A change in the weather...

Just when we thought we were over the worst of winter, it's come back to bite us!  We've had 5 inches of snow today, and its still going.  Unfortunately, it put paid to our plans for the day, together with a mechanical hitch on the car.......
Today dawned as an exciting day for us - the arrival of our first visitor!  Kathryn, who Lew used to work with  at Fonterra, was arriving at Nice airport tonight, to stay for a few days.  We decided to take off for the whole day, driving up to Cabris which is a small village in the hills above Nice, to visit someone who we nearly ended up house sitting for, but the dates didn't work out.  It was raining when we left, and as snow was a possibility we rang before leaving, just to check that they weren't already snowed in.  No, all was clear up in the hills, so off we went.
Heading down the D7 we were aware of a humming noise....we'd noticed it the night before coming back from having a pizza with some friends (more on that later), but this morning it was much louder.  After 30 minutes driving we decided it was too loud and ominous to ignore, so we pulled into a garage and asked the mechanic if he could check the rear driver's side wheel, as that was where we had isolated the noise.  He obligingly jacked up the car and tried to spin the wheel - which proved near on impossible!  Further inspection revealed the rear brake master cylinder had failed, (try translating that with the help of your pocket English French dictionary) meaning the rear wheel brake was partially on all the time!  No wonder fuel consumption was at record levels for those 30 minutes!  Enquiries as to whether they could do anything today were met with much puffing out of cheeks and surprise that we would even begin to think they could fit us in much before a week on Thursday.  So, we carefully drove home, into the increasingly heavy snowfall.
So now, what to do about Kathryn, arriving at 7.30pm?  Neighbours Jo and Jeremy to the rescue, offering their car, over a cup of tea and Jeremy's apple struesal cake.  Car gratefully received, we brought it back to our house, planning to leave later on in the afternoon.
And then it snowed a bit more...

and a bit more...

and then some more...

By 4pm we'd had 5 inches and it was pretty obvious we shouldn't be going anywhere, so we organised an airport hotel for Kathryn and researched train times for tomorrow, so hopefully we'll be able to drive the 15 minutes into Les Arcs tomorrow to pick her up.

As usual, snow is all very pretty, but it does cause a few problems.  We had to go out twice this afternoon to knock the snow off the cyprus and olive trees so the branches didn't break - they lost a lot of their trees this way last year, with the weight of the snow breaking branches and trunks.

It's always hard to stop taking photos in this weather...

Some family members weren't quite so impressed...

And that was earlier on this afternoon; by the time we'd had five inches they were wading around up to their tummies in the white stuff.  Still managed an egg each though.

Other news this week?  We've had TWO social engagements!  Last night we went out for a pizza with a couple we were introduced to at Jo and Jeremy's house, Mark and Emma.  They took us to a place right on the edge of a main road, in the middle of nowhere, that any self-respecting person would drive past without a second look!  Looks can be very deceiving.  By 7.30pm it was packed wall to wall with locals, and the pizzas were coming out at a phenomenal rate.  We put our order in, and our pizzas were on the table in about 6 minutes.  The thinnest pizzas I've ever had, very authentic Italian, great toppings and flavours, together with a bottle of peppery olive oil and balsamic to drizzle over the top.  They even had a parking attendant to ensure everyone parked properly to maximise the limited parking space.  We'll certainly be back there soon.
Our second night out was going to watch England beat France at rugby tonight.  The French don't go in for watching sport at a bar or pub, but we were asked up to another couple's house along the road, Robin and Natasha.  Robin is English, Natasha French, and their 6 year old son Tristan is bilingual, but speaks English with a French accent - very cute!  So, Lew got to drink beer, eat chips (or crisps as we have to call them here) and shout at the TV with other like-minded souls!  Allez le bleu.  Vive la France.  Happiness comes in simple forms.

Well, its now two days since I started this post, and we are well and truly snowed in!  The snow froze overnight and its snowing again now, so far too dangerous to take our car to the garage, or go anywhere in Jeremy's car.  With Kathryn safely here, we decided the only form of entertainment possible was to walk into the village to get croissants for a brunch.  Off we went, with the snow coming down lightly...which got progressively heavier as we walked.  It took us an hour to get there, only to find the boulangerie closed as the baker couldn't get through the snow!!  Luckily the newspaper shop had a delivery of bread and croissants, so we managed to get the last ones, before the trek home again - no sign of our footprints anywhere from the walk in.
So now we're home and dry, warm and happy.  At least there are plenty of books here to read.  Not quite what we had planned for our first visitor, but that's life.

