We left Canada in May, spent some time in London, then on to Paris for a while, then went to the south of France where we met up with Monique and her parents in Bandol and stayed with them at the Hotel Splendid. We had been to the south of France on our 1972 trip to Europe but this was the first of many times we stayed in Bandol at the Splendid.
It was a pretty good deal at the time for a hotel right on the Mediterranean. We had a sea view room with a terasse for the equivalent of $20 a night and this included breakfast and dinner for the both of us. Them was days!
For the month of June we had rented an apartment with Monique in Annecy, her home town, and a place we had heard a lot about. Annecy is on a lake in the French Alpes close to Geneva. In July we went to Cannes for a month to take a French course, then went to Paris for the month of August to study more French at the Alliance Française.
August isn’t usually the best time to go to Paris since Parisians leave in droves; however, we didn’t find this to be the case in the Pigale district where we found a cheap apartment. This is the district of “working women” and I guess these people stay around for the tourists in the summer so we found the area to be very animated and very little was closed. And for us Paris is wonderfully fun at any time of year.
After that we were going to go to Italy but we had been invited to Poland and also to Amsterdam by friends we made at the course in Cannes and so we figured it was a good opportunity to see a country “behind the iron curtain” and to see Amsterdam. We felt we could always see Italy. We almost got to Italy on numerous other occasions but didn’t actually get there until 2002!
I took surprisingly few pictures and most of those were slides. I should be able to scan the slides and make JPEG's but that aspect of my scanner doesn't seem to be working. We weren’t really into picture taking and we often left our camera at home because we didn’t want to seem like tourists. I had some slides made into photos a number of years ago. You'll recognize those by the faded quality. I also felt that I would remember everything and didn’t need pictures....well, so much for that theory...
I’ll post the first letter tomorrow.
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Jim, with Monique and her parents having breakfast on the terasse of the Hôtel Splendid, Bandol.
The hotel in 1976.
This is a painting I did of the hotel on an Oak Bay Dump treasure.
