It’s easy to take a day trip to the little islands on the other side of the Venetian lagoon – Torcello, Burano and Murano. The most picturesque is Burano, which is actually a little achipelago of four islands, known for its brightly coloured homes and beautiful lacework. We succumbed to the charm of both. Even the dish antenna is painted pink in one of the photos!
I feel like I’m in a sort of limbo at the moment – on the verge of a great new adventure that I can hardly believe is about to become a reality. In just two days’ time, we will have the keys to our late 16th century Renaissance home in Blois. At last we will see it without furniture (well, practically) or decoration (almost). So difficult to imagine.
The previous owners are moving to a slightly smaller and much more modern home so they unfortunately won’t be able to take all their furniture with them. So we are going to inherit (for a pittance) some original pieces such as a dresser with a built-in clock, a maie in which flour used to be kneaded, various utensils connected with our bread oven, a Henri II sideboard and an art deco bedroom suite.
In the meantime, we are making various preparations. To divide the house in two for rental, Relationnel has devised a separation consisting of a series of door panels (photos later!) and we have bought a trailer for which he has made a réhausse to increase the height of the sides. We lost the panels on the highway last time we were in Blois, nearly causing an accident, because it wasn’t secured properly. Very scary. The new system, however, can’t possibly get away!
I have been sorting through cupboards in the apartment to find anything we aren’t using here that might be useful in Blois. Need I tell you that I am amazed at what I’m finding. It’s also giving me the opportunity to throw out things I know we’ll never use again. One of the things I’m getting rid of is my Encyclopaedia Britannica, bought on credit in 1975 when I started freelancing as a translator. Who could have imagined then that those twenty or so volumes, not to mention the Year Books, would be replaced by just one CD-Rom?
All the moving and throwing out is going to give us extra space for our home exchanges as well as I won’t have to play musical shelves to provide room for our exchangers to put their belongings. I’m going to make sure I leave all the top shelves free so that I just have to move our things up from the bottom shelves before we leave each time. It’ll make them easier to find as well. After our Madrid exchange, it took me a while to remember where I’d put things!
Yesterday, we continued our purchases through the second hand site, www.boncoin.fr, with a new 44-piece porcelain dinnerware set for only 15 euros. We’re waiting until we’re in Blois to buy the rest as we’re running out of trailer space and time! We did go to Leroy Merlin though to buy an amazing array of power tools. One of our first tasks, before we move into the main bedroom, is to clean the very sooty fireplace. It seems we’ll be donning masks, hoods and boiler suits and enclosing ourselves in a PVC tent to do the job. I’ll post photos!
So, bear with me for the next few days. We’re supposed to have an internet connection but I imagine things will be quite chaotic for the first few days. I may not be posting as often.
This week has been like mid-summer in Paris, yet we’re only just moving into spring! So I’ve been swapping over my wardrobe from winter to summer. Strange, I didn’t realise that extra kilo or two had sneaked in there. My winter clothes weren’t getting tight but I have a couple of pairs of summer trousers that are more closely fitting. I guess I haven’t been exercising as much lately (I haven’t been swimming for a while) and maybe the trip to Madrid didn’t help either!
So what to do? One of the most important things when you lose weight is to make sure that you nip any subsequent weight gain in the bud immediately. Thinking “well, I’ll just wear some looser clothes for a bit and it’ll come off all by itself” is courting danger! You need to apply the “200 grammes of protein at each meal and no carbs” rule for a day or two. If you’ve only gained a kilo, it should come off pretty quickly. You should then continue the 200 g protein day once week until your weight is stabilised again. It’s even a good idea to do it regularly.
If that extra kilo or so turns out to be a bit more stubborn though, you could start writing down what you eat again as I explained in Part 2. Either you’ll automatically adjust your eating pattern or you’ll be able to see where the extras are coming from. You can also cut out wheat-based products for a couple of weeks. That should be the trick! If it doesn’t, you’ll need to analyse what’s really going on.
