Yesterday I posted a stylized photo of the church and château in our town. We live about a mile and a half northeast of the château, as the bat flies. Here's another version of that photo, with color but also stylized. This is a stitched together image. I took the two photos I put together to compose this image back in July 2004 with an 2001-vintage Canon digital camera (a Pro90 IS).
Meanwhile, I've been sitting on (as it were) some more photos from a 1998 trip to Paris that Walt and I took. I captured these images with a 1996-vintage Kodak DC50 digital camera that CHM loaned me for the trip.
I like the soft-focus quality of the image above, which shows people shopping in the bouquiniste stalls along the river on the Left Bank, with Notre-Dame cathedral as a backdrop.
I guess this last image is pretty blurry, but there's something about it I like.
Local news: I've told two of our part-time neighbors about the furniture-burning that we saw taking place in another neighbor's front yard a couple of weeks ago. Both reacted just as Walt and I did — mystified and slightly shocked. The neighbors I'm talking about are women in their 60s and early 70s, and the said they've never heard of anyone burning their deceased parents' furniture this way. I'd been wondering if this a common practice out here in the French countryside, but it doesn't seem to be.
One of the neighbors I've mentioned is the daughter of our former Blois neighbors who have "turned a page" by quitting driving and no longer down coming to their country house in the Saint-Aignan area. Their daughter and her husband are taking over the house and making some modifications inside, as well as mowing the grass. They invited us over for an apéritif dînatoire Saturday night. We've known them for years, but not all that well. They've never expressed much of an interest in living in the country, asking us on many occasions over the years what we do here to avoid getting too bored. But here they are. We'll see how often they really come down here from Blois, where they have lived for many years — especially when this current streak of sunny, clear, warm weather breaks.
The mystery continues, then. Crazy.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite of the photos above, is the middle one, with the bouquinistes.
I like that one too.
DeleteThe last photo looks like an old timey postcard to me.
ReplyDeleteTrue
DeleteSome people are easily bored, but I don't see either you or Walt as being like that....Someone suggested that perhaps the furniture being burned had worms or some sort of rot and that might make some sense. But I'm not sure how likely it might be.
ReplyDeleteI, too, like the photo with the bouquinistes.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the furniture burning was in retaliation for some ancient family feud. It's such a dramatic statement that it seems it should have a dramatic reason, not something as ordinary as possible insects or worms.
All lovely, the last image is magnificent, but to me, the one with the bouquiniste says Paris!
ReplyDelete