Ella shopping...

Mail from Home...27 November 2008

Today Andrew collected his Christmas present to himself from me. Does that make sense? He’d ordered the dvd of the rugby league grand final this year that Manly won, a Manly Sea eagles scarf and also a mouse pad.

We also received a parcel from Aunty Sherrie for the kids which was a book/dvd about the 12 days of Christmas, Australian style for Samuel and Ella to take to school to show their French classmates. Thank you Sherrie. The kids love it. It is absolute bliss to receive mail when we are so far from home.

More French lessons...

Andrew and I continue to go to French class twice a week with Dominique who is an absolute character. We really enjoy the classes mainly because of her personality I think. All up we've had 20 hours of lessons. I read in a blog somewhere about this guy who is entitled to 250 hours of free French classes to be paid for by the French government. I am so envious. I think I would need a couple of hundred hours at least to get to a level where I could hold a back and forth conversation like a normal person. At the moment we are still leaving out a lot of key words and adding much gesticulation in order to make ourselves understood. It must be pretty funny to watch. I would love to have us on video. I think it would make hilarious viewing.

Time with Dad...

One of the best things about coming to France I think has been the extra time that we've been able to spend doing things with the kids, especially Andrew. He’s actually able to have time to think of things and then do them with the kids. I think even if they don’t remember all the tourist attractions we’ve taken them to, they will always remember that this was a really special time with Dad.

Cite de l'espace...23 November 2008

On Sunday we visited the Cite de l’espace exhibition in Toulouse. The highlight was the imax film which showed astronauts in space going about their everyday work floating around in the space shuttle. It showed how they manage to eat, sleep and carry out repairs to the outside of the shuttle. Pretty amazing to see (and terrifying if you ask me).

Frost... 27 November 2008

Today (jeudi) was very exciting. The weather has been getting colder and colder. This morning it was -1°C on the car temperature gauge.

We don’t have a carport and the poor car has to stay out all night in the freezing cold. There was frost all over the top of it and the windscreen had ice on it. When we put the wipers on to clear the windscreen the ice broke off in little sheets.

The countryside looked foggy and the fields were covered in frost. It looked so pretty. The prospect of a white Christmas is very appealing. The kids are hanging out to light a fire in the living room. We have a wood stove thingy as well in the kitchen. We’ve ordered a load of fire wood so that should be interesting. We also need to buy an axe because the wood comes in large chunks which need to be split and made smaller.

Lourdes 7 November 2008

Grotte de Massabielle

We visited Lourdes on our way back from Pau a couple of weeks ago. Lourdes is a town of about 15 000 people which was made famous by a 14 year old peasant girl Bernadette who saw the Virgin Mary in a series of visions that came to her in a grotto. These days around 5million visitors come every year from all over the world many of them terminally ill and praying for a cure. There has been 67 medically certifiable cures over the years.

It was interesting to see what Lourdes was all about as I’d heard a lot about it over the years and wanted to see what it was like. There is a huge tourist complex built around the cave (Grotte de Massabielle) where Bernadette had her vision and there’s an ornately decorated church built right over the top of the cave.

Carlipa Images

The Route de Bram

Carlipa boulangerie

Looking up the Route de Bram from l'ecole

Ecole Elementaire de Carlipa

Our street in Carlipa

Snow shopping 25 November 2008

Today we went shopping for Christmas goodies for the kids at the Carrefour at Portet-sur-Garonne which I’d read about on the Americans in Toulouse website. We came home with various bits and pieces but the best bit was getting Samuel kitted out for the snow. The reason I was so thrilled to get Samuel's ski gear is that we only paid 29 € for the all in one suit in a fire engine red colour and I was expecting to pay hundreds. But I shouldn't speak too soon. Andrew and I have to get our ski clothes yet. We are planning to go ski-ing in January some time. It seemed like a good day to buy snow gear considering the temperature outdoors didn’t get over 4° all day and also raining. It was like walking around in a freezer. The thermometer in the car started flashing on 3°, maybe it doesn’t go lower than that.

Mobile mini markets

Something which they do here which is a great idea is the mobile grocer and butcher. One day a week, in Carlipa it happens to be on a Friday morning, a couple of vans roll into town madly tooting their horns to tell everyone they’re here and they set up a couple of stands of fruit and vegetables. The boucherie (butcher) has a van with the side that comes down and displays the fresh and smoked meat, sausages and deli items. We don’t get the Boulanger (baker) very often because we have a boulangerie in Carlipa (our only shop). Andrew and I do our big shop in Carcassonne or Castelnaudary every week but it’s great to have the mini market to get a few things if you’ve run out.

Penpals

As part of learning another language (French and English), all the kids in the school wrote letters to a school in England and the school in England wrote letters back. Samuel and Ella wrote their letters in English and they both received letters back in French which they brought home. The letters were fun to read. Andrew and I could actually read them, they were at our level of French. They wrote simple things about themselves and their family and drew a little picture at the bottom. I thought it was a great idea to make learning a new language more interesting.

