Bathtime of Champions

How to bathe outdoors:

Fill tub with cold water from the hose.  Chop firewood and light a fire beneath the bathtub.  Wait for the water to warm up enough to get in.  Don’t grab the hot sides with your hands when you get in, or burn your bum when you get out (despite many warnings, I still managed to do both!).  Relax and enjoy the view.

It turns out that OF COURSE people wash here!  (What was I thinking?!)  And to my immense surprise, it IS in that old bathtub.  Outside.  In plain view of everything!  My prudish English instincts were immediately “oh my goodness, this is not possible!” Once you’re in the bath, no one can really see you, except for when your head and feet are spotted bobbing around people give you a wave, but generally leave you to the privacy of enjoying your bath.  Overlooking the strawberry patch, it’s an excellent spot to keep an eye on everyone!  There’s a big slab of stone in the bottom, so that you don’t burn your back and bum when you’re lying in the bath.  It’s the best bath in the world, because instead of getting colder as time goes by, it gets hotter and hotter!  I was told that everyone bathes here, even in the depths of winter when it’s freezing and snowing – true bliss!  The fire underneath is perfectly placed so that when it’s lit, all of the bath gets super hot, except for the bit where you put your head back, so you don’t burn your neck.  You can stay in for an hour or two, tranquilo!



Once you’ve soaked yourself into a crinkly prune-like texture, you hop out and get dressed, chuck another log on, and call for the next person to bathe.   Nothing is wasted here, not even bathwater.  Once everyone is suitably clean, you let the bath water out, which runs down the hill to nourish the runner beans. 

(In case you’re wondering what on earth I am doing showing a picture after I had been asked not to – my new friends decided that as long as I didn’t show or mention anything that would identify their whereabouts, they kindly decided that they are happy for me to show my photography to illustrate details of my experience here.  The reason they don’t want to be found, is not because they are doing anything illegal, but because lots of people find their way of life a novelty and come and poke their nose around, which understandably makes them uncomfortable.  This is their home, and I’m sure you wouldn’t like other people poking around your casa either.)

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First impressions on living off the land

Hola!  I AM HAPPY AS A PIG IN SHIT THAT I AM LIVING IN A YURT AND BEING ALLOWED TO TAKE PART IN THIS AMAZING LIFESTYLE!  SO HAPPY THAT I HAVE TO WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS!

However, I have had a small but understandable setback.  I just cycled the four kilometres from the yurt to a bar where I can use internet, to put together some blog posts and share this amazing experience with you all.  I was planning for this post to be a photo-extravaganza of the beautiful place that I am living, but just as I sat down to work, I was informed politely by one of the community that they have a no-photos-pon-the-internet policy, and would I be so kind as to respect that.  Of course I would.  After all, it’s their home that I’m staying at, that I’ve been invited to.  This is not a zoo.  Even though it would benefit the world to show you all about how amazing this is, it would not benefit this small community who are living a quiet revolution, and so I will of course respect their wishes.

I can write words to explain what I am doing, as long as I am non-specific about the location.  And if we make a plan to meet up this summer, I’ll show you the photos I took.  It’ll make you so excited!

Anyway, it was very cold in the yurt the first night because I didn’t think about lighting a fire (rapidly gotta get used to the fact that heating is not at the flick of a switch!).  I got up in the morning to meet the gang: six people in total: three couples made up of four Spanish people and two French.  Funnily enough, the French people are my bridge, translating from Spanish to French so that I can understand what's being said!  The kitchens are clean and sleeping areas comfortably worn in.  In my yurt there is a kitchen area with a cooker and food storage inside, and the washing up station is outside.  Pretty much everything I can see is made from what can be found on the land.  Apart from the fabric of the yurt, the whole thing is hand-built from scratch, from trees that have been felled from the forest; crafted and assembled into a fine dwelling.  There is so much time, effort, love, labour and skill in this yurt that I have the honour of living in. 

It is very cold here and has so far rained every day.  I can’t believe I wasted a whole day looking for a pair of shorts in Bayonne!  There is absolutely no need.  It is the furthest thing from a fashion parade here. 
I think I could hear a little creature scratching away under my bed last night (that is made from wood pallets – yessss!).  Even though I am sheltered by the yurt, this is real outdoors living.  Everything has to be tidied away properly, food-wise, otherwise the ants and mice that live around here will want to share your space and become your friend.  As I write this, there have been three mice deaths in my yurt this week, due to unfortunate collisions with mouse-traps, which has made me very sad.

