Yesterday, I was invited to accompany a school outing to the town of Megève to see an exhibition of Dali's sculptures with both Indie and Anna's classes (rather conveniently, they were going together...). It was a great outing, mainly thanks to the weather (gorgeous, warm and sunny) and the fact that the sculptures were just scattered along the main street of the town instead of a stuffy museum, so we were outside the whole time and it didn't matter how much noise the kids made.
I hadn't been to Megève before - you basically go down the valley and up the other side (there were a couple of kids sick on the bus on the way up from the windy road, but the teachers were on it and had bags at the ready, this is obviously not unusual on bus trips around here on the mountain roads) - and it was another classic pretty little Alpine town with a pedestrianized main street and stunning views of the mountains all around.
We had our picnic on a field to start and I was curious to see what the French kids would have in their lunch boxes. Sadly, nothing very interesting - a lot of baguette, of course. And they're much more relaxed here about nuts (there is no ban), and also there were lots of chips, chocolate bars, candies and one little boy even had a can of coke. Shock, horror! Unheard of at home! Thankfully, the kids then had about half an hour of running around - literally - on the field before we set off.
We then walked through the town, looked at each sculpture, found their title, and heard a little background to their themes and inspiration from the teacher. We stopped to sketch one of the sculptures, and then at the end the teacher, Blandine, was prepared with some close-ups of some details from the sculptures (the texture on St George's chain mail, the legs on another etc.) for the kids to identify. They were amazingly observant! Even the teacher was stumped on one, and Indie was the one who correctly identified Dali's signature from the very first one we saw. I was impressed. The kids seemed to enjoy Dali - I think his skewed, surreal view of the world somehow makes sense to them. A piano with a dancer's legs and a tutu? Of course, why not.
Indie's clearly got some artistic skills, and funnily enough, her teacher yesterday said exactly what Indie's kindergarten teacher said to us last year - that she's convinced Indie is going to be an artist when she grows up. She joked that she was going to keep Indie's sketch of Dali's elephant to sell when Indie is old and famous... Indie lapped it up, of course. She's certainly got artistic eccentricities, anyway.
A grand day out.
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