French Trip 2019 - Day 2 and 3
We all woke up and were tucking into some fresh French baguettes for breakfast by 8am sharp, ready to begin working on restoring the abbey at 9am. Two project leaders for the Vieux Manoir, the association that that works with young people to restore different historical monuments around France, spent the day teaching us some techniques to restore very old stone and brick walls without damaging them.
The walls we worked on dated back to 1337, so understandably the stone was very deteriorated! That was no problem though, as we soon repaired the wall using special mortar that we made ourselves. The brief recipe is as follows: 2 parts fine sand, 1 part more rough, gritty sand, 1 part chaux (which is similar to lime or cement) and then as much water until the mixture doesn’t slide off a towel when held at a 45 degree angle. I found the most difficult part of the labour actually applying the mortar to the wall, because if it is just a bit too wet, is just slides off the wall! Despite the occasional difficulty of the work, everybody in our group (including Miss Tyrrell and Dr Rimmer, of course) got involved and enthusiastically helped on the task at hand, and we made a lot of progress in the last two days. I think the rap music we worked along to also helped to keeping everybody’s spirits high.
Food-wise, we have cooked meals for both lunch and dinner, which is something that I was not really used to. However, the food has definitely surpassed my expectations! As a self-confessed ‘picky eater’I was a bit apprehensive before coming here’ I feared that it would be a challenge to find food that I could eat. Luckily, however, there are shops in the small town of Pont Saint-Maxence that sell a good variety of different foods, so even if someone in our group doesn’t like a certain meal, we can pop down to the shop and get them something that they can eat. The 10 of us Lower 6th students here all get on amazingly well, and I think that that is what makes this trip so fun and enjoyable – today we were even laughing our socks off cleaning the toilet! All of the communal cleaning tasks are shared by everyone in the group, which is helping us to gain a greater appreciation of collective responsibility, as well as what is done for us a t home!
- Lauren