So I am staying in the communal yurt, where everyone comes and hangs out in, cooks and eats lunch together.  Turns out everyone else has kitchens and food in their own yurts, so I am welcome to help myself to everything that is here.  I stood looking forlornly at all the huge jars of dried pulses, spices, flour…..ingredients, and couldn’t think for the life of me how to combine any of it into an acceptable meal.  All I wanted was a cup of hot sweet tea, but I couldn’t even work out how to turn the hobs on…It made me realise how useless (and (comfortably) removed from) I am at basic things, like cooking a meal.

A typical day here involves everyone meeting in the communal yurt at 10am, to drink a coffee (or a malta = natural, delicious, caffeine free alternative to coffee – I’m hooked!) and then to start work around the terrain.  Work so far has included weeding vegetable patches and laying hay around the plants.  Sowing seeds.  Cleaning and assembling bee hives.  Making nettle & water potions and watering the plants with it.  Harvesting mushrooms.  Cutting the grass.  Moving logs of wood around and chopping them for firewood.  Cleaning the yurt.  One person cooks, and everyone eats together after about 4 hours work, at about 2pm.  Everyone does what they want in the evening.  I love it!  There’s such a strong community vibe, and everyone works hard because they all depend on it.

For the most part, the people living in this community buy very little.  The idea is that they can live off (and with) the land.  Depending on the day (for example, every day I’ve been here, the rain has been pouring down) depends how much work they can do.  At this time of the year, there are not a lot of crops that are ready, and from time to time they buy essentials such as spices, honey, tea, coffe, oil, rice, coffee, canned tomatoes (when their tomatoes aren’t grown yet).  If they can’t make it, they’re already thinking about how to.  As much as possible, they are working towards full self-sufficiency.  Their job is to work on the terrain.  It’s a full time job, but many hands makes light work.  This gives them time to enjoy life and spend time doing what they want to do.  For my part this has included writing and reading a LOT.  And taking photographs (but my camera ran out of battery and I had to wait til today for the sun to charge it up by solar power!).  They go and visit their friends; their friends visit them; they volunteer in a fair-trade produce shop; they carve wood sculptures; watch films; have a siesta and love life.  If they need money, collectively they contribute.  They find bits and pieces of work (teaching, selling wood sculptures) and collectively they run a yurt-building workshop once a year to bring in some money.  They have an exchange agreed with the local school: they allow children to come to the terrain and run activities for them, in exchange for use of the school’s sewing machine to make roofs for the yurts. 

I went to bed on the first night totally happy and quite out of my depth.  With the (very low!) level of my Spanish, with the adjustment to this new lifestyle, with just how great this all was and how excited I was to learn.  No one has mentioned showers, and I’m starting to wonder where, or indeed if, everyone washes.  There is a bath tub halfway up the hill to the toilet tower (more on that later!) looking out across the strawberry patch…but there is no hot running water here, and surely they don’t bathe in the open air in icy cold water?!  If they do, they are either round the twist or hard as nails, and I am neither.  I’m starting to contemplate the next 2 weeks without washing. 

Look out for yurt adventure updates over the next few days.  Hope you enjoy the just-writing.  I’m really enjoying it.  You could consider getting yourself a place on Tammy Strobel of Rowdy Kittens (Click here to visit RowdyKittens)’s brilliant writing course, Writing in the Digital Age.  Click here to view more details.  I took it and absolutely loved it.  More notes on yurt-life coming soon! XXX

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Thoughts on Ride Sharing and a weekend Couchsurfing in Biarritz

In my opinion, trains in France are not bad: compared to UK trains, they run on time, are clean and tickets are reasonable, even at the last minute.  However, to take the train to where I wanted to go (from Montpellier in France to Spain) was too expensive for me, and the journey was too long due to changeovers.  A friend of mine uses BlaBlaCar all the time, and says it’s great.  BlaBlaCar is a ride-sharing scheme: like organised, paid hitch-hiking. 

Through BlaBlaCar I managed to find myself a way to get to Spain in a timely fashion (i.e not having to wait around at stations for hours on end); and for half the price of the train.  Because I was relying on other peoples’ travel itineries, I had to make the journey in two stages, over one weekend, but it meant that I got to spend the weekend exploring Biarritz and Bayonne.


My first chauffeur was 20 year old Marine who was off to Bilbao to be near her boyfriend and learn about the hotel industry.  She had other passengers, so I hopped out at Bayonne.  The journey was sweet as a nut.  We all agreed that ride-sharing was the way forward, for both the driver and the passenger.  Everybody gets to save money; meet other people and share the journey; and from an environmental point of view, it saves two cars going to the same place.  I’m definitely going to use it again in the future, and will post my journeys so that other people can join me and chip in for the petrol/ toll costs.


