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Travelling back and forth to Aix-En-Provence

I love travelling by train. Each time I need to get to Aix-en-Provence I take the train. It’s easy. I hop on the bus in Cognin, walk to the train station, jump on a first train to Lyon. I change trains in Lyon to catch a TGV to the south. Sometimes, I’ll go as far as Marseille and back to Aix. Other times, I’ll stop in Aix-En-Provence TGV station. From there, I get to the town centre and walk to the seminary. Easy.

Today, the SNCF took me on a different route. Rather than going all the way back to Lyon town centre, the train dropped me at Lyon Airport TGV station. It is a spacious, open, modern building. It was purpose built for the TGVs. It avoids trains to go to the town centre, which would waste time.

I am now waiting for another train that will take me back to Chambéry. It is the 16:41 train from Paris to Milan. If I wanted I could go all teh way to Italy under the alps. I love travelling by train.

Nietzsche, its relevance for the 21st Century

I was in Aix-En-Provence for two seminars in John Calvin Seminary. On Friday afternoon, we had four hours lectures on Nietzsche. It was heavy, but not too bad. The most difficult was to do it without coffee. The person who is usually in charge of preparing coffee for the break was away.

I won’t give you more details about what we heard. There’s too much to digest. But it was an encouragement to read Nietzshe and consider his impact on the 21st century, especially in the West.

Burned cars

I was up early on Friday morning, making the most of the quietness of the night. But I heard a series of loud noises in the darkness : “Bang, Bang”. I initially thought : “Gunshots ?” But we are in France, not in the US. You hear gunshots in the  autumn, during the hunting season, but not in May. I didn’t worry too much and went back to my reading.

This morning I saw this in the local paper: http://www.ledauphine.com/savoie/2015/05/08/deux-voitures-brulees. Two cars had been burned on a car park the other side from the main road, maybe 500 meters from where we live. I had walked that way in the afternoon. It is not the first time I see a burned car in Cognin since we arrived last September. It seems to happen quite regularly.

Is anyone still in doubt that this place need the gospel ?

Brittany holiday

We spent ten days in Brittany for the spring holiday. The weather was gorgeous: warm and sunny but the cold water reminded us that it was not summer yet. We rented a cottage in Pommerit-Le-Vicomte, a few minutes drive from Guingamp. It is a lovely place, in the countryside, quiet without being too remote.

We wanted to go in ordre to keep in touch with the place and the people before they forget about us. We had not told anyone appart from some former neighbours who were going on holidays. But we managed to see them before they left.

It was good to be there. We visited some people, and each time we went out, we bumped into people we knew. I went to the football with the boys. Guingamp was playing Evian Thonon Gaillard which is our local premier league team. Strange: we drove 1000 km in order to see Guingamp meet a team that plays 40 minutes down the road from us.

We also went all the way to Quimper in order to visit a couple from the Quimper church. If you get our newsletter you may remember that the church in Quimper folded up at the beginning of November. It was sad and we wanted to see how these folks were coping.

We had a happy time. It was restful as well. It was a proper holiday at last. We’ve been back for a few days now and the children are going back to school tomorrow.

Les Failles

After the carnival, “Les Failles” took place. The name sounded familiar to me, but I have no idea what the meaning of this festival is. I tried to look it up on the internet, but it has not been helpful. All I could find is that you only find it in some limited parts of Switzerland and Savoie, where we live. In Switzerland, it takes place at the beginning of lent but here, it is celebrated about half way through lent. That’s all I know. It was fun. There was a huge bonfire, and a few hundred people were there.

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