Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Southern France (part two)

In the area of Frejus, very few people spoke English, so I had to dig out my French from the summer I studied in Strasbourg (some 15 years ago). Fortunately, I spoke enough French to tell people that I was an American living in Germany who spoke a little German and a little French, so they wouldn't think I was a completely crazy when I started a sentence in French, ended in German and threw in an English word or two for good measure. Mercifully, most of the staff at our hotel were English speaking.

Another French/German blending happened for Maddie regarding our rental car. It was a French car called a Citroen. In German, "citrone" is the word for lemon. So Maddie kept calling our car a lemon. She thought that was great!



Everywhere we went, Maddie had to pick out postcards. She was obsessed with them. She has written postcards to people whose addresses I don't even begin to know!

Maddie and Skip on the Coeurs Mirabeau in Aix en Provance. There is probably a more quaint part of Aix, but we were just there for the afternoon, and found a beautiful old part of town with exquisite buildings that has been turned into a huge mall. I turned around to go home when I saw the Gap.


Here I am in front of one of the many fountains in the area where we stayed. Based on things found in abundance, we deduced that the French love fountains, traffic rotaries, pharmacies and hair salons. Lavender, wine, olive oil and goat cheese are also big.

We went all the way to St. Tropez so that Maddie could discover a love of mini-golf.

The harbor at Frejus. Frejus is really two towns. There is the old town where we stayed with it's historic buildings and a church with an old baptistry that dates back to the 5th century and then the harbor area which looks like something you might see in Florida.

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