Salut, tout le monde! We have arrived in our other world! Les & I left Charleston, our normal world, on June 7, to head for a week in Chicago with family & friends. (For recent photos of our families, see "A Wild Week in Chicago, June '14".) We left Chicago on Monday, June 16, & arrived in Paris on Tuesday to discover that the French rail system is on strike. Everybody who had a paid reservation was shifted to the ONE & ONLY train leaving the ai...

Hello Everybody! Happy End of Summer. Week 10, and Boo-hoo!, our final full week in Languedoc came & went. We spent it tying up the loose ends: visiting places we'd been before & wanted to revisit, & doing one last art exposition. Here are the highlights: Charles Trenet in Narbonne We love Narbonne--it's an old Roman city (in fact the Via Domitia runs right through the center of town) with many museums & the lovely markets (inside & outside...

Here we are, Week 9--one more week to go before "Re-entry"! Can't believe it! We've just finished a lovely week, full of new experiences & old friends. Can't beat it! Thursday, August 15 was "La Fete de La Vierge", a holy day that's also a national holiday, & serves as the official reminder that summer is almost over in France. Although this holiday floats with the date, it is very similar to Labor Day weekend for the States, where families gather for ba...

Our seventh week here was full of surprise, squish, shock, & awe! Surprise...and Shock! On Tuesday afternoon, around 5:00, I decided to take a walk around the village. All of a sudden, I noticed a huge cloud of very black and dense smoke, coming from just about where we live. All I could think of was that Les was working away on his laptop, and the town was burning around him. I quickly changed directions, and headed back to the village. The medieval block ...

Hi Everybody! The end of July already, and we've just finished week 6 of our summer in France. Hope your summer is going well! We had another wonderful week--here are the highlights: Music! This week was full of music! We started Thursday night with a jazz concert, right here in town, about 2 blocks from our house. An English couple open their home to about 120 people (mostly English) once a month for what they call "La Nuit du Jazz". It's one of those houses ...