{"id":18,"date":"2010-04-12T16:24:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T16:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abingdon.blog\/daybyday\/2010\/04\/12\/international-friendship\/"},"modified":"2010-04-12T16:24:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-12T16:24:00","slug":"international-friendship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/?p=18","title":{"rendered":"International Friendship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/abingdon.blog\/abingdon2007\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/09041206-300x227.jpg\" \/><br \/>Argentan in Normandy has been a twin town to Abingdon since 1956 and is therefore Abingdon&#8217;s longest lasting twin. It is the most easily reached of the twin towns -just a <em>Brittany Ferry ride from Portsmouth to Caen and then a 30-40 minute car drive<\/em> away.<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/abingdon.blog\/abingdon2007\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/09041201-300x200.jpg\" \/><br \/>The first weekend after Easter is known as Quasimodo Sunday, the weekend when Argentan has its &#8216;Quasimodo&#8217; agricultural fair. Here the Mayor of Argentan (centre) can be seen next to the Mayor of Rotenburg (another twin town), about to cut the tape. With EU funding, a mock German street had been re-created in one hall of the fair, and market stalls brought over, so this year it was very much a Franco German event.<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/abingdon.blog\/abingdon2007\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/09041204-300x230.jpg\" \/><br \/>The fair includes a large funfair, an exhibition of commercial stalls, displays of agricultural equipment and cars, and best of breed competitions for cows and horses.<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/abingdon.blog\/abingdon2007\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/09041203-300x229.jpg\" \/><br \/>Here two shire horses strut their stuff.<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/abingdon.blog\/abingdon2007\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/09041202-300x204.jpg\" \/><br \/>You can see from this stall in the Fair that we Brits easily make up the most visitors to this area of Normandy.<\/p>\n<p>Already this year from Abingdon as part of twinning: cyclists have gone across, a rugby team, 46 MG club members, some members of the Church in Abingdon, John Mason School, and next month a combined choir of the Church in Abingdon is visiting. So at the grass-roots relations are thriving, but at the civic level the Mayors of Argentan and Rotenburg have remained unchanged for several years and have built a relationship and this joint fair may well be the result. Such things don&#8217;t happen easily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Argentan in Normandy has been a twin town to Abingdon since 1956 and is therefore Abingdon&#8217;s longest lasting twin. It is the most easily reached of the twin towns -just a Brittany Ferry ride from Portsmouth to Caen and then a 30-40 minute car drive away.The first weekend after Easter is known as Quasimodo Sunday, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abingdonblog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}