Stroll around Ceret for a while and you’ll start to see stripes – Catalan stripes. These bold colourful lines seem to enliven everything here in the village from screens in bistros to pot-plants on windowsills, and even appear on plastic shopping bags. In boutiques and gift shops, you’ll find them brightening anything from summery espadrilles to … Read more
It wasn’t on the scale of the festival we’d just experienced in Perpignan, but we were delighted to return from the Southern French city to our little village of Ceret to find the French Catalan community out in full force on Place Picasso doing a folk dance known as the sardana. On the drive to … Read more
What we are really loving about doing this Price Check series – more than forcing us to do comparison shops at every destination – is that it’s making us pay more attention to what’s on the shelves at supermarkets, rather than what we are buying, and is therefore helping us to understand what people are … Read more
Good Friday or Vendredi Saint is marked in no small way in the town of Perpignan in Southern France with the Procession de la Sanch. This slow, somber march through the streets of the old town opens the Easter Holy Week or La Semaine Sainte celebrations. Even when we arrived a few hours before the Procession de la Sanch, … Read more
“The town is alive – there’s always something going on,” Carl, our host in Perpignan, had told us when he took us for a coffee shortly after we arrived. “I’ll hear a trumpet and drums from my window and I’ll stick my head out and there’ll be a band and crowd moving down the street, … Read more