 80-90 normandy residents all excited to meet the internationals!  The format was similar to a gran fondo or other type of charity ride that included meal stops and sights but this one led us all around to different farms, sights (such as the mayors new office and the local bakers house) and an excellent field where we had lunch.  The event after the first two stops had snacks everywhere and at 1:45 all the cyclists turned into a field where lunch was provided that came complete with a whole bottle of cider, a huge bag of chips, a liter of water, sausage on half a baguette, potato salad with ham and kir (still wine with crême de cassis added).

Sarah, Ben and Ana enjoying lunch at ACC

 They even gave us dessert which was a chocolate/ toffee eclair which was incredible.  The challenge following lunch was one where you were blindfolded and had to stick your hand in a bucket of grain to see if you could guess what it was,  I was volunteered unwillingly and realized that its very hard to figure out what kind of grain it is after it has been ground up and even harder to translate what I thought it was in english into french :)

All the events ended around 6:30pm and awards were given out including last place for us on the international team haha.  We ended the evening back at our hosts house with cake and balloons for Ana's birthday (one of the workawayers) then proceeded to pack up and prepare for a day of travel.

After saying our goodbyes to everyone on Monday we boarded the train to Paris at 3:24 and made it

Sarah and I in Villefranche heading to dinner!

to Paris after a couple train problems but nothing too drastic.  Once in paris we jumped on the metro to make it to another train station (i think there are 7 train, not metro, stations in paris alone) and grabbed some dinner in Paris before boarding our 12 hour train ride to Nice Ville.  While people watching in Paris, we saw ladies riding city bikes in heels, a man on something like a one-wheeled segway with nothing to hold on to, and so many cool city dogs.  The 12 hours went by pretty fast (on the way back we already purchased the bunk bed option) even though we were only in reclining chairs but by 9:30am the following morning we had made it to Nice and found our way to Villefranche.  Luckily our hotel is amazing and let us check in early and upgraded us to an amazing room for free so we didn't have to lug around our backpacks all day so after meet and greet with the hotel owners and them showing us where to go and what to do we headed off to the beach and successfully avoided getting sunburnt!  A first!

our small little town and one of the beaches

Since it is such a tourist area a lot more people speak english (many with a scottish accent though) so that has been a bit refreshing but overall this place is amazing and a very nice vacation within a vacation.  More pictures will be coming soon as we explore the surrounding areas of Villefranche so until next time, Au revoir!

W

L'Abbaye de Hambye and Agri-Cyclo-Cool

Hello readers!  Sorry this is a brief post for now.  We had an epic weekend full of biking, beautiful sights, and the bizarreness of a 75+ person bike ride/farm tour where no one really knows what's going on.  We are now headed down to the South of France for a week, but we'll flesh out this post as soon as we're able!  So here you go, we're alive and well, and the adventure continues.

Saint Lô, Mont Saint Michel, Saint Malo, Vegetables, and More Paving

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!

Will driving on the right

Church missing part of its facade?

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.

 

Pretty flowers at the top of St Lo's ramparts

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.

High tide!  This boat was sitting
in a sea of sand when we arrived.

Giant fireplaces in the
"Welcoming Room" of the Abbey

A windy day at Mont St Michel!

Beach at Saint Malo

Giant omelettes at MSM

Spiral staircases for dayz

More windy hugs

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!

We folded little circles of crepe paper into papillons
 (butterflies) to glue onto a float for the local
parade. 

Here we are in our cool oilskins.

La vie quotidienne (Daily Life)

Our Guide to Life

Let me start off this post with some big news: I have a job!  I'll be Chesterfield County's newest French teacher, and I couldn't be more excited.  Part of me is itching to hurry home and start planning from the coming year, but I know that each new thing I learn here can be passed back to my future students (yay!) as rich bits of true French culture.  Ideas for lesson plans keep popping into my head and have been making work rather difficult ;)

So, excitement aside (or contained, for the moment), this post is about the little things that make up our daily life.  We found out that our cute little thatched roof house doesn't actually have a street address.  It is literally listed in the postal book as "The Hamlet" of Percy or Le Hoc, Percy.  Seriously, check it out on Google Maps.  The funny thing is that there are three houses that are technically a part of this hamlet, and the proper arrival of mail depends solely on the wits of the local postmen and women.  They know that Roseanne and Mike are usually the only ones to receive mail from a different country and large packages, so most everything arrives just fine.  If you want to send us something, act fast because we'll only be here for two more weeks!

Making cool steel accents for the spiral staircase

We wake up each morning somewhere between 8 and 9, eat breakfast of croissants/pain au chocolat/ceral/fruit and then get to work for the morning.  Don't worry, Mom, I'm working hard enough during the day that I have actually lost weight rather than gained from all the bread, cheese, and wine I've had in the last week or so.  Our work for the better part of last week and what will probably be the rest of this week is the paving of a patio.  We mix mortar and lay these giant paving tiles all day long, and it's just like a five+ hour cross fit workout with all the lifting, squatting, shoveling, and stepping over things that we do.  It lightly rains almost every other day here, though there's a rumor that a heat wave is on its way, so Will and I wear these old Scottish oilskins.  We'll get a picture of those and a completed section of the patio up here soon.

