determined to put insomnia to use...

amazing sunset over the atlantique
loire view
at the beach
abbaye de fontevraud
eleanor of aquitaine's tomb!!

p in saumur
trying to steer us into a tree, la venise verte
sorry these all loaded back to front all out of order, but they took so long to load in the first place, i'm not going to go back and do it again :)

so a lovely weekend (once p actually arrived, three and a half hours later than planned, having driven in circles for an hour around a completely different argenton, one that is 100 km from here... oops). we have been INCREDIBLY lucky with the weather - it has been sunny and warm all weekend, t-shirt weather, and it was definitely a treat to get out and see a bit of something other than argenton chateau.

friday morning after breakfast we started off, going through thouars (can't miss market day, after all; weekly cheese purchase cannot be skipped) to the abbaye de fontevraud (beautiful, peaceful, and weirdly deserted), where i got to say hello to eleanor of aquitaine in person, which definitely felt like i was checking off an important item of some obscure list that had been in my subconscious since the age of about seven, kind of fun. then on to saumur, which has to be one of the prettiest towns ever (and has the extra bonus that the saumur castle is the same castle which appears in the background of all of the illustrations of duc de berry's book of hours what i have framed in my bedroom (another item checked off my medieval art nerd checklist! hooray!). we had a loverly lunch in an outdoor cafe, a wander round the town, along the river, some blackcurrant sorbet mmm.... and back to AC in time for a bonfire in the garden of les sylvains.

yesterday (saturday) we were much more ambitious; we drove all the way out to the coast, to the poitevin wetlands, near niort for anyone who feels like looking it up. we had a picnic at the ruins of the abbaye de st. pierre, very very pretty except for the scary disembodied french voices who start telling you things as soon as you cross a threshhold (presumably about the history of the abbey, but for all i knew, it could have been "aurore... aurore..." (for fans of the movie delicatessen).) major item of note here was that after i said hello and two tickets please to the lady at the ticket booth, she asked me for my postal code (to which i replied, hunh?), after which she said, oh, i see, you're not french. but HEY! i said five whole words before she figured out that i wasn't french, which i am going to count as a major linguistic triumph. (we managed to massively confuse the girl at the tourist office where we stopped for a map; p. had paolo conte on the brain, and so was pissing about talking to me in a mix of spanish, english, and faux italian, while i asked the lady in my horrible french if she had a booklet with a map in it. her hand was hovering over her stack of booklets while she tried to figure out which version she should give us, and every time we said something, either to each other or to her, her hand would go uncertainly to the italian stack... no, to the english stack... no, the spanish stack... c'est la vie in the 21st century european union, i guess.)

after lunch we rented a little canoe and paddled around the canals, a.k.a. 'la venise verte' ("green Venice"), which was SO PRETTY mon dieu. i didn't take many pics because pau kept trying to capsize the boat and i was afraid for my camera, but the canals are maybe eight feet across, tree lined, through fields full of cows and wildflowers, with a carpeting of what looked like green lentils on the surface of the water, and it's not like english canals in which the rubbish to water ratio is about 1:1, and you are constantly having to jump out and go around locks. the whole canal network is completely flat (no locks), completely rubbish-free, and i have to reiterate that it was gorgeously sunny tout le jour. p. flatly refused to sing 'o sole mio' to me as he rowed, which was disappointing, but we did get a herd of cows that followed us wherever we went, which was almost as good.

after that we drove out to the coast proper, to the beach, arriving just in time for a spectacular sunset and a quick run-around on the sand, and then back to vihiers to the scrumptious hole in the wall restaurant that we had missed on thursday night (a terrine of something, boeuf with some sort of complicated french thing that they do to boeuf, and creme brulee; neither of us could finish, and a kir cassis on top of all that food made my last remaining neuron flicker pathetically a few times and then conk out completely, which was difficult, because the thing about p. is that he is the debate-world's version of the energizer bunny. by the time we got to dessert (at which point i was slumped over my plate barely conscious) he was solving the problems of public education in catalunya, and of course demolishing with one blow of articulate logic whatever tiny last gasps of counter argument my poor brain could try and muster. what i really need to do is study for a week before he comes, social theory, economics, current affairs, etc so i can keep up. either that or get better at steering the conversation towards stuff that i know more about... :) hey, let's talk about medieval art and obstetrics! come on, it'll be fun!

anyway. the only bummer (no pun intended) of the weekend has been that somewhere along the way i ate something i shouldn't have, and have picked up a not-very-fun bug that has me running to the loo every two hours. blech. fingers crossed that it will be short and sweet. i love the fact that the french have self-cleaning public loos everywhere, however. i don't care how much people living in socialist countries complain about the taxes and the bureaucracy, it's all worth it for the immaculate and omnipresent public bathrooms. vive la france. liberte, fraternite, egalite, and a comfortable clean place to crap. love it.

okay, it is now three a.m.; week seven of class (eek! time is beginning to race by at the most alarming rate) begins in six hours, so i am going to give this sleeping business another shot.