We saw a glacier!

I'm not really coming back to blog regularly - I still chat to lots of lovely bloggers on Facebook and life is good but very busy, but it's surely worth sharing this wonderful view of the Mer de Glace glacier, taken from a mountain walk above our campsite in the Alps last week. If you happen to see this post, do feel free to tell me how you are!

Camping, camels, causses and canoes

We've just come back from a week in and around the Tarn Gorges, about four hours away from our home near Toulouse.

The landscape is high limestone Causses (ideal for keeping sheep so long as you can store the water) which are dissected by huge winding gorges. The Gorges du Tarn itself is 53 kilometres long! The motorway which cuts past the area has to cross a number of minor gorges, using viaducts like the one you can see in the photo of our campsite sheep, and of course like the famous Viaduc du Millau, visible in the distance on the high approach to our campsite.

Our campsite was a very basic one, with occasional hot water, showers, some 'French' loos and one highly-contested 'modern' toilet. There was also a large covered area with tables and a fridge (luxury) and beautiful woodland camping spaces, separated by green oaks. Did we take a photo? No we did not - we had real difficulty charging our phones and cameras, which was probably good for us.

La Blaquiere farm makes traditional sheeps' mik cheese, herds traditional tourists into the campsite and some beautiful historic gites, and leads treks across the causse with slightly less traditional Bactrian camels. This is not our photo - we saw lots of the camels but didn't pay for the trek, as we saved our money for the even more exciting canoe trip down the gorge. Did we take a photo of that? No, we were having too much fun getting wet! We canoed 10 kilometres, stopping for swims, a picnic and a chance to explore a riverside village accessible only by boat. We got a 10% discount on our trip, on the charming basis of a note on the canoe flyer marked, 'Bises, Manue' ('Kisses, from Manue'), as our campsite cheese maker is great friends with the canoe trip family! Here's a generic photo of the wonders we paddled through:

The area is full of history, from the medieval hermitage on the farm were we stayed:

to the also medieval troglodite church from which you can see the Viaduc du Millau:

all the way back to prehistoric menhirs up on the highest causses:

with attendant chambered tombs:

Not a bad fit!

As well as canoeing, walking and visiting, we had plenty of time for relaxing.

We spent several days around the campsite, cooking up fun lunches and playing games of Kübb or Trivial Pursuit. On one of those days some of Papé's (the grandpa's) bees swarmed and caused quite a bit of excitement! We bought some of the honey to commemorate the event.

One the other days there were just ordinary old camels to enliven the campsite...

Joyas

Google Translate tells me that the Spanish for 'jewels' is 'joyas' - I sure hope it's right, as I spend all day telling students not to trust that programme... but here are some beautiful, jewel-like Spanish treasures for you:

They almost seem like a beautiful children's craft project to me, made of thousands of tiny pieces of sticky paper, or maybe wine gums...

They're actually tins, imported into France containing sweets, something like the vintage Huntley and Palmers tins I sometimes find on Vide Greniers stalls. I've never seen anything else as spectacular as these jewelled Spanish tins, though. The first time I saw one I enquired the price and the antique stall holder said to me: 'People are always asking about the tin, but it's not for sale, only the contents!' After that I seemed to see the same dratted tin with the same stubborn brocante dealer about once a year, but never any others, until...

...I bought the lozenge-patterened one with the pale roses earlier this year. It was lovely but a little lonely, and slightly lost amongst less textured tins I own. Until...

Our wonderful housesitters spotted this black-centred tin, FULL OF BUTTONS, at the brocante market in Toulouse and decided that it had 'Floss' written all over it. The wonder of generous, blog-reading housesitters!

They saw it and they knew I'd love it and they wonderfully bought it for me, all without knowing I had another one just looking for company.

Late in the summer I bought the frankly inferior (untextured) tin at the top of the frame, with the idea that two's OK but three's a display. And it seems I was right!

You may remember the frame - it's a complete fake, made of solid foam, but it does mean you can play around with it like this!



Some of my favourite tins are in this stack, but I think they look ordinary compared to the glamorous Spanish tins to their left.

It's hard to snap a photo of the whole thing - the mantelpiece is never in natural light, but here's my best effort. Marie-Antoinette is tucked onto the gold rim of the mirror - can you spot her?

Thanks for all your comments - it's now the holidays and my timetable has reduced just a little bit, so I'm trying to take the time to reply when I can - it's ALWAYS lovely to hear from you!

Marie-Antoinette and the Midden

In the middle of our town there is a church. Next to the church there is an old school. Next to the old school there is a play centre. Next to the play centre there is a car park. And in the car park there is a hole.

 

Holes in the ground may be a nuisance to some, but to an archaeology-lover they are a magnet! I know that before the old school (1900s) and play centre (1920s) were built, this area was the livestock market. Son 2 studied photos of it in school, looking at how life has changed since the days when farmers drove their cattle and geese into our town for sale down the hill from the church.

