A letter from St Paul to the Australians…

Waiting for a ferry at Cannes

Well not really, we are now in Rivalta Italy near Bra at the home of our WWOOFing hosts Silvana and Enzo but we couldnt pass up the opportunity to use such a cool title.

Our time in France ended well, on our last day we did a bit of star spotting. Instead of going to check out Monaco (it was two days before the Grand Prix and the roads, and drivers, are crazy here at the best of times, we had avoided any bingles on our hire car and didnt want to push our luck) we decided to explore St Paul Du Vence again, a little fortified village where we were staying, 10kilometres north of Nice. As we were about to leave the village we passed a shiney black mercedes 4WD with its windows open pulled up on the curb next to us and I heard American voices inside but didnt pay much attention. When we walked past Chris said “Deanna that was Leonardo Dicaprio in that car”  and he then got out of the car and walked around. Another person also got out of the car- we dont want to start any rumours but it might have been Lauren Conrad 🙂

The day before we went to Cannes, it was one week after the film festival so there was still plenty of people around plus a lot of serious looking polic and people dismantling the stages and arenas for the event. We took a ferry across to Isle De Saint Marguerite a little island about 2 kilometres off Cannes. It is the location of a fort that was once used to look out for the mainland and later become a prison for prisonners that were incarcerated by order of the king declared a threat to the monarchy or the safety of the State or religion- probably what we would now call terrorists. There was only one person to ever come into contact with the prisoners and there were no records kept or no trial held, it sounded a bit like an early version of Guantanamo. This is where the Man with the Iron Mask was held for over 10 years before being moved to Bastide in Paris where he died. There is also a museum there with exhibits of items found underwater from ancient Roman shipwrecks dating back to first century BC. It was amazing. We walked around the island and found a gorgeous secluded little restaurant but after lookin at the prices of the meals we decided just to have two small bottles of Perrier. When we asked for the bill we got a bit of a shock- it was 14 euros for two little bottles, about a litre in total. We were stunned, this was our first experience of an exhorbitant bill in Europe!

After leaving our little gite, a little reluctantly as it was so cute, we delivered our hire car to Nice and caught a couple of trains to Bra, Italy (the home of SlowFood) where half of our WWOOF hosts Silvana picked us up. We got to the house around 7pm and met some other WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) from America, this was quite handy as they were able to give us the unofficial “lowdown” on the place like what was expected of us, what time we were to get up, whether or not we should help with the dishes etc etc. Enzo, the husband, got home around 12pm that night from working at the markets. We ate tea around 11:30pm- it is a very different lifestyle to us. The next day, Sunday, Enzo was due to go to some markets in Dolceaqua (meaning Sweetwater) inland from Ventimiglia, it is another fortified village, for some more markets so we offered to go to help. We left at 7am in the morning and drove about 3 hours arriving at the markets around 10am where we helped to set up. We left the markets that evening at around 9am and arrived home at 12pm. It was a very long day but really good fun.