Sunday, September 18, 2016

Please take a moment to download and read my file Fully Funded Public Transit .

Agony! This time next week I'll be asking myself "Where did all the time go?" and also "What shall I do on my last day here (besides sorting through all my junk)?"

These twenty-odd pages ought to serve as a reminder to me that I did spend my days here fairly well.

Today I plan to go to the Jour de Patrimoine, if I spelled that right.

I remember that the 12e had such a day when I was there two years ago, but I didn't understand it. Several events are planned around town, and I plan to tour the event at the Collégiale in this local area of St Louis.

I eat the remainder of my apple as I key in yesterday's notes. You'll remember my use of a plastic milk-bag for storing uneaten Croque Monsieurs? Well the bags also make excellent containers for part-eaten apples. Pop the apple in the bag, fill with water, and let stand. The water seals of the apple from most of the air, and stops it browning.

I eat the core but slip the pips out of my mouth, delighted to find that a pip has begun to send out a radical.

I recall hearing a podcast on Australian Apple varieties a couple of months ago, and growing an apple of this stock is illegal under international law. I quickly flush the pips down the toilet!

I neglected to take photos of my room, so here they are.

The room is small, but that is of no matter to me. I am either in bed, or sitting at the table typing up notes, or else I am outside enjoying the buses and the streets and the shops and the people.

The view from the doorway, past the bed, to the writing desk and my view of the street.

The bathroom is over-equipped in my opinion - that's a hair-dryer on the right.

A closer view of the writing table. I use a pillow in the chair to support my back.

The closet is small but suitable for my four shirts and two pants. It sports a couple of open shelves, not very accessible. There are two small ledges outside the closet.

We are promised showers, but they do not materialize.

I have to walk past the church and make a wide path to make use of the crossings. The area is fenced-off and security guards check bags as we enter.

A small child has been introduced to the wheel (you can see the orange shirt) to get a preview of life in a modern office. A legal office, for once the first child has worked hard enough to raise the stone, a different child is introduced to walk backwards and lower the stone in preparation for a third child to raise the stone again ...

This man is using medieval tools (note the ax in the foreground) to shape tongues and grooves to build a trestle of some sorts.

A view of his tools.

Two ladies turn the flywheel, a third holds four stands of thread apart, and a fourth, in line with the white car, attends to the far end. We'll come back to them later.

In another area I find intriguing models in Perspex cases. At least one of them is a model of a building in something like 1:1500 scale (I think)

Now it gets interesting. I arrived at the forge to find a lad of about ten years old pumping bellows and clutching what looked to me like a pair of tongs. I ordered a burger with onions. He looked at me blankly and then grabbed some red-hot metal from the fire, and went off to hammer it out on an anvil. His dad arrived and explained to me with a smile on his face that burgers were "off" today, while what I took to be his son kept his ears pricked open.

Now I suspect that the lad is the son, and yet I saw many ordinary children operating equipment, the treadmill for example, and some lifting stones by hand to be chiseled

I was impressed that children were allowed to make their mark, and were not held back by parents worried about crushed fingers and so on.

This man is chiseling away at a block of stone to make a pile of very coarse sand. He is wearing a pair of Perspex medieval goggles and pretending that he doesn't see me approach with yet-another-question.

Here is a young’un making his mark. He is chiseling the name of his girlfriend AIMIE in stone. Next year he can move on to Carole and other girls with curvy letters in their sweaters.

I came across this stall with food and asked for free samples, but the lady said that it was just an example of what they would feed the workmen, so I asked her the origin of the foodstuffs, and she made the mistake of telling me that she had baked the cake herself, at home. Where is home? Tours, I think she said. Then she offered me a slice, so, hah hah, I accepted. Just to be in the spirit of the game, you understand.

Here she is pleading for some onions to put into the next ginger cake, for ginger cake it is, and very good, too. I want another slice!

Here's how you get another slice: You wait until a small crowd arrives, then you point to the knife and ask if you can take a photo of her demonstrating how a medieval knife is used to cut a modern ginger-cake. She is, like the others, a semi-professional performer so she happily demonstrates while I click-click-click-click. The crowd admires her work.

Then I ask if she would care to demonstrate how she would hand the slice to a good worker, and she obliges. I obtain my second slice.

The crowd admires my work.

I am an Australian Tourist, but I am not stupid!

It was explained to me that it is marinating in wine, but I couldn't determine what "it" was in the cloth sachet.

Another burger-less barbecue.

I passed on potage-du-jour; I didn't like the look of the ingredients.

I took this system to be a precursor to the Transilien network - this region's superb system of Public Transit.

You turn the wheel and it reels in, or out, the twin ropes.

