Hang in there kids... it's a going to be a long one...
On a very grey and wet Saturday in November, seven expat bloggers braved the rain to meet up for lunch in a tiny
Corsican restaurant in Avignon for Blogapalooza, the second (
the first one was in Aix last March).
Some of the same faces were there but some new ones as well; Sarah of
St Bloggie de Riviere came along with Samantha from
Life, Love, and Living in France, Ameena from
Mummy in Provence, (
and to any Americans reading this... that's Mummy like Mommy, not mummy like scary, dead, Pharaoh), B from
Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Cheese, Aidan from
Conjugating Irregular Verbs (
I don't seem to do much of anything without Aidan nowadays do I? Well I don't, and I don't want to, so there... I may or may not have stuck my tongue out at my laptop right now). Crafty Kirsty from
You Had Me at Bonjour and Piglet from
Piglet in France came with the two newest additions... babies!
In fairness, the babies were there for the last Blogapalooza but they just weren't out yet. So really, they weren't the newest additions; Sarah, Ameena, and Samantha were. But anyways.
We couldn't have picked a better day if we tried, while the rest of Avignon seemed to have stayed indoors and out of the rain, we had the entire restaurant to ourselves. How cool is that? We got to speak English in our American, Australian and British accents as loud as we wanted without dealing with any stares from other tables. That's pretty much an expats idea of heaven... chatter, gossip, chatter in our native tongue without fear of the French stares.
And after three hours of chattering, laughing, and sharing stories it was time to head back into the rain. Aidan, B and I had some place to be. You see, not only was the weekend in Avignon a happy Blogapalooza occasion, it was a sad one too.
{throw another shrimp on the barbie mate}
(Sidebar: do you see that old map of Ireland hanging behind B & M? My Mom has the same one hanging in her house. No wonder I felt so at home at that pub. Pub = Mom's house. Huh. It all makes sense now.)
It was our goodbye to B and her husband, M. My buddy B. My little Australian koala is headed back to Australia with her husband to have their baby, and start their life fresh again in Melbourne.
So since we were blogapaloozing for the afternoon, we decided to bring our husbands along and make a weekend out of it. A proper goodbye weekend.
After lunch we found our husbands in an Irish pub having pints and watching rugby (
shocking right?!). There wasn't really anything to do but join them. I mean it was raining outside, and the rugby was on. Pints all around please (
except for B... her baby koala didn't want one).
Pints, rugby, chat, laugh, repeat... was followed by dinner at
Fou de Fafa. Listen up my little friends... if you find yourself in Avignon, Fou de Fafa is where you want to eat. Holy schnikeys it was good! But you have to make reservations, they are always booked solid, because yeah, it's that good.
Moving on.
Of course we couldn't just say goodnight and bid adieu after dinner... no no no... it was a goodbye weekend after all, so what to do to but return to the Irish pub where someone had this clever idea...
{you never learn, do you}
And that someone was not me.
And then the next thing you know, after you've been hand-jiving to songs from Grease (in a pub... so embarrassing), and it's the wrong side of midnight and you think that we all really should be saying goodnight, but then someone (not me again) has the maybe-not-so-brilliant idea to beg the night watchmen at the hotel for a bottle of wine from the bar so that we can keep on saying goodbye... so we did.
Then morning comes and that same person who was looking for wine on the wrong side of midnight isn't feeling so hot (and again... not me).
But then we really had to say goodbye because unfortunately, crazy fun weekends saying goodbye to friends in Avignon don't last forever.
To B & M...
wishing you both
much love, luck, and happiness
back in Australia.
Le Petit Village will miss you.
gros bisous
P.S. Happy Birthday Miss Minnesota! I hope your year is full of silver dollar pancakes.