A Week in St. Nectaire - 1

Last week was interesting in many ways. Despite living in France, albeit in a remote corner of the country, I have seen pretty much nothing of the country. Save for a sightseeing Saturday I spent in Lyon last winter, nothing (I'm saving Paris for an occassion). Last week, there was a collaboration meeting (I work in an experiment collaboration at CERN that involves institutes and researchers from all over the world, and we meet once a year off-site from CERN) in St. Nectaire, a really small village in France.


This is the route we took to St. Nectaire. It was a lovely route through the Jura mountains on to the other side, through and over villages located in and between the mountains.

	After a while, it got flatter, and pretty boring. :-)

We were put up in the most luxurious hotel in St. Nectaire. On arrival, we took a walk around the town. In a 45-minute walk, we met _one_ local inhabitant. This continued over the next few days, over which we met a handful of locals, and hardly any young people.

I read about rural depopulation in Europe before I came here. This is a phenomenon where the population of villages reduces because younger people apparently have no reason to stay back, since tourism and agriculture are not lucrative enough as careers. Lots of buildings were for sale, some sadly going into ruin.

The French food over the next few days was great overall. Apart from the one disappointment where they served the boiled remains of an animal massacre, the food was great - the French have learnt a thing or two about flavour and do a good job (between bouts of amnesia).

The area is full of volcanic craters and mountains. It doesn't concern people much because the latest eruption in the region was ~7000 years ago. However, the craters still look like craters (more pictures to follow). The mountains are also famous for an old Roman temple (~2000 years old) and as a popular paragliding site. After climbing one of the neighbouring summit, looking at the town of Clermont-Ferrand from a height of 1400 metres was . . . satisfying. Of course, this was also the site of Blaise Pascal's famous experiment where he measured the effect of altitude on a mercury column (to prove atmospheric pressure).

Here's the first batch of photos.

St. Nectaire