Lew and Kathryn setting off for the village

Taking a tour to Tourtour

The insects grow big in this part of Provence!  For those of you with better eyesight, you will see that this is a sculpture, seen on one of our many sunny days, when we went up to the village of Tourtour.  Yes, yet another medieval hilltop village, but they're all different in their own way, and always interesting to wander the streets.
Our days out have started to form a pattern: get up around 7.30am when Tutu the cat starts meowing to be fed "QUICKLY, LIKE RIGHT NOW, I'M IN DANGER OF STARVATION" outside the bedroom door!  That is followed by releasing the chickens from their coop and feeding them, changing their water etc.  By now, Tutu has eaten the first of his many feeds of the day and has decided to come out for his morning walk down by the river.  This is a relatively slow process, as he has to stop and drink from the river several times, which involves him doing a virtual handstand down the vertical bank to get to the water!  He then needs to launch up a tree, just to show he's still got what it takes, even though he is 17 this year.
Once the livestock are fed and happy, we can get out the door, with the first task being to find the perfect pain au raisin for Lew, and croissant for me.  Be assured, not all croissants are created equal, there are croissants and there are croissants!  The same has to be said for pain au raisin - a sweet rolled up piece of croissant dough with raisins and a custardy filling.  I know, its a hard task for us to do the research, but we feel we have to do it.....
Purchase complete, we then find a cafe at our designated hilltop village of the day, and sit outside with a hot chocolate and a coffee to watch the village go by.

Cafes here seem quite happy for you to eat food purchased from elsewhere, as long as you are buying a drink from them.  In fact we watched a couple last Sunday at a cafe in Salernes get through a virtual three course takeaway meal that they had assembled from the market stalls, together with their beer and glass of wine at 10am!
Wandering around the streets of these villages is very relaxing at this time of year - there's no-one around, so we can explore and take photos without people getting in the way!  It will be strange when tourist season starts and we find the croissants have sold out and we can't get a seat outside the cafe after 9.30am!  Tourtour is quite high up - don't ask me how high - so there was still some snow around in places.  There's an old chateau in the centre of town which has been taken over by the mairie (town hall) on one side, and the post office on the other side.  Its a funny looking building with four towers, one at each corner.  While I couldn't get a good photo of the chateau, the towers were represented elsewhere, on someone's front door:

Still on the subject of doors - the variety in France is incredible - Lew particularly liked this example, with a high-spec top of the range cat door at bottom right....

The other fascinating aspect of French houses is the use of bars over the windows!  Presumably for security, so windows can be left open year round, there is an endless supply of designs to choose from, with some people going for functional and distinctly prison-like, others going for designer chic...

A few more pretty pics of Tourtour...

From Tourtour we went back down to Villecroze (which is currently top of the league table for pain au raisin - shame its about 30 minutes drive away!) which has a park on the edge of the village with cave dwellings.  Its been hard to find any information about the caves, as they are closed until Easter, and surprisingly there isn't much on the internet either, but it seems that they were created fairly "recently" ie post-15th Century!

The park was very pleasant, with lots of terraces and rocks to climb over and around - a kid's paradise.  Amazingly there weren't any signs preventing this activity; the French do love to say "no" if they possibly can!
And on that subject, a word about notices: the French love to inform the public about all sorts of things, and its obviously required for them to post a vast array of council information prominently for all interested parties to read in detail.  All part of the mountain of bureaucracy they have an endless thirst for.  Every village consumes several forests each year in their quest for ensuring they produce enough paperwork to show they are being effective.

Even in the small hamlets like Les Fadons, where we live, there is a noticeboard with the agenda for the next council meeting pinned up for all 6 houses to read!
Far more interesting was the noticeboard outside the primary school in Villecroze - the week's school dinner menu was there for all to read and debate whether the 5+ per day was being achieved or not!

Please note the four courses: country terrine to start, omelette with ratatouille, then the cheese course, followed by a banana.  My favourite was last Friday when they appeared to have grated carrots for entree (a little unimaginative maybe?) then salmon ravioli, followed by cheese, then stewed apple and banana.  No mince and cheese pie and a coke for these kids!

On the work front, we finally picked the day for burning all the garden rubbish we've been accumulating, after chopping down toi toi and bamboo, pruning grapevines, wisteria and roses, and collecting up mountains of leaves to they don't all blow into the pool.  There is a fire pit for the purpose, but for some reason its been dug in an area surrounded by trees.  We were a bit nervous to light anything unless there wasn't a breath of wind.  Friday dawned, frosty and calm, so we set to with the matches and firelighters and soon had a good fire under control.

Note the surrounding trees overhanging the fire...but at least you can also see the river!

