Painting

Yup, it's a three pronged attack on the house.  Taking no prisoners. This time we are leaving the house complete!  One of the things that wasn't completed last year was the painting.  We got one side of the house done with two coats and it looks great.  Around the side was a bit of a different matter, as the painter ran out of paint so it only had one coat and the top part was not done at all.

We managed to get in touch with the Dutch company that made the original paint and were able to order the exact same colour.  I suggested to Michelle that the side bit wouldn't matter so much, but from the look she gave me it obviously does.

Sometimes we forget the sorry appearance the house had when we first bought it....what were we thinking!!!

...there was no way I was going up there!

Electrics!

When we planned for Michelle to go back to France for a month in April we thought it would be a simple job of doing a bit of plastering in the kitchen and fixing a couple of sockets.  Enough time for her to check on our house, see her parents and maybe get an internet connection sorted.

Well on the plus side we did get all the internet sorted, but it did come with quite an effort of drilling through stone walls and rewiring the inside.  Old houses again.

For the past 12 months we had been waiting for our builder to reconnect one side of our downstairs electrics, install a new light and switch  and fix a hole in the wall that he had previously created in trying to install said new light switch. As we were only visiting once a year it wasn't a big deal but it was quite a pain not having one side of the downstairs having power, especially with a small kitchen.

Finally able to use the old sockets again!

Eventually we realised we would have to engage a professional electrician to do the work.
Michelle asked around and found a reliable electrician who was available.  He was able to reconnect the non functioning plugs downstairs, create a new switch for a hall light and put in some new electric sockets upstairs.  He was even able to fill in the hole in the wall downstairs.

When we bought the house in 2015 we were told it had all been rewired. I suppose in the fine print it didn’t say rewired correctly, but when ever you hear a French sparky suck his teeth, shake his head  or go 'merde' under his breath you know that your wallet is going to take another hammering!

The new fuses

..and these were the old ones which are apparently not very good. Yeah I'm none the wiser either.

It turns outside that all the fuses were basically crap and noone had bothered to set our massive hot water boiler ( I’m still at a loss why it’s so big) to only heat during off peak times. So they are now replaced and we on ‘heures creuses.  Hopefully the bills will reduce.

Ok so that's plumbing and electrics sorted, just one more thing to sort out before Michelle has to lock up and join me back in Perth.

Plumbing!

I think most old properties in France have idiosyncratic plumbing and ours is no different. There are still noises and gurgling sounds in the house I choose to ignore, but some have to be addressed.  When we bought the house there was a pump under the sink. There was some sort of gravity issue, so after the sink emptied the pump kicked in, and moved the water under the lounge floor and into the waste water pipe in the laundry.   When we had the kitchen remodelled our builder took a different approach and connected the waste water to run straight outside the house along the gutter into the drain halfway across the square and down the road!  Très rustique non?  Well apparently not. We were advised this was ok by our builder. Anyway, the Marie asked us to get it running underground.  I thought it went very well with the medieval history of the village. Ah well.

Michelle found a contact on the Ariège network Facebook group who was available and able to do the job. Sighh....more money!  The local tradesmen must rub their hands in glee every time we arrive!  This house is getting more like a financial tardis each time we visit!!!

2015 to 2018 changes

It seems an eternity since we were last here together in our French home.  Michelle was able to come for a few weeks in the spring, but I was unable to get the time off so had to wait until the end of August.

In the intervening period we have made steady progress on making our little home more liveable.  The stop gap  furniture from Emmaus is gone and replaced with more comfortable furniture from the 'But' store in Pamiers.  The outside is almost painted and we now have our cooker and stove top connected. If I'm not careful I may run out of excuses not to use it.

Kitchen in 2015 and 2018

Inside the house, old sink now replaced with window seat.

...and finally got around to painting the outside

The cats are still there and hungry as ever!

La France in Perth

Having recently invited some friends over for a French-themed lunch here in Perth, I felt inspired to write about our experience of seeking out French food, and the presence of French culture in Perth. Most important was to look the part so Richard secured a typically French outfit - beret and stripey t-shirt (hey, no stereotypes here!), adopted his best French accent, and grew a Poirot-type moustache (oops, Poirot's Belgian, isn't he?!).

"It 'az been a good day. I 'ave sold all zee oignons!"

