My friend Lucy sent me this link--DIY knickers! How awesome. Other than the kids, the woman sounds a lot like me...I can't wait to get home to be making shit! I have to buy a new sewing machine (rather than having my old one shipped from Vancouver), so I'm hoping to find something beautiful and rather old, or I'm going to get the same, super cute sewing unit that Venus has!

June Address!

466 Avenue de Castres

31660

Bessieres, France.

For those that haven't seen it in various other places. I'll be there until mid June--don't wait until then to send letters!

Barcelone, March 2010

Barcelona is truly a beautiful city. more than Paris, everywhere I looked, I found something beautiful, no less for Gaudi's additions. Here is the top of one of his apartment buildings.

Light and colour were two things he did well, besides many other things. In fact, his buildings are quite well designed, from using natural light and simple heating techniques. And fabulous desig, of course.

The core of the building was all in tile, with wooden vents to regulate the temperature. It was a better picture through the molded glass.

Organic. Beautiful.

A fire place with a room all its own! Like a warming oven, but for people! I want one of these.

Perpignan

Spring! Magnolias and the moon. Some people said they didn't really like Perpignan, but I did. It's quite pretty and diverse, and after being in the mostly white Toulouse, it was a relief being around people who weren't all the same!!









I got into the city too late to get into the hostel, so I hung out in the park and drew a thousand palm trees. It was a beautiful day, so why not?












Another thing that makes Perpignan cool? Their velo system. They're cruisers!








A quiet little street. Narrow and peaceful like so many other streets in France...

My last day in Bessieres

I was really tired of fighting with the computer, so this picture hasn't been rotated. I have plenty more to add, but I figured one sideways photo was enough. There was a community vide grenier my last day in Bessieres, a community garage sale! Yeah! This was a wasps nest--it's a nest of Asiatic Wasps that have been turning up more and more in France. They hunt bees, so they are really, really bad to have around, and they are quite large (apparently) and red and black. It was still winterish, so this hive was dormant, and I'm pretty sure they were going to burn it afterwards, but they brought it to the VG just to show--and it was huge! That woman's head was right beside it! It was quite the show stopper.



At the VG there were plenty of farm implements! This is (the back of) Berangere and here daughter, buying a plow. Farm stuff is always really colourfully painted...

The one thing that was EVERYWHERE were CASSETTE TAPES. And, yes, I bought my first cassette tape since I was 13. I'm starting a collection, don't you know. I got the soundtrack to Down By Law! Five for a euro, so I got a few others... Hey! They're light!

I went for a bike ride...

I went for a bike ride between Bessieres and Gaillac, which is...maybe 20 or 30 kms away. It was a beautiful Sunday, if a little cold. And here is what I found:

A memorial to the war dead. Every town has one, some more interesting than others.














A great sign for apples.












Spring!















Lisle-sur-Tarn. French names are terribly adventurous. It's on an island in the Tarn River. And it's pretty, just like every other town in France.















The light was beautiful, the clouds were beautiful, the sky was beautiful. I am obsessed with taking pictures of the sky, of clouds, and of power lines. I can't explain it.















The French countryside.















A corner pigeonnier in St Sulpice-sur-Tarn. I thought is was charming that there was a pigeonnier in town. It fit, and yet seemed an afterthought.















Below is Albi. Super beautiful Albi. The cathedral--the final picture--is enormous. I went in around 530 and there was a choir practicing for that night's show--so pretty! The insidee of the church is kind of crazy--it's basically a church inside a church, and there are plenty of macbre paintings, mostly of the seven deadlies and the torture for them in Hell. Uplifting!

The Pleasures of Reading

In order to improve my French, I've been reading in French exclusively since January. It does help--reading in French gets it into your head more, and my vocabulary improves with the reading, as does my grammar (I hope). However, reading in another language is TOUGH! I am used to burning through books, but now, lost in a sea of new words, I find it difficult to find books that both interest me and that I can understand. In some ways I am reminded of being an overzealous child who wanted like nothing to read books too far advanced for my reading skills. I've read a few from Le petit Nicolas series which were written in the fifties and sixties, I think, and are intended for nine-year-old boys and come with plenty of explanatory pictures. They're great fun to read, and it feels satisfying to read one, because I can finish it in a few days. Other books, however, take a great deal longer. I plowed through Rene Remond's history of the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, but it was slow going. In English I think I would have enjoyed it much more, and understood a lot more; I enjoyed it all the same, it's just it took a lot of work to read it.

I finished Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours this morning, a book by Jules Verne for those that don't know. It was somewhat incredulous to read--written at a time when long-distance travel was a novelty, I'm fairly certain he wrote it from an encylcopedia and a map of the world rather than his own experiences. And the attitudes! At the same time, I found the main character, an English gentleman doing the tour of the world in eighty days on a wager, rather paralleling a lot of travellers today. he had no interest in the areas he was travelling through, only in playing whist to while away the long hours on the train. But drop into a hostel anywhere in the world, and you'll find tourists more bent on drinking or seeing the sights listed in their copy of Lonley Planet than interacting in any meaningful way with the people that live there.

At any rate, I'm determined to soldier on in my French reperatoire, and hopefully one day the pleasure of reading will find me in French as it has in English.