We're heeeerre!

It is unbelievably gorgeous. No, really - it is. Singapore was as adorable as it always is (if you're in Singapore right now, find Wyman-in-Chinatown, buy him a beer and ask him - anything. Ask him anything. Ask him why his mother named him Wyman. He'll tell you. He's wonderful!); Rome was Rome and full of tourists and music and art and bad pizza and nuns; and France responded to news of our imminent arrival by plunging into a full-on air-traffic-controller's strike from the moment we left the hotel. So seven extra hours in Fiumicino Airport waiting to board, a certain amount of crowding and panic and temper (not ours) in the crowds at the taxi-rank, and it was still worth it. Into Marseilles ten hours late, stacks of running around and losing each other and trying to make sense of the arcane vagaries of all the French bureaucracies small and large, and we didn't arrive in the village till dark,

and still someone was waiting, the lights were on, the bells were tolling, the air was full of soft, gentle early-spring woodsmoke and we were shown through the house (a couple of centuries old, and achingly lovely) and straight to bed. And this morning we woke to the bells again (they weren't tolling while we were sleeping, surely?) and headed off to the markets, not having had time to shop or cook the night before.

And the markets - oh!

*sigh*

We're going to be happy, here.