Not goodbye forever

Goodbye Grenoble. I cannot express, not in my broken French or fluent English, how thankful I am to the family I have stayed with in Grenoble. Or how much I love them. It has been an honour to live with them, be part of their normal life and get to know them. They have continually…

All naturale

The last few days have been outdoors and wonderful! The family owns a plot of land 30 minutes from the house where they have flourishing vegetables. Last Thursday, while her parents chopped wood and harvested, I took care of the one year old, making food from the many ingredients a leaf could pretend to be…

Up where they fly from

Today we drove up and up the mountains to see one of the spots where the paragliders take off. On the way we got lost. But that was excellent, because we found a group of huge abandoned buildings! It looks like they used to be hotels, but now they are only shells. Lost in time…

Family Weekend

The weekend was filled with bouncing from one meal to the next with different family members. Saturday morning I had the honour of watching Dad’s cousin’s wife work her magic in hairdressing. Then we had lunch at her parents house. They are Italian, so the food and company is always exquisit. They adopted me as…

End of week 1

Some accomplishments this week: Having an almost 2 year old say ‘Happy Birthday’ to me in two languages! Being given a new name: “Brittany”, because they can’t say my real name. Getting up two hours before everyone else on Monday because I didn’t know when they would get up. Going shopping a few times. The…

A cloudy night

We went to a restaurant tonight in a town nestled in the mountains. The view made my breath stick to the back of my throat. In other words, it took my breath away. It wasn’t much to look at at a glance, but, when I stopped and looked, I could have stayed in that moment…

A few of my favourite things

While traveling: one has been visiting chateaus. They are so diverse and huge, with such varying histories. The word ‘chateau’ roughly translates to ‘castle’, and I am using the word here to include the castles we saw in England, but in Franc they are more like large estates. Except the one we saw today! It…

And then there was one….

…immersed in a sea of French culture and family. Sunday morning my parents and younger sister, with whom I had been traveling, jumped in the campervan headed to Australia via Heathrow. Inability to grasp the reality of their forthcoming departure made me numb, yet after my sister and I sang our farewell I said a…

The Lakes District

Today we walked through the rolling hills of the southern Lake District to get to Hill Top (Beatrix Potter’s house). It was beautiful and so calming. It felt like home. Before I left Australia, I supposed that one thing I would be homesick for would be the wild Australian Bush. If Belgium is anything like…