And we're back!
Well, the terrorists tried to stop us from going on holiday, then the buses tried to keep us up all night the night before we left, creating a chain of events that led to bad tempers and a packing strike, but we at least made it to the airport...As soon as we touched land, it was good times, belote, cote de boeuf and 'mouclette' (Steve's cute deformation of mouclade). We rode our bicycles everywhere. To La Flotte's market, where Steve discovered lots of new foods to love, fleur de sel, huitres and rillons; to Les Portes, where, our joints stiffened by the 22km bike ride through salt marshes and bird reserves, we sat down to a three-course meal costing £10 but worth £100. We both really needed a holiday, and this was the perfect place for it. And although it is hard to get any kind of intimacy in the family environment, we somehow naturally started to whisper to each other instead of talking. I sometimes found this more intimate than being alone, in a strange way.
After a week of laying around in the sun, we bought a two-second tent from Decathlon for our little camping trip. Great in theory, even better in practice. Nearly as good as our home-made bbq, which I must say I was skeptical about at first. Steve proved to me that boy-scouting can come in handy (not least for his almost perfect predicitions of rain showers), and althought his romantic ideals of a tent next to a stream in a meadow were quite different to my experiences of dusty camping sites with dirty showers... Our little trip took us from Ile de Re to the Golfe du Morbihan and back dow again, passing through Nantes – beautiful cathedral with trippy stained glass windows and a monument to Francois II that has engraved ninja monks; Elven – the dungeon that held Henry VII before he became king; Guer – millenary funeral cairns; Chateaubriant – nothing to see but amazing steaks to eat; Angers – nothing that interested us enough to stop off; Montgeoffroy – the beginning of the Loire valley chateaux was a model of refinement; Saumur – amazing views of the Loire, with abandoned sand islands in the middle, on which we had a picnic! We also went to Parthenay, and Echire, saw caves where wine is stored and mushrooms grown. It would be impossible for me to list everything we saw in those three days.
But the most important destination of our journey was St Gildas de Rhuys, where my high school friend Olivier was getting married to his high school sweetheart Charlotte. The wedding was breathtakingly beautiful. Stunning people everywhere, with great teeth, great hair and great hats. After a (very long) ceremony with sins, doubts, 'Mary forgive us' and a good sing-song, we walked behind the newlyweds' English taxi to the marquis hanging to a cliff of the coast of Brittany. Uninterrupted views of the Atlantic, romantic, secluded beaches were therefore the backdrop to the 'cocktail champetre', where champagne was sipped and oysters and salmon nibbled on bails of hay. Under the tent, at tables which bore the names of streets that held importance in the couple's life, we were distracted by the numerous 'hommages' from the fathers, brothers and sisters of the bride and groom. With families of of four and five children, that meant a lot of entertainment. And the strange desire to build a family of three of more children of my own...
Steve's French improved dramatically in the small period that we were there, and I think that if he keeps it up a little, he will be speaking fluently before he knows it. It's so cute to listen to a foreigner speak French. Strangely much more attractive than a French person trying to speak English... With his limited language skills, he found out that the weird noises coming from the neighbour's garden were not from dogs, but a badger! His progress served him well as most of my family came over one day, giving him a taste of French days of eating, drinking, playing petanque and belote, eating and drinking again. With the novelty that this time there were babies to play with too.
All in all, a perfect holiday, a perfect place and now a very scary return to reality. I'd almost forgotten that I actually have a job...
posted by The rat and the monkey @ 9:02:00 AM
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