No pictures today.
I have a big screen so now I can write long drawn out descriptions of places based on what I find out on Wikipedia and other people's travel blogs. Without pictures I can also imply that my children are impeccably dressed and groomed in the French style, and did not, on our outing, develop headaches and complain about the heat after 3 minutes in it, and then when told not to complain did not flop and scowl and look pained and ask to go home while carefully avoiding doing actual complaints about the weather. Nor did they need to go to the toilet at a very awkward moment and nor did we rush from place to place asking in terrible French or in desperate English where the toilets were and were sent in eighteen different directions. No no, not us, not my children. And I can happily report, they are now, of course, speaking fluent French and chatting happily to locals with their little plastic brains sucking it all up. They are definitely not saying what does du pain mean, or Bonj....????!! Also, with the big screen I will never make a typo in French or English again. That was all due to screen size. Yup. (This is like those getting to know you games where only one of the 18 things I say is true). So yesterday was nice. No really. Wanting some fresh vegetables we went to the Moûtiers market and it reminded me of the Willis street market except more mushrooms and cheese and salami and seafood. And we bought fresh things and so what if we ended up with kiwifruit rather than nectarines. Then we went to a Creperie and Saladarie in a shady alleyway and the children ate crepes with lemon and sugar and I ate salad and Joe ate something he didn't expect to and we drank our first cafe coffees. We said oui a lot, without understanding what the waiter had said because we know the word oui. And then we went to the Cathedral which was first built in the 5th Century on a Roman Forum and then built over and over as it got ruined at various times. I liked the leaflet, it was badly photocopied and the one diagram had that lovely over inked too black look. I would have stayed longer and looked at all of it but one of the kid's DID have a headache and kept asking to leave. But what I saw was the reminder of how every inch of places like it had beautiful details. It was so carefully done and so thoroughly. Every inch saturated with colour or coolness or detail. There were statues and paintings, and stained glass and I think if I had stayed and looked then the leaflet told you which things were from which century. There were lit candles and candles available to light, 1 Euro for small ones and 3 Euro for much much bigger ones, and a heap of rocks in front of the statue of Jesus, and folded up prayers on paper, scattered on to them. The stained glass windows behind the altar had St Paul on one side, St Peter (the Cathedral is called Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Moûtiers) on the other, and Mary with baby Jesus with a grown up face in the middle. I tried to explain to Lily why there was so much Mary imagery and why they often show baby Jesus as not-a-baby-Jesus. One of the most intriguing cool things was a ceiling with a group of birds with halos. Can someone tell me, why birds with halos, are they the 12 Saints? That ceiling was exquisite.
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