We're leaving for the south of France tomorrow. By the the evening, we'll be pitching our tents in the lovely hills outside of Montpellier, enjoying lavender, cicadas, pastis, olive trees and people with cute accents.

Lucky, lucky, lucky us!

I don't think, however, we will be enjoying a WiFi connection. So, I probably won't be able to post on my blog until we get back.

So, I'll be back on Tuesday, with lots to tell, no doubt.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Taciturn-ish Tuesday

Never a dull moment.
Yesterday, I took the kids to Amphion Les Bains to swim in Lake Geneva. The beach where we like to go is just below the bank of fluffy clouds in the center of the photo.

It's a nice place:

Today is the 14th of July- the French national holiday.

It marks the date of the storming of the Bastille

We're having a little party here today in honor of the event- a decidedly non-revolutionary, non-violent barbecue for about 15 people.

Yikes! It's starting to RAIN now and I'm getting worried...
but I'll just have to hope for the best and wish a

Bon 14 Juillet à Tous!

I guess I could have saved these photos for a 'Taciturn Tuesday', but I felt like posting them today and nattering on endlessly about them. We had such a great time yesterday, I want to share it!

Saturday morning, the kids dressed up in their garb (it's always 'garb', never 'costumes' ) and we headed off for yet another pseudo-historical festival. This one wasn't really a Ren Faire. It was a bunch of French and Swiss SCA-types that decided to plant their tents near a beautiful lake and enjoy the weekend. It was open to the public, so we got gussied up and went to visit.

As you can see, we've had some changes in our garb. I went to the thrift shop last week with the girls and we made some amazing, dirt-cheap finds! We found a perfect skirt and a bodice for Mallory. She already had a great shirt that was a hand-me-down from a neighbor. All she needed was the darling cap that I'd sewn up for Valentine years ago. With those few elements we managed a great, simple medieval look.

The thrift shop is also were I found the shirt Valentine's friend is wearing and Valentine's fancy bodice. The latter was a really lucky find and she adores it.

The people at the camp were very friendly and the kids got lots of compliments on their clothes. Tourists asked them to pose for pictures.

Princess Alexa was especially in demand:

The location of the camp was lovely- right on the shores of Lake Annecy:

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We had a picnic and then went off to yet another fun activity- a visit to the Menthon Saint Bernard Castle. It was on the opposite side of the lake from Saint Jorioz, but the drive was lovely and only took about half and hour.

The castle is still owned by the Counts of Menthon. The family lives in two of the towers. the third (the Lake Tower) is open to the public. It completely furnished and is amazing. Sadly, they don't allow photos inside. I would have loved to show you pics of the 13th century kitchen and the library full of 12,000 ancient books.

The guided tour was fun. It consisted of costumed actors playing the parts of the family and servants, each character explaining some aspect of castle life and the history of each room. (My kids had nicer 'garb' than the actors, though!)

This is the small interior courtyard:

Again, the kids featured in the photos of many tourists. It's true that they blended right in with the decor of the place. Most people asked politely, though some just snapped away without saying a word.

Burkina Faso has been on my mind a lot lately, as you may have guessed from my last post. It's not only the rain that keeps it constantly on my mental radar. There's also the fact that JP is still there, nearly at the end of a one month research stint.

And Aisha just called a couple of nights ago, to see if I'd "forgotten" about her.

The answer to that question was "no", of course. When JP left France he had one duffle bag almost completely full of little gifts and letters for Yvonne, Aisha and other people I'll certainly never forget.

Knowing people there seems to be the only way to get any real news of the country, that's for certain. There's little to be had online, anyway. If you google for some news of the place today, for example, you'll find out that the president of Burkina just named a new army Chief of Staff.

It's very hard to find anything about the news I got last night from JP: There were riots yesterday in the marketplace in the center of the capital city. You only find an article about this if you search with both the words 'Ouagadougou' and 'marché'- so basically, you have to already know the news in order to find out any news- if you see what I mean. And you have to speak French, of course.

