And now July has scurried by

Our resolve to post once a week definitely hasn't held up this month. This month's excuse is that we've been busy.

The season for the evening Marchés des Producteurs has started. These are evening markets where local food producers show their wares. Visitors can do a little shopping, buy bits for their dinners, and have it cooked on the spot. La Rochefoucauld always leads off the season, and it is an especially nice one with a big variety of vendors present. This year there were several snail vendors cooking up their snails and selling jars of various snail products.

For our main course we had some brochettes with pigeon meat and we bought some pigeon sausage for the freezer. Luckily we got to the ice cream stand while the line was fairly short.

In another outing, Kaye and a friend visited four gardens in Haute-Vienne (the department just east of the Charente), part of an Open Gardens event. It looks like this event will spread into the Charente next year, so we may do some more visiting. With a camera.

Kaye also attended a one-day stained glass course, coming away with this device that now hangs in the kitchen window. After the fact, we found that this triangle knot is the logo of Bordeaux.

Ed has finished the roof on the woodshed and is now busy painting the kitchen porch.

And his choirs have been busily finishing off their seasons. The Rochechouart choir, Cantique, sang in the cathedral at Limoges, which has beautiful acoustics for vocal music.

His Montbron choir, Voces Concordiæ, gave a concert at the Montbron church and then took part in a show at a charity picnic/musical soirée for the Children of Chernobyl charity that provides vacations for youngsters from that area. (There should be a little video here of the choir singing, but blogspot is not cooperating, sorry.)

Besides Ed's concerts, we've attended some other ones, a violin-piano recital in Montbron and a program by a group doing renaissance music at a château below Limoges. 

This past week we visited the Grotte du Placard near Vilhonneur. Remains of a Neanderthal habitation have been found there, as well as extensive remains of Homo sapiens presence up to 20,000 years ago. Walls are engraved with animal symbols, some of which are found in caves hundreds of kilometers apart across the south of France. It's not allowed to take photos in the cave itself unfortunately, but many artifacts are shown in the little museum including this reindeer horn engraved with a picture of an aurochs. (The last auroch died in 1627, but similar cattle have been bred. There's an aurochs grower in the area who shows up at the marchés des producters.)

This week we went on a walking tour of La Rochefoucauld (Kaye did this last year also), led this year by an enthusiastic French guide who spoke very slowly and clearly so we could understand most of what she said; she also had little flashcards for the dates, which was very helpful.  La Roche was once a center for the tanning industry. Skins were stretched on these cattle horns in the walls of buildings along the Rue des Tanneurs.

A bridge along this street has an especially nice view of the château, which is kind of a fairy-tale castle. The square tower in the back is the oldest bit, dating from the 11C.

A house next to the bridge has some very nice cats on their roof.

We visited the lovely church of St Cybard, which is one of the few Gothic buildings in the Charente.

A week ago, we had a brief visit from Max, the now grown-up son of our Dutch friends Patrice and Wim, and now Patrice and Wim are here themselves. The four of us went to another marché des producteurs in Massignac, but we forgot our camera.

The government finally saw a bit of sense and the new division of regions has all of Poitou-Charente as well as the Limousin included in a new super-region with Aquitaine, rather than the Centre.