Thursday April 14th was sunny but cool.  Pretty much a fixed schedule for today, we’ll see how it works out.

The forecast was for rain by noon, so we wore our rain coats to our tutor Christine’s house.  We didn’t have any problems with the bus, or time of arrival today.  It was an uneventful ride to the gare.  We waited for our connecting bus, but there were no cute dogs to watch today!

Just before entering Christine’s house we saw a beautiful flower which was a camellia. On

camellia

entering her house we noticed her dining room table was gone.  That is usually where we sit to work with her.  She told us it had broken.  The table was the kind that can expand or contract and she had tried to make it smaller and part of the sliding mechanism broke. Her husband and a friend had to load it into a large car (NOT very common here) and take it to a furniture repair shop.  Instead of the dining room, we worked in her kitchen.  We sat at an old oak school cafeteria table and bench.  The wood was very pretty and a great color.  It was much different from the plastic and metal cafeteria tables we are used to seeing in the USA.

Phil did get to take a picture of Christine’s espresso coffee maker.  This will help in deciding

Christine’s espresso machine

what if any type of espresso maker we purchase.  It is still up for debate.

As we left Christine’s house it started to drizzle.  But not enough to make a problem for us.  We got our bus as planned, made our connection at the gare, purchased our newspapers (Ouest France and Pays Malouin) at the tabac/presse and entered our building at 12:20.  Its good when a plan comes together.

Just before lunch, our neighbor from the 4th floor stopped by to say hello.  It was good to see him after almost two years.  He had taken the last train from the Gare  Montparnasse (train station) in Paris and arrived in Saint-Malo around mid-night last night.

We had our friend join us for dinner to celebrate his arrival.  Sandy had some wonderful coq au vin along with couscous and vegetables for the meal.  Delicious. For dessert Sandy tried making Panna Cotta using gelatin leaves.  It was her first attempt.  It was wonderful.  It was difficult to stop at one helping of the Panna Cotta.