You can vote in Perth too....

The election in France doesn't really make top news in Perth.  Among the hot topics here are the Roe 8 project and why the West Coast Eagles can't win at the MCG.  Its the flip side of the coin - in Australia we think Le Pen is something the French write with and Macron is a sort of cake; similarly maybe the French think a West Coast Eagle is...well a bird that prefers to hang around the côté ouest and Roe 8 is a keen enthusiast of open boat oarsmen!

Donc. As it's the election Michelle had the opportunity to vote.  Oui, although to see and hear my wife, she sounds completely English but can turn on the French lingo at the drop of a hat.  I am really jealous, especially when she laughs at my more amusing faux pas with the language. I will persevere however!!!  Just keep the gender of cats away from any topic discussed in public.  Anyway.. it turns out the the local Alliance Francaise here in Perth had a booth set up for the Presidential election. It was very popular too. I never knew so many ex pat French lived in Perth, but then again,  pourquoi pas!?   The weird thing though is the process is completely different from anything I had seen before.  They have all the candidates names, face up, on cards to choose from.  Now here comes the sneaky bit. You have to choose at least two of these in clear view of the officials and take them with you to your booth.  I suppose you could take them all if you wanted absolute privacy! Then you discard the one(s) you don't want, putting your single selection in a little brown envelope.  Seems a bit of a waste of paper to me, but who I am to question nearly 150 years of democracy!

But I have to say I do like the simplicity  of just voting for one person. At the recent State election here in Western Australia we had 58 different candidates to choose from.  In theory this would mean I would have to mark them down in preference from 1 to 58. I have enough trouble finding something laudable in my first choice candidate.  To work out the pros and cons of the 58th on the list would be a full time job!  I tried to take a photo, but would need telescopic hands to fold out the concertina form.

Kitchen

Well... Sid, the chap who sanded and re-varnished our floors did such a great job we asked him to have a look at the sorry state of our kitchen.

Bedroom floor now without paint flecks, with skirting board varnished and sealed!

Since the floor was leveled the kitchen has sort of ‘sunk.’ Well not actually sunk as such but it has that effect as the since the ground floor was leveled all our kitchen units are suddenly 6cm lower than before.  It really is a perfect kitchen for a hobbit. 

The kitchen was always on the list of things to do, so we thought it time to grasp the nettle and get on with it…or at least let someone else far more capable than us get on with it while we were away. 

Until now when we  had always got by with a microwave and a fridge, hence most of  our meals were cheese, ham, olive, salad and bread based.  No problem at all for us but the time will come when it gets a bit chilly and we fancy something cooked.

The kitchen at the moment...note the lack of sink. 

The house did come with a large gas cooker.  It's a bit ugly and doesn’t really lend itself to the small kitchen. Half of the cooker is taken up by a big gas canister; and the other half sublet to a family of spiders and other invertebrates. We never got around to getting a gas bottle.  It just sits there, gathering dust and we only use it to balance the microwave! 

The kitchen sink is great. I love its style and size.  If only it were in the kitchen itself.  Like the rest of the kitchen it’s now that bit lower. Plus we need to have a pump underneath to help the water navigate itself to the drain. 

Which comes to us asking if Sid could lend his hand to remodeling our kitchen.  The sink and the oven are both going, and we are going to put the sink in the kitchen itself.

So this is a rough computer impression of what it might look like. The old sink is currently locate below the side window. That is now going to be a window seat that will double as a place to store wood for the wood burner.  Fingers crossed it will all be done by the time we get back there!

Planning ahead!

It seems ages since we were in France. Four months, fourteen days and seven hours but who's counting.  We keep a photo on our fridge of the house to remind us of why we are working over here in Oz.  Plus I have found that Woolworths here sell Comté cheese so silver lining and all that jazz.

Looking back now we actually got a lot done last year with the floor, ceiling and bathroom projects completed.  It's now onto the bedroom...ooh la la!  A quick tip for anyone planning to get work done.  Plan ahead and get a builder booked in before August.  August is holiday time for the trade in France.  Down tools, sit back, enjoy life.

We were able to get our wood burner installed...but only after we had already left.  Its bit odd really as we are there in the summer but have been doing a fair bit of work towards making the house warm and cosy, ripping out and installing new heaters and wood burner. Not much call for a wood burner in summer.

Bought,  but not installed by the time we left!

We have a wonderful woman who looks in on our house each month checking the mail, making sure the roof is still on, and giving us regular updates.  We thought she may know someone who could help with work we still need doing.  The floor in the first floor bedroom needs sanding and revarnishing.  I think the previous owners were fans of Jackson Pollock as the lovely floor is spattered with white pain splotches.

It turns out she did know someone, a Dutch craftsman who was free and had reasonable rates. Better still for me is that he speaks English.  Malheuresment, I can get just so far with shrugs, pointing, smiling and waving my arms like a windmill.  I am improving my French but still get into a bit of a panic when a word I have never heard of gets thrown into the conversation. Actually make that half the words in any given sentence, and the glazed look of the dead sets in.

So he starts next week, sanding, varnishing and sealing the floor, and also putting down the lino in the bathroom which has been rolled up and leaning against the bathroom door since October!

