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) we've mentioned before. But this weekend was Narbonne's "Festival Trenet". We went especially to see an exhbition devoted to Charles Trenet, the "native son" of Narbonne. He was a very prolific song writer, poet, singer, & artist, and is probably, in the States, most known for his song "La Mer", made famous by Bobby Darrin in the '60s and used again by George Bensen in the '80s. The exhibit was very hands on: you could pick what videos you wanted to see, & what songs you wanted to hear. There were multiple items on display as well, including an essay he wrote when he was 22 entitled "What is my Inspiration?" as part of an entrance exam into a career as a performing artist. In this essay, he says he will embrace art in any way he can, throughout his life. And so he did. See our album titled "Week 10" for some photos & further explanations regarding this fascinating character that changed French music forever.

Saturday we opted to take the train to Montpellier for our final art exhibit of the summer, called "Signac: Les Couleurs de l'Eau". Montpellier has a wonderful art museum, & once again we were impressed with the number of works displayed & the great acoustiguides that explained his life & his art theory. His meeting with Seurat in 1888 obviously influenced his treatment of color & light, and the title "The colors of water" was very appropriate., We saw example after example of the Pointillist method of creating an image in the eye of the viewer based on the color theory of tiny dots of intense color placed side by side on the canvas. The big surprise: he also did incredible ink (Chinese) & water color paintings. As most of the paintings in this exhibition were of southern French cities, ports, & the Mediterranean sea, it was a beautiful way to end our summer stay here in Languedoc.

We leave Wednesday for Paris by train. This year it seems so easy! No packing our household stuff to be moved into another house. We just cram our homeward-bound stuff into our suitcases and off we go. We've reduced our luggage to 3 items--we're stuffing suitcases inside suitcases in an effort to make the train ride easier. And we're going home with much less than what we brought. We are also happy to be seeing our good friends Ruth & Hans, who are meeting us for dinner Wednesday night.

We hope you've all had a super summer, wherever you've been. We hope you are ready for your "re-entry" into a new season. Join us next year for "View from the Terrace, 2014.

Love,

Elise & Les