Ben and I were passing the other weekend and decided that the ‘stuff’ piled up next to the hole was just too interesting to ignore. We spotted a huge ox shoulder-blade and many other bones, indicating that meat as well as livestock was sold around here.

 

There’s so much ‘stuff’ in the hole – in layers as you can see – that it’s clear that the area was covered with rubbish at some point, probably to form a base before the car park surface was laid.

It’s hard to pin down exactly when the layers were formed, but we seem to have a ‘pre-school’ market layer, and a ‘post-school’ layer of 1950s and 1960s bits and bobs which probably just pre-date the car park.

You might feel that rubbish from within living memory is, well, just, rubbish, but it’s from a very desirably ‘retro’ period and tells more about life in our town in those days than finding the same things on a Vide Grenier stall, so I rather enjoyed peering through the fences and picking out a few things from the spoil heap.

Well-washed, they look rather special around the house.

Four little bottles, glittering, iridescent and impossible to capture in a photo.

 

And Marie-Antoinette, a Limoges ‘cameo’ – a very popular and inexpensive form of jewellery from the 1950s and ’60s - although I can’t find a photo of this specific cameo on the net, there are many, many others for sale, some of them in the little bronze setting which has corroded around this fragment. I bet someone was upset when this broke – maybe she still lives in our town! Wouldn’t she be amazed that her treasure has resurfaced after all these years?

The Pilgrim Way to Santiago

In 2011 I found myself by accident on the pilgrim route to Santiago. I snapped this photo of a pilgrim's scallop shell in the little shrine on the back road, which is actually only about 20 minutes' drive from our house.

Just over two years later, we headed quite deliberately to the end of the pilgrimage - Santiago de Compostela itself. You can see my photos of the Baroque frontage of the cathedral in my previous post.

Ben and I paid to go up into the museums which take up some of the rooms around the cathedral, and I snapped this photo of pilgrims and tourists together in the square. You can spot the pilgrims because most of them are lying down! They have had to walk at least 100 kilometers to get there, or cycle 200, and most of them had probably done more. You can see a huge pile of rucsacs in the middle of my photo, with a few pilgrims watching them as their fellows head off - maybe into the cathedral, or maybe into the well-stocked city pharmacies, which advertise a great range of foot-care products!

The sense of arrival must be wonderful. The Catholic pilgrims go to confession and mass, and everyone mills around in the cathedral, which has quite a sense of bustle and awe, probably as it has done for the last thousand years. This photo shows you what you can see there:

But this photo gives you a much better feel of the place!

Whisper, crackle, shuffle, bustle, shhhh, shuffle, bustle... it's a fascinating place.

But when you think that you have come to the end of the pilgrim route, it turns out you are wrong. THIS is the end of the road - the end of the world - Finisterre!

Pilgrims traditionally continued walking until they got to the true end of the road, on the blustery cape of Fisterra, or Finisterre.

There they burnt their pilgrim clothes - Son 2 is investigating the site of a very recent fire, composed mostly of boots, he informed us.

Nowadays, as well as pilgrims and tourists, there is a lighthouse and a radio mast.

The sign says 'Do not leave clothes on this radio mast' in many pilgrim languages...



The town of Fisterra is just tucked into a bay behind the cape. Here the pilgrims stopped in medieval times to pick up the scallop shell which would show the world that they had completed their holy travels. And here Son 2 dived in the cold, cold waters of the Atlantic and found...

Bank Holidays in France

In France, Bank Holidays don't move around to the nearest Monday like they do in the UK. Sometimes, this means they all fall at the weekend, and we get no extra days off.

But sometimes, they fall in the week and we get crazy amounts of time off - hurray! This last week we had VE day (Wednesday 8th May) and Ascension Day (Thursday 9th) - it was a weekend in the middle of the week, and we enjoyed it to the full, despite a bit of rain.

Son 2 and Ben worked together to construct a small hutch for the new guinea pigs. They came with all their accommodation, but we think that the garden they were in before was more sheltered, and we feel happier now that they have a proper bit of 'indoors' to go into at night, when they are in their run on the lawn. They love the new home, and Son 2 is so happy that his work has been appreciated... and it's fantastic for Ben to have shared projects with the boys.

A trip to the Vide Grenier... a Fabric History of France!

I got back from the massive school Vide Grenier this afternoon and unloaded my finds:

There seems to have been a theme to today's haul! I'll take you on a mini-tour of French fabric history, thanks to today's stall-holders. Let's go backwards in time...

So, it won't surprise you to know that in the 1970s, French women were crocheting granny squares with the rest of us! 3€ with a matching cot blanket thrown in...

They were also buying repro floral fabric rather like the Laura Ashley trend in the UK - I thought this fabric was original early 20th century, but the woman who made the curtains sold them to me, and she should remember when she bought the fabric! She was using it as a tablecloth today... another 3€.

We leap back to the 1950s, and find the origin of the fabrics that Cath Kidston has made so popular today... 50c.

