Back in Céret! The trip back to France from New Zealand went well. Despite 43 hours of travel, including 5 flights, 2 buses and 2 train trips, we are fine today, the morning after our arrival. No dramas with the trip at all, though the TGV train into Perpignan was a few minutes late, and we nearly missed the first 1€ bus to Céret, not that it would have mattered a whit.
We finally got into our original apartment at 6pm Wednesday, rather worn out, but very pleased to be back. Our apartment was, not surprisingly, exactly as we had left it. It makes the travelling so easy when you simply have to unlock the door, turn on the power, and life can begin again in a whole new world.
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After simply dropping our bags off, the first priority was to climb up the stairs to the new apartment to see what had happened inside. Great news. It was clean and tidy, the last of the fittings had been stripped out, and Monsieur Freitas had marked out the mezzanine, with the first notch cut out of the wall for one of the beams. The perfect state for us to be there and get work under way in earnest. We can see that the headroom above the front edge of the mezzanine would be marginal, and so we will lower the mezzanine floor a little to improve it. Very pleased we got there in the nick of time. We are so excited. We can see that the space is going to be lovely.
Next was Bar Pablo to say hello, which of course turned into a coffee. Absurdly, our friends Liz and Ross arrived all the way from Australia while we were still sipping. We'd all four of us spent the previous day and a half on planes, us via Dubai and Barcelona, and them via Kuala Lumpur and Paris. Different ends of the plane though. We had a very pleasant hour catching up, seated outside in the relatively warm evening. We'd planned to get a few things for the morning at the little supermarket, but left it too late, so dinner was a kebab from Chez Mercé.
To bed early, expecting to wake during the night, which indeed happened. At 2am I thought to check if we had any UHT milk I could load into the fridge for breakfast, but we had finished it last trip, and the best I could do was to load some beer in. I'm sure it will go well with muesli.
Thursday saw us up bright and early(ish) and off to Netto for vital supplies for breakfast and lunch. A couple of huge red peppers, 4 varied cheeses, some serrano ham, a baguette and two 500g boxes of strawberries set us back less than $NZ20. Unbelievable! We came back to our apartment feeling that we are indeed in the right place to be.
Everybody is sneezing. The plane trees are releasing clouds of fine fluff, and it is getting up people's noses, both figuratively and physically.
