Just sometimes nature does a a better job at art than me!. Last night the brown and muddy lower fields of the Alps around Davos were transformed as we slept.

Whilst 4 days ago we were back to t-shirts, today we will have to put on what warm weather clothes we did not leave in St Martin and brave the elements for a much needed snowball fight. Strangely everyone else is sleeping still. How can one sleep in such silence?

It would be nice to be stuck here for a few days, but with the wonders of swiss engineering that is sadly not likely.

Today’s vista

Three days ago

Terrible I know but I have been too busy taking in the winter wonderland to write much.

I have done a couple of paintings of the village and the chalet we are in. Bloody lovely sort of sums it up.
In between painting I have been nursing my knees, my hips, and a few egos.
I hope you like my latest editions and sorry for the quality. We do what we can here in the French Alps… C’est la vie.

One of the joys of travel in winter is layering. Black on black on black as it turns out. Layering is something we are only able to do a few days a year in Melbourne and generally only indoors due to our archaic heating and insulation.

M reminded me of staying in Kaikoura Ave with Penny and I the 90’s where the floor boards were so wide apart you could see through them and you needed a beanie indoors. I then recalled the day I got up for work, had breakfast in aforementioned beanie plus coat, scarf and woolen socks with boots. Once I’d eaten I grabbed my bag and left. Whilst waiting for my change of train at Spencer St station I noticed in a window reflection that there was a bag lady following me. On closer inspection it turned out to be me, still in my pyjamas (and beanie).

Needless to say any subsequent and previous clothing faux pax does not parallel turning up to work in pjs.

This brings me to a more serious topic of the numbers of homeless people sleeping rough on the streets of Europe in the middle of Winter. Most disturbing are the Roma children begging with their mothers. What sort of a life is that? It makes me so angry on so many levels.

Its one of the difficult things you really have no good answers to when your kids ask why. The puppies are bad enough. Every second beggar has a puppy. What happens to them when they are no longer cute? But then they may be the only love they get. And the people asleep across the pavement in the rain in the middle of a busy shopping strip. We are very sheltered in Northcote. It is far from PNG.

Today 10.20, still at home on second coffee. Yesterday’s 690 steps+ up the Eiffel Tower, followed by four hours of walking was too much for some, even though we had climbed three bell towers in preparation. Unlike the youth hostels of old, which made themselves as unappealing as possible to get you going (and besides they close their doors from 10 till 2) the places we are staying in are so homely and cosy that we can barely drag ourselves away. This ‘charming flat in the Sorbonne’, sides onto the ‘smallest street in Paris’ and it has a bathroom to match, where even my knees touch the wall when I am on the loo and I need to have the door open to stand in front of the sink. The floor, walls and ceiling are on a slope so it appears that we are in a perpetual Escher painting and you don’t even need to have indulged in 3 Euro bottles of sav blanc to stagger about the room. Totally gorgeous. Totally what ones expects from a building with 13th century foundations. It is a slight change from M and M’s apartment whose living space was possibly larger then our whole Northcote block. With 5 storeys from laundry to playroom, who needs jogging or the gym.

…. it is the next day now as Mick and I spend every evening playing scrabble online and making up words, many of which the computer accepts. What on earth is a wawa or laids. When in doubt just make up a work and hit ‘play’. Anyhow, I rarely have time to write as I labour for hours over how to use my ‘x’, ‘z’ and ‘g’ in the same word. I am going to try to cover a few days with this one.

(two days later)

Going backwards… we have just had a great meal with 5 tired kids at a restaurant called Fish a Bouillabaise. Apparently it is an Anglo hang out, though we did not know this as we walked past. It just had an interesting menu and could seat 9. The staff speak perfect English, but the menu is only in French. They offered to do us a special menu for the kids of Barley with eschalotte sauce. Frenchy ate hers. Lala required some bribing. When we left it was packed and there were people waiting for tables, glasses of wine in hand inside and out, even though it was about 1 degree.

This followed an excellent lunch at the Musee D’Orsay, in the old train station dining room, with a ceiling to rival St Peters in Rome. We arrived there about 1pm to find that there was a queue of about 400-500 people (give or take) and we were all set to bail when M decides to have a chat to the man at the door who promptly waves us past the whole queue. Go figure! M claims he just said that the kids were hungry. Maybe that is all it takes in France: Les Enfants qui ont faim. Once inside it was absolutely overwhelming: the architecture, the artwork, the sheer amount of people. The kids of course were soon restless and underwhelmed by the art, but did not lie on the ground claiming utter boredom as they did at the Uffizzi. Instead they ran around and we were given two whole hours to see a couple of thousand works.

Getting around town with 9 people is always a bit of an effort. Our last two big journeys also involved 9 but we had 3 boys to complement our two girls. the boys kept things moving and also provided entertainment for our two watching the boys beat each other up all day. This trip the girls have taken to beating each other up, which, along side, not having trimmed their nails has made for a few tears. Today we are off the the louvre with the promise of no conceptual art and more hot chocolate