This morning we woke up to realize that there was no heat and the house had become quite cold. Our bed has a thick duvet and blankets, so it’s nice and toasty and we didn’t wake up due to the cold, but as soon as Z came downstairs he saw that there was a problem. Not only were the radiators cold, we had no hot water! This led to furious Googling about what the problem could possibly be.
Luckily, I had paid attention when we first arrived and I knew where the hot water heater was. When I looked at it, I saw that an error code was blinking. More importantly, I saw the button next to it that said RESET. I pushed the button in a gamble that something would happen, and guess what? The heater turned on, the water got hot, and the radiators started working. Crisis averted.
Totti didn’t seem to notice the cold, but maybe that’s because we wrapped her up nice and comfortable in a blanket!
It’s pretty cold this morning, and the fountain was even more frozen than before. Snow is forecast now for all of next week, so I think it will freeze further.
We walked over to the Intermarché today to pick up some groceries and took a little detour to the cemetery. Maybe it’s weird to visit cemeteries in places where you don’t know anyone, but French cemeteries are really beautiful. The tombs and the graves look very different from those in the States, and there is a lot of history there – so many graves from people who died in both world wars. There are also too many graves for people who died very young – children who may have died of disease, young people who may have died of infection, women who may have died in childbirth.
In the Confolens cemetery, there is an entire row of graves for men who died in World War 1. They were all in the same unit. This was common in the first world war, and military leaders learned from it. There were programs where buddies/brothers could sign up and they would be assigned to the same unit so they would be able to serve together. Unfortunately, when an entire unit was destroyed, this meant that the young men from a family or town could be wiped out. In some towns, all of the young men were killed. In England, there is a registry of towns/villages where all of the men returned after the war – they are called Thankful Villages. There are only 12 such towns in France.
After this happened, the commanders of the armed forces in many European countries realized that these “buddy units” weren’t a great idea – it was better to mix soldiers from different areas so that no particular village was hit so hard. The Confolens cemetery has quite a few graves of those killed in WW1, quite a few who died in WW2, and we saw one who was killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
There are also some older graves – not quite as old as in Nice or Paris, but from the early 1800’s. There were quite a few that are marked that they will soon be removed as there is nobody around to pay the bills to keep the plot. As families die out or move away, these old graves are no longer visited and many of them start to fall apart. In France, it is normal to pay for the gravesite on a limited basis – although you can choose to pay “in perpetuity.” For the ones that are removed, the remains will be cremated and put in a columbarium.
Along the way home, we passed by the old washing street. This is where the laundry would have been back in the day. The old water trough to wash clothes is still there and full of water, but nobody uses it for anything these days.
