Monday, January 15, 2007

Still on Vacation



Nothing really all that earth shattering to report. We are having a lot of fun with our friends wondering why we ever stopped being missionaries in the first place - NOT really.

Hmmm that could be misinterpreted so that people would think that we've become alcohol drinking heathens that are full of piss and vinegar for our old tee-totaling psedo-sexist employer. Oh wait, we've always been that way.

I'll move on to putting in a list of things we've done since my last post - its been cool and there has been much alcohol imbibed (but not much drunkeness :)

1) Arles - we'd never been to this city of Roman vestiges and Van Gogh's inspiration. We walked right by the site where he painted Starry Starry Night only to realize later that that little emblem in the sidewalk wasn't a dude with a backpack but a painter - duh. This was a very nice and very French town. We ate Confit de Canard, an old favorite.

2) Football (the american kind) - We spent time watching the playoffs with our friends. Since we left Europe, some genius has come out with the North American Sports Network. This would have been awesome when we lived here and is a perk we can enjoy with them since we are not in a frantic hurry to have the vacation of a lifetime. I woke up at 2:30am with a huge Buckeye fan to see them get embarrassed - went back to bed at halftime.

3) Cassis - little French costal town where we went for lunch. Watched the sun set in the Med. ==Pic== We ate whole wheat crepes and salad with bowls of French cidre to drink. We also went to a movie in Marseille called Hors de Prix. It was a surprisingly light hearted French comedy, and we both loved it.

4) Carcassonne and Le Pays des Cathars - I'd been to Carcassonne before. It is a beautifully restored medevial town in the south of France. L and M hadn't been, and we spent the night there inside the city. No tourists but us and it felt like we had the whole city to ourselves. The swankiest hotel inside the wall actually offered me a room for 300 euros off, but it was still too expensive. We didn't have to go far to find another option. I ate Cassoulet with duck and sausage and had probably my 3rd serving of foie gras since the trip began. ==Goofy Pic for LB==

4a) The Pays des Cathars is a region in the south near the Spanish border that I really didn't know anything about before this trip. The Cathars were a catholic splinter sect that existed for somewhere between 200-300 years in the south. They left probably a dozen fortresses around that you can visit to this day. This region of France was not known to me as a wine region, but oh boy is it ever. The drive was truly an exquisite one in the foothills of the Pyrenees which are almost covered with vineyards. I wish I could come back to hike across this area sometime in the summer. We had steak-frites in a small town and then feu de bois pizza in Narbonne on the way back to Marseille.

there's more, but I'm bored with this post.

Comments:
Ha ha--thanks for the picture--that's one of my favorite signs yet (of course, made even better by your impersonation of it)! Did you guys take any pictures of all those crazy circular roads in Carcassonne like I asked you to? I'm sure you ran across one or two of them... Your trip sounds awesome--can't wait to hear all about it this weekend! Hopefully by then you will have once again successfully defeated your jet lag.
 
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