St Hilarious and the Martars

A bit of benedictine history was the plat du jour today as we visited the abbey church of Saint Savin.
We grumbled at first because all the displays in the Church were in French with no translations so the most I could glean from it was that something happened in 897 and St. Hilarious did something.
However the ceiling of the church, the walls and the crypt were covered in Fresco's of different scenes from the bible. It would help if we knew our bible stories but we still managed to study and admire them for 4 hours- no joke- God knows where the time went- particular faves were God throwing the Sun and the Moon in the sky and the receiving of the ten commandments.

To aid our quest for information about the fresco's we used an interactive board (thank the lord as we this meant that didn't have to stare at the ceiling for 4 hours, it would have given me a serious crick in my neck) that went through each picture. Yet the french translation proved to be rather amusing as martyrs were called 'martars' earning some giggles from the three of us

in the evening we were invited to go for aperitifs at Nicole's friends. Laurence and Allan own an absolutely huge farm. with a large farm that Allan intends on converting into a music studio. He is obsessed with music as is evident as we were shown round their house as CDs were stacked in every nook and crannies. The whole collection was estimated to be about 14 thousand.

A common theme of the day was  'where the hell did the time go' as we arrived for aperitifs at 8 and did not leave until 1 - bloody hell