Nadine Williams

Oooh La La To Lovely Adelaide

Our French visitors at Dame Roma Mitchell’s statue

For me, this has been an exhilarating week  of  girlie stuff: a strange French woman staying in my house, a glorious garden party with heaps of girlfriends, a girls’ night in delightful accommodation, a Friday lunch to celebrate a much younger female friend’s fiftieth and afternoon tea with my beloved sister.  There was the lunch-hour talk by former colleague Samela Harris on “Books in my Life”  where I snapped photographs and an evening pub meal with my dearest friend.

This smorgasbord of “sugar and spice and all things nice’’ began a week ago when I met the French woman I had agreed to billet, who was a stranger to me.

It did cross my mind as I stood at the balllustrade at the Adelaide airport awaiting the arrival of my house guest that my decision to billet a stranger could be disastrous – a weekend of an impenetrable wall of silence if her English was as bad as my French.  But within a noni-second of meeting Daniele, one of eight French women from the Lyceum clubs in France, I knew our three-day sojourn would be an enriching experience.

Instead I engaged with a delightful female of a certain age – like me – whose limited English bridged all the gaps in my schoolgirl French. She, who swooned when she discovered a koala in a street tree, hails from Brittany, an area where my late husband Olivier had also lived.

Danielle and her seven French colleagues are on their way to Perth for the tri-annual International Lyceum Clubs Congress – and I will join them next week in Perth.

On the Saturday,  Veronique, Jacqueline, Marie-France, Sabine, Danielle, Christiane and Muriel visited the Art Gallery of SA to see the Turner exhibition before my French teacher, Elsa and myself – and two other members of the Adelaide Lyceum Club – took our guests on a walking tour of our lovely city. Patrice, Sabine’s husband was the token male.

Our French friends at Palm House

Our tour had taken hours of planning and began walking along our cultural precinct, North Terrace, then onto the Adelaide Festival Centre, past the River Torrens to lunch at Regattas. Back onto North Terrace we all caught the free tram to the Adelaide Central Market for a 20 minute shop.  After gathering them all up like mother hen with her chicks, we caught the free bus to the East End, walking down Liberman Close to Rundle Street East to Fellinis for superb coffee. There we sat under umbrellas on the pavement against the quaint colonial Northern streetscape of Rundle Street.  We could have lingered, but walked briskly on to the Botanic Gardens.

We nipped into the Lily Pond pavilion in the nick of time before casually walking across the gardens to Palm House, the delicate Victorian glasshouse designed by Gustav Runge. Danielle is in the front row on the right.

Later that night, as Danielle and I dined at Windy Point Restaurant, with our gracious city twinkling mischievously below us, it occurred to me that we are blessed to live in such an accessible, visually beautiful place – Adelaide.  In one delightful  day, I can report that Danielle has fallen in love with the ambiance of our city and tomorrow we will visit Fleurieu Peninsula and our beaches to make her visit a memorable one.

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