A few shots taken the last few days.

I liked this place smat and napkin displayed outside a home store in Forcalquier.

Colorful strands of garlic for sale.

A stack of chair cushions.

Wouldn’t you like this on your balcony? I don’t have one either.

My daughter in law ordered this tartine making me wish I had too instead of my boring salad.

Forcalquier, a village northeast from us on the other side of the Luberon mountains, is home to a huge Monday market. We often take guests there and it is always packed with tourists and locals alike. It is spread out over a large area in the village, below a hill topped with the ruins of a citadel from the 10th century and a chapel. I see some of the same sellers here that I see in Apt or Lourmarin. That must be an interesting life, moving from city to city each day, setting up your wares, selling things in searing heat or blowing cold wind and rain.

Colorful signs made of pottery. Expensive though.

I often see this divinity for sale but I don’t think I’ve seen it with cherries before. We bought some and it was really good.

There are always hats for sale. I took this photo because the little girl looked so darling in her hat but she turned her head before I could get a good shot. She bought another hat. I bought one too, a panama to look more stylish than I usually do.

This booth was selling pottery jars and vases and took the time to put some daisies in their display.

I wanted one of these caserole dishes just because I liked the design on them. I didn’t buy one though as I thought they were too expensive.

Getting my French driver’s license has really turned out to be an ordeal. I found that I had enormous holes in my French vocabulary and that there were many words or terms in French that I didn’t know. An example of this was the verb, franchir. It confused me at first because I thought it was a form of franc, which means to be frank and open. It turned out to mean to cross, as in going over a line.
The class takes place in a really small building in a room that holds about 25 chairs. It can get really hot. Thank God there is a portable a/c unit there (that is if the instructor doesn’t move it to the front room where she is). The class works with DVD’s. There are 20 of them, I believe, with six different sections of 40 questions each, and we sit and watch photos and questions are given about the photos, such as a street with a sign to the right of the road and we are either given a choice of four answers or choices, or two choices -yes or no-about that sign and street. If a question has 3 possible correct answers and you miss one, you miss the whole question. There are two types of tests, one with 40 questions, and one with 20 which gives questions on a specific subject, such as signs or signilisation. You have to consistently miss fewer than four on the 40 question tests before they feel you are ready for the real thing. You can’t miss more than four on the real thing either or you won’t pass. Oh, and did I mention that the questions are timed? There are 30 seconds to get your answers down. So, I have to translate the French, figure out what some new to me word means and also then answer the question. I have to take my test in Avignon where they are set up for foreigners who don’t speak French well and they will probably require me to pay for an interpreter although after sitting through this class for so long-over two months-and learning everything, I’m not sure if I even need one. New since I wrote this-I’m going to take the test in Pertuis in French because I don’t want to wait until September or even possibly December to have a translator. I can’t remember all of the information that long and I sure don’t want to keep taking the classes until then. They only have tests with translators when there are a certain number of people wanting to take them.
As you might guess, the driver’s ed classes are filled with mostly younger people, although I’m not always the only older person there. I now recogonize many of the young people either riding bikes or motor scooters or hitching a ride here and there. Some older adults have gotten too many tickets and are required to take the course again although I’m not sure for how long. The classes are given every day but Sunday with Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday having classes at 10 and 11 AM, and Monday, Wednesday and Friday having classes at 4, 5 and 6 PM. The first couple of weeks I only went every other day but was doing so poorly on the tests that I decided to go every single day until I mastered the material. Usually on Tuesday and Thursday morning there are fewer people and, in particular, an older lady about my age. She is very funny and has “un blockage” as she says and isn’t doing very well. It brightens my day a little to know that many of the French people in the class are doing worse than I am and they understand French. The problem is that many of the questions are tricky and you have to figure out what the heck they want. An example: the rule is that if there are no signs or lights at an intersection, the car on the right has the right of way. So everytime a photo comes up of a car to the right you look for a stop sign or yield sign for that car or a white line or dash line indicating that the car is required to stop and that you have the right of way. So they put up a photo of a car waiting on a side street. There are no signs for them, no lines painted on the road in front of them. Everyone usually guesses that the car has the right of way. But, wait! It is a small side street, a sort of alley, so it turns out that they don’t have the right of way. You have to notice all of this, analyze the situation and get the right answer.
One Tuesday morning, the funny lady, three young people and I were there for the class. The door was closed as the DVD started and they all started talking amongst themselves talking about the questions. A photo came up and the older woman said to the young guy next to her, “What’s the answer?” and he confidentally told her. He sounded so sure of himself that I changed my answer. It turned out to be wrong. The teacher finally yelled through the closed door that everyone needed to stop talking. When we finished and had to take our papers in to be graded by the teacher, the older woman said, “What was the answer to number 10?” A young girl said, “A and D”. I looked at my test and had only put down A, so I quickly circled D which turned out to be wrong too. For the second class I ignored them and only missed four instead of the seven I missed with their “help”.
The French have this noise they make, a sort of popping, spitting without the spit sound, maybe pppbbb? They use it in place of the American shrug or to say, “I don’t know”. Maurice uses it all of the time. “Do you know where the hammer is?” “Pppbbb”. And so on. It makes me smile in class when a situtation is shown on the DVD in class and we have to pick one of four possible answers and I hear someone behind me make that sound. It means they don’t have a clue as to what the answer is. I, naturally, know just how they feel.
The main teacher is a nice lady, the one who told me that the course would be very hard-boy, was she ever right. Sometimes, after we have done a test of twenty questions instead of watching the correct answers and explanations on the video, she will come in and go through each question and give an explanation. I don’t understand all of what she says, but she is very good at teaching and getting her point across. If the young people in the class get rowdy, she tells them to shut up. She doesn’t take anything from them. They obey too. One day I parked in a lot that is usually open but when I came out the gate had been closed. The only way out had been blocked but a huge stack of large wooden slats used to move heavy items, like a huge pile of bricks or the like. She came out and helped me move about twenty of them so I could get out-hot and sweaty work. Those things were really heavy. I didn’t have a choice though. I never parked there again, of course.
So my written test-in French-will be on August 12th. It takes about three months to get prepared enough to take the test. I’m so hoping I will pass and can stop going to the driver’s ed classes. I’m really getting bored by them and the constant driving back and forth. Believe me, if I pass the world will know. You may see it on Times Square.

