Festy Weekend

Puyloubier, Trets, and Pourrières (week 9)

Craig and Yolanda with their tasting glasses

According to the caretaker for our place, this is the last weekend before the grape harvest (he warned us to be on the lookout for tractors "everywhere").  Because of this, it's festival weekend throughout the region.  On Saturday we stumbled on Pourrières's club days, with judo and wrestling demonstrations (and probably others we didn't see), booths set up to recruit for the film club, model plane flying club, etc.

On Sunday, Trets had a food fair, with booths selling food and local wineries plying their fares.  For €3 you could buy a tasting glass, and go booth-to-booth for samples.  The food was from various restaurants in the area, including a few from Marseille and several from Aix, so it was higher quality than "fast food" (sort of like Fox-on-the-Run, for you Thunder Bay people). 

Craig's first bumpercar ride in 20-ish years

Meanwhile, starting Friday afternoon and continuing into the next week is the Puyloubier Fête.  It is basically what we would call an exhibition - with carnival rides, concerts each night, fireworks, and various vendors.  There are pétanque competitions (a type of lawn bowling - for those of you who've played Assassin's Creed III, it's that type); the entry fee is €450 per team of three, so you can see they take their boules seriously!  We went out Sunday night for the kids to play on the midway - we all played foosball, David tried his hand at the video arcade, David and Andrew played air hockey, and everyone but Andrew went on the bumpercars.  Unfortunately, the town is so small that the bumpercars only ran when a group of kids arrived together to use the ride.  Otherwise, we had to wait around until enough people arrived and go in with them.  We eventually got tired of waiting for the adult cars (David went on the kids cars with group of local kids) so Yolanda, Craig, and David went just the 3 of them.

Fireworks as seen from our terrace

On Saturday morning, the grand opening was a ceremony called "Awakening the Wolf".  It was never clear to us why someone would want to do this, but the kids sang the waking song louder and louder, and eventually the wolf mascot awakens and comes out of his cage, holding the key to the town (which was then given to one of the lucky singers).  The song was an old Provençal folk tune, in the Provençal (Occitan) language, so the kids had to be taught the words on the spot.  They also all got bandanas with the local town crest on them.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the noise bylaws are quite a bit less stringent in France - so the rock concert went blasting away until 2 am both Friday and Saturday nights .... then the workers clanked away another 2 hours tearing down the stage gear to prepare for the next day.  Luckily David and Andrew can sleep through anything, 2 am is Yolanda's normal bedtime, and Craig learned how to sleep through any volume of music having once lived on the 3rd floor of Cameron House.