France Wk 2: 18-24 June; House Hunting, New Car & Exploring Pau

This week was all about house hunting. We'd seen a few during week one, but none of them had interested us so we sat tight and hoped for a chink of light in the ever diminishing pool of houses on Leboncoin. This week, we viewed two, both in town and both which drew us in for different reasons.

House 1: Cool and quirky. Decent size and a somewhat overgrown garden. Retro kitchen and bathrooms. Not available until the middle of July (four weeks away!)

House 2: Completely unfurnished. Available now. Old house but just been refurbished so very modern kitchen and bathrrom. Huge! 6 bedrooms but only one bathroom. Across the road from the pool. Very overgrown garden.

We saw the second one on the Thursday so Christelle gave us the weekend to make our decision. Did we want either, or none. Decision coming next week! 

Away from the house hunt, this was another busy week of exploring. Every day is a total adventure when you don't know how to do even the most simple things like where you can park if you need to drive into town to collect a cheque from the bank (yes, that's how we were expected to pay for our car) or buy fruit and veg at the supermarket. (For your information, you need to weigh everything and get price stickers for your bags before taking them to the check-out). 

How to remember where you parked your car in a massive underground park? Snap it. 

Some funky art installations William and I stumbled across in the Joffre Arcade (yes, Joffre!)

This was just a regular Friday morning at Auchan. You don't want to hold everyone up by not weighing your fruit and veggies. Imagine doing a thing like that?! Btw, I reckon they could learn a whole lot from New World and get shopping packers in. 

Our new wheels. Hurrah! 

The weather continued to hit some extremely high temperatures but gave us respite on other days. William got up to all sorts of nonsense in our wee room; climbing onto the desk to try and get Sarah and Duck to play on the MacBook (EEEEEK!) and taking over our bed. Cheeky! 

We also hung out some more at Idron playpark; just William and me, and also Iain, William and me. It's a lovely spot. It's weird though that during the day, we were the only people there. In general, French women return to work after around three months of maternity leave and their kids go into full-time care via the heavily state funded crèche system. Thus, play parks are empty during the day (apart from the ex-pat-mum-crew!)   

After our walk with Julie at Lons Lac. 

 And then it was the weekend. We parked our car at House 1 to see how long it would take us to walk into town (turns out, about 15mins) and we stoated about our new town and drank GnTs in the square.

All the fun of the fair! 

His Dad takes him to all the best places (an army supply store in Tarbes). 

What a week! Phew!
LM.