Posted in Friends, Food, Happiness, Fun at 10:48 pm by Jackie Danicki

It is very warm and sunny until about 8.30PM. The night is very mild, no chill. As always, the food is great and plentiful. We have free wifi at the hotel. It’s a shame we’re only here this time until Sunday.

It’s my first time in Saint-Étienne, the town where Antoine’s grandfather was born and died, and which he called “one of the ugliest towns in the world“. I don’t know what it looked like while he was alive, but right now much of the main roads have been completely dug up; you have to walk over planks and around mounds of rubble to get down the street.

And yet, it’s not unpleasant. It’s actually quite nice. It baffled me before, but now I can sort of see why Exbrayat made Saint-Étienne his main residence, after living mostly in Switzerland for seven or eight years, before he died.