Our last day exploring in Lourmarin

It has been a lazy day today.  Because the original forecast was for snow, we planned to just stay here and explore in Lourmarin for the day.  It has been cloudy and cold all day but no snow.  Now the forecast is for snow tomorrow when we will be driving toward Paris.

Last night at sunset, a red glow was over the village, so Leon suggested I take a couple of photos.  It gives the streets outside an eerie glow.

 Our apartment is upstairs over a restaurant.  There is a door beside the restaurant that we enter, then go up two sets of stairs.  There is an apartment at the top of the first set of stairs, then up the second set is our apartment with another apartment opposite our front door.  There is an apartment above us up another flight of stairs, but we have not heard anyone in it.  We sometimes hear the people whose apartment is sort of beside our bedroom.  Our door has 3 locks on it, so we feel pretty safe when we are locked in except for the fact that we think half the town has keys to our door!  Apparently the stairway is used as storage for the chairs and tables from the sidewalk restaurant below.  Sometimes we come in and can barely get by to the stairs.  Also, Walter told us that there has been a disagreement over who maintains the stairwell since there are 4 apartments and the restaurant who use it, so nobody maintains it.  It looks like a stairwell in a tenement building...or at least in a building that is 300 years old.

                                  Locks on the inside:

Our shutters are engineering works of art.  Leon loves them.  We have exterior louvered shutters that we close at night, then we make sure that the glass windows are closed, then there are interior wooden shutters that close with the same metal mechanism that locks the windows.  It is really interesting that it is such a complex locking system but obviously over a hundred years old.  There are 3 of these "buckles."  The rod is attached to the window and closes it when the wooden interior shutters are open.  Then you have to turn the rod so that the flange catches in the buckle on the right door, then you turn the handle and that latches the two interior shutters to the windows, and they are all locked down securely. 

We ate breakfast and decided to walk up to do one more load of laundry, buy a few more postcards, go to La Poste for stamps, and explore more of our neighborhood.

This little narrow path is on the way to the other apartment where we do laundry.  The houses were built so close to the edge of the church, or maybe it was the other way around, that a fat person could not walk through there. The church is on the left.

We took the scenic route back to the apartment through some narrow streets and down a path by a little stream.  We think that the little roofed area is where the town laundry used to be.

It is just amazing how narrow the streets are.  We have seen more than one car with skinned mirrors or scraped sides.  

Each doorway or set of windows is so unique.  I was getting ready to take a photo of one window that had lovely colored shutters and a window box of red flowers when Leon pointed out that there was a man sitting just inside the window watching me zoom in on his window.  I decided to just pass on that one!

I don’t think I mentioned that the author and Nobel Prize winner, Albert Camus, is buried in the cemetery here.  There is a street named after him, too.

There is a little boutique on the way to the laundry that I think has a problem with its spelling...

 

The Christmas lights have been turned on.  We watched the crews put them up yesterday, but tonight they were turned on.  I will have to see if I can get a photo of them.  The ones here are not gaudy like we have seen in some of the other villages.  These are simple lights strung across the street in our little plaza.  We have not seen them in other parts of town.

We made a ham sandwich with the ham we bought on market day.  We are cleaning out the refrigerator since we are leaving tomorrow.  It is always interesting to see American products here.  We bought some Pringles and Colgate toothpaste at the Super U.  The little mini fridge in this apartment is a Whirlpool.

We have a flock of pigeons that roosts on the roof across the plaza from us.  When they take off en masse, it sounds like someone turned on a huge engine.  They fly right over us, and if we are looking out the window, we automatically duck. 

 Oh, Jason and Jennifer...I saw this Jeep parked right outside our window today and thought of you.

We went to a different restaurant for dinner tonight.  They had a plat du jour which we had no clue what it was…a filet of something.  Leon ordered the rib steak and I ordered the special not knowing what it was going to be.  We were brought out our wine and a little bowl of very salty, wrinkled dark olives.  They really were quite good.  When our meals came, mine was fish.  It was really quite good.  Leon and I used to think we could at least order from a menu in France…we recognized poulet, agneau, boeuf,  and poisson, but now they are getting too detailed for us.

We decided we might as well order dessert, so we asked our waitress to recommend something.  She said she loved the tiramisu Nutella and the chocolate cake.  The owner told her she should say she “liked” those instead of “loved” but we told her that we say “loved” for food, too.  She really did not know very much English at all, but as usual, she did better than we did with French.  The desserts were wonderful.  Leon got the chocolate cake.  It was warm, dense, and very chocolaty sitting in a big pool of vanilla sauce with whipped cream on top.  Mine was served in a little jar with a lid like old fashioned canning jars.  It had a big chunk of chocolate in the bottom with a luscious pudding on top and was sprinkled with cocoa.  I did not taste Nutella, just chocolate, and no coffee flavor like tiramisu usually has, but it was delicious anyway.  We both “loved” our desserts!

  On the way back we noticed a tree that had been strung with lights, so got a photo of it.  Hard to believe that everyone is getting ready for Christmas. You can see the strings of lights in our little square in the distance.

Off to Paris tomorrow.