Maybe that snack-reflex has come back again recently for some reason – a new source of stress or extra fatigue in your life. Each time you see yourself wandering towards the kitchen, stop, turn around and go into the living room. Sit down, close your eyes and imagine yourself on a beach or in a forest. Breathe deeply and relax. Then go back to what you were doing before you felt like snacking. At mealtime, remember to serve food in the kitchen and take it to the table so you won’t be tempted to seconds.
It usually takes a month to get rid of a habit so you may have to persist a little. You might need to start listening to your hypnosis tapes again too. And if you’ve kept any of your “bigger” clothes “just in case”, it’s probably the moment to get rid of them altogether!
The Natural Skinnies and Us How I lost 20 kilos after 50 – for good: Part 1 How I lost 20 kilos after 50 – for good: Part 2 How I lost 20 kilos after 50 – for good: Part 3 How I lost 20 kilos after 50 – for good: Part 4 How I lost 20 kilos after 50 – for good: Part 5The posts from other blogs that I’m featuring this Wednesday are by American blogger Mary Kay, from Out and About in Paris, who is a fund of useful and interesting information and will help you have a pickpocket-free holiday, fellow Australian and photographer Karina from Carams who takes us to Siena in Tuscany and Doni Belau from Girls’ Guide to Paris who recommends a visit to Burgundy as a day trip or weekend out of Paris. Thanks to them all!
After dodging holiday shoppers and having my foot run over by a renegade baby stroller while visiting the Christmas Market on the Champs-Elysées yesterday, Stéphane, Sara and I decided to take metro line 1 from George V to Tuileries to have some hot chocolate. As we always seem to arrive at Angelina’s just after it has closed for the night, I stood on the metro platform with my back to the wall to check their opening hours on my iPhone. Stéphane and Sara were facing me, we were speaking English and for all anyone knew we were tourists in Paris. Read more.
Up until last year when we found ourselves in the area, Siena had never been near the top of my travel list. Yet there we were one morning, driving winding roads through Tuscan valleys, following signs to the old city, named (according to legend) after Senius, son of Remus, of the Remus & Romulus duo. Read more
As much as all Parisians love Paris, they also adore a petit weekend—a getaway, either a day trip from Paris or an entire weekend. Recently, during autumn, I hightailed it out of the city for a wine-tasting trip to Burgundy. My friend Kelly and I headed for Beaune, which is perfectly situated to explore both côtes, Côte de Nuits and Côte de Beaune. Read more
I do, of course, love the long summer days when it stays light until 11 pm. Cycling after dinner is particularly attractive. What I don’t like is the actual changeover because it puts me out-of-kilter for at least a couple of weeks and I’m not a good sleeper at the best of times. Black Cat tells me that everyone in the metro was overly aggressive in the metro this morning because they all had to get up an hour earlier than usual! The changeovers take place around about 21st March and 21st October each year.
Relationnel never manages to remember whether he has to put his clock back or forward each time. In French they say “avancer” or “retarder l’heure” meaning “putting the time forwards or backwards”. Of course with all the electronic equipment we have these days, it’s much harder not to know about the changeover and miss a train or something though I noticed the clock on the car hadn’t changed yesterday.
We’ve been having unseasonably warm weather too (not that I’m complaining!) which means that no one was very keen on going to bed an hour earlier than their biological clock last night either. I can remember how difficult it was to get the kids onto the new time when they were little. I even joined a lobby group in the hope that daylight saving might disappear altogether, but it didn’t do any good.
It all started of course for purely materialistic reasons. According to the French finance ministry, “Daylight saving (or l’heure d’été – summer time – as they say in French) was implemented in France in 1975 after the 1974 oil crunch with the aim of saving energy by reducing lighting, particularly in the evening. Today, it is estimated that 250,000 tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) are saved each year as a result of daylight saving in France”. So, there’s not much hope of a lobby group having any effect!
