Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Geographic Differences’ Category

This is how the Canigou mountain is supposed to look from around late October through to around April ie lots of snow all over it.

I’d planned to take a photo of it with the flowering fruit trees in the foreground and snow covered mountain in the background for over a year now. Quite hard to do actually as there are usually only a few weeks in which you can take it each year and, of course, you can’t really depend on the weather being perfect for your photos.

In fact, it wasn’t possible to take this year simply because it hasn’t been snow covered since March last year. Ever since then, it’s been pretty much constantly t-shirt weather where we are and the montain has only been mainly snow covered for stretches of a few days at a time over the whole of that period.

Funnily enough, whilst it’s been t-shirt weather all that time, now that we’re heading into Summer, we’re getting the winds that we normally associate with February (when we didn’t get them) along with the rain and generally dull conditions that are more a Winter-time thing here.

Is the freakish weather an aspect of global warming? It’s much too early to say that of course but one thing that people forget is that a “global warming” doesn’t necessarily mean that everywhere gets warmer and in fact many places would experience unusual weather conditions due to the changing weather patterns that a global warming would bring.

At first glance, the shopping district in Perpignan seems to be quite small and compact. It’s mostly a pedestrian area and even those areas where it isn’t, the streets are narrow enough to really slow down both the speed and the volume of the traffic considerably so it ends up with a very calm feel to it.

After a while though, you realise that there are a whole lot more shops than you first saw because many are set back from the street in little courtyards like the one you can see here. In fact, we’ve only really started to discover the true size of the shopping area recently as many of these little courtyards contain not one but often four or five of the little shops.

They’re all different too. This one is relatively ordinary in that it’s effectively just got a longer than normal entrance hall but others come with statues, waterfalls, and the like. The range of shops is much greater than those directly on the main street where you’ll generally find the international shop brands. It’s in these little courtyards that you find the more unique shops.

Of course, the biggest plus point of this arrangement is that in the Summer, the courtyards are a good deal cooler than the street. Airconditioning isn’t that widespread here at the moment so these little courtyard shops and restaurants provide a welcome break from the intense July and August heat.

Anyway, if you’re here on a visit, keep an eye out for them and explore some of the courtyard shops of Perpignan.

The landscape around us has remained stark since the last of the grape bushes were prunned at the end of the year but it’s all about to change.

As you can see the first shoots have started to appear on the grape bushes just beside us but already the landscape has taken a greener appearance. The various types of grape start growing at different times so we’ve been watching as the greenery has been sweeping towards us over the last week or so and we noticed the first signs of growth in the plants beside us just a few days ago.

What’s very surprising is the sheer speed at which the plants grow. Once they get started, you can find a small bush appearing within just a few days of rain. The climate locally is pretty dry so most of the growth happens in very short bursts after each day that we get rain. 

An Australian, an Irishman and a Frenchman were sitting in a pub.

Australian: Gee, it’s wet today.

Irishman: Sure is, almost as wet as we get in the west coast of Ireland.

Frenchman: You’re not French. You’re not allowed to criticise the weather in France. I’m going to start a poster campaign against you and have someone come round and smash your place up.

Australian: Wow, do you mean that the weather in France is just the same as it is here in Belfast today?

This one is specially for SuperFrenchie 🙂

We seemed to go directly from Autumn to Spring this year in the Pyrenees and the fruit trees have already started to flower as you can see.

Something of a disasterous year for the ski-ing, at least for us, as we’d have needed to go much farther than usual to find snow. Having said that, we’re incredibly lazy with the ski resorts and don’t look for anything much further than 90 minutes or so drive. If we were a bit more keen, we could have ventured further afield and went to one of the higher altitude resorts though going by the snow on Canigou, they had a much shorter than normal season too At the current rate of going, I don’t think we’ll ever finish off the heating oil that we bought two years ago! We’ve not had that much in the way of wind (usually the thing that really chills things down locally).Even the river running through the village has never filled up this year and we never had to take the long way round to avoid the flooded bridge. The local habit of building “bridges” that just skim over the top of the water makes for cheaper bridges but normally the result is complete chaos for perhaps 10 days or so during the Winter when you find what “route submersible” means.