A great Easter weekend pt 1- Saturday

Brocante

What a good combo. Friends, food, wine and some of that culture type stuff. Could leave it at that really as it more or less sums up what we've been doing for the last few days. Although much is lost without the detail. So I'll keep writing. Note to self - today is Monday, tomorrow is Tuesday - otherwise I'll be a day out. Friday was an ordinary working day over here and not a holiday as in the UK. So all the shops were open as per usual.

Saturday we drove into Tours, early. Beautiful day. Found somewhere for breakfast (coffee and croissant) and then went for a walk. Discovered there's an enormous flower market every Saturday morning near to the town hall. We've not been to Tours on a Saturday before, so hadn't realised it was there. Absolutely great. Terrific range at very reasonable prices and of course on a gorgeously sunny day, it was just lovely strolling through. Then found our way to a terrific art-supplies shop, Plein ciel Cadres et Papiers for Mike, who was needing some origami paper for a workshop he's doing in Chinon. Slightly off the beaten track, but worth the trek as Mike found everything he needed. Then headed back towards the centre to La Boîte à Livre, our favourite bookshop. Absolutely great selection of books, but as I've mentioned before books here are incredibly expensive, even the paperbacks. But guess what - simply impossible to leave empty-handed. This time it was with a novel, a play and a magazine.  The book is Le Collier Rouge by Jean-Christophe Rufin. One of the founders of Médecins sans Frontières, as well as a writer, he was amongst other things, the former French Ambassador in Senegal and is the President of Action Against Hunger. His career and experiences heavily influence his writing. The play was Savannah Bay by Marguerite Duras which we'd seen just the once, years ago at the Edinburgh Festival with our good friend Angie - in English. Quite wonderful and forever in my head. Now I have the play in French. The magazine is a special edition of Beaux Arts, dedicated to Henri Cartier-Bresson.

We'd actually come to Tours to meet up with a group of friends and go to an exhibition.
So next up was lunch at Le Turon in the Rue Colbert. Lovely bistro, very good food, very well priced and very friendly staff. Ten of us in all - a great time. Then we headed up to the Château de Tours, which is an excellent exhibition space. Always worth going. This time the main exhibition was - until comparatively recently unknown - the photography of Vivian Maier (1926-2009). An American of French/Hungarian extraction. She was a nanny, with an almost lost cache of over 100,000 images, which having been discovered have, posthumously, given her the deserved reputation as one of the most accomplished street photographers. Her black and white street images shot with a Rolleiflex camera, taken in New York and Chicago images are quite superb. The website link is in English and is excellent. It also contains under Film a trailer of the documentary made in 2013 about Vivian Maier's life and how her images were discovered. Quite extraordinary. 

After such a great day in Tours, we headed back home for a brief visit. Got changed, sorted out a couple of plates of apèro type eats and some wine, and then walked down the road to our friends Nadia and Patrick who were driving us over to a mutual friend's Easter barbecue dinner party in Seuilly. A great crowd. Sixty of us in all. A mixture of French, American, Irish, English, German. Chris and his wife Moira come over from the States at various times during the year, the longest usually being in the summer. We saw them when they were last over in December. We went over for dinner with their family, friend Steve and Nadia and Patrick. It was just before they went for Christmas back in the States. They are generous hosts and brilliant barbecuers. Fortunately we'd been very careful at lunch time, otherwise we'd have exploded. Everyone had gone to town on the food, so it all looked good and was all quite delicious. Someone had got a Doodle link organised so that we could all say what we were bringing, which ranged from appetizers, vegetables, salads, cheeses, cakes and desserts.  Various of his local friends had helped get everything set up as Chris only arrived back in France on April 17. Moira had had to stay in the States, but they're coming out again in June some time for about 10 weeks. All worked brilliantly. We caught up with friends we hadn't seen for a while and met some new faces. What a fabulous end to a glorious day.