We've had company

Company has come and gone. Our friends Jack and Jeannie, of Austin, stayed for two nights at the end of their European tours. Jeannie toured Italy with her sisters for three weeks. She had planned to spend two nights in Paris, but the train disruptions from the strike lost her a day and she ended up flying there a day later. We picked her up at the train station early Friday. After we had a bit of breakfast, we still had some time till Jack's train arrived (from Basqueland, where he'd spent a week touring), so we went to the nearby Victor Hugo market to buy some veggies and cheese. When we returned to the station 30 minutes later, we found all but one entrance blocked and a squad of riot police just inside the door; Jack's train was delayed by 20 minutes. The situation cleared, we gathered up Jack and spent the afternoon being tourists in Angoulême. In the next day's paper we discovered that in the short time we were at the market, protesters had several times sat themselves down on the tracks. Apparently each time they were on the track, Jack's train had to stop. And we missed all the action!

On Saturday we had a relaxed day around the house, a nice walk over to Ecossas on the ridge behind us, and dinner at our favorite local restaurant. In the evening it started raining and continued on Sunday. Which we think was a good thing because it kept the strikers off the train tracks and roads so that J&J got to the airport in Paris without much delay.

On Sunday, after we left them at the train station, we went to a concert (at 5pm, hooray!) of Flemish, English, and Italian renaissance music by the group Mythematis, whom we've seen before, in the church at Chazelles. The rain had cleared by that time and the light was lovely outisde and the stained glass window in the church shone.

Tuesday we took ourselves to a movie in Limoges (Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger). There has been a dearth of original language films lately, and we're trying to see any that look to be interesting.

France has changed to digital television now, without too many problems as far as we can tell. We still don't have TV reception. We do have to pay for a TV license just because we have a set. There's no antenna on the roof and the rabbit ears don't pick up anything. (Our cell phone reception is also limited; we seem to be in a "shadow" for these things.) We can't be bothered paying for cable, which is a lot of money for something we don't really miss that much. We are investigating ways of getting TV and movies through the internet, but it's not a high-priority To-Do.

The new roof on the "tower" part of our house, the old house with the kitchen below and the bedroom above, is finishing up today. This was a preventive exercise: the roof was old-fashioned non-interlocking tiles and every time there was a windstorm, tiles would blow off and the remaining ones would need to be shuffled. We now have new-fashioned interlocking tiles that will stay in place in a storm.

Protest activity seems to be tapering off. The unions say there will be more coming, but support seems to be wavering. Creating fuel shortages maybe wasn't the thing to do. We were largely unaffected by the whole thing, except for some traffic tie-ups and train delays.