Little town, big day

Sunday was the date of municipal elections in France. That means every town, village, and city elected a mayor and a counsel. I got to experience it a little because my host father Philippe was on one of the "lists," or the election cards. Every town in France has these election lists to determine the new counsel, and the length (number of running members) on the lists depend on the size of the list. Boissières, as it is so small with less than 400 eligible voters, has only 11 counsel members including the mayor.

So I went to check out the reading of the election results on Sunday night, which was kind of interesting. It was kind of amusing to me, even though I've never voted in the enormous area that I come from, to see the two curtained voting booths and the small glass box of enveloped ballots. Voters would come in, take both the lists and circle who they wanted, or write another name or two if they wanted someone else in office. So I stuck around for about an hour listening to votes being read off and watching how they marked them down, and how the two people marking who were candidates from the opposite parties would say out loud every time another candidate got to a multiple of 10 votes. But after seeing how it worked for a while I got bored, and didn't really feel like sticking around to see my host father lose, so I left. He jokes now about how demoralizing it is, but it was still good that he got 123 votes out of 319 for being a relatively unknown man in the village (if you can believe being unknown in such a small place). But anyways my dad and I told him to make him feel better that he was like Al Gore in the fact that the better candidate doesn't always win!


Other than that I haven't been up to a ton. I've had some work to do with a group research project being done this week. So unfortunately I didn't get to ride my bike today, but I am going to try to ride this weekend and take some pictures of some pretty things around me - the old Roman settlement on a hillside in the nearby town of Nages and the Pont de St. Nicolas, a Romanesque bridge. I can't promise but I'll try! Goodnight