Hello Everybody! Hope all is well with you & yours, wherever you are.

This week was a fun one! We had friends here, from DC, to show around. Funny how showing off your turf makes you realize just how special it is!

We started by revisiting a Roman pottery museum about 45 minutes from us. It's called Amphoralis, because that's where they made their "amphores", the clay jars they made for exporting wine & olive oil. They do an excellent job there of making you understand & appreciate how important wine was to this region. The Romans brought wine with them, & the land was perfect for its cultivation. The Romans exported all over the world, so they needed pottery for export. This factory made a special amphore called #4. The museum created an actual Roman oven (following archeologists' specifications), & lots of tiles (roof & building bricks), amphore, & put it all into vignettes that make the digs outside come alive. You get the connection between wine & the rest of the world trade that happened in this place. All roads, as they say, lead to & from!) Rome.

From there, we headed to Narbonne, the ancient capitol of the first Roman province in Gaul (ancient France). There we saw an exposed part of the Roman road & the Horreum (a storage depot under the city). We also walked through the courtyard of the Bishop's palace, & the City Hall. From ancient Rome to Medieval times in 5 minutes. Whew!

All these things we'd seen before, but from Narbonne, we went on to a new place for Les & I. It's a storage place for wine "barrigues" (barrels), & underground as well, just like the Horereum. Sort of a Disney take on wine history, but extremely effective. We started with a "sound & light" show (a bit hokey) in the main storage room (1500 barrels) 80 meters underground, in an old gypsum factory. But then we "walked" through a Roman village & a medieval tavern, saw how they made the barrels, how they cultivated the grapes, & a variety of wine implements.

But the biggest thing I took out of this experience happened for me with the first video. It was a very short history of the area--all of it was familiar to me, but I hadn't really considered the IMPACT of wine on the region until that moment. The Romans brought the wine culture with them--it flourished because the south of France is the perfect place to grow wine. But when the Roman civilization faded & the "new religion" (Christianity) took over, the Christians made wine the symbol of THEIR culture, & from then on wine became not only the region's single biggest product, but a sacred part of everyday life. Then the Cathars founded their own religion, rebelling against what they thought was a corrupt Papal society. This brought about an Inquisition against the Cathars, & incredible brutality to wipe them out in the Middle Ages. The Canal du Midi (mentioned often in this blog!), built in the 1600s as a corridor between the Mediteranenan Sea & the Atlantic Ocean, became a new kind of Roman road, using barges to move produce. Then the railroad came, & finally, our cursed A9, the super highway that causes massive "bouchons" (traffic jams) every Saturday & Sunday in July & August in southern France. The A9 hugs the old Roman road. Now it's trucks, not chariots, but they are still moving the wine (first) & the olive oil (second) that originated with the Romans. And of course, the A9 moves the people from all over the place, to & from the south of France.

Our second day with our guests, we tried to find the Roman road we remembered, but couldn't. Actually, we did find it, but it just didn't look right. Eventually we figured out that we'd confused 2 places we'd visited 5 years ago. I've put pictures on our album entitled "All roads lead to Rome" to show you the BIG difference.

Another highlight of our week was a visit to Toulouse to tour the Airbus factory where they make their huge airliner, the A380. Airbus has 4 locations that contribute to this massive airplane: Toulouse, (France), Spain, the UK, & Germany. But it's in this factory that they assemble & test the planes. Their "take" on the future of the airline industry is different than Boeing's. Airbus thinks big airplanes flying to major hubs with lots of people aboard (the A380 holds 550 people) is where the future lies. Boeing's take is the opposite: they think that more smaller planes flying to smaller destinations is the way to go. Two different interpretations of a changing industry in a world that changes constantly. Wonder what the Romans would think!

Funnily enough, we ended the weekend at a pottery place! It's an incredibly fun bargain spot, everything reduced by 50%. You can buy anything from iron tables (very ROMAN!) to pottery pigs. But of course the earthenware caught my eye. Same clay, updated a bit, but not a lot!

What a wonderful World!

We hope you too are enjoying our Wonderful Changing World!

Love,

Elise & Les