Bill and I seldom give a definitive “no” anymore when one of us poses the question “Are we doing anything tonight?” Back in Atlanta we had a bulletin board at the house where we posted a calendar so that we could see all of the upcoming events for the month. Heck, you could probably make that for the year since we always scheduled vacations to Europe at least that far in advance. We had the challenges of getting time off from work, arranging flights and specific seats on the plane, finding a holiday house/apartment in the right location with the ever-important dishwasher and washing machine, etc. Now that we live in Europe, things have changed…for the better. Continue reading “Doin’ nothin’? Nothin’ doin’!”

For over 30 years, European countries have banded together to celebrate  their heritage on the third weekend of September. In Paris this year, for example, it was possible to visit the Presidential palace of Elysée, tour the city in vintage buses last seen on the streets in 1935, peruse the outstanding art collections at the Musée d’Orsay, gaze down upon the streets below from atop the Arc de Triomphe or explore dozens of other attractions all for free. Since these “Days of European Heritage” were based on an original creation of the French Ministry of Culture, it was only fitting that Carcassonne should fully participate. Continue reading “Open house”

In elementary school, one day a week was devoted to art. Although it was not a subject at which I excelled, I still looked forward to those days because it meant that we could temporarily put aside long division, cursive writing, and vocabulary lists in favor of crayons, colored pencils, and poster paint. Bill and I had our own grown up version of Art Day last week and we didn’t even have to get messy. Continue reading “Art day”

When we first moved to the Atlanta area we were kind of isolated in both the physical sense and with social connections. We knew some of the neighbors and we saw people at work but being far out of the city had its disadvantages. The first weekend dinner group that we joined was called Out in the Country to give you an idea of our remote location. It took a few years after that to discover another social group for us that actually had Georgia’s capital city’s name in its title. Luckily, within two weeks of moving to Carcassonne we were part of a discussion group and after this past weekend’s Rendez-vous des Associations, things are looking even brighter. Continue reading “Free association”

Like you, probably, Bill and I thought that we lived in France. For the past 4 days however, it seems that we’ve slipped south of the border into Spain. For the last 10 years the city has held an increasingly popular music festival for 6 weeks during the summer that literally fills the air with sound from concerts that stretch from inside the walls of the castle to the banks of the river and canal. While the majority of those events are in French, lots of what we heard and saw this weekend had a distinct Spanish accent as the city celebrated La Feria. Continue reading “Carcassonne, Spain”