Wee wee

Something I can’t get used to (and don't want to) is seeing grown men taking wees on the side of the road in full view of the traffic. They don’t bother to conceal what they’re doing. They just pull up and go for it. Very unattractive.

Parlez vous francaise

The kids are saying more French words every day. Ella has different little expressions which she has picked up. It sounds great to hear them speaking French. Their accents sound like real French not like when Andrew and I say things. Ella comes out with a few phrases and words like voila (there you are), d’accord (ok), c’est finit (it is finished) and others. They've learned lots of words at school, numbers, colours etc. They cut out pictures and write the french word beside it in their books. Samuel doesn't seem to be absorbing as much as Ella which is surprising because he is so much more interested in being friends with everybody than Ella is.

Samuel's absolute compulsion at this point in time is Pokemon cards which he exchanges with the other boys at school. So he's gleaned enough language to let him carry out that one crucial activity in his life at the moment.

Hooray for the canteen 18 November 2008

Today was the first day for the kids to have lunch at the canteen. I’ve been meaning to book them in for a while and by the time I finally got around to going up to the Mairie (I’m just sooo busy all the time) they tell me you have to book and pay one month in advance so we actually had to wait almost another full month until their first time.

Practically the whole school (25 kids) goes to the canteen for lunch everyday. It involves going by bus to the next village (Cennes Monasties) and eating a cooked lunch which is way better than the ham on baguette we have at home. It costs €2,80 each meal. Money well spent. It means Andrew and I can have a whole 8 hours to ourselves to do what we want without having to race around in a mad panic to get home by 12 noon to pick upthe kids for lunch.

Anyway our first day without the kids, we kind of wasted the time doing necessary errands, food shopping and picking up our computer which has been in the shop getting all the grotty viruses and spyware removed. We’ve been computerless for 10 days and it’s been hell!

The past week without the computer has come at an awkward time with Andrew having emails needing printing out and faxing. We had to drive back and forth to Carcassonne several times. (It’s 25 km away from Carlipa.) But the best bit by far was the cost of sending a fax from the post office in Carcassonne to Australia, €9 for the first page which is about $18 AU. We had 32 pages to send. I refused to fax it on principle. Jeepers! So we were thrilled to discover at the internet café “Alert Rouge” they charge only €1 per page to send a fax so we trundled up there only to be told they can’t fax to Australia. Can you believe it? Back to square one.

Well after this we were tossing up buying a fax. We thought it’ll be cheaper in the long run and we found a multifunction printer scanner fax all in one thingy. It was a beauty for €79 but when we enquired about it, they were out of stock on that model. We started to think the universe was against us.

Anyhoo, finally after chatting to Mark our landlord he mentioned he had an old fax machine in the attic somewhere which we managed to dig out, dust off and at long last send our 32 page fax, one page at a time. The End.

Snow at last....6 November 2008

Snow melting and running down the side of the mountain

Snow capped mountain


Our first sight of blobs of snow

Samuel was amazed how heavy snow is

Our first attempt at a snow man

We passed this shrine on the roadside

Today the kids saw snow for the first time. To describe it as exciting would be a major understatement. But after about ½ hr we had to call it quits playing in the snow because the kids were both totally soaked and wet and it was cold and starting to rain. Definitely something we will be doing again. The kids loved it. But we need to have the proper gear, our Mount Isa winter woollies just don’t cut it.

We drove to Laruns from Pau and called in to the tourist office to enquire about walks we could do that weren’t too adventurous for the kids (or us for that matter). We decided to drive higher into the Pyrenees to drive closer to where we could see snow and we weren’t disappointed. Our first blobs of snow were awesome according to Samuel - Samuel said it was his best day in France so far. We had to stop the car and get out and feel it. It was fun seeing our first blob of snow. We kept driving and not 2 minutes further up the road there was snow everywhere. All over the sides of the road and up the hills in piles. So we pulled up to have our lunch and the kids played in the snow. Ella said the snow wasn’t soft but it was cold and icy and the kids’ hands got really cold.

Driving up into the mountains gave me the creeps abit. There's a deep drain on one side of the road and the edge of the cliff on the other. The road was wet from rain and there was a lot of water running down the mountain side and along the edges of the road from melting snow and quite a bit of water over the road in places. There's no shortage of water here. The rivers and streams were gushing with water after all the snow and rain.

More pictures of Pau

Interesting parking

Boulevard des Pyrenees

Beside the little Funicular train

The Pau Chateau and The Junior Suite

Samuel waiting in the rain for the Chateau to open
I wanted to show these great footpaths which we see alot of everywhere made entirely of little stones.
Formal garden at the side of the Chateau

One of many massive wall size tapestries hanging in the chateau.

Outside chateau

Outside chateau, raining and rather cold

We spent a couple of hours on a guided tour of the Pau Chateau today. An ideal way to spend some time on a cold and rainy day. I find it fascinating to imagine the way people lived in those days and how they spent their time. The tour was all in french but we had a printout of a translation in english.

The hotel where we stayed in Pau was a good internet find. 56€ a night for a 2 room 'junior' suite with a kitchenette. free parking and right next to a huge E.Le.Clerc shopping centre for getting essential supplies. It wasn’t walking distance to town but you can’t have everything. We found free parking in Pau at Place Verdun on the first day when we visited the Pau Chateau.