Once I got to Bayonne I hopped on a train to Biarritz that was just 10 minutes away, and as I still hadn’t received any replies on Couchsurfing, I checked into the youth hostel there.   My roommates were Spanish, which was good for a bit of practice; although I realised just how useless I was at Spanish these days, so I bought a couple of books on my kindle (Practice Makes Perfect: Intermediate Spanish Grammar and Collins Easy Learning Spanish Words ) to help me learn.  Whilst at the hostel, I got a message from Lucie and Gaetan, a couple who lived nearby in Anglet, who invited me to stay at theirs for the rest of the weekend, and offered to show me around.  I gratefully accepted.  Youth hostels are fine and dandy, but all you meet are other travellers and tourists.  Couchsurfing is great for getting some inside local knowledge.


I wasted the whole of the next day traipsing round Bayonne looking for the ‘perfect pair of shorts’ (as I had none, and am heading Spain-wards where surely it will be hot?!).  I did however like the Bayonne’s architecture and the shutters that were in the colours of the Basque country.  I took the bus back to Biarritz, and was starting to think that it was a boring place, full of old ladies with over-done cosmetic surgery, so I was relieved to meet up with Lucie and Gaetan who were so friendly and hospitable, and totally proved me wrong about Biarritz.  They showed me secret beaches with cool little surf shack bars.  We drank sangria and watched some amazing sunsets (that is not even photo-shopped!) – all this I would never have found if I’d stayed in the hostel. 


On Monday I met up with my second ride-share chauffeur, Chris, the dog super-enthusiast who was on her way to a competition in Spain.  Turns out Chris is a big deal in the world of dog-training.  We stopped for a picnic lunch in a sweet spot in north Spain called Islaras, and finally got to my destination, just as I missed the 8pm bus.  I got a call from a girl who lives in the yurt, who said she’d be passing at 10pm if I wanted to wait.  I had no choice, so I waited.  I asked my first few questions to people in Spanish, about bus times and other trivial nonsense, and boy was it scary!  It’s really good for me to be out of my depths with languages for once.  I can empathise better with my students the fear they encounter when trying to get French words out of their mouths. 


Finally a tiny little Spanish girl, full of energy and smiles turned up in her white van and greeted me with the warmest and kindest welcome in the world.  This is Laetie, who’d just finished a belly-dancing class, and was to be the first of my new friends.  We chatted in Spanish, English and French all the way to the yurts.  It was dark when we arrived, but I was shown into my very own yurt (!!!!) which is normally the communal yurt, where meetings take place and cooking is done, and general hanging out happens.  But for sleeping, this is mi casa.  As I went to bed I could hear water flowing and horses making horse noises and I can see already that this is the place of my dreams.

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Celles – Village Abandonné

Photographs from a photo-walk around Celles, an abandoned village near Montpellier.  Next to the village is a manmade lake with another village that is submerged completely!  Everyone had to leave Celles too, as it became too flooded to live.  It's now a very eerie photo spot!

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On the road again…

Hey Monstres, how do? 
I’m on the road again and it feels great.  I’m putting my shop on holiday mode, as I am on walkabout and not carrying my new collection with me.  Below is what’s in the shop, and if there’s anything you like the look of, fire me a message and I can reserve or make one for you towards the end of summer.  I also have a Je Suis Une Monstre website in the making, being designed for me by a friend.  Looking forward to opening night and sharing it with you!  I checked my stats a couple of days ago, and was bowled over to have had over 300 hits per day (a top record!).  Turns out that my favourite ever writer Tammy Strobel had shared a link to my article about leaving Pikey Park.  I can’t tell you what an honour it is to have a writer that you admire not only check out your stuff, but share it with their world too.  Merci mille fois, Tammy. X


Before I started this blog and before ever coming to Meribel, I took myself off on a solo voyage around France, learning French and how to live simply and self-sufficiently.  Using sites like Couchsurfing and Help X, I was able to stay with people who started off as strangers and soon became great friends (one of whom has become such a close friend that I went to her wedding last week!  Congratulations my Jenny Jenn!).  Everything that I learnt on that trip stuck with me, and was certainly the most interesting and valuable learning I have done so far in my life.  I’ve been dreaming of that way of life, of adventures, learning, exploring other places where people live in alternative ways.  So this May is my month of solo voyages, speaking in other languages, writing, photographing and investigating. 

I left Meribel and spend a super week in the countryside near Montpellier with my friends Alexia and Laura.  We stayed with Alexia’s family, and spoke only French for a whole week.  It was so good for me!  Even watching crap on TV meant that French language was going into my brain, and it was really cool hanging out with the girls, after a busy winter season working together in Meribel.  We went on a couple of photo-walks: one to an abandoned village called Celles; and another around the hills, looking down on a beautiful lake on the other side of Celles.

