My first week in Coutances is behind. In the begining I was exhausted in the evenigs, after dinner. I guess it’s because there was everyday so many new things to learn and people to meet. Now I feel like I had stayed here for ever!

I have been working in the greenhouses and in the dahlia field. I have been picking strawberries in one tunnel and collecting Alstroemeria flowers in an otherone. I spend one and a half days cleaning the strawberry plants. There were quite a lot of fungus spreading there, so I tried to do the job properly.

Alstroemerias are nice. They grow in the real soil in a tunnel, and the oldest ones have been there for over twenty years. Only the very tall ones are collected. Small ones and the ones having only a few flowers are thrown away. My heart is crying! But I understood it better when I got some of the not so good ones to decorate my room, It wasn.t easy at all to arrange them nicely.

I have also arranged things in the shop of the greenhouse: organising plants nicely, writing name and price tags, cleaning faded flowers.

And then, of course, I have been a little in the dahlia field. It is quite a big area full of dahlias. All the different colours, all the different shapes. It is amazing! And all of it has been organised, planted and taken care of with students of the school. The Dahlia Festival was opened on Saturday afternoon. At the same time a new variety of dahlia was launched and baptised: it is called Normandie, and it is brilliant, pale yellow, like the famous cream and butter of Normandy.

Next time I will try to add some photos. For the moment, it has been enough to find out about the wifi, to be able to post anything at all.