A friend for Kepler

...and maybe for us as well.

Turns out that Soubes has quite a variety of inhabitants. We hear English Dutch and German in the streets and at the town cafe. And some French too, but surprisingly little at times. It's a phenomenon here: the holiday homeowners aside, there are an incredible number of foreigners living here, particularly English. Lodeve even has an English library. But that's a topic for another entry.

Anyway, one of the families living in the village is from germany, and they seem very cool. They have a freelance videography company and they travel all over the world making reportages at the behest of various television companies. They've actually been a lot of the places that we have, including Niger. And they have a daughter who's a little younger than Kepler.

Her name is Greta.

They seemed to play well together, and after running into them at the playground several times, we finally got the invite back to their house. It was a very interesting layout of a place, right in the pedestrian center of Soubes, a combinaton of two old houses with some exterior garden space overlooked by the ramparts of the castle, and a nice mix of ancient and modern in its overall design. A little dark, but it is a village house sandwiched by others, after all. I liked it.

Great. Now we have friends. Another step toward stability. Woo hoo.

And the kids played, and we talked.

Greta's mom and dad have lived in Germany, Brooklyn, and most recently Barcelona, but with the arrival of their little girl they decided to seek a slightly less urban lifestyle. It took them years, they said, but they finally found the house they sought, and here they were in Soubes.