Food-wise, we have bemoaned the lack of variety of Australian cheeses in a previous blog post, but it is possible to buy French cheeses over here - albeit at hugely inflated prices so we rarely purchase them. Roquefort, for example, can retail for around AUS$100 per kilo, making it more than twice the price of the best rib eye steak! C'est fou!

AUS$100 is approx 65 euros. The same cheese retails in France for around 28 euros per kilo.

One of the cheeses we selected for our lunch was a small slice of one of our favorites, a mild cheese made from ewe's milk called ossau-iraty. At AUS$90 or so per kilo, the little 100 gram slice we purchased was probably equivalent to small rib eyes!

Ossau-Iraty cheese for sale at Little Sister deli in Fremantle

You have to be a bit careful when selecting your French cheese, however, as some available over here, such as Le President Camembert, are actually made in Australia, not in France. Ce n'est pas pareil!

Cheese, wine, baguette, cheese jam (not very French) and quince paste (also not very French)

For charcuterie (cold cuts), we were unable to find anything originally from France so settled for prosciutto, chorizo and salami which were probably produced in Australia or China! French paté is also non-existent over here - I think because of Western Australia's strict importation and quarantine laws - although you can buy Normandy paté made up the road in the suburb of Malaga (bof!), and we did hunt down a few small tins of terrine.

Otherwise, all things French are greatly appreciated in Perth, and none more so than French bakery/pastry shops or boulangeries-patisseries. To provide an authentic lunch, we were obliged to sample several of these boulangeries-patisseries to find the best French bread - baguettes - and cakes, including Choux Café in Swanbourne, La Galette de France in Nedlands, and Jean-Pierre Sancho in Dalkeith. Actually, Jean-Pierre Sancho have a chain of bakery/pastry shops across the metro area and coincidentally, the name of the business is inherited from a small boulangerie-patisserie in Lodeve (where Michelle's parents live) called Sancho - it's a small world! The Australian Sancho even include a photo from the 1920s of the original Sancho in Lodeve in their promotion (see below):

The Jean Pierre Sancho on Hay street in Perth City

Zoom in on the photo at the top to see the original Sancho in Lodeve

After all our sampling (poor us), we settled on macarons, small eclairs, petit-fours and a sachet of freshly baked palmiers biscuits from La Galette de France for the dessert course of our lunch. Michelle also made a galette des rois - a frangipani-type almond pastry available in France throughout January, traditionally made to celebrate Epiphany on 6 January. All washed down with cream (not French) and a bottle of French sparkling wine, a Crémant de Limoux, Limoux being only 20km or so from our residence secondaire. We're fortunate that we live close to a Dan Murphy liquor store which carries a range of international booze so buying French wine is easy enough although there's not a huge selection. I did, however, draw the line at buying a 75cl bottle of Normandy cider for over AUS$20 - it would probably cost the equivalent of about AUS$5 in France!

Interestingly, the staff in the French boulangerie-patisseries are often French and indeed, there are now enough French people living in Perth that you often hear French voices in the street - that wasn't the case when I lived here before in the 1990s. There are a number of French organizations in Perth promoting French culture and language, and social interaction for native French speakers, including Alliance Francaise and La Maison de France, and there are even pétanque clubs where you can play in competitions. And, of course, there are a number of French restaurants in Perth run by some internationally acclaimed chefs - Guillaume Brahimi, who featured on the Australian TV show French Food Safari springs to mind with his Bistro Guillaume. So all in all, it is possible to live the other side of the world from France and still experience a taste of France locally, albeit a lot of it comes at a pretty steep price!

Reflections

I thought I would add my own two cents worth to the blog as I haven't contributed for a while - due to a lack of time (!), the absence of a decent internet connection and the photos that I want to add always being stored on the wrong device. However, scrolling through the blog, I think Richard has covered it really and used the photos I would have chosen. The only thing to add here is a photo of an almost finished kitchen. I would have added a photo of our wood-burner too, but having mentioned it in several earlier posts, we completely forgot to take any photos of it once it was installed in the house!

