City of cats and joggers (and good hospitality)

Limoges (week 3)

One of Craig's former students, Thomas Kraft, is doing a PhD at Université de Limoges, and that city's central location made it an ideal place to take a mini-break on the trip between Normandy and Provence.  So we stayed an entire day (two nights) there, with Yolanda taking the kids much of the day (just hanging out at the apartment-style hotel) and Craig going to campus for a tour and to give a departmental seminar.  He then went for lunch with Thomas and a few of his colleagues, before picking Yolanda and the boys up to run some errands: specifically getting Yolanda's cell phone switched over to a European SIM card and navigating the payment system.  While Thomas was helping translate (both language and the intricacies of the French telecom system), Craig took the boys to the local aquarium.  It was small in floor space but large in the number of actual aquaria they stuffed into the room, including something none of us had seen before - a tank where you could pat fish (as opposed to rays, which they had in Clearwater and Cité de la Mer).

The hotel was located right on the Vienne River, next to the Bridge of St. Martial, which has a foundation dating back to when Limoges was the Roman city of  Augustoritum.  There is a favoured jogging path nearby (based on the number of joggers we saw) and everyone in that area seems to own a cat.

Thomas, us four, Mme, Thierry, Manon, and Claudio

The food situation requires its own paragraph.  On the night we arrived, we just walked into a family-run place next to the hotel, which turned out to have just one menu and no à la carte choices (in French, "menu" means a prix-fixe multi-course dinner).  It turned out well, though, with simple salad and beef/fries as the plât (main course).  The place was popular with single men who congregated in one corner and you got the impression they were regulars.  Craig's lunch with the Limoges gang was in an out-of-the-way "steak-house" where they keep cows (literally) in the basement and sell steak upstairs in the restaurant.  But most interestingly, one of Thomas's supervisors Thierry Monédière invited the whole family (along with Thomas and another PhD candidate, Claudio) to a BBQ at his house that night.  The boys did very well, running around in the yard and later playing Wii (MarioKart) with Thierry's teenaged daughter.  The dinner went very well - with Thomas and Claudio helping to translate, a mixture of our French and the family's English kept the conversation moving and an enjoyable time was had by all.  Claudio and Craig bonded over a common set of favourite bands: Rush, Frank Zappa, etc. (perhaps oddly since Claudio grew up in Italy).