As for the news I heard last night- here's what I know: The Rood-Woko market (where I bought most of our household odds and ends when we arrived in Ouaga) caught on fire and was badly damaged in May of 2003. It was an ugly thing- Sankara's graceless modern replacement for the old colonial-era structure. But at least the new cement box was huge and provided shade and shelter for many, many small merchants. Built in 1989 to hold about 2000 traders, by the time we arrived in the country (1999) there were about 5500 present.

It was chaotic and overcrowded and noisy. It smelled like dust, rotten fruit, Oro brand insect spray, blood, spices and a million other things.

The lower level was the basics: cheap polyester clothes from Asia, pagnes, shoes, hair supplies (it was the go-to place for wigs and extensions). And just after the wigs was the meat market, buzzing with big black flies and full of huge, scary machetes -my least favorite place.

Upstairs you could find the touristy arts and crafts and fancier fabrics. In the southwest corner of that level was my favorite place: the bead merchant stands with baskets and buckets full of nothing but brightly-colored beads of every kind.

Getting through the market was not for the faint-hearted. You had to duck under beams, squeeze up crumbling cement stairs nearly completely blocked by the goods of traders who'd set up their shops ON the steps and then hop over the many jerry-rigged electrical lines hanging like 220 volt spiderwebs everywhere.

Crazy as the place was, it was the center of life for thousands of people. This in mind, I had thought the Burkinabé government would make a heoric effort to get the place running again quickly. But the clean-up and repair dragged on for years. It was only just re-opened in March 2009.

And, unfortunately, things haven't been going very well. It's badly organised, the merchants claim, and inaccessible. Business is slow. It's nothing like the dynamic and lively place it used to be.

One real sore point is the presence of a great number of machine-gun toting police officers. This , in fact, was the cause of Thursday's riots. They chased a young man through the marketplace and he died while trying to escape them. The people in the market reacted by burning some of the officers' motorcycles.

There's other news, too. For the last months the crime rate in our old neighborhood has been steadily rising. The robbery at our house last year was just one of many more to come. And now purse/backpack snatchings have become a huge problem, as well.

Good news? There's not so much. Even the climate has gone funny. Out in the Winye villages, where JP does his research, the rains have come late and people are worried for their crops. The people are blaming the Earth Priests, who carried out the proper sacrifices, but too late in the year. They were disorganised and the ceremonies didn't take place at the right time. They admit that the lack of rain is their fault-how could they do otherwise. They're very sorry, but the damage is done...

In Burkina Faso, life stops when it rains. The clouds gather, the drops start and suddenly the roads are empty of all bikes and mopeds. Off to the edges of the nearly empty streets, you see everyone huddled under whatever shelter they can find.

Maybe you see a few pedestrians, really desperate to get where they're going- nearly all of them slogging through the mud wearing a garbage bag as a poncho, or a small plastic bag as a hat.

The rain is noisy. It falls hard, pounding down on metal roofs and the hard-packed ground.

But other than that, everything is strangely quiet.

All the normal noises of the neighborhood are gone. The deafening hammering of the metal-smith's workshop down the street completely stops. The voices of the dozens of the children that play in the street just outside your front gate have vanished. The tailor's shop courtyard nearby, usually full of whirling pedal sewing machines and chatting, joking, arguing appprentices is silent.

It may rain for a few minutes.. or a few hours, but while it does, time stops. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. And that makes sense. The rains are usually hard and blinding, making it impossible to safely travel. Even in a car, visibility can be reduced to nearly nothing.

And most of life's daily activities in Burkina are carried out outdoors. Places like mechanics' garages, tailors' shops and carpenters' workshops might have a small shack or some kind of shelter, but certainly not enough covered space for everyone to work out of the rain.

Even in homes, not much can be done. A kitchen , for most Burkinabé people, is simply a corner outside with a fire and a branch or rock to sit on. No tables, no countertops, no cupboards, no roof.