French "twinkies"

Work usually ends when we stop for gouté, as we mentioned before, which can happen anywhere between 4 and 7, though the French only have gouté at either 4:00 or 4:30.  We had the French equivalent of a twinkie, which actually tasted like a slightly denser twinkie cake filled with the strawberry filling of a nutrigrain bar, and BN biscuits accompanied with tea, as usual.

Other things you may want to know: anther workawayer named Ana arrived yesterday, there are three cats here (four if you count Ana's indoor cat who stays in her caravan), there's a nest of baby birds outside my window that seem to be trying desperately to kill them selves but I'm doing my best to keep them from leaping out of the nest (and into the gaping mouths of said cats) before their feathers are grown, there were wind gusts up to 30 mph today, Will bought outrageously priced candy at the open air market in Villedieu today, French washing machines and dryers are TINY, electricity costs less here at night, our farmer behind us rides a four wheeler and is so cool, and we are doing quite well.  Til next time!

BN Biscuits

Honey comes as a solid here

D-Day beaches, thousand year old tapestries, and wet bicycle rides

Sarah in one of the craters made from artillery fire
the photo doesn't do it justice but its over 10ft deep.

This weekend has been one adventure after another as we started our Saturday off with heading to the
seaside of Normandy to Pointe du Hoc.  This was quite an incredible site as this was one of the first landing points of the June 6th D-Day invasion and it has been kept as close as possible to how it was after the invasion.  That means huge blast sites, broken bunkers and amazing cliffs that the allies would
have had to climb to overtake the position.  This area was critical to the success of the Normandy invasion as a large stash of artillery and guns were kept here.  Apparently the Germans didn't think that the allies would ever attack here because of the steep cliffs, but in the nearby museum you can see some of the neat things that the Allies used to climb the embankment.

The view from a German bunker that you could climb
inside as well as the cliff that the Allies climbed.

Next stop was lunch in a local cafe which was delightful and while my French is still quite limited it was fun to try to order and pay in French (and only received a little help in English from the waitress).  After lunch it was off to Omaha beach and the memorial and cemetery.

As you get closer to Omaha and Utah beach you see more and more American flags and, after watching some of the films in the memorial, it is quite neat that the local Normandy peoples still have a huge respect for the Allies and Americans because of the joint effort to win back the land.

one side of the tapestry which is
over 70 meters long!

The museum at Omaha was so neat with lots of information and notes from soldiers who were about to embark as well as all the info and planning leading up to it as well as all the secrets, fake paratroopers that were dropped in different positions to confuse the enemy and inflatable tanks used to create "fake armies" to further distract the Germans.  Sarah and I took a walk down to the beach just to see what it was like to look up at the bunkers and the hill that the Allies would have had to overcome.  It is quite the juxtaposition as if you look along the beach you see all the fun things you would expect at any beach but a quick look up reminds you of what happened here.

Sarah and I in Bayeux!

After a walk through the cemetery we changed eras by around 900 years and headed to Bayeux to look at the Bayeux tapestry, a tapestry that is near 1000 years old!  In 1066, William from Normandy (Guillaume le Conquerant) who was rightful heir to the throne as King of England had to leave Normandy to fight to win back the English throne and, after defeating Harold who broke an oath and claimed the throne as his own, he commissioned someone to make the tapestry which tells the entire story which was really fun and quite comical in parts.  The tapestry is 69 meters long and it was designed to wrap around the walls of a church to recount the story of conquest to illiterate people of the village!

We ended the night with a potato dinner and some card games before retiring for the evening and sleeping in until 11 this morning.  We decided to brave the rainy weather though and rode into Percy this morning to get some lotions and candy (my sweet tooth was uncontrollable) which is only about a ten minute ride.  All that is left today for now is getting dry and relaxing as paving resumes tomorrow!

This is hard work!

Hello, dear readers, and apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of days.  We're in the thick of our workweek, and it is absolutely exhausting.  On Tuesday, we woke up at 8:00 so that we could see Olivier, the son in our workaway host family, off to school at around 8:15.  Our wake up time has been sliding further and further from this ambitious goal, however, as we get more and more tired from the various things we do each day!  The minimum five hours quickly turn into more as you become emotionally invested in a project.  Because this house is ripe with opportunities for DIY, almost everything you do makes a tangible difference.  Over the last couple of days, we have:

Uncle Ben's rice has gone global, go figure! 

• fixed up the bikes so that we can ride into town (if we ever have enough energy, perhaps this weekend)
• fixed up the scooters, on and off road
• raked the pads for the new patio flat and leveled with gravel
• compacted said gravel and re-leveled
• commenced paving activities (that is such slow going because nothing is actually square and we're creating a 3 cm drop to run water away from the house.  Homes built in the 1500s don't have much in the way of water diversion systems)
• washed two cars and a caravan
• vacuumed the house
• gone to the market at Villedieu
• gone to the decheterie (dump)
• spent numerous hours jumping on the trampoline with Olivier
• cooked dinner (thanks for the recipe, Maggie!)

