A scholarship somewhere in the south....

Sorry I didn’t write any post during the last week.... I was in Villefranche, a village close to the city of Nice (south of France close to the italian border) for a training course focused on offshore seismic surveying... I was two days on the boat to see how an offshore survey works and I spent the others days in the oceanic observatory of Villefranche which is managed by the university of Paris. But I found some time to have a look around because Villefranche is an old harbour/port. It was an important place for the Sardaigne kingdom in the 14th century so the king decided to build an fortress to protect his ships, and it was also a sort of “penal colony”. So I couldn’t be in this place and don’t share this experience with you! So I took the following pictures in order to show you the old citadel (fortress) and some aspects of this beautiful place.

Panorama of the Villefranche harbour

On this picture you can see the bay and some buildings of Villefranche on the right. The red one was one of the palaces of the princes of Savoie. The jetty of the royal harbour is on the right in the background.

View of the old royal harbour of the Darse

This one was taken from the citadel. On the background, at the end of the jetty, there is the old jail, the naval dockyards and the forge. Now it’s a univerty laboratory... And our rooms were in the jail... But nowadays the atmosphere is really different in this place, and the cells are more confortable!!!!! No we weren’t whipped by our professor...

The construction of the citadel was finished in 1557,and restored in 1981. Since this date we can find 4 small museums there and the town hall.

The citadel from the end of the jetty

One of the bastion from the access bridge

The access bridge

The only access gate to the citadel

The town hall

A view of the harbour from one of the tower

One of the tower hidden by a bougainvillier (the plant with the violet flowers)

Who knows the mushroom!

I don’t know if it’s very usual in Autralia to search mushrooms for dinner... And I don’t know if the australian mushrooms are dangerous or not... In my family and with my friends we go often in the forest to find them from the end of the summer to the middle of the fall. If we’re lucky, we can find enough for one dinner and we freeze the rest.
Like my grand father did, I took a train on saturday morning in order to reach the Vosges mountain close to Strasbourg. 40 min after leaving Strasbourg the train stops in a little valley where we can find the good secret mushroom places “lost” in the forest!!!! The best time to find them is when there was some rain two days before and one sunny. Luckily we can find a lot of eatable species in Alsace but we need to be careful because some of them can be dangerous. We just took species we’d already eaten. We have found the following; girolle (yellow and really tasty, one of the best), chanterelle charbonnière (deep yellow foot and brown head,the shape is close to the girolle, and one of the bests too), chanterelle(deep yellow foot and brown head, and one of the bests too), pied de mouton (light to deep orange), and amethys (violet, but the taste is not very special)

Chanterelles

Girolle and some Amethys in the background

A mushroom hunter

BIIIIIG Girolle

One big Chanterelle Charbonnière and some Chanterelles

We were lucky because we found some big Girolle and the weather was dry the days before. and this slope was still wet enough because it’s in the shade the most part of the day. On the way we walked through some small typical villages and we found some bunkers from the first world war because the front was in these mountains where the border between France and Germany was.

The entry of a German bunker

A village called Wackenbach

The same village

The church from the 18th century

And enough mushrooms for a good dinner.....