Red

On the spur of the moment, we decided to take the day off and go to Perpignan for Visa pour l'Image, the annual photojournalism festival -- that's one of the advantages of being self-employed.

We saw a number of the exhibitions -- I think our favourite was a rather cheerful one about Australian Aborigines by Amy Toensing. The bulk of the collection was at the Couvent des Minimes, including harrowing images of mentally ill people in African war zones, by Robin Hammond, and sad photos by Stephanie Sinclair of child brides as young as five in Afghanistan, Nepal, Ethiopia, Yemen, and India -- sold by their parents to pay for food for the rest of the family. After we'd looked at those, we felt all photo-ed out.

Apart from that, we wandered around Perpignan, and I for one had my mouth hanging open in amazement half of the time. Although it's only an hour from home, we almost never go there. As Chaiselongue says, it's a beautiful, lively city with stunning architecture at every turn -- not just the monumental buildings, but ordinary houses in the narrow streets of the city centre as well. I couldn't stop taking photos of balconies. I've put a set on Flickr, but this atypical modern one was my favourite. Chaiselongue's very fine Flickr set is here.

We had lunch at Al Tres, in an ancient building in one of those narrow back streets. It was excellent; the à la carte menu was very pricy, but we had the no-choice menu du jour, which was fantastic value for money at 18 euros each for three courses of perfectly cooked food (including very good steak, which is not a given in restaurants in France). Wine and coffee only added 11 euros to the total bill. Highly recommended.

Edit: aha, Google tells me this house is actually a restaurant! Maybe we should try it next time ...

Quote of the day, from the festival brochure:
"Twitter makes you think you're a celebrity, Instagram that you're a photographer, and Facebook that you have friends. You're in for a rude awakening."