Wow... I just noticed that I start off almost every blog entry with the word "today." If it's not the first word it's at least in the first sentence... crazzyy. Sorry for my awful writing style - I'll have to work on that.
Well, well... These pictures are from my trip to La Puisaye - a region of France. It's about 2 hours outside of Paris and, from what I saw, it's very rural. During this excursion we visited 3 different places: 1) a pottery maker who still uses 18th century methods to create their pots 2) an organic french farm 3)Guédelon - A castle that is currently being built using all the same methods that were used to make castles during the 14th century.
I almost didn't make it on this trip - I stayed up till 3am unpacking so the next morning I was wicked tired... I ended up sleeping through my alarm and got to the bus 15 minutes late. Luckily, I wasn't the only late riser so the bus waited. Phew!
This is the outside of the pottery shop.
This is the inside.
This is our tour guide explaining to us the type of soil found in the region. It is especially good for pottery making - there are three different layers of the soil all of which are used to make pots.** I have three videos that I wanted to post here - They showed the progression of pottery making techniques over time. Howeverrr, all my videos downloaded to youtube sideways and I don't know how to fix it :-\ just check back here later and maybe I'll have figured it out **
Our guide making a pot on the electric wheel.
This is a picture of an 18th century pottery oven. It's a man-made cave built on top of a natural hill. Apparently, it has to be on a hill because the oven needs to slope down in order for the pottery to cook properly - I wondered why the hill had to be natural though. I mean, if they were advanced enough to know how to build this oven in the first place then, most likely, they could dig their own slope. I was too nervous to ask though.
A few more interesting facts about the oven:
The cave is built out of bricks, however, the bricks have molded together from the constant heat; the gray color of the cave is because the bricks were coated with salt... I forget why they did this exactly - it wasn't because they thought that the color gray looked better or anything... Oh well, sorry for my less-than-thorough explanation.
Oh, and i guess it's important to mention that the inside of the oven was filled with thousands of pots. They would stack each clay piece up on top of eachother until there was no room left in the whole cave.
This is the other end of the oven where the fire was built. It took three whole days and nights to cook the pots, with people maintaining the fire constantly. The oven had to reach a temperature of 1,300 degrees celcius (2372 degrees fahrenheit). On the third day, they sealed the oven and let the fire die out. It took almost 2 weeks for the oven to cool down completely.
I thought that the pottery hut was pretty. I have fallen in love with almost all the buildings in France.
1 comment:
I bet the pottery is great there. That is an interesting question about why they needed a natural hill.
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