Twirling

Sorry this entry is so long -- I didn't have time to write a shorter one. The visual, as opposed to logorrheic, version of our weekend is in this Flickr album. Summary: more twirly dancers, many sheep and goats, a few horses.

Day two of the fair in Tarascon dawned sunny and warm. Another sheep photo (spare blip) would have been more representative of today's activity, but I thought I'd spare you.

Today was the big day, when sales took place. It was a very low-key kind of sale, with no apparent selling going on. Herds of sheep, about 150 in all, were crammed into small pens. Men in berets leaned on the barriers chatting to each other. No bargaining seemed to take place, nor did money obviously change hands, but every now and then someone would back a van up, grab a few sheep using their convenient head-mounted handles, and persuade them up the ramp. By lunchtime most sheep were spoken for, but there were still goats to be had. The dancers danced off to the war memorial (it's VE Day, a public holiday in France), and we bought some spit-roasted pork to take home, and set off to the nearby Parc de la Préhistoire. I thought we had been here once many years ago, but when we arrived I didn't really recognise it.

We thought the 12-euro entrance fee was a bit steep, especially when we saw the first few outdoor installations: rocks, ponds full of tadpoles, a few tents made of skins, and a very lame diorama consisting of a sequence of scenes painted on walls that were lit sequentially. However we brightened up near the end of the outdoor circuit when we found the Labyrinthe des Sons: a maze in a wood, with winding stone paths between tall barriers of spring-green bushes and bamboo. The birdsong was entirely natural, but subtle doses of prehistoric sounds had been added: howling wolves, gurgling streams, roaring mammoths and the odd bit of piping and drumming. We sat happily in the circular structure in the middle, beatific smiles on our faces as we soaked up the green atmosphere.

After a pause for S to dip his hand in prehistoric pigments and do some wall painting, we went inside the museum. It's in a massive windowless modern building, partly underground, and is surprisingly impressive. We started with life-sized models of an auroch, a mammoth, and a cave lion, with suitable sound effects, but the museum is mostly focused on prehistoric art -- specifically that in the nearby caves in Niaux, but also other sites in south-west France. We're lucky enough to have visited Niaux three times, so the various reproductions and scale models left us a bit cold -- although the audioguide commentary was quite interesting. 

But the last section of the museum is a massive dark space, with just the odd point of light indicating items of interest, to be illuminated by pressing a button. One exhibit is a reproduction of the wall of a cave in the Dordogne, with the art reconstructed as it would have been at the time, thanks to 3D laser imagery. Beautiful, and very atmospheric. We were surprised to find we'd ended up spending three hours there, so perhaps the 12 euros weren't such a rip-off after all.

Back home under beautiful big blue skies with swirling clouds, along the rolling and gorgeously scenic road between Mirepoix and Fanjeaux -- I love this road. But nearer home the sea wind was blowing, it was raining, and you couldn't even see Alaric through the fog. We lit the fire when we got home.