Sete again.

24-9-2010
Originally uploaded by cspatrick

Friday, September 24, 2010
We went to Séte today - I for an AWG book club meeting and Roger for exploration of this charming town. We rode with Anne, a 60-something British woman who was an actress at one time and who worked at UNESCO for 23 years. She is quite a talker – I asked her how it is that she came to live in France and she spent the entire hour of the trip telling us!
There were 15 of us at the book club meeting. I already knew about half of them from the Apero and the garden club. This was the planning meeting for the year, and each woman had come with one or two (or in one case, three) books to recommend. Each spent 3-4 minutes describing the book and explaining why she recommended the book, while Maggie, the chairman made notes of what she said. Then Maggie read the list of the 19 books that had been recommended, along with the notes, and the group voted on which books to read. The interesting thing is that a member could vote as many times as she liked! I think I voted about 5 times. After the books were selected, they were assigned months – we already have the book for October, which was selected at the September meeting (which I missed because we were canoeing). There are books for every month from November through June, with the exception of December, at which meeting the members will give short Christmas readings. There is a summer read as well, which was selected by the group on recommendation of Maggie. The books sound really interesting – there was quite a diverse selection. I hope to read all 19 instead of just the seven for the club. I am pretty sure that a number of the other members will be doing the same.
We finished at about half past noon and moved on to lunch. There was a delicious combination of foods brought by the members – a salmon tart, a salad Nicoise, a seafood tart for which Séte is famous (didn’t care too much for it), curried eggs, a couple of other salads, and, of course, wine. After all, this IS France!
While the AWG book club met, Roger spent time exploring Séte. Unfortunately it rained at least part of the time, but I think he stayed pretty dry. We had a nice drive back with Anne, who is as opinionated as the day is long and doesn’t hesitate to express her opinion, even without being asked!
When we got back, we had an email message from someone named Wendy stating that her husband had lunch with Francis and inquiring about the nature of our computer problem. When I answered back to describe the problem, she replied that our problem was probably beyond hers and her husband’s expertise and recommended a couple of other repair places. Sigh.