It seems that daylight saving goes back to Ancient Times and was resurrected by Benjamin Franklin in April 1784 in a well-known satire. The next person to promote the idea was New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson. He was a shift worker and used to collect insects in his spare time so obviously wanted as much daylight as possible. He presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society in 1895 proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift. It didn’t catch on though until an Englishman,William Willet (poor man with a name like that), published a pamphlet in 1907 called “The Waste of Daylight”. He thought up this really complicated system of putting the clock forward by 80 minutes in 4 stages in April and then back again in September. No wonder it took another 9 years to be voted in by the British parliament, by which time poor Willet had died of the flu.
Ireland, Italy and France followed suit as did most of the other European countries after the War. But France did away with daylight saving in 1946 and didn’t bring it back until 1975, the year I arrived in France. Having been born and bred in North Queensland, I’d never experienced daylight saving before. Queensland is still holding out against the rest of the country but there’s a lot more lobbying these days, particularly by groups such as the The Daylight Saving for Southeast Queensland Party.
So now, Leonardo (who’s in Sydney) and I are 9 hours apart instead of 10. For the moment, I don’t know whether it’s better or worse.
And thank you, Wikipedia, for all the facts and figures!
I spent my first 9 years in France living in a flat and biding my time until I could have a house and a garden again. It finally became a reality when I was pregnant with Black Cat and Leonardo was nearly 2 1/2. It was a funny sort of a garden, 10 metres wide by 30 metres long, but typical of the area which used to have a lot of orchards with espalier pear trees. I was into organic food then and we grew apples, hazelnuts, black currants, red currants, tomatoes, strawberries and, best of all, raspberries which the kids loved to pick for dessert. We also had the most wonderful old style rose bushes with the most divine scent.
Before I had my own roses, I didn’t particularly like them but the garden had an enormous variety and I took immense pleasure in picking them to give to my friends who didn’t have gardens. There was a lovely yellow one which started out pink and a red rose whose petals felt like velvet. I was so sad when we grew a hedge of thuya bushes for privacy and it crowded out most of the roses. We realised the damage too late.
When I divorced, I had to give up my garden but I was lucky enough to find a ground floor flat with a small garden that we gradually turned into a mass of flowers. We had trumpet creepers and clematis, hollyhocks and azaleas, columbines and delphiniums, irises and forsythias and even a lilac bush, all of which would all suddenly appear after winter. Every year in November we’d plant lots of tulips, jonquils and hyacinths, tiny pansies and cyclamens. We had lilies of the valley for May Day as well.
In the summer, we’d plant masses of busy lizzies, geraniums and nastursiums. Our hanging pots were filled with petunias and begonias. Just thinking about it makes me nostalgic! Then we moved to our apartment in Paris overlooking the Palais Royal gardens. We couldn’t even have window boxes at first because it’s a listed monument. But I finally convinced Relationnel into letting me have planters on the sills of the French windows that you can’t see from the other side.
So you can imagine how much I’m looking forward to our new house in Blois. I can’t wait to see the shrubs come into flower and discover all the different species in the garden. The little wood at the back is full of daffodils and primroses and even tiny ground orchids. I know there are hollyhocks because I’ve seen the leaves but no one has mentioned any columbines or delphiniums. There’s a climbing rose on the front stairs but it looks a little lonely so I’ll have to see what company I can find. And I can’t wait for the wisteria to bloom in April!
Spring is without doubt the best time to go to Venice. The wisteria is out everywhere in April and it’s quite splendid. The photos below capture the essence of my Venice. Since we were there for a week and had a vaporetto pass, we took the time to venture outside the main tourist areas. One thing I remember is the somewhat misty light that pervades most of my photos. I also loved the slightly decrepit look of many of the palaces. And I absolutely adored the masks.
My monthly post has just been published on MyFrenchLife. This time, it’s about spring. We’ve been cooped up and wrapped up for so long now that the warmer temperatures, new leaves and blossoms and blue skies feel like heaven!
