More Medieval, and the Brits still hate France

I ws very happy with this nice shot of an old Tabac sign at the Guérande Medieval Fair. Too cool! I still have a lot of photos to post, and a new selection of shots of the Dolmen of Kerbourg to upload some time in the distant future. For now, here are some more pictures from the fair:



The tents stretched around the walled city along the tree-lined path, and made for some nice photos in combination with the walls and the moat. I don't actually know the size of the walled city in square miles or kilometers - It is hard to guess at, because it isn't very large but the interior is such a maze of tiny twisting streets that it is difficult to get an idea of the overall scale of the place.

A fun open-air sausage vendor's stall. Complete with swarms of insects lighting on all the displayed sausages. Did it make a good picture? Yes. Did we buy any sausage to eat? No. I remain too deathly afraid of most French sausages to sample them - One look at the insides of andouille is enough to put anyone off - though I've grown to love chorizo. Also, our village butcher makes a yearly mountain of something he calls "Mexican sausage" which is fantastic. Where the "Mexican" part comes from is anyone's guess, but it is the only sausage I've had here which is really similar to what Southerners think of as sausage.

It was a blustery day, and we took many big blows of buffeting from the magnificent multitude of billowing blue and black dresses.

In other news, it seems the British still hate the French. Granted, I read just as much anti-anglo gibberish in the French press, but I really don't understand this poll. The French are the rudest people on the planet? I did get a laugh out of the Frenchman's defense that they were a nation of sulking romantics, but really... I've lived here for four years now and can categorically say that French people aren't any ruder than people back in the US (and at least they're polite enough to never walk right up to you and start talking about their religion!). Neither of our sets of visiting parents seemed to see much French rudeness, especially in such experiences as the big family dinners, the nice English-speaking locals who helped us evacuate the TGV disaster, the Fresnis and their bodacious breakfasts, the hotel staff, and on and on. I don't get it. Granted, Paris is a hell-pit of savage assholes, but that can be said for most really big cities on the planet. I'm sure Beate will be thrilled to know that the Germans ranked #2 for rudest, as well as Most Boring and Most Ungenerous. How anyone can call a 6' tall pipesmoking woman with purple hair "boring" is beyond me...

Oh, and one other thing - Do any of you techie readers know of any freeware utility which can batch-modify multiple JPGs to smaller dimensions? I have roughly six folders filled with photos taken during Emily's parents' visit, but each photo is 1600x1200, and quite a bear for them to download on their 56K modem connection. With 200+ photos, individual resizing and compressing is out of the question. I do most of my photo work in Paintshop Pro, which can do batch format conversion but not batch resizing, so if anyone can point me to a freeware utility that can handle this task, thanks in advance!