Castles in the air

You've probably noticed that a number of our blog posts have been about Cathar castles and it seems to have become one of our 'things' to visit them. Sadly, there aren't any castles (Cathar or otherwise) in Australia so alongside photos, I now rely on the power of my imagination and memory to evoke the sights, sounds and smells that feed into the joy of hiking in stunning countryside up to a Cathar castle. The countryside I mostly conjure up in my mind is around the village of Roquefixade and its castle ruin, although the castle itself is technically 'closed' at the moment for restoration. Here are some of the photos we took. Now just add in the deeply resonant sound of silence, broken only by the distant, gentle tinkling of cow bells, the buzzing of insects, and a soft, soothing summer breeze rustling the tree tops ...

Chateau de Roquefixade

View of Roquefixade village

It was easy to think we we were in the middle of nowhere until we came across this emotive memorial to 16 local members of the resistance killed during the World War II in a battle with the milice and some German soldiers:



Memorial at the site of the Battle of Roquefixade

Panneau explaining the circumstances of the Battle of Roquefixade

Leaving on a jet plane!

Well that seemed to go very quickly. No sooner had we gotten used to walks in fantastic countryside, wonderful historic sites, and even more fantastic food and wine, when we were booked on an Emirates flight back to Perth.

Yup, we are now back into the realms of three types of cheese instead of the hundreds in France.  I kid you not, in Australia we only have four basic cheeses, 'Colby, Tasty, Extra Tasty, and if you really want to push the boat out...Strong & Bitey.'  All of these are some variant of cheddar and all are bland and boring. OK, sorry et pardonnez moi...while I collect my toys and put them back in the pram! But I suppose that is the cultural difference (well, one of many actually).  In Super U or Intermarché they dedicate at least an entire aisle to cheese, plus a deli section! Not so much in Australia. Anyway, I digress.

So we are now back in Perth, and back at work. It was a bit of a rush to find somewhere to live in a week and arrange to get our belongings out of storage and collect the cat. This time we have rented somewhere a bit cheaper so we can save quicker for our next trip back. We ignore the lack of lampshades, the dodgy stains on the ceiling and the really badly designed tiny kitchen.  Instead our focus is France and to keep our 'eyes on the prize!'

On the plus size of the ledger the cat has forgiven us for abandoning her, and as we are approaching summer here so we can take full advantage of the beach again.  But my heart is in the Ariège. In the meantime it's back to shift work, a reduced selection of cheese (grrr!) and a probably fruitless search to find Minervois or Saint Saturnin wine that retails at $7 a bottle...sacre bleu!!!! Having said that, a drop of Australia's finest McGuigan Black Label always goes down very nicely...

Mosman beach

Another day another castle...

There was not a great deal we could do in the house with the builders in so as it was another sunny day we took a trip a bit further afield to see another castle!  Yes, life is hard. This time we went to Puilaurens castle, which is actually in the next department (Aude) but still only about 40 mins away.  I now take for granted empty roads, dappled sunshine through the trees and a stunning backdrop of hills and mountains.  It's such a change from my usual daily grind as I drive to work, through metropolitan Perth, stop starting at lights, and looking at the back of a 'ute' or bus. The views from the castle are not as spectacular as nearby Queribus or Peyrepertuse (which we visited a few years ago) but the amount of castle still remaining more than makes up for it.  For instance the cistern is still intact, as are some vaulted ceilings.

Afterwards we drove back but stopped again at Puivert (also in the Aude) at the Brasserie du Quercorb as I had previously enjoyed one of their tasty beers at Le Rendevous restaurant in Leran. I understand the brewery is run by an English couple who took over an old garage and converted it into a brewery.   They have a good range of beers I think starting at 3.8% and you can get it on tap there for €2.50 for a middy (half pint), which is comparable in price to the mass produced pression available in most bars.

 I think we missed rush hour!

The builders have been in!

Work has been getting done on the house....at last!  We had to move into the nearby Village Vacances for a few weeks to allow the builders to take over and work inside the house. We had no real concept of what levelling the downstairs floor and putting in a new ceiling upstairs actually meant.  It turns out quite a lot. On the first day we popped in to see how things were progressing. Well, our builders had taken over our place with an industrial cement mixer, a big truck,  and lots of bags of cement with what looked like polystyrene balls mixed in.

The downstairs floor being levelled and raised

I understand that in the normal process of laying parquet floor, when there is a slope they put in a layer of something called chape liquide to make the floor level before laying down the sous-couche (underlay). However, in our case, due to the more severe slope they had to put in a substantial amount of concrete instead!  It's probably a good job I didn't show them the top floor bathroom. Up there when you are sat on the toilet you are in the same position as a downhill skier!  Anyway the slope was a bit more than we thought and the floor is now 8 cm higher than before! Ah well c'est la vie.

Meanwhile the ceiling in our main bedroom was also being levelled. Before, it was simply floorboards, hence bits of sunlight and lots of dust coming through. Shame though to lose the beams.

The next step was to level it (we probably lost another 8cm in height there too!):

and finally put insulation in before creating the new ceiling:

We are also now very close to getting the floor finished. Unfortunately, although we over-ordered on the parquet we are missing a measly 3 cm wide strip - so close yet so far! - hence the job is not quite done.  However, we have a shed load of the accompanying skirting board left over so I suppose that evens it out!

We had hoped to get the wood burner installed as well but that's not now going to be fitted until we have gone back to Oz. Yup the dance floor is ready but no band arrived to play!  Plus those of you with a keen eye may have noticed that the kitchen sink is now more suited to hobbits as levelling (and raising) the floor has probably made it about 7cm lower than before!  Ah well, another job for another day!

So far during our adventure, downstairs has gone from this ...

... to this