Sarlat

      We left Figeac and drove to Sarlat la Caneda where we would be spending the next couple days and were given a couple of hours to explore the local market and city. 

Like I said earlier I love markets so much! There’s just such a fun ebb and flow of people, delicious food, great distractions, I wish I could shop at an open-air market all the time! For lunch I got together with a group of 6 other girls and we had a picnic with lovely fresh food from the market: nectarines, strawberries, grapes, tapenade, walnut cake, and (of course) baguette.

 It was so amazing! I love how much more food tastes like the food it is here…does that make sense? For example, the grapes we ate had a lovely dark grape flavor that bloomed into a perfume when you pressed them onto your pallet! I now understand how grape flavoring came about, I had never thought that American grapes remotely tasted like the flavor that’s in candy, etc. but after these grapes I can taste the resemblance.

    We then went to the Musee National de la Prehistoire (Prehistoric Museum) where we learned about the history of the human race, and all of the cool pre-historic bits of civilization that have been found. I think that prehistory is a really interesting subject. It sounds like most of the science and studies about it have just had to make up answers to answer questions about ancient civilizations. I find that to be a bit scary—who got to decide exactly how wide the Neanderthal’s nose was? How do we know that they worshiped animals? People just stuck some evidence together and guessed. That’s a lot of power to have, and I suppose that’s what a lot of things are based off of. No one has proven anything to be false, and so we’ve just accepted things as facts. Hmmmm.

Then we drove to the Lascaux caves where lots and lots of perfectly preserved cave paintings from the …..era were found fairly recently(check facts). Unfortunately, because the carbon monoxide from people breathing damages the paintings, it is no longer open to the public. So if you are dying to see the paintings you’ll have to be a fancy cave-painting studier of science. To remedy the massive public demand to see the paintings, a set of false caves have been made with a super accurate replica of the paintings. Great time and research was put into figuring out how to authentically replicate the paint ingredients and techniques of the original paintings, and although I haven’t seen the real ones, I think it would be pretty hard to tell the difference.

    We drove back to Sarlat where the program provided some ice cream for our attentiveness at the museum (yes, we are in college). I got pink grapefruit and chocolate—just incase you were wondering. The grapefruit was very convincing—it had the sweet and acrid taste all in one—success! Then I shadowed some people to a pizza place (because I was super full) chatted, got to sample some (and by some I mean maybe half of it) of someone’s left-over potato pizza, and then we walked around town.

On our jaunt we came across some magical lights! I didn’t get a very good picture of them, but it was super romantic (theoretically….of course). Then we practiced our shufflin’ moves in the street and had over 3 people mock us (alas for trying to blend in--yay goofy teenagers) and enjoyed Sarlat a nuit!