La Vie en Vosges

Happy new year everyone! I hope you all had a great time celebrating.

After 4 1/2 weeks of being here alone, Richard finally came to visit for a week, and that made NYE pretty special on its own.

I was working until midday on the 31rst, we then packed up on nice food for dinner and decided to quickly go and buy some fireworks. In France, everyone buys fireworks and bangers for NYE and fires them in the street at midnight. For security reasons the sale of fireworks in nonetheless limited from 1am to 6pm on the 31rst.

I had read about a shop called 'Au Travesti' (The Tranvestite!) in the village next to ours selling them, so we headed straight there hoping we could then spend the rest of the afternoon going to a walk in the nearby mountains. Oh no. The shop had taken over a massive hangar full of every kind of fireworks ever created, from 20c bangers to €600 massive fireworks display boxsets. The whole place was a massive queue of people - perhaps 200 or even more. So we ended up queuing there for 2 hours, trying not to get too upset by it. Still, we got there in the end. Followed a flawless evening of grand food cooked by Richard and lots of champagne, white wine, red wine and a liter of mulled wine that made the whole flat smell of aniseed. Nice!

Yesterday we braved the heavy rain for a first long walk discovering our surroundings, amongst which a stork reserve (where we also spotted a few herons looking a bit confused), lots and lots of cycle paths and steep vineyards. We also spotted a huge bird cage outside a house with weird looking brown pigeons that looked very inbread to me. I'll have to go back with my camera and send a shoot to Pigeonblog some day.

Woke up to a wonderful sight this morning - it snowed overnight and the whole village was covered of snow with bright sunshine and blue sky, it felt like being in some ski resort. Unfortunately Richard had to go back to the UK today, this time for a last week of packing up. Next Saturday he'll be back permantently, driving all the way with all our stuff. I have to say, the flat as it is at the moment i all very feng-shui but it will be nice to have some furniture, like a sofa, and no more echo when I'm on the phone.

Till then, take care!

Anne-Sophie