BOUNCING ABOUT

I got up early today for my first full day in France. I say that I got up early but the reality is that the bed is so hard that I hardly slept at all. Nevertheless, I was excited to see all the changes that Rich has made to the house. Upstairs we now have one large dormitory style bedroom. The ugly dark built-in closet is gone and the housing for the stairway to the grenier has also been pulled out, revealing a nice small space that will eventually house the shower and toilet. Rich also had part of the wall that formed the entry to the stairs torn out so that now there is a generous access to the upstairs without the door at the bottom.
After breakfast we took a ride into Chinon, lovely Chinon. It was lunchtime so everything except restaurants and bars was closed. We started to walk about. We came across an exhibition of works by a woman named Isabelle Thomas, a friend of Karen’s. She was in the shop arranging things. When she saw us peering through the windows she beckoned us in and offered us a glass of wine while we perused her work. She told us about a group of English and French people who meet upstairs from the shop to practise their respective languages. We went upstairs to meet them. They invited us to the next lunchtime meeting to practise our French (Mondays for French, Thursdays for English).
We continued walking around. We poked our head in to say hello to M. Wilbrun, the barber. He was excited to see me but a little disappointed that my hair is so short. We agreed that it would be at least two weeks before any trimming would be necessary. We stopped to have refreshment at the café in the square.
Later in the afternoon we headed over to Fontevraud. We went to visit the new studio of Gregoire, the stain-glass maker. He had a party of people in the shop and he appeared to be giving a lecture about hisw process and his art. After that group left we invited him to have a drink with us so that we could chat. He told us that he was born in Algeria during the war to parents of Spanish ancestry (his surname is Garcia-Pepin) then when his parents no longer had a country (the Algerians won the war, thankfully) they moved to Ivory Coast for his first seven years before returning to the motherland. He spent some time in London and New York and eventually moved back to Paris and pursued a career as a fashion designer. Now he is tired of the big city and lives outside Fontevraud. His interest in stained-glass has evolved from a hobby into a full-time passion.