Yesterday was Carol's birthday. We took Jane with us to show us the large fabric shop near Le Boulou, where we spent an hour browsing, before going on to Perpignan for lunch at a huge shopping centre with Flunch - a kind of superstore dining area - and then looked around a specialist lighting shop. We need to buy more lights for our kitchen and studio lighting, but now we know where the shop is we shall wait until the electrician is ready to start and then just make a few checks with him on positioning the lights. The prices are good.
We walked around the Auchun superstore for a while, and bought a flashdrive, and checked the price of printers against UK prices, not much difference I think. Possibly even cheaper than in England.
Finally we went onto a specialist art suppliers in the outskirts of Perpignan, and Jane stocked up on supplies she uses for her classes with children. We are going to attend her "playing with art" class for adults on Sunday, with lunch as a bring and share. She decided to buy the hanging rail system for displaying art that I am also going to use. I was pleased to see that my rails and wires cost a lot less second hand than her system. It was interesting to see what the load capacities are for these systems.
As Jane is going to lend me the use of various easels, palettes, brushes, and paints, I only needed to buy a few canvases and some poppy oil and turps, and some charcoal. I shall start painting again now that I have equipment.
The fabric shop has a lot more than we get in Woodley in Reading. It is much larger and they cater well for people who do patchwork, with a large section selling "fat quarters" of cloth. Prices appeared very competitive.
Perpignan is just 30 minutes from us, and is a large centre, bigger I think than Reading, and with much larger shops.
Céret is also proving to be a very friendly place. On Tuesday, for example, we were just taking a stroll around town, and bumped into Tania, and Maurice. Tania is half English, and speaks English, French and Japanese! Maurice has been very helpful in getting my internet application sorted out, and I finally have an engineer booked to do an installation next week. We decided to join them for lunch at a pavement café, where they were eating with Carles, the chap who runs the marketing and photo agency in town. I like the fact that the French eat out so much, and a meal out with a glass of wine at mid-day is quite common, and quite affordable, with great food. A meal with decent house wine, bread, and a coffee is only about €12 each. And they make an effort with the food too.
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