Our trip to France was an odd one this time, partly due to trying to live in our house with building work still going on - this dictated our schedule and made it a little less relaxing. In addition, Richard was unwell for most of our stay in France - I probably kicked this off by catching a cold in England but Richard's version mutated into a persistent virus. We even went to see a doctor to make sure he wasn't more seriously ill. The health issues didn't end there as my mum was hospitalized for five days (all better now) so what with visiting mum in hospital and helping out my dad, and escaping the building work at home, we probably spent nearly half our holiday in France staying with my parents. Being in the south of France during August, peak holiday season, also made it quite challenging to get around due to heavy traffic and crowds of tourists. We learnt to get around this by doing our sightseeing and motorway driving early in the morning.
Despite these challenges, we still had many lovely moments and experiences: fields of sunflowers, a butterfly farm, catching up with friends and family, four nights of "fete" and live music in the village, evening food markets, visits to our favorite Cathar castles, walks in beautiful countryside, refreshing swims in pools and lakes, good food, wine and cold pastis, and frequent visits from our two favorite french kitty cats (who by the way, to set the record straight, have both turned out to be girls, not a boy and girl as we initially thought and wrote in our first blog about them).
Plus we had the satisfaction of seeing our house taking shape. We painted the main bedroom and first floor landing, Richard assembled bedroom furniture, and we started hanging pictures including blown-up canvas prints of our favorite photos which we organized through photobox.  Next step is probably to improve the look of the exterior of the house with a complete paint job and painting the shutters and front door in fresh new matching colors. Maybe by the next time we visit, our house will have a completely new look!

Cambodia

....which isn't really the Ariège, but it does have a French quarter to go with its colonial past so there is a link there albeit a bit tenuous. Plus, Jacques Lafayette born in Le Peyrat (the village conjoined to La Bastide sur l'Hers), introduced horn combs (historically, a major industry in the area) to Cambodia back in 1875 so there is a tangible link. (I may have made up that last bit!)
Prior to leaving for France, we had decided to spend the last week of our holiday in Siem Reap in Cambodia to help us face the end of winter in Australia and our return to work. We also reasoned that it would give us a chance to get over the jet lag as there's only an hour's time difference between Cambodia and Perth.
We flew out from Nice on 27th August.  The trip was long but worth it. We flew to Doha, Qatar, had a  couple of hours in transit and then a connecting flight on to Bangkok. Unfortunately we had to wait about 5 hours for the next connection to Siem Reap but for what it's worth, Bangkok Airways have a private lounge for all passengers where you can get free drinks and snacks and wifi so we found a corner there and slept as best we could. Besides, getting through immigration and security at Bangkok airport ate up a significant amount of the five hour wait!
This will actually be our third trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia. We love it. The hotels are fantastic, and sooo cheap. As is the food, drink ($2 for a margarita cocktail) and clothes. The people are also very helpful, kind and easy-going and this makes it very special too.

Our favourite hotel, the Borei Angkor (above) is fantastic; five star standard, but the most amazing thing is that out of season the prices are ridiculously cheap.  An extremely comfortable, spacious and well-finished room and buffet breakfast for US$50!  You would have trouble getting a broom cupboard in a Formule 1 in France for that price!

Most people come to Siem Reap for the temples at Angkor Archaeological Park. Most of them are are 11th and 12th century with a Buddhist/Hindu theme running throughout.   Considering they are getting on for a thousand years old they are still amazingly preserved.   You would need a week to do them all justice.

One thing we should point out is the climate. It is very hot and humid. We did a morning tour of some of the outlying temples such as Preah Khan (see photos above), and found that four and a half water bottles was just enough to keep us going. There are lots of sellers en route, however, to sell all sorts.  This actually worked out quite well as when we came back from our last temple, our tuk tuk (a sort of motorbike with a passenger cart on the back) had disappeared.  It turned out he had a flat tyre, so we took the opportunity of buying a couple of cold bottles of water and promptly poured them down the back of our shirts....yes that is how hot it gets!

Come dry season the above 'baray' will be gone, dried-up, although from above it would look like a rectangular moat surrounding a temple. Actually bit of trivia...the largest man made structure built by the ancient Khmer wasn't Angkor Wat which is the biggest temple but this western baray.

Of course, there is a dark side to visiting Cambodia too. It's a very poor country and it's a little surreal to be holidaying in a place that has a relatively recent genocidal past. I still remember being shocked by the movie, 'The Killing Fields' many years ago. I guess we hope that by being there, not only do we have an enjoyable, affordable, educational and interesting time, but that we are also in some small way doing something that helps the local people to make a living, and that maybe, eventually, in the long run, all this tourist activity will contribute to improving their lot.