Blending in.

Sometimes, to fit in, you have to wear orange hair.

This in Vivre en Lodevois, the monthly Lodeve magazine:

The captions I added for clarification. So, why, you might ask, are Sarah and I in the local rag, and why, you might wonder, do I have orange hair?

It's all because of Kepler of course. He participated in the fete, which is something like a Carnaval celebration, postponed because Easter came so easrly this year. They waited for good weather to have the party. So we made Kepler a costume, and me too, and Sarah dressed up like a shadow (or a New Yorker (ie all in black)), and paraded through the streets of Lodeve with confetti and music and a whole mass of decorated people and a police escort. Fun.

Oddly, 90% of the people wearing costumes, both adults and kids, were dressed as native americans, what they call "red indians". But what possible association our much maligned casino-owning friends can have to Easter, I have no idea.

But I digress.

My point is that slowly we're participating in society a little bit here, at least enough to appear in the annals of Lodevois history. But at this point it's mostly through Kepler that we're integrating. He's part of the community far more that we. He goes to school, he has his teachers and friends, and only rarely to we intersect with that world, like at the fete.

But I guess when we finally settle somewhere, the lesson here is that we have to make some effort to join the community we end up in, we have to actively participate in the town life. I'm looking forward to it. But first we have to find a house...