Marilyn and Tony's visit

Marilyn Cernosek is my good friend from Rice University, where we lived next door to each other in the dorm for three years. She and Tony followed their Thomas Jefferson-in-France alumni trip (sponsored by Rice) with several days in Couze. It would have been more fun if Marilyn hadn't gotten sick on the trip, but it was still great fun, and the experience with the French medical system is a a different blog post...We managed to cover some territory.

Aside from the obvious (eating and drinking), we went to the Lalinde

market, and we went to Monpazier, a really good bastide town down the road. The bastide

towns were built in the fourteenth century as planned villages that were also, fortresses, with walls (generally

in a square), gates that could be closed in case of attack, huge churches where people could take shelter (som

e of them, like the one in Beaumont, incredibly ugly and depressing). Lalinde was a bastide town, but all the evidence that left is a piece of a gate and the covered market.

Monpazier, however, is almost perfectly preserved. And it's got a great covered market, of cour

se, across a huge place.

Perhaps I'd better quit uploading pictures before I crash this...more about the visit later...