Spring is hardly a very original subject, is it? But spring will always remain a source of wonderment for me. You see, I come from tropical North Queensland and until I was 22 I only knew about spring from books and poems. Read more.
Well, as I explained in Part 2, I left Milan furious as a result of our huge garage bill. I hate being had. We took the motorway straight to Ancona on the Adriatic Coast about 400 kilometers away and got there at about 4 pm. Impossible to find our B&B, Villa Fiore Conero. It was on one of those streets split in half and we couldn’t find the other end. The instructions given on the phone were not very helpful but we eventually got there.
Not a particularly warm welcome. Only 15°C and a steady downpour, hardly what we were expecting in Italy in July! We had chosen Ancona which is a big seaport so that we could cycle for a couple of days in nearby Conero National Park and wouldn’t have too far to go to take the ferry to Split. The room in the B&B was spacious and comfortable so we had a short rest before venturing into the town. The main attraction proved to be a hill with a church on top and a spectacular 360° view. Fortunately the rain had stopped by then and we could enjoy the view along with half the population of Ancona.
The centre of the town was so deserted that we decided to go to Sirolo which is in the middle of Conero Park and built on a promontory overlooking the sea. After visiting the town, which is very touristy, we found a wonderful place for an aperitivo right on the esplanade where we could watch the sunset over the Adriatic. Afterwards we had an excellent fish platter in a very friendly restaurant called La Cambusa on via Cialdini.
Next morning, we optimistically dressed for cycling but pouring rain during a very disappointing breakfast made us change our minds and go to Loreto instead which turned out to be the most popular religious destination in the area. The rain let up and we were able to wander around the town and visit the church which contains what is believed to be three walls of Mary’s house in Nazareth. We arrived during mass and visited the house in Indian file without having to queue. As soon as the mass was over though, there was suddenly an enormous line of people, many moving forward on their knees.
The sun suddenly appeared so we headed for Porto Rennati where we bought some picnic goodies and set off on our bikes along the seashore, witnessing, for the first time, Italy’s famous “private” beaches with their rows of matching deck chairs and umbrellas (all folded up because of the low temperature). We finally found a public beach for our picnic but stayed on the rocks because our feet didn’t like the strange, sharp sand.
On the return journey, we had an excellent (and cheap) cappuccino in a bar attached to one of the private beaches then made our way back to the car. In the evening we were able to walk up the hill to a restaurant near our B&B, Villa Romana on Via Montacuto, and have an excellent tagliata (not as good as our first experience in Tuscany, but still not bad). I had to speak Italian because it was too out of the way to attract tourists. We weren’t quite sure what we were ordering because my iPhone app didn’t have most of the things that were on the menu.
Early departure next morning to take the ferry to Split. Terrible organisation – we had to queue for ¾ hour just to get our tickets (we had already reserved and paid for them over the Internet with SNAV) and then had to drive for ages around the terminal before we got to the boat. Relationnel parked the car while I went to find a seat. The journey seemed to take forever and was an hour late.
But at last the Croatian Coast came into view. Everyone crowded onto the deck and it felt like summer at last – a blue sky and 25°C. Our holiday in Croatia was about to begin!
Bringing you Wednesday’s selection of posts from other Anglobloggers on France. This week, Weekend in Paris, Femmes Francophiles and French Entrée. Many thanks!
A weekend in Dijon is just the ticket for anyone who wants to get out of the hustle and bustle of Paris and get down to some serious fun. A mere 1 ½ hours by train from Paris, Dijon has it all…world-class museums, top shopping, fab wine tasting, amazing walks along the most charming streets and yes, the famous Dijon mustard. Read more …
When I lived and worked in Paris, coffee was the one thing that continually frustrated me. How could a country which is famous for its food and wine, serve such bad coffee? This is a question that has left me baffled on many occasions in what is otherwise my favourite country – Rachel Guernier investigates. Read more…
Some practical advice for that emergency situation when you have wine but no corkscrew. Not sure that this situation would arise in France. What self-respecting French woman or man would be without a corkscrew? See the video!
