Art Opening at St. Avit Sénieur

It's been such a busy week! Some time before we moved to here, I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in an art show at the gorgeous little village of St. Avit Sénieur, a town on the St. Jacques de Compostella pilgrimage trail. The setting could not be lovelier. Here's a photo of the courtyard in front of the presbytere, where the show is hung. It was a real challenge to get together the paintings to hang and to find all the little things we need for a show as well. I had ordered new business cards and they showed up in plenty of time. Plenty of time to disappear for a while, since one of the enduring problems with a new house is that you no longer know where you put things. But they were rediscovered in time for the opening, which occured this past Friday. It was a great success, in that crowds of people showed up. Here's some photos of the crowd - well, since I was taking them, they are the parts of the crowd showing other artists. But, trust me, there were people other that artists and their friends there! The organizer of the show, Jacqui Clark, mentioned that people come to this show because over the years that it has been running, it has gained a reputation for having art worth seeing. (I am doubly pleased to have been invited to participate.) The featured artist at the show is a well known New York Abstract Expressionist, John Griefen, who has recently moved to St. Avit.

I seem to have specialised in the backs of artist's heads! From left to right, Gillian (red hair), John Griefen (grey hair), Jane, then (facing you) the mayor of St. Avit, and Jacqui.

As usual at this sort of thing, Jacqui gave a speech about the show, and then the mayor did the same, mentioning that there were plans in the works for continuing the renovation of the space, providing us with more in the way of electrics in the near future. All in all a very good evening. But - even better - Jacqui called me today to say that I had sold two paintings on Sunday. Wheee!

Yesterday, in our travels back and forth, we took a little road that leads to one of the noted 'must-see' items in Nojals, a dolmen several thousand years old. It's much larger than I thought. You could walk around in it. Interesting to ponder how they makers managed to pose that upper rock on the others. No cranes...

We're finally connected to the internet again!!!

At last! We are once more connected to the outside world! It's been a very strange three weeks. We had no internet, no land line phone, and no cell phones that worked, since it seems our house is in a dead spot for the SFR cell phone coverage. The internet service was supposed to be working as of March 24th! After several frustrating and useless phone calls, we gave up. Even when our (French) estate agent called and argued with them nothing happened. So we decided to forget it and go with another provider, Orange, after first having France telecom give us a phone line. That happened last Friday and then we were just to wait until the internet light on the router came on. It did! On Monday! We couldn't do much with it on Monday since we had the house and garden full of workers. But before describing that, let me tell you why we needed a house full of workers.

Ahhhh, where to begin. Let's begin with the actual move. The move from hell. It all started in Espéraza at 7 in the morning. Or at least it did for us. The mover had said to meet him at the house at 7AM, when they would start loading the truck. We had gone to the mairie the previous week to ask for that section of road to be cordoned off so that the truck could park - standard practice in French towns, where streets are narrow. But no such luck. When we got there the parking places were filled with cars, leaving no place for the truck to park. But, hey, the truck and the mover were nowhere to be seen anyway. But in the course of the next hour or so they arrived, one car moved out of the way and there was just enough room to squeeze the truck into a spot where it could be filled. Here's a photo of John officiating.

After loading everything from Esperaza, we continued on to the house in Ste. Colombe. The first problem there was that the truck was too large to fit around the corner of the small street that runs in front of the house, and had to park next to the terrace, making loading a bit more difficult. By noon or so, our car was filled with last minute stuff, but the moving truck was far from full. Jean and Jim, friends from Fougax, had also filled their car with loose odds and ends stuff and had left some time before. We then took off for the trip to Nojals, leaving the movers to fit whatever they could into the truck. We arrived at Nojals around 4 in the afternoon, meeting Jim and Jean, who had to get back home. So we unpacked our car and waited. And waited. And then waited some more. The movers arrived at 11PM. By this time, they were tired and had no interest whatsoever in putting furniture in the proper rooms, or even putting boxes in the proper rooms. By the time they left, at 3AM, we had one room full of boxes and another full of furniture, floor to ceiling, literally. Here's photos of the sea of boxes and the mountain of furniture.

The boxes, as seen from the stairway to the tower room. Note that the pile of boxes almost reaches the ceiling lamp.

The furniture, as seen from the kitchen.

We've slowly moved bits of furniture and unpacked more than a few boxes. But it's not easy! For a start, most of the boxes are full of books, and most of the bookcases are at the rear of that hill of furniture. And the hill of furniture occupies the room where all the bookcases will go! Some things are more urgent than others. Not unusual, unfortunately, to find a box marked 'fragile' to be under a stack of book boxes! And through it all we keep remembering that the reason we hired movers instead of just renting a large truck was so that we would not have to be moving heavy furniture and boxes full of books. Arrgghhhh. Now we get to move many of these things not once but several times, stacks of boxes and furniture being disorganized things by nature. But we reward ourselves from time to time with - lunch!

Here's my salad from one lunch at the brasserie in Beaumont.

And here's the plat , a local specialty called anchaud, which is pork confit, served cold.