Everyone rushes to shelter- maybe first pausing to get all the drying laundry and other vulnerable items gathered up and out of the wet. At our house, our guardians Salif and Rasmane would run to grab the patio furniture and pile it up next to the house, well under the terrace roof and out of the reach of the driving rain that would sometimes seem to fall nearly sideways.

People do what they they have to do, then wait for it to pass.

And it always does.

It stops suddenly, like someone turing off a firehose. Then the big West African sun pops out and everything seems to dry out in an instant. Cooking pots go back outside, the laundry is re-hung on walls and across shrubs, commuters get back on their bikes and mopeds and the smith's apprentices start hammering away again. The chairs are once more nicely arranged on the patio. And everything goes on like usual until tomorrow, when it will rain again.

The rain here in France is so...strange. It's hard for me to get used to gray and drizzly skies for days on end. I feel like everything should just stop. But it can't. This is Europe. If everyone stopped moving the minute rain fell, doom and disaster would result. At least, I guess so...

I took a "rain day" yesterday. I had decided that the rain wouldn't stop because it wasn't getting the respect it deserved. Maybe a moment of silence and stillness was all it wanted from us?

I didn't go anywhere. I didn't do any laundry. In fact, I didn't do anything terribly useful except for cook a couple of meals. I played games with the kids, read a novel, surfed the internet and watched tv on my computer. It was, in fact, a great day.

It did not, however, stop the rain.

So, today I'm back to rainy days, Euro-style. It's nearly noon and still pouring rain, but I've already been to the dump with a load of bad junk, the recycling center with my good junk, the public treasury to pay the water bill, the store to buy cat litter, etc. I guess that's how they do it here. But I miss the strange peacefullness of the Burkina rain...

We were all very excited about our outing on Sunday. We'd been seeing posters touting the opening of the newly restored 13th century castle at Faucigny and the Ren Faire they'd be having there over the weekend.
We were a teensy bit disappointed when we realised that by "restored", they'd meant "slathering some concrete over the crumbling walls". Not that it wasn't a good idea- left a few more decades, the whole site would have disappeared to nearly nothing. But it was all bit less than we'd hoped for.

And the Ren Faire turned out to be really tiny.
On the other hand, it was a nice day for a walk and the ruins were situated high on a hilltop with a great view.

Here are the only remains of the lower gate down in the village:

As you can see, there's not much left of the original walls of the towers.

I was so busy getting pics of the kids, I never got a good one of the ruins from down below. Sorry.

On the other hand, I enjoy pictures of my kids way more than I enjoy pictures of rocks. Even really old rocks. So it all works out...

?

We left after only a couple of hours, as it started to rain.

A bit later, when I looked out my bedroom window back home, I saw this:
It was far more lovely than the photo shows and stretched all the way across our valley in a perfect semicircle. I've never seen one so flawless.

When I ran out to the balcony to get a better look, I saw that it was actually a double rainbow. It looks kind of faint in the pic, but we could see it really, really well.

Mallory said we should go to see the end of it. Sadly, it seemed to start and stop right in the middle of the forest.

Actually, there are a few lucky people who have managed to find and photograph rainbow ends. Kind of cool - but no pot of gold.

The Fourth of July/US Independance Day holiday was always kind of a big deal in Ouaga. We were always invited to the US Ambassador's house for a pot-luck picnic.


It doesn't seem to be the same here in France. The US Ambassador in Paris didn't invite me to his party, for some reason.

Despite being left out by the big-shots, we managed to make our own fun.

Severin, being the Man of Da House these days, was in charge of the grill:

A bit later, a few of Valentine's friends arrived for a slightly early birthday celebration. The big day is really on Monday, but Saturday seemed like a better day for a party.

I made her a cake, of course:

The guests are still here, playing a board game...It's 10pm and I'm not exactly sure how long this is going to last...