Limoges

Bonjour mes amis!

I hope all is well with all of you and that you haven’t been too cold – I hear it’s absolutely freezing in many parts of the US! As I may have posted earlier, it’s been miserably cold here for about the past month – I think that’s how long there’s been snow on the ground, too! It finally got above freezing today (I think the high was in the upper 30s) and it felt SO warm! Other than the cold, I’ve been doing well since my last post, and of course I’ve had more adventures since then!

Hilary and I went to Limoges this weekend, which was snowy and cold, but really fun! For those of you who are thinking, “Hmmm… Limoges… That name sounds familiar, where have I heard that before?,” Limoges is world-famous for its china and its porcelain. We arrived on Saturday around lunchtime and then spent the afternoon exploring the city and doing some shopping. The French only have sales twice a year – in January and in July – so we had to seize the moment! It would have been irresponsible not to, right?!? We visited several churches, all of which were (to our surprise and delight) heated and had lovely stained glass windows. Most of them also still had their Christmas decorations and Nativity scenes up, so that was nice to see as well. We did have a sad moment when we tried to go to one of the city’s museums to see their collection of porcelain and art and couldn’t find a way to get into the building. They were doing work on the building, so there were big work sites up all around it – we walked all the way around the entire building and never once saw a door through which you could enter! We never found a sign explaining if/why it was closed, either, but then, I guess we ARE in France! We walked through the older section of Limoges after that, and found a cute little half-timbered street called rue de la Boucherie (literally, the butcher’s street) with a tiny chapel dedicated to St. Aurelien, the patron saint of Limoges’ guild of butchers – very different, but pretty cool!

On Sunday we visited the Musée National André Dubouché, a great collection of porcelain in a beautiful building. It was completely dedicated to porcelain, but it had a video about the production of porcelain that was actually legitimately very interesting, and it had a lot of cool stuff! For example, I saw a plate that was made in 1345 in China and is now one of the most valuable pieces of porcelain in the world. They’d also made reproductions of [past and present] heads of state from countries around the world, so I got to see what Abraham Lincoln’s plates looked like! (The have a bald eagle in the middle, then a ring of purple around the edge of the plate, in case you were curious.) Our trains back to Nevers from Limoges were slightly delayed on Sunday night because of bad winter weather, so I was glad to get back to my warm, dry apartment after so much time spent outside!

My teaching schedule changes on Monday, so this is my last week with my current classes. While I’m certainly glad to be done with a few of my classes, I’m pretty sad I won’t have some of them anymore – they’d grown on me! I’m sure my new schools, classes, and teachers will be fine, but I definitely don’t relish the idea of starting all over again and of having no idea how things are run! I hope all is well with all of you, gros bisous de Nevers!