Which go up towards the top of the building.

And then down again to the carriage

I have just asked this man how long it takes him to go from a block of stone to a completed gargoyle. Note his hands crossed in exasperation. I didn't have the heart to tell him he was carving it upside down.

Here is why he is so exasperated. Uncaring visitors keep interrupting his work. he could probably knock one of these off in a day if it weren't for the tourists.

I move on to the next unsuspecting Artisan.

Now we know what this man is doing. he is carving out a ticket for the transit system we saw a few minutes ago.

These two lads (feet just visible) are keeping a close eye on me in case I decide to steal their scooters, which look wonderfully incongruous in this setting.

The original photo showed a treadmill crane, with a single pulley at work. I asked why it didn't have multiple-wheeled pulley blocks (which Physics tells us, allows you to lift heavier loads - it is a form of gearing) but the operators couldn't explain why.

Then I found the fellow who operated this display, a crane with a pulley block, and he explained that, for sure, they knew the principles of gearing by pulley-blocks, but it made no sense to use them if the loads were light enough to be lifted by the energy of one man, using the leverage gained by the radius of the treadmill.

Aha!

This scaffolding reminded me of Union Station, still not completed after all this time.

So I decided to walk around the chapel.

The floors appear to be set with remnants of construction stone, trimmed to fit whatever gaps they can. Using, just like Toronto, an irregular patch of bitumen if stone is out of stock.

A blurry zoom shot of the pipe-organ.

A regular shot from behind the altar. The roof is amazing.

I considered picking up some candles, these are about as cheap as those in the Dollar Store, but probably much better quality.

Here you go - One thousand years old!

Another stall was mass-producing medieval transit tokens for the medieval transit system at the far end of the church. Again, just like Toronto, bloody miles to walk before you get to your train at Union Station.

Seriously, I was impressed again that children were allowed to make their own tokens, but in this case I had impressed child-labour to make my token for me.

I paid for a token and got a Senior's Ticket (paper) too.

One side of my token.

The other side of my token.

The man on the right is happy because everyone is diving into their wallets and purses. I have already dove (diven?) into mine.

You could buy a tranche, or bread-plate of lentils and stuff.

Or you could buy some fried apple-cakes - like potato cakes but with apples slices inside them. Now why don't I do that when I get home?

A view of the ingredients table and in the background, one of the kitchen staff receives a neck massage. ‘Twas ever thus ...

I once again skipped the Potage du Jour

Took some close-ups of the church while I waited for my supper to appear.

Almost nobody is eating in the dining area; they are wolfing down the snacks as soon as they appear.

More carved detail of the church.

The local cops are out in bulletproof vest force checking for terrorists. When I entered the grounds the security seemed more scared of the contents of my bag than of terrorists. I wanted to show them how well equipped I was with sixty bus timetables, two Michelin sheet maps, four carrots, two Australian apples, a plastic mac and so on, but they waved me through anyway.

An early example of medieval piped music.

Well, stringed, at any rate.

OK. This is what €5.00 got me. Three pieces of food and a lifetime of memories.

The slice of bread holds grated cheese and fried onions. Only a tub of ice-cream could beat that.

I promised to bring you back to the string thing. Well, here we are. In the background is a modern crane, showing off in the presence of its predecessors.

In the foreground is the mobile trolley used in rope-making.

Only one lady works the flywheel in the distance, a second lady maintains separation between the four threads, the third lady kicks away the chocks from the trolley.

A view of the leading edge of the trolley. I have this wonderful vision of the manufacture of twined thread and rope becoming advanced little by little as someone brightens up with "You know what would be better? If we put a hinge on it!” Or wheels, or a chock or ...

Nothing seemed to happen for about two minutes, then before I could whip out my camera, the four threads coalesced into one over a span of about five seconds. You are looking at a piece of rope made by inducing a twist, under tension, in four contributing cords.

The threads were twisted from thinner pieces, and I think today's cord will be twisted with others to make a stronger rope.

What looks like a waxed or oiled cloth is run back and forth along the new rope.

Quickly!

The trolley has been abandoned. The tension in the new rope has run it forwards about two feet from the chocks.

Here a group of medieval babes is having a discussion about what they will sing and in which keys. In those days keys were made of iron.

NO, the little purple one hasn't stalked off to sulk in her boudoir (from the word we use as "pout"), but is hidden by the lady in blue. The lady in blue is holding the microphone, so she will win the argument, for sure.

On my way back through security a lady was offering candies to the two security guards, so, as my friend says, "The answer is 'NO', unless you ask". So I asked and to my delight, out come an agglomeration of gummies!

Check out the striped brickwork here. Lovely!

These windows, too, have been fooling me for ten days.