Margot says:
It took a while but we are now fully connected to the outside world - technologically speaking - thanks to Telstra and Catherine's genius!
We had a lovely walk around the city today at "Nana-pace". That is, when the hotel manager advises that the walk to the train station is a mere 15 minutes away, this translates into 45 minutes at "Nana-pace".
This is a delightful city. We were not expecting it to be so beautiful and charming. It is full of history and has a strong bond with Australia. Australian flags and references to our country appear everywhere.
We lunched at Le 31 restaurant on the river; highly recommended. Scallops for me and salmon for Catherine (who is still overcoming a case of "Bali belly" due to the local water!)
Today we had the great fortune of falling upon an advertisement for a concert at a nearby church. It was a short walk from our hotel to Eglise Saint Leu. We were most excited when we arrived at the church, read the programme and discovered that a Professor of Music & Musicology from the Sorbonne was the director - Frederic Billiet! It was a brilliant performance of mediaeval and renaissance music by Le Speranza choir. We were amazed at the collection of 15th century musical instruments and the Professor was highly animated - he resembled Lenin but with a considerably more joyful countenance!
Although we could not understand all of the language, the performance was magnificent - a most unexpected bonus of our time in Amiens.
The church itself is extremely old and bears the scars of bombing during 1940. Burnt and bullet pitted walls are prevalent. It was obvious that the stained glass windows had been destroyed and never replaced. Such a shame that this old church was not unscathed, whereas the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Amiens was untouched and continues to retain all its original glory.
The altar was most ornate, heavily gilded and dramatically lit throughout the spectacular performance.
The choir was small, consisting of 6 women and 3 men plus the instrumentalists. They all wore medieaval costume. As it turned out, this was a free concert and I was amazed that there was such a small attendance of only about 100 people.
The acoustics were very much suited to the music and I bought a copy of their CD. Strangely enough, all day we had been listening to Catherine's iPod (connected to portable speakers, of course!) - a beautiful compilation by a French choir (founded by Laurence Equilbey in 1991) which performs under the name of Accentus and is in residence at the Opéra Rouen (one of our next stops) - some of the songs we had been listening to on the iPod today were performed this evening!
It finished at 10pm so we walked slowly back to our hotel in the daylight.
A day full of surprises!
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