Despite designing and building a big house – especially when you consider that it’s for just two people – we’ve found that space is at a premium in certain areas. So it was great to discover these beautiful folding bamboo stairs. An incredible combination of beauty and practicality, from Bcompact Design.
Art + Architecture
2013 Menton Lemon Festival Parade
Yesterday, I shared some pictures of the citrus gardens, today, I have some pictures of the parade.
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2013 Nice Carnaval – Afrique et Amérique
Africa and America each had two floats.
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| Le premier Carnaval fut africain | Taxi brousse | |
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Athens, Greece
After our weekend of driving and wine tasting, we spent 5 nights in Athens, in a clean, non-descript hotel in a bad part of town – or so people said. We chose the hotel because it was cheap and convenient: located near Viktoria Station, a metro stop on the same line as the school where we took our Greek classes. While I wouldn’t describe the area as seedy exactly Continue reading
6 corners of the Hexagon: Lorraine
The weather was pretty lousy during our last few days in Niederbronn, which was just as well as we needed to pack and clean the apartment before heading out.
Our next destination was the region of Lorraine, which has two important cities: Nancy, which we’d never visited before, and Metz, which we had. We spent two nights in each – not nearly enough.
The heart of Nancy is the beautiful gold-and-black trimmed Place Stanislas, named for Stanislaw Leszczynski, the deposed Polish king who became Duke of Lorraine and created this royal square. Other points of interest are the Saint-Epvre Basilica, the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-l’Annonciation, numerous gardens, and various museums.
We also visited nearby Toul and tasted the famous Gris de Toul, a type of rosé wine found only in this area. We were very surprised at how much weaker Lorraine wine is than its neighboring Alsace’s – the food in the two regions is very similar, but the wine couldn’t be more different.
Metz has a reputation as a dirty, industrial city, but in fact it is very beautiful and full of flowers, and the cathedral is stunning. We’d already gotten a good taste of Metz during our visit in 2008; we went this time solely to visit the brand-new Pompidou museum (Centre Pompidou-Metz), which I’d been dying to see since I first read about the construction plans about 7 years ago. I wasn’t disappointed – it’s an amazing building.
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Artistic tomatoes
I know this photo looks totally staged, but it wasn’t. I had a bunch of not-quite-ripe cherry tomatoes, so I set them out on the marble table in a strip of sunshine. Then when I glanced at them a few minutes later, I saw this lovely reflection.
