28 Aug - 6 Sept Ceret

It's been a nice quiet time recently. We've had the odd day to the beach, where the sea temperature is cooling down but still pleasant, and there's still plenty of heat in the sun. Since the start of September the temperatures quite quickly dropped down to around the mid-20s. The French holidays are over now, with all the school children heading back into their classrooms on Monday. Hence, there were far fewer people at the beach early this week, but we were virtually surrounded by Germans instead. Clearly the school holidays must be different in Germany.

Not too much of note has happened in the last wee while, except the fuel smell that plagued us for a while last year started to appear at around 3:20am again, for four nights out of five last week. We thought - 'oh no, not again'. We cured it last year by pinning it down to one of the local bakers, who uses kerosene-type fuel to fire his bread ovens. We'd spied the tanker delivering to his shop one morning, and confirmed with other bakers that he is the only one in town who uses it. We had a word to the council, and they obviously got onto it pretty promptly. In fact, after we'd brought it to the council's attention, the baker must have had a technician check his fuel system straight away, because the smell ceased from that night onwards. Hence, we are 99% sure that the problem came from his premises.

When the fumes started to appear again last week, we thought we'd have a polite word with the baker himself, just alerting him to the problem and asking him to check his system again. He confirmed that he was due for an annual check by his technician in December, but refuted that any smell had ever come, or was coming, from his ovens. He started to get rather grumpy so we didn't push it. We decided to just monitor it for another few nights and if it kept up then approach the council again. However, despite his protestations, the baker presumably checked his system anyway, because we've had no more smell from that night onwards. A good result.

Apart from that, life is fairly quiet. We often take a plastic container or two when we go on our walks and have accumulated an impressive crop of blackberries. They get tucked into our freezer and brought out to decorate our muesli for breakfast. 

The blackberries are really coming on

Last week we repeated a long walk we've done twice before up high in the Pyrenees We'd spied raspberry bushes last time we were there and hoped to time it right to pick some this time around, but alas there were very few on offer. It was a great walk anyway. We love being up high in the mountains - another reason why it would be hard to consider moving away from Ceret and the Pyrenees. We've become real foragers - also collecting ripe figs that fall on our walking tracks, though it is still too early to go mushroom hunting in the surrounding forests.

Sheep sheltering from the sun

Meadow flowers (cardabelle) used by locals as for bringing good luck

View of Canigou (highest mountain in the region)

More meadow flowers

Cows making the most of summer pastures up in the mountains

We're back into our running reps in earnest now that we can't get our exercise fix at the pool any longer - it closed for the year last Friday. Just about all of our expat friends have arrived back in Ceret to enjoy the cooler weather of September/October. We are having a big gathering at our place tomorrow night to welcome everyone back, catch up on all the gossip and also celebrate John's birthday. 

Yesterday we drove into Perpignan to collect some Aussie friends who have just flown back. We went in early in the day and had a good wander around town, taking the opportunity to view some of the annual displays from international photojournalists. The photos are incredibly dramatic and amazing, but the subjects are typically war scenes, environmental degradation and the like - pretty sobering stuff. We also wandered into the local mairie (council) offices, which are housed in a complex of gorgeous Catalan style 14th century buildings. One of the rooms which is open to the public is used for wedding ceremonies. All marriages have to be solemnised at the council, with any ceremony at a church or elsewhere an optional extra.

Room used for wedding ceremonies at Perpignan's council offices.