Wow! We have arrived and it’s awesome. This morning is what
living here is all about. Another clear morning, with sun shining on the
buildings opposite us in the church square. A leisurely breakfast, with our
first cup of tea, courtesy of our new jug. It’s lovely hearing the people,
locals and tourists, wandering about below us – we are amazed at how many
visitors there are despite it being way before the tourist season. Lying in bed
working out the new kitchen we had a revelation that we could reuse an
existing cupboard as a pantry, thereby reducing both the work and expense of
doing a new pantry. We can also use the 2.5m kitchen with an extra bench instead
of the 3m version. So the new kitchen would cost just €999 including fridge-freezer,
cooktop, rangehood, oven, sink and mixer tap. Absurd really.
Our first stop was the church (1750). Inside was full of people
doing the Easter decorations and changes. They are assembling frames of some
sort for the procession tomorrow. We noticed there is a performance in the
church next week – Bach’s Magnificat, Vivaldi’s Gloria and Handel’s Messiah, so
we’ll book that today.
Next was the market. We were stunned. It was busier than last
year, and larger too, spilling out along another street. An unbelievable array
of produce and goods, people, sights and smells. There’s many saucisson sellers, cheese vendors (some
you can smell from many stalls away), butchers, even a dedicated horse butcher,
olives, paella, soaps and herbs and spices, all operating from stalls or
fold-open trucks. We feel like we’ve fallen on our feet – it is even better
than we remembered, and those were great memories to start with. We sat down at
Bar Pablo with a coffee (yes, €1.40 is now the going rate) two meters from a
4-piece jazz band, and spent an hour just soaking up the atmosphere. The trials
of the last 4 days have drifted away and been replaced with a feeling that we
are going to enjoy this place immensely. C’est
si bon!
As I write this in Cafe de France (Pablo Picasso's cafe when he lived here), the patrons are singing French songs. So cool! The bar owner and his wife are good mates of Dan Carter (she was one of his French teachers here).
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| Anthony at Bar le Pablo |
