Saturday, April 07, 2007

Oysters in Sommieres


Ben, Paula and Ave (Paula's mum) arrived from Barcelona yesterday afternoon. They will spend the Easter weekend with us which will please Jan, because her eldest son and his extended family always bring fun to the house, and she won't be stuck with just me (yup - Ed.). Having said that, my head usually hurts after an evening listening to French. You can imagine what it's like listening to Spanish, which I barely understand, and loud Spanish to boot. B&P became Minnie's new best friends for the evening which can be more of a curse than a pleasure, especially as she tried, and succeeded, to sit across their laps at the table. At 37 kilos she is hardly a lap dog but we forgive her because she is still a puppy.


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Our visitors love oysters, (yuk - I stopped eating snot when I was two), so it was off to Sommieres this morning to sample such delights, and to meet up with friends. Whilst we were shopping for squid ink, for the arroz negro tonight, we bumped into an old friend (pictured above in an old police photo) who had heard that they were offereing free wine at the cave in Sommieres. Trust him to be there. He claimed that he had popped down for his breakfast so that sounded about right. Anyway, when we got to the market it was absolutely heaving. Seats were at an absolute premium but some nice tourists (you know that they are tourists because the men wear shorts and the women summery dresses, whilst the locals are still in winter overcoats) offered us their seats as they were about to leave. Wasn't that nice? I might start to feel better about tourists after all?

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