Rosé and a mini Tour de France

Sunday morning - coffee, a late breakfast and a jaunt to the market, followed by a midday stop for a glass of rosé.

“Une rosé avec glass?” I heard the waiter ask.

I paused for a moment, considering how I felt about drinking rosé straight from a bottle. The waiter, clearly having encountered this issue before clarified that he was asking about “‘glace’ or in English, ‘ice’”.  Ah. Would I like ice in my rosé?

“No, no glace, svp”, I replied, another proud learning moment for me. A few minutes later, the rosé arrived, WITH ice. I couldn’t muster the vocabulary to decline it politely,and so said nothing and drank it. Very Canadian eh!

The cafe we see from our livingroom

And here is our favourite place for a beer

- afternoon -

- and evening -

We left the cafe after an hour of watching families and friends congregating at the tables, and  young children tearing about the square on bikes with no pedals (that’s the little ones), scooters, and regular bikes, doing flips and mid-air turns. No helmets, no shin pads. Collisions generally resulted in a race back to a table of grown-ups, a few tears, a sip of something that was usually bright blue or brilliant pink (I’m hopping candy floss or bubblegum flavoured syrup, not gin or grenadine) and then off they went, back to playing. 

Heading back to our apartment meant passing my favourite ice cream shop, and so another stop. I’m not even a fan of ice cream, it’s Daniel’s thing, but here I have discovered walnut ice cream and I could eat it every day. Continuing our meander home we came upon a mini tour de france on the main street. The bikes seemed less significant than the actual outfits. 

The main street, just inside the city walls                            ==> The bike race

 
The kids were dressed to the nines in cycling gear! Not wanting to stand out too much we took a lot of pictures, just like everyone else on the sidelines, but the event meant that the main street was closed and really our focus was on how we would get across the street to our favourite bakery. And it was hot today, with no cooling mistral winds, so Daniel was starting to smell a little (the market cheese purchases he was toting in a back-pack were warming up), so there was an emerging sense of urgency.

... although not quite as urgent as the poor guy we saw on our first night here:  having deposited what seemed to be his last bit of change into the one of the street-corner condom machines he was jumping up and down, in a very agitated and public display of frustration at the machine’s refusal to produce the merchandise. At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder what we would do if he asked us for some spare change.



<== Bike storage on the train