Getting into the swing of things, with a mixture of very dry and partly damp stuff, we thought everything was under control, even when the wind picked up

Suddenly Sue (neighbour) appeared on the scene, to ask if we had a fire permit, and did we know that when the smoke is blowing at anything less than a 45 degree angle you have to extinguish your fire immediately?  Mmmn...no, and no!  I'd say ours was blowing almost horizontally, and we hadn't heard anything from James and Lavinia about needing a permit.  So, we decided to claim ignorance, and pretend to speak no French if the fire police arrived - which apparently they do, on a regular basis.  We were lucky, and managed to get through all the rubbish without threat of deportation.  And without adding any of the surrounding trees to the fire, just a few scorched leaves maybe.

Meanwhile, inside......Tutu has found the warmest seat in the house!

It's all about the food....

We seem to spend a large amount of our time each week shopping for food, cooking food, eating food, thinking about what to have for the next meal, all of which is entirely normal in France I'm sure!  So this week I have decided to take you with me to the supermarket, to show you a few of the sights! While Jean has taken over the major shopping responsibilities I have shifted efforts from finding the perfect croissant or pain au raisin to understanding the various cuts of meat, the extent of the potato chip range and tasting as many different brands of wine as possible.  I thought that would be a useful contribution!  

This particular supermarket is about 25 minutes drive away; we have a couple of closer ones, but this is the biggest - hence the name: "Hyper U" pronounced "eeeeper uuuuuu"!  This is the big brother of "Super U" and it sells clothes, kitchen gear, mobile phones, car stuff, whitewear etc.  However, we're only in it for the food.
But first, obtain your trolley: why the rest of the world hasn't adopted this idea I don't know, as it would certainly cut in half the number of supermarket trolleys found in river beds or left rolling erratically around car parks .
1. Approach the trolley park with your one euro coin in hand (or two euros, or 50 centimes)
2. Place euro coin in slot of first trolley in the queue of patiently waiting trolleys all chained up together in a little car port structure

3. Push coin in firmly whilst pulling trolley towards you until the red thing comes out of the socket, releasing the chain, and releasing the trolley into your tender care for the duration of your shop

4. Reverse the process once you've done your shopping and got it in the car, not forgetting to take your coin with you for the next shopping experience
(5. Ignore fellow French shoppers who wonder why on earth you are photographing the whole exciting process!)
And now, into the shop!
It takes us a phenomenal amount of time to get our shopping done, partly because we don't know the layout of the supermarket yet, but also because everything is very unrecognisable, and I need to read the labels quite carefully sometimes to make sure I'm actually buying just a tin of tomatoes, and not tinned tomatoes stuffed with foie gras or something similar!  But its all very interesting and entertaining, as long as we start the day with a good breakfast, and set aside the whole morning, we get through the experience amicably.
Some things are very different, and wouldn't be found on any shelf in Countdown or Pak n' Save:

Fish soup....

Or how about a tin of preserved duck instead of baked beans?

Maybe a jar of snails...

Or perhaps a jar of chicken stew!

As you can imagine, it's fascinating examining the jars and looking at the contents.
And if your freezer is big enough, you can always take home some crab legs and a few lobster tails:

Some things are peculiar to France: there is a whole aisle of the supermarket dedicated to "tartines" which are packets of dried white sliced bread which the French have for breakfast, spread with jam and dunked in their coffee.........who would have thought there would be so many different varieties of something so simple:

Our favourite area is the fish counter.  These photos aren't out of focus, or deliberately misty around the edges for romantic effect - the chilling function results in mysteriously spooky fog floating over the fish, occasionally clearing like sea mist, so you can see what you are buying more clearly!

I have to carry a list of all the fish names with me when shopping, so I can work out what to buy.  Who would have thought that "englefin" is haddock, while "cabillaud" is cod.  Some fish is very cheap, like salmon fillets are the equivalent of $14/kilo, while other types are more expensive, like cod.  We are enjoying the north sea fish like haddock, mackeral and sardines, which we don't see very often in New Zealand.
Leaving the fish counter behind, we enter the confusing dairy section, particularly the yogurts.  I thought we had a huge choice of yogurts in New Zealand, but its nothing compared to France.  I think I've finally cracked the difference between yogurt, fromage blanc and fromage frais, but it was doubly confusing until I worked out that they also group these products by their fat content.  Therefore once I've found the natural yogurt section, I then need to work out what fat content I want - usually a choice of 0% (not quite sure how that's possible, or even edible) 3.4% or 7.6%
Here's the choice:

 Remember this is just the natural, unsweetened, 3.4% fat content choice!  I haven't dared consider the fruit/flavoured yogurt section yet as that's another similar minefield.  Lew spends his time on the other side of the aisle, amongst the similarly vast choice of chocolate mousse desserts:

And I needed a wide angle lens to do that aisle full justice!
Round the corner and we're into the milk section.  But no chiller cabinets here - all milk in France is UHT.  Well, you can buy fresh milk, but its very expensive, and is tucked away in some insignificant part of the supermarket as no-one buys it.  I actually quite like the taste, as it reminds me of French camping holidays when I was a child, and Lew seems to have got used to it quickly.  So, you pick up your 6 pack of plastic litre bottles and they can sit all day in the car on the way home, coming to no harm at all!

