The "New" Appartment

Well I was hoping to be able to share some pictures of our new apartment with everyone say two or three weeks ago when we moved in, however the lack of internet access prevented that from happening. Luckily we are finally connected, so I can stop spending my money at the internet cafe and stop going insane using french keyboards where the letters are in different places.

Anyway, back to our humble abode. So the apartment is really quite grand. It far exceeded my expectations of what we would be able to find in Privas for our budget. Not only that its fully furnished! We have furniture that is old and beautiful, a real kitchen, a real bed, a dining room table that seats 6 and a kitchen table that seats 3!, a shower and a washing machine. And I'm not being facetious in my amazement here, I really didn't know if we'd be able to find a furnished apartment in Privas at all. I had nightmares of sleeping on the floor, of one room studios with no kitchen, of cooking on one burner and not having an oven and various other horrors. Matt can attest to the fact that when Madame Cruz the property manager brought us in to sign the papers, my jaw pretty much dropped in amazement.

A few other notes... as you can see from the pictures of the outside, our apartment is in a very old building. I'm not sure how old, but the exterior is made of stone, and less than 100 yards from our house there is a bridge called the Pont Louis XII that was built in the 12th century. The exterior door to our foyer looks like a castle door and we get to use an old-fashioned long key on it. We have a small courtyard thats shared with the other 3 apartments, and windows that looks out on a small creek. The only downsides so far have been that there are lots of creepy crawlies about (small scorpions, spiders, millipede like bugs), all the locks to the doors and cabinets use old fashioned keys, and we don't have a couch. However, in the greater scheme of things I'll take the downsides.

Anyway I took lots of pictures so you can check it out for yourselves. Here are the main rooms:

We have a very nice view from our livingroom/kitchen and can see down to the stream/creek below our house and to the houses across the ravine from us. Next door there is an empty stone building that looks like it will be made into usable apartments at some point. We also have a nice little creek and waterfall next to the building, which increases greatly in volume during rainstorms.

Well thats all for now. I'm sure I'll post more in the next week or so about our adventures here in Privas over the past few weeks. We've done lots of hiking, chestnut gathering, fromage eating and so much more... It's nice to be back online to be able to share my photos.

I hope everyone back in the US is doing well.