Mr. Vincent is cleaning the pool

I have easily settled into Millau. Our little chalet porch overlooks the only gym in Millau, which is run by Mr. Vincent, who also owns the chalets. He is an intersting little man with eighties permed and frosted hair, full of gel and somehow still a little frizzy. We can always hear it when he teaches aerobics, because the bad eighties music gets loud enought to drift through our usually open front door. Whenever he sees us sitting outdoors, he comes out and greet us in French, then for my and Jed's benefit adds in English, France is good, no? It is, we agree.

Millau is a compact city and everything radiates out from the Village Centre, which is marked by the giant water fountain that comes on around 9 am. All the red rooved buildings are settled into the valley and up on the fills around it, and the road out heads straight under the Viaduct. In the evening sunset it would make a great ending to a French Western. Do the French have Western movies? I don't know, I gave up on French TV shortly after my dive into French Wheel of Fortune.

All the women here, and most of the men, walk the streets with prams. According to French Glamour all the women who don't already have babies by the time they are 35 will have them afterwards for sure. Crossing the street can be tricky business, because one is so easily disctracted by cute small children that there isn't always time to look for oncoming traffic. This may actually work to my benefit because you need a great deal of confidence to cross the streets. They don't have stop signs and rarely have signals. There are roundabouts instead, and if you want to cross the best thing to do is step out into the street and hope the drivers will stop for you. I haven't made up my mind yet, but the overall consensus as far as I can tell is that the French are good drivers (translation: good brakers) and though they drive fast, they also stop fast so pedestrians aren't usually in danger. Justin says the key is making eye contact; I guess the idea is that if they acknowledge your presence they cannot in good conscience pretend they didn't see you and then run you down.

There are bakeries and butcher shops everywhere, though the idea of the "super store" is becoming more common. More and more western style stores with everything available are around, like Super U and Spar. Yesterday, we ventured out to Geant which is a sad little mini-mall like place with two cheap shoe stores, only one of which was opened, a cheap clothing store, closed for renovation, and two giant and cheap supermarkets. I guess I prefer the Super U at first, and the market second.

Jed and I went to the market the other day and it was lovely. Besides being a beautiful sunny day, we wandered through the closed streets and watched all the people buying meat, fruit and bread for the next few day's of meals. Market it three days a week. The sidewalk we came down to walk into it went past a long row of interesting and delicious looking breads, but not before we passed a trailer full of raw meat. I looked over just in time to see the proprietor swinging two dead and skinned rabbits up onto the scale. I don't want to say that they were bloody, but they were certainly freshly dead and quite red. I think it may have scarred me; I can't fully explain how, because fresh meat is better than frozen, but I don't want to eat rabbit and besides that it was just gross.

The days here alternate between slightly cloudy but warm and super warm with endless blue, unbroken by so much as a wisp of clouds. There are hanggliders over the cliff daily, and to top it all off, Mr. Vincent is cleaning the pool. Spring is afoot.