By now, an hour or so has passed and we're getting towards the home straight.  But its the cheese counter, and that demands a whole heap of attention and decision making, just when your blood sugar has dropped to an all-time low.

 So far we haven't bought anything we don't like - apart from Lew and the goats cheese, but I'm sure that will be an acquired taste and he'll love it by the end of the year!  Very unlikely!  It's very strong. I prefer the brebis (sheep) cheeses - soft, rich and creamy.  Yum.

We're particularly enjoying the sheep's cheeses, and hard or semi-soft cheese seems to be more to our taste than the softer bries or camemberts.  At Hyper U, the cheese counter is a bit different in that the cheeses are already cut and packaged, but there is still an attendant there to answer any of your questions, and if you want a smaller amount than one of the packages, she will recut it for you.

 Bread is sometimes at the beginning of the supermarket, sometimes at the end, with the usual variety of baguettes, plus lots of different types of grainy/sourdough/rye loaves.  This has really surprised and pleased us - when I was a child coming to France for holidays, it was a white baguette and that was it.  We've been trying a different bread each day and have had some great varieties.  Supermarkets have very good bakeries on the whole, and you'll get equally good bread from a supermarket as you do from the boulangerie.  You can also throw your bread into a slicing machine if you want, but the accuracy and performance of these machines DOES vary - we've seem some pretty mangled results and have steered clear!

By now the blood sugar is at rock bottom, so, with clever marketing management, the patisserie section is at the end of the supermarket!  Again, very good quality tarts and cakes can be bought in the supermarket, at pretty good prices - hard to photograph through the packaging, but these berry and apple tarts looked very impressive.

These little sweet delights are 1.80-2 Euros.  It's going to take a while to taste all of the options!

I haven't even mentioned the wine section - that will come in another post!

No bags whatsoever are provided at the checkout.  You can either buy fairly strong reusable plastic bags, bring your own, or just reload your trolley at the end of the checkout, and then unload directly into your car.  Or, like us, you forget your plastic bags which you bought at the supermarket last time, you think you're only going in for a couple of items, end up buying more, feel too stingy to buy more bags, so struggle out of the supermarket juggling 27 items between us!

We're finding food prices on the whole are much cheaper here.  Certainly fruit and vegetables are way cheaper, and while they aren't all necessarily from France, most produce is from France or nearby Europe - its the law that the country of origin has to be displayed on all fresh goods.  We're in the middle of winter here, but we're buying tasty tomatoes, courgettes, peppers and aubergines for less that NZ summer prices.  Meat is also cheaper if you keep a look out, so Lew has been enjoying pork, chicken, sausages and beef, mostly very good quality.  We went to a butchers today in Salernes when we went over for the Sunday market - tiny shop down a side road, husband and wife team, a queue almost out the door, so we knew it was the place to go.  We watched a customer select a large topside of beef, then the butcher cut off two large slices, and fed them into a machine: it forced the meat out the other end into a flat round mould and he slid it out between two pieces of paper - a perfect pure beef burger, nothing added!

While the markets are fun to go to, we've been advised that you don't buy your food there on a regular basis, as its more expensive than the supermarkets or small shops!  And we've discovered that that's definitely the case - especially cheese, bread and olives, all can be bought cheaper and just as good from the nearby shops.  Even the fruit and veges are slightly more expensive, which is bizarre compared to Nelson market where everything is better quality and price than the supermarkets.

French toilets - two words which can strike terror into your heart if you are caught short in a strange town!  They have a well deserved reputation of being decidedly dodgy at best, ranging from the hole in the ground, which threatens to swallow you up if you lose your balance, right up to the tardis capsules in the centre of town where you pay your money, and the door opens and closes automatically - hence making you terrified that the door will open "mid-procedure", exposing you to the whole market place!  Therefore I was delighted to come across my best toilet experience in France to date - in a little cafe in Salernes this morning - I'll leave you with the photo....and yes, those lights on the seat were flashing!!