Pau and the Pyrenees - 4 November 2008

Rest stop on the way to Pau

We're in Pau for a few days. Pau is one of the main cities in the Pyrenees on the Atlantic Ocean side of France. Pau looks beautiful despite the drizzling rain and cold grey weather. Pau is nicknamed "the English city" for all the beautiful gardens. The drive here was a little bit slow because of all the little villages we drove through. We wanted to show the kids some snow and have a little play in it. The mountains look gorgeous with the tops covered in snow. The man in the tourist office said it's been snowing in the mountains for over a week already. He said it doesn't normally snow in Pau but when he was growing up he remembers having a metre of snow in Pau. That would have been exciting!

Barcelona - 26 Oct to 30 Oct 2008

Mime artists and street performers along the colourful street called La Rambla kept us all enthralled. They stand still for ages and if you give them a couple of euros you can have your photo taken with them. The kids and I actually found some of them a bit creepy (too real)


Barcelona is great! What a city! We really enjoyed the hustle and bustle of the city for a change. So much to see and do. We made a stop at Figueres to visit the Dali Museum which was amazing. I was so amazed I forgot to take any photos, sorry about that but if you've ever seen any of Dali's work, it's interesting to say the least.

We arrived in Barcelona on Sunday. Driving in Barcelona was terrifying, so much traffic, all hurtling in various directions. We find arriving in a new place hard with the unfamiliar street names but with Andrew's skilful driving we managed to find our unit in Barcelonetta which is near the Port.

We went to a shop called El Corte Ingles which is a department store similar to Myer in Australia. The huge range and quality of clothes was amazing. The shopping in Barcelona city is gorgeous. The people are very well dressed. They look like they’re in their Sunday best every day. Very stylishly co-ordinated and accessorised.

Our first couple of days were warm and sunny as predicted but then there was a day of serious cold and rain and we were wearing almost every piece of clothing we had brought with us on this day. It was so cold. We had been told how warm it is in Spain, well today it was freezing and raining. There was snow storms all along the Pyrenees mountains which we are heading to next.

We ended up buying 2 umbrellas from a man selling on the street. He wanted 5 euros for one umbrella but we haggled him down to 5 euros for 2 umbrellas and they are rubbish umbrellas anyway, Andrew’s is already falling to bits after one day in the rain.

We tried to practise the Spanish words for please and thank you, hello and goodbye everywhere but we keep saying the French words instead purely from habit over the past couple of months. The kids were funny. They seemed to be saying alot of their french words in Spain more than they do in France.

We’ve found the people very friendly and helpful in the shops, hotels, restaurants and even if they don’t speak much English they still seem more than willing to be as helpful as they can.

It is noticeably cheaper in Spain but having said that, we had a couple of costly learning experiences in the buying drinks department. So be warned, if the price isn’t listed on the menu, ask because no doubt you’ll be in for a nasty surprise.

We found the parking situation atrocious which is normal in a city. You’re not allowed to park in the street unless you’re a resident. We ended up using the underground parking areas which was another huge expense but the safest option considering what everyone was telling us about the crime.

The photos below are a bit out of order but should give you a general idea of what we got up to.

The best market I have ever ever seen! The Market of the Boqueria (of Sant Josep), the way the food was displayed was amazing. It was all so artistically presented. This colourful photo is a lolly stand.

Place Catalunyna

The dragon at the entrance to Park Guell. Park Guell was originally designed by Gaudi as a residental development and landscaped gardens .

Park Guell

Park Guell

As you can see from how rugged up the kids are it was freezing this day but we still enjoyed it anyway.

Samuel and Ella showing their interest in the Picasso Museum while Andrew and I wandered around each room. They're playing Pokemon cards.

Lining up in the rain at the Picasso Museum. The queue was intimidatingly long but it seemed to move quickly and the kids were happy.

Had to take a photo of the bathroom in the unit we stayed in. It was so small your head touched the wall when you sat on the toilet. Ella's got her arms stretched out to give an idea of the size. Her arms are not very long.

A whole shop just selling Hello Kitty stuff. I had to get a photo. Ella loves Hello Kitty.

La Sagrade Famille (The Sacred Family) Cathedral

The outside of the unit block where we stayed. Not in an especially nice area. We ended up deciding to stay an extra 2 nights after this unit because it was all so interesting and new. And found a 3 star hotel right in the centre of the city which was fantastic for walking to everything.

Typical unit block, with all the washing hanging out the windows.

Banyuls Sur Mer - 25 October 2008

School holidays for the kids. We decided to head down to Spain for a few days. We drove to Banyuls Sur Mer and stopped a night on the way to Barcelona. It’s a very beautiful little place of about 5000 people which apparently swells to three times that number during summer.

Walking around Banyuls Sur Mer

Ella coming down the slide head first.
There was a great playground opposite our hotel.

View of Banyuls

Steep streets in the town

(good for walking off all those croissants)

Heading south with the beautiful Mediterranean behind us