We have to go back a bit further in time to discover that France was importing, or even making, paisley shawls in the 1840s - I am going to have to research this a bit further. It's a fine woollen weave, and in pretty good condition - much like the fragment of Scottish paisley shawl that I've treasured since I found it in the 1980s. This one is whole, with one hole on the fold and a rather fragmenting fringe. 3€.

It seems we have to go even further back for this embroidered bag!

OK, so the bag itself is a little damaged, but the fine embroidered roses and the swags, ribbons and chains are in great condition.

"Oh, around the time of the Revolution..." opined the stall-holder, selling it to me for 3€! What do you think? Which one would you choose?

In other news, Son 2 has adopted not one, but three guinea pigs! I will be asking Seranata for advice... He was very, very keen to care for some rodents, and the owner of these three is ill and has returned to the UK for immediated treatment (please pray for her - we are very moved by her story) so we stepped into the breach! Son 2 didn't really sleep last night, because he kept imagining that he was a guinea pig, and he had a nap with them in their substantial run on the sunny lawn this afternoon. It's going to be hard to get him back to school tomorrow!







An ABC of my life in France, right here, right now!

A is for animals – I have been thinking a lot about hares recently - I love them. I spotted one in February, went looking in March but didn’t see any, and then sadly found a dead one on the road this weekend. They are all around us here, but almost completely hidden from us. Wonderful, reclusive, animals.

 

B is for birds – they are singing again, and the hoopoes are back. Last week they were hoo-hoo-ing from the top of tall posts as they looked for their mates. Now they are quieter, so I think they found them!

C is for crutches – Son 2 ended up on them last week, just as Son 1 is reaching a complete recovery after his knee operation…

D is for Downton Abbey – we borrowed the first DVD from work, bought the rest at Christmas, and I have now even made a new local friend (American) as we unite in search of someone in the area who has a copy of the 2012 Christmas special. No spoilers, please (I’ve seen enough on my friends’ blogs, anyway…)

E is for eggs – we have plenty, and the boys seem to be capable of eating as many as the hens produce! I find that I’m buying less meat now that so much of our protein is provided by eggs.

 

F is for Facebook, which is proving a very convenient way for English speakers in the Toulouse area to keep in touch – my last four pupils have all found me through Facebook!

G is for the garden, which is water-logged but blooming!

H is for the Hunger Games books, which Son 1 talked me into reading over the Easter period – very impressive, and addictive too!

I is for ironing – I taught Son 2 to iron shirts a few weeks ago, as he’s looking for extra pocket money! This is going to be very convenient…

 

J is for jaune – a yellow packet of licorice sweets which a trainee gave me this morning, because they are traditional to Toulouse!

K is for keeping a record of all the good things that happen – however busy I am, I am glad that I have my gratitude journal for a daily record of the good times, and my blog for a chance to share and keep photos and stories of our life here together in France.

L is for lessons – I am enjoying work with pupils and trainees aged between 4 and 54, so there’s never a dull moment!

M is for Marriage – we’re going to a good friend’s wedding soon, and are so excited for her – more to follow…

N is for nest box – China the funny hen has been shut out of hers, as she is broody again! She goes broody so often that it’s tempting to get her some eggs to hatch one of these days… but then what?

O is for ordinary. This is just ordinary life – same old, same old, you could think – but how pleasant it is to think about all the interesting things that happen in an ordinary life.

 

P is for blog posts– I really don’t seem to manage many at the moment, but still enjoy reading those of my friends, and even meeting some new blogging friends - hello to my newer followers!

Q is for Queen Elizabeth II – I have a jubilee tin or two on display in the living room, and realised how very British it all seemed when my new American friend came to visit…

R is for really muddy – that’s our front garden, including the path! It’s forced us to act on something we’ve considered for ages, so we should soon be getting some work done to have a driveway and path put in to the front garden.

S is for the Simnel Cake I made on Easter Day, with the British marzipan left over from Christmas!

 

T is for Achilles the tortoise, who is out of hibernation but still seems to think that the days are made for hiding indoors – no summer-time rambles round his enclosure yet!

U is for growing Up! Our boys are growing up like wildfire – even little Son 2 is approaching my height now, and losing some of the puppy fat that has ‘dogged’ him (did you see that, Ang, did you notice it?) for the past few years. And Ben and I are appreciating getting more mature in the good ways, whilst holding on to the fun side of youth, obviously… no point in being TOO grown up!

 V is for Vide Greniers, of course! They are starting up again now that the weather is, in theory, more spring-like. We have a lot of weekend projects and not much spare money, but I shall visit a few and shall share my finds with you, friends!

W is for washing machine- ours has broken down again! Fortunately, Intermarché is only 2 minutes away and has a launderette, while we wait for someone to come and sort out the machine for us…

 

X is for X ray – Son 1 has what might just be a final check-up in June, so hopefully all will be quiet on the leg-bones saga from now on.

Y is for yellow – the daffodils were severely hit by our late snow (not as late as the UK’s I know!) but the yellow tulips are just fantastic this year!

Z is for our local zoo/safari park – just a wonderful place to visit whenever the boys and I are looking for a wander. How nice to have a local tiger family…