Along with lavender, you can find fields of sunflowers in Provence too. On the way to Valensole, we stopped at a sunflower field to take photos but it didn’t turn out to be a good field. It was really on its way out, with heavy flower heads dropping over, many without petals but the kids were fascinated with the seeds inside.

They hadn’t seen sunflowers in fields before. They took some seeds to see if they can grow their own next year.

I had to search to find any sunflowers to photograph. Still a thrill to be driving along and see a field of these flowers blooming.

Decorating is not my thing even though I am always looking at decorating blogs. I know that our living room really needs some help from someone who has that special touch and knowledge but never really found anyone until Corey . She is a decorator extraordinaire with that decorating gene that I wasn’t born with and an expert at finding buys at brocantes. She is an American married to a Frenchman and also lives in Provence. When you say that someone lives in Provence that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are within walking distance of your house, or even 15 or 30 minutes away. Provence is a huge area. It turns out that Corey lives an hour away from our home as we found out when she kindly invited us over for dinner one night. Her place is just as fabulous as you might expect. I had my camera and it was all I could do to not run around like a paparazzi taking photos. I restrained myself but did get a few shots. You can see what great taste she has.

An urn filled with all sorts of interesting antique things.

The bathroom. She wrote a really interesting post on decorating it, from finding the tub and painting it, to covering herself in paint doing something different on the walls.

Anyway, to my delight and amazement, she has offered to help me decorate my living room. She has yet to see it except in photos with summer so busy (plus she is going off to Prague with her husband on his motorcycle any day now) but maybe after August. Maurice and I went to a brocante in Pertuis, a city near us, and saw an armoir that we thought might help the looks of our living room. It wasn’t that old but it had been decorated with touches of yellow-we have light, creamy yellow walls-and it would be delivered for free. I sent Corey a photo in an email and asked her opinion. She thought they were asking a little too much but she liked the armoir. We negociated with the antique dealer, got the price down and now have our French armoir. I think it really looks great although I still need to find some things to go on the top of it. Isn’t the blogging world amazing?

Here it is. It also gives me more storage space

I made it to yet another Lavender Festival at Valensole. Each year it seems more crowded and this year they had huge fields cleared for parking. There were many many booths selling lavender products. I bought some lavender oil and lavender honey (although the nuns weren’t there this year selling their’s).

Lavender infused sponges. I kind of wanted one of these.

The lady who makes these lavender incense sticks is there each year. They last for two hours.

Lavender scented and colored teddy bears.