Will holding groceries in Villedieu

Highlights over the last few days:

1. Trip to Villedieu-les-Poeles (literally, God's village of pots and pans).  We did our fresh-food shopping here on Tuesday and Will perfectly applied his knowledge of French: Desolé, je ne parle pas français (I'll let you look that one up).  In all seriousness, though, he's learning really quickly and is picking up tons of vocab each day!  This village really wasn't destroyed by WWII bombings or invasions of Normandy, so it's in its pristine medieval state and covered in copper everything.  During the medieval ages, this town's bell foundry provided bells for newly established churches wherever the crusaders went.  Today, the foundry mostly focuses on more usable copper goods like pots and pans.  Imagine the Blacksburg farmer's market times twenty and sprawling throughout several blocks of a medieval town, and you've captured our morning.

Compacting!  Notice the Surf & Adventure Tshirt

2.  Trip to the dump.  The French are really big on recycling whatever they can, so the dump was divided into more sections than you'd usually see in your average American dump.  Because we were throwing away mostly rotted plywood and other random things, our stuff went into your standard all-purpose bin.  After the dump (and this is the cool part), we went to Mont Robin, a lookout over Percy, Villedieu, and the surrounding countryside.  After admiring the view, Will, Roseanne, and I played on the little workout course winding through the park.

3.  So much chess, trampoline time, and minecraft!  When Olivier comes home from school, we usually wrap up our work for the day and have gouté (the afternoon/early evening snack and cup of tea).  After that, Will and I usually play with him whether we do the things listed above, play outside, or play one of his imaginary games.  He's really quite a sweet nine year old boy, though I've heard he can be quite the demanding overlord when it comes to Minecraft constructions.  I've begged out of Minecraft because the way the characters look and walk gives me motion sickness, but Will plays most every evening.

Paving in the rain

4. Paving!  Who knew this could be so hard.  I think Will and I laid 9 tiles today (to be fair, they're 50 cm each, so larger than your average bathroom tile, we don't have any square things around to base off of, and we're making them tilt 3 cm from house to grass) and we're positively beat.  It was chilly and misting this morning and slightly sunny this afternoon, but we managed to cover ourselves in mortar AND get slight sunburns throughout the course of the day.  Roseanne opened up the lost and found DIY clothes cabinet to us and we picked quite clever outfits which kept us warm as we really did pack for a totally different (read: WARMER) climate.  

Yum!

5.  Strawberry, basil, goat cheese, balsamic open-faced sandwiches!  I borrowed Maggie's pizza recipe and transformed it into its sandwich cousin because our oven doesn't currently work.  With Wills fabulous help as sous-chef, they turned out great and paired surprisingly well with a red wine.  I was a little nervous because we initially tasted the chevre (goat cheese) with the rind on, and it was horrible with strawberries.  Luckily, we were able to trim off the rind and the sandwiches were saved. Thanks for sending me the recipe, Maggie!!!  With each dinner, and sometimes with lunch, we go through one-two bottles of wine (ranging from table white, table red, Normandy bubbly, and the famous cider made from Normandy apples) and linger at the table for at least an hour and a half.  The conversation is always so stimulating and we go into crazy in-depth conversations about everything from religion to politics to comparing and contrasting our different cultures.  If I had to categorize the personalities at dinner, I'd say Ben is the young idealist, Will and I fall somewhere into the category of pragmatic dreamers, Roseanne is a wealth of wisdom (she's done it all from banking consultant to full-time mom), and Mike is always willing to play devil's advocate.  It's safe to say that meal times are never dull!  What's also a wonder is how well Olivier is behaved during dinner, not that you'd expect anything otherwise from a nine-year-old French boy.  He sits politely and contributes when he is spoken to or has something to add for most of it and, when he gets bored after an hour or so, asks to leave the table without any fuss.  It's incredible!

Everyone gathered around the dinner table.  Olivier
approves of dinner!

Overall, we're happily exhausted at the end of each day and loving our time in Normandy.  Our hosts have been living in France for 19 years, so they're really able to explain differences in customs and why the differences exist.  For instance, the number of bisous (kisses of greeting) you give really depends on age.  Will and I went with Roseanne to pick up Olivier from karate, and each of the little kids ran up and greeted her with one bisou.  Later, they came and greeted Will and I, and we were all startled when we (W&I) expected to give two kisses and the children only expected to receive one.  Roseanne later explained that they probably felt quite grown-up by our double kiss and not offended, so all is well on that front.  We try to go on as many little excursions as we can to better explore the surrounding area and meet as many genuine French people as we can.  These French folks are totally different birds than their Parisian cousins, and I'm so glad we decided to take this trip!