And some more EUROPE PICS

Alright, here are the rest! These are all from France (I had to consolidate a lot!! haha) We did a festival in Martigues, France, which is GORGEOUS!!! It is known as the Venice of France. There wasn't a lot to do there, but it was beautiful just walking around and spending most of our time with the other groups at the festival (and eating yummy Turkey kebabs!). Tiff and I spent most of our time with the Argentinian guys, which was a big challenge to my rusty Spanish, but it was a lot of fun! However, we got to know majority of the groups...there were really great dancers at this festival and everyone was a lot of fun to be around! The other groups were from Cuba, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Canada, Ireland, South Korea and Zimbabwe, as well as a local group to the region of Martigues...and each night we got to dance with them at an amazing stage that was set up in the canal! Yes, our stage was in the water! It was a beautiful venue and people apparently paid a lot of money to come watch the shows. It's so great doing folk dance over in Europe, where it is truly loved and cherished and the people absolutely love it (it's not just the nerdy thing it is over here lol).
The other excitement of the festival was getting to do workshops with Joanne Doyle, who is the ex-Riverdance lead! How cool is that!? She is one of the nicest people I have ever met!! We were also able to see some of our friends from Confolonnes, France that came down to visit us...we met them last year in Italy at a festival we did there...so we got to spend some time with them too. We stayed in host families during our 10 days in Martigues...and I just have to say that our host family was fantastic!!! They were so great and so sweet! They had a really nice house and put the three of us girls (me, Tiff and Hailey) in a nice big room. We had fun BBQing with them and swimming and spending time getting to know them.
We also went to Marseilles and spent a little time there. Marseilles is such a big city, but is so beautiful! After we left that area when the festival was all over, we went to Carcasonne, France, which was absolutely fantastic!!! We had SO much fun in this cool place! It has the old castle still but the city is built all inside the castle walls (well not all of the city, but a small portion. So we stayed at a place right near the castle and did lots of shopping and wandering around. It was great!