Social Butterfly.

Yep, that's me! Just a little gadabout. To start at the beginning - I hadn't been feeling all that well on Thursday and Friday, although I managed to go to school. But things were in a bit of disarray in mon petit studio, so I spent most of Saturday morning having a big clean up. Including a hands and knees floor wash. I would have made a good early settler. Or perhaps not - I am not partial to long drop toilets or worse. Dommage! At 1/4 to 4 Valérie came and picked me up and took me to her place, which turned out to be in Montamisé, a little village not far from here which you may recall from a previous blog entry. (Famous for its Boulangerie - remember?) Valérie is one of the English teachers at the Lycee, and like all of them really, she is just lovely.
She invited me for tea and to watch rugby beforehand with her husband Franck. Who is also just lovely! Really keen on and knowledgeable about sport, but also with a wide general knowledge about almost everything. And, like so many French people, a huge fan of New Zealand. I gave him a key ring with a silver fern and flag on it, and he was so excited you would have thought I had given him gold. He was really keen to take it to work to show it to his friends, who were going to be so jealous, he said. Amazing! We watched the rugby and saw Toulouse beat the Parisian team. I think I have seen more of Byron Kelleher here than I ever did in New Zealand. Oh yes, Franck is a great fan of Andrew Mehrtens too, which kind of cemented our life-long friends status really. He knew about Frank Bunce, Laurie Mains, teams and matches from yester-year..... It was all good stuff. He speaks English very well, but we talked mostly in French so it was really good for me. We also watched the tennis and saw a really close game in which Nadal almost got beaten. And I almost forgot - Franck thought that I had a 'l'air Française' which kind of meant that I seemed a bit French. I was very excited about that indeed! The meal was good, and Valérie had gone to the trouble of making something which is traditional in the Savoie region, where she was born. Wine from there too - a nice white.
After tea we watched some of the Eurovision Song Quest. Although Sandie Shaw was not there singing Puppet on a String, she could well have been, as it looked like it had popped up from a time warp somewhere. It was quite strange.
Anyway, that was my nice time with Valérie, Franck and their two children Valentine (13) and Paul (11).

The meal might have been just a bit rich, as I woke in the night and felt terribly sick. I really needed to do the two fingers down my throat trick, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Yuk! I managed to get back to sleep, but struggled a bit this morning. It could just be that I am suffering from an overdose of socialising. Lol!
Anyway, at midi I walked down the road to a meeting point and was picked up by Rose, another English teacher from the Lycee. She took me to her place which is about 20 minutes south of Poitiers in a village called Smarves. Which doesn't sound like a cute little French name at all to me, but never mind! Any had also been invited. Remember - I went to her place for lunch one time and she had her gorgeous little granddaughters there who wanted to learn the haka? Since then Any's husband has died, so she has been battling a bit. I also met Serge, Rose's husband, who is a Physics teacher. In the photo: Rose, Marie-Alison and Any.
Another lovely meal, then we gals headed back into Poitiers to an Exposition. There, after spending absolutely ages looking for a car park, we met Any's two daughters and those cute little granddaughters again. It was kind of like Show Day. There was a big display of things like machinery, cars, washing machines etc, there was a large fun fair, and there was the bit we and most of Poitiers had come to see. It was a display about the Inca civilisation. The French have a huge love affair with things African, I have found, and it would seem they are quite partial to South America too. It was quite good. Some of the things were incredibly old and I do find the Inca civilisation interesting. But it was amateurishly displayed and overall a bit ordinary. There were shops selling South American stuff at the end, and I picked up a cute little poncho thinking that it might be good for Sienna. The man there snapped, "Ne touchez pas s'il vous plait!" Well how on earth would you know if something is going to fit, or even if you really like it, unless you look at the darned thing? So he lost a possible sale. Anyway, what I was leading up to saying, in my roundabout way, was how well a New Zealand expostion would go down. Everyone loves New Zealand, and especially the All Blacks. They really do. (And there are people lke Franck who also know about the Evers-Swindell twins, Kiri Te Kanawa etc etc!) As I walked round I was envisaging what we could have on display, and how we could bring a Kapa Haka group over, and they could perform, and we would have really classy stuff on show and for sale,(and you would be allowed to touch it.) Some of things that people seemed to really like in this display were some really large photos of the landscape. Well, can you imagine how impressively we could do that?? A few Craig Potton photos here and there.... Hmmm..... I would really like to organise something like that and take it to France and do a bit of a tour, but of course it would be impossibly expensive and on a scale which would require an Events Management group, and I suppose I am only dreaming. But I like organising things. I wonder.... Any ideas?
So that was the weekend. Any and her family stayed on to visit the Fun Fair, and as the rain had stopped and the sun had come out they are possibly still there as I speak. Rose dropped me back here, and that was that. A lovely weekend with nice people.

School tomorrow and Tuesday, then on Wednesday I am off to Belgium for a week. It's another Pont weekend here. Louise, Suzanne (also in Belgium) and I plan to go to Amsterdam for a couple of days, and Louise and I also hope to get to a few other places. So you may not hear from me again for a little while, but don't think I've forgotten you - oh no!