Celles – Village Abandonné

My main dream to be realised since the last time I travelled like this, five years ago, was to go and live in a yurt, learn more about growing vegetables and learning Spanish.  So I typed my requirements into Help X, fired off some messages, and got an invitation from Ines in Asturias to go and live with their community of six people who live in yurts and live off the land.  Perfecto!

My only dilemma was how to get from Montpellier to Oviedo in Spain.  There are trains that do that journey, but they take all day; are very expensive; and don’t match up with the bus timetable to take me on to the yurt village.  I spent all of an evening trying to figure out what to do – searching for ride shares on BlaBlaCar and finally found two rides: one that could take me from Montpellier to Bayonne on Friday, and another that could take me from Bayonne to Oviedo on the Monday after the weekend.  Perhaps I could find some cool people to spend the weekend with on Couchsurfing…so I sent another round of messages...

28 messages later and still no response, I was starting to wonder if this was all becoming more hassle than it was worth, and what on earth was I going to do?!  I realised it was late, and that was why I had no replies, so I went to bed and picked up Bird by Bird to read.  I came upon these words:
“The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream and not at cross purposes with it.”

After all, haven’t you noticed that when you are travelling, the universe has a funny was of conspiring to make things happen alright for you…

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Chunky Knitted Cowl Collection 2013

I am proud to present to you all Je Suis Une Monstre’s Chunky Knitted Cowl Collection 2013.  All Chunky Knitted Cowls are 100% designed and knitted by my own fair hands; they’re made from the softest, squishiest mohair & wool blend; they are all made from hand-dyed, hand-spun yarn that is full of sequins, glitter, flowers and other magical surprises!  They are perfect for fresh spring days and cooler evenings; and are guaranteed to keep you as snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug!  Merci mille fois to Rachel for lending her neck and photographic skills, to bring you these photographs, and for a really fun day out exploring Conflans, a medieval village in the Alps!  (Click on the photo to take you to the shop).

Plus one very sexy new Hoop-la Scarf in “Graffiti”. 

You can see my previous posts about these Cowls as works-in-progress when they were but balls of yarn; when the yarn made it snow; and Crafternoon.

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So Long, Pikey Park…

Salut Monstres, It’s been a while since I wrote, so you may not have seen the final days of Pikey Park. 
We did a lot of International Relations and really got to know our French van-dwelling neighbours.  They’re all really cool.  We all wish we’d done it months ago, but better late than never.
The last day of snowboarding happened.  (It was glorious!)
The lifts shut.  It rained.  It hailed.  It snowed.  The sun shone through at last, at long last!  The winter season is officially over, Aslan arrived and chased the White Witch away: spring is here.
Our French neighbours fired up their trucks and rolled off into the sunset, pumping out some serious smoke and hard-tech beats from their homes on wheels.  Like gigantic snails, moving ever-so-slowly with their homes on their backs.
  
Us lot were the first ones in and the last ones out.  We love Pikey Park!  We cleaned out our vans and battened down the hatches.  A lot of jump starting and motor repair went on, but we all got there in the end (of course!).  Physically, all that’s left of Pikey Park is 18 concrete posts, with 17 empty gaps in between where our vans used to be.  When you look at the space between the posts, you can’t  believe how small the spaces were that we lived in.  Yeah, we survived the winter in our vans!  (And yes, we were beautifully warm the whole time, thank you for asking!).
 


It’s hard to believe that so much energy, life, creation, happiness (and a respectable lack of soap opera drama) happened in those tiny gaps.  But it did, and these past six months have surely been the best of all my life.  Spiritually, Pikey Park has left an impression on my heart, not necessarily as having to be a place; but as a way of being.  The Pikey Family that I have had the absolute honour of sharing my life with, have made this a winter that has changed and confirmed the way I think about things; the beautiful ways I think life should (and can!) be led.  About warmth, creativity, community, FUN and not giving too much of a shit about the things that don’t really matter anyway. 

All that remains of space number 13 is my rucksack with all my worldly possessions, packed up and ready to go on their next adventure.  I am becoming a different sort of snail for the next few weeks – one that doesn’t even have its wheels beneath to carry it along.  The next adventure is nigh, and I am saying goodbye to everything I’ve known this winter: my friends, my love, my tiny little home; the mountains.  Toby and I are travelling in different directions for a few weeks, to live the dream in different ways: he is going to the UK to get face deep in screen and do lots of music amazements; I am heading south, first to Montpellier and then onwards to Spain…..to write, photograph, wrap my tongue round different languages!  And then in just a couple of weeks’ time, we’ll be re-united when I head to the UK for the first time in a year, to see friends, family, and explore my own beautiful country.

So long Pikey Park, and thanks for all the fish!

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