Weekends on the French Riviera
For us, weekends on the French Riviera vary between being on-the-go the entire time, or being quiet, lazy and peaceful. This weekend is one of the quiet, lazy ones, and I’m looking forward to it!
Our routine on the weekends is different from the weekdays. Saturday mornings we may or may not sleep in, but we enjoy coffee and tea in bed, with fresh croissants picked up from the bakery around the corner. (Whoever gets up first usually walks over to get them.) While we enjoy our “petit dejeuner” (pronounced pe-tee day-jen-nay), we’re each usually on our laptops, and we share bits of the latest news with each other, or emails, and synchronize our calendars for the coming week.
After that, we read the bible – Alain got one of those daily calendars for Christmas last year, so we’ve been doing one chapter a day, and at the end of the year, will have gone through the entire bible.
And then we read something about French history. Right now we’re into French art, and reading about the “Fauvism” period. Something that’s endlessly fascinating to me is reading about a particular French painter and then being able to go and see an exhibition of his art. We did that a couple of weeks ago, when we went to St. Tropez for the day to l’Annonciade museum, to see an exhibition of the work of Maximilien Luce (1858-1941) who was a painter of the Neo-Impressionist movement in the late 1800s.
And after that, we get up, do a little housework or go to the open air market, which, in Toulon, is open every morning until 12:30 or so, except Mondays.
We usually eat lunch here at the house, although sometimes we’ll go pick up Alain’s dad and then drive into the mountains, or out into the French countryside, have lunch at some little out-of-the-way restaurant, and explore the area.
This weekend, we’re going to go somewhere ourselves this afternoon – there’s a scuba diving museum I haven’t seen that Alain wants to show me (I’m thinking about how to turn it into a paying article), and then tomorrow morning we’ll pick up beau-dad (my pet name for my father-in-law) and we’ll go have lunch somewhere.
In the evenings we may catch a movie, take a walk along the beach – there are so many choices and the Med is endlessly fascinating and draws me like a magnet, or visit with friends.
What I love about our lazy weekends here on the French Riviera is just that. That chance to unplug, unwind and just spend time together.
Tags:Daily Life,Fauvism,French Art,Museums,Saint Tropez
Tags: 
Loading ...