Dijon and Burgundy

We have spent 5 days in Burgundy in North Eastern France near the city of Dijon.  Dijon is where the mustard is made, it is also a wine area where they make a wine called Beaujolais and they grow and eat snails too!! My mum likes snails but I don't.

We went to Dijon to have a look at the buildings and the city and we had a picnic lunch.  We also went to a town called Gray which has some of the decorative tiled roof that are found int his area - they look like coloured foil.

It is very cold here, it is often below zero in the mornings and only gets to 5-8 in the day, but we have jackets and gloves and boots and hats so we are ok!

Tomorrow we are going to Lego Land in Germany.

the view of the frost from our bedroom

working on the computer in front of the fire

our house

the decorative roofs

an old pigeoneer and lavoir

Liam, my dad and I in Gray

Cannes, Monaco and Grasse

We went on a really big road trip up the Mediterranean from Cannes to Monaco and back through Grasse.

Cannes is where the Cannes Film Festival is held each year.  It is right on the water with a long, wide beach.  There is a walkway above the beach and really expensive designer shops along the road.  The beach is hard to get on to because all the hotels and restaurants have private access to the beach and you have to pay to eat or stay there to get to the beach.  They also charge you for chairs or umbrellas on the beach!  We went down to the beach near one of the big hotels and then walked along through the water.  The water was gorgeous, so clear and clean.

After Cannes we drove up the coast towards Nice and Monaco and we stopped at a beach and had a picnic lunch and a quick swim.

Monaco is pretty amazing, you drive down a steep windy hill with views out to the ocean.  The water is full of huge boats and cruise liners and the streets are full of fancy cars.  There are people and cars everywhere and every spare bit of water is crammed with huge boats.  We drove around parts of the Grand Prix track.

After Monaco we went to Grasse.  This is where most of the perfume in France and the world is made. They grow jasmine and roses and other flowers for perfume making and there are large perfume makers here.  I did an assignment on perfume making in Grasse, I want to get some perfume to bring home with me.

The Hotel Carlton Cannes

The beach at Cannes

Monaco

Monaco

Part of the royal palace at Monaco

Millau Viaduct

Me and my family went on a road trip to the Millau bridge. It took almost 3 hours up and 3 back.  It felt like a very long trip, more like 5 hours than 3!

Anyway, more about the bridge.  Did you know that the Millau bridge is 343m tall and 2,460m long?

The bridge is located in the village of Millau in the south of central France, over the Tarn River.  The bridge was constructed to help with the large amount of traffic that travelled through the village as this is the main highway between the South of France and Paris.  The old road is very steep and slow and in the summer time traffic used to back up for ages.  Now they just go over the bridge straight over the town.

Construction on the bridge began in 2001, 4 days after I was born and was completed 3 years later, to the day!  The company that built the bridge is the same company that built the Eiffel Tower.  In the middle the bridge is almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

We drove over the bridge - I was a bit scared being up so high especially after seeing it from the bottom and knowing how high it was.

There were lots of people parachuting and gliding off the  mountain above Millau, they looked really good as they came down in their colourful parachutes from the top of the mountain.

My assignment on Wine in Bordeaux

As part of my work for E-School I had to do an assignment - this is my assignment on wine facts.

Wine facts

A wine region is called an appellation.

Roots of the vine dig as long as they need to find water. Digs as long as forty meters.

In Bordeaux there are different wine regions all so known as appellations (AOC) we stayed in the st Emilion (AOC)

The AOC have very strict rules eg:

• How close the vines are. 
• How many grapes you can grow on each vine 
• When harvest can begin 
• What info can be put on the wine bottles

In St Emilion the start of the harvest is announced in September at the Vintage Banns from the top of the Tour de Roy.

White wine is always harvested before red wine

The soil the vines is very rough and rocky and sometimes has shells in it.

Some vines are harvested by hand, these are usually the very best and most expensive wines.  Others are harvested by machine.  We saw a harvest by machine of the vines behind our house.

BY LILY O’DONNELL

Gordes and the Village des Boires

We visited a town near our house called Gordes.  It is on the side of a mountain and many of the houses hang off the side of the cliff.  Near the town is a village which was lived in until early last century and was first built in the 12th century.  It is the village des Boires - a Boire is a type of stone hut.  The houses and buildings in the village are all made of dry stone, no concrete or mortar was used to build them.
We saw houses, storage rooms, a room where they grew silk worms to make clothes and cotton trees.  They had the remnants of a vege garden with herbs and they had goats and sheep and pigs for meat and milk and cheese.  They were self sufficient which means they grew all their own food and made all their own clothes and didn't need anyone else.  It was really cool to see how they lived, I think their life would be pretty good, they had meat, cheese, olives, vegetables and wine.  The inside of the houses were a bit spooky though. They also water in rivers near by and water troughs in the village.

Avignon

Avignon is a city in Provence, it is the capital city of the Vaucluse region.  We spent the day in Avignon then had to write notes about it in our journals about all the interesting things we learned about it.  Here are some of the things I learned about Avignon.
There is a stone wall called 'ramparts' all around the whole city for protection, it is over 4 kms long.  The wall was built in the 1100s.  Inside the wall in the city is the Pope's Palace.  Avignon used to be the home of the Popes of the Catholic Church before the Vatican in Italy.  Avignon was home to 9 Popes.
Outside the wall is the Pont d'Avignon - the remains of the old bridge.  it used to be called Pont Saint Benezet after the man who helped build it.  Part of the bridge was washed away in a huge flood and hasn't been re built. We walked on the bridge, it was really old a bit scary.
Avignon was occupied by the German army in World War 2.

Our house in Provence

This is our house in Pernes-les-fontaines, Provence.
The house is really nice.  It is made of stone and is two stories high.  The bedrooms and bathroom are upstairs and the lounge, kitchen and dining room are downstairs.  The house has timber shutters which we shut at night. Outside there is a ping pong table and a huge garden with soccer goals and swings.  we have a soccer ball and a rugby ball which we use to play footy.  I like living in this house.

The village our house is in is very old, it is a medieval village, it had a stone wall around it once but only part still remains.  It has 40 fountains. It has a night time market and we went.  We bought some cow's cheese, some gala apples and some strawberry syrup made from fresh strawberries.  We will drink the syrup with fizzy water - yum.

There is a village near where we are staying called L'isle sur la morgue.  It has canals which run all through it.  It is called the Venice of France because of the canals.  We went on market day, it was really busy and took ages to find a park - we had to walk through a park to the market.  The market was huge and wound all around the village and across the bridges.  There were lots of olives for sale and cooked chicken pieces with potatoes to eat.