France Tales

I am happy to report that not all the French are in no particular hurry to help you. Twice in the last week we were in stores where some employees were on roller skates. Customer service people skating around the store, one even looked like Roller Girl from Boogie Nights. The first time we saw it, we were in LeClerc. Roller Girl was sprinting past us, I don’t know how you say “going really fast” when you are talking about roller skating, with the cash register drawer insert. It was surreal, I thought they might be shooting some French Heist type movie where the villainess holds up cashiers and then speeds away on skates with a Lacroix scarf trailing her in the wind. But no, she was really just replacing the drawer for the next cashier. Reality is overrated.

In Toulouse, at Carrefour, we saw another skater. This one male. He looked like he got lost on the way home from the skating rink though, maybe sometime in 1979. He twirled past us, yes he twirled, on his way to help a woman in the lingerie department. Reality is not so overrated.

It is a little unnerving when they speed past you, they always look in such a rush.

If only we could get those French hand dryers on skates, then we’d be set.

I had this in the sidebar, but the sidebar items are actually widgets. This means the more I have of them the slower the page loads. I am going to try to add to the list and then just make a link posting it back to the top. Feel free to add your own words in the comments. I am going to expand it to phrases.

pillory

provocative

sanctimony

barometric

excoriate

false economy

weep

This week’s wine also has a funny name. It is a Bourgogne called Grand Ordinaire. It’s kind of like the chicken and the egg. If it’s Grand then why is it Ordinaire? If it is Ordinaire then how is it Grand too? I swear this was 1,25E at Lidl. I think some drunken farmers harvested some crappy grapes and said let’s bottle this, call it something ridiculous, put a “French” label on it complete with a coat of arms, and see who will buy it. It probably ended up at Lidl because no one bought it. Except stupid Americans like me. It is a 2006 so how good could it be, I mean it fermented for like 10 months, I had dustbunnies older than that in my house, when I had one. House that is. Oh yeah, the wine is barely acceptable. With so many others to choose from, i wouldn’t waste my time on this one.

We had been looking at cars for a couple of weeks. We wanted something small and economical but nice looking. In Europe that hardly narrows it down. The average car on the road is very nice looking and well designed. We looked Peugeot and Renault but started to see that Alfa Romeo’s were expensive new but reasonable as a used car. We purchased an Alfa Romeo, 2002, 147 1.6L, with leather interior. It had only 40,000 km on it. We are very happy, look at the pictures.

Look at the license plate, our car has VD. VD it gets around, anyone remember that commercial from the 70’s? while we were getting car insurance, we were at the insurance office, Jean-Jacques discovered the VD in the license plate. He decided to explain in French to the insurance agent what VD meant in English. Of course I was a little concerned but the agent burst out laughing. We are not in the US anymore Toto!

Our container arrived last Tuesday morning. We packed the container ourselves and had help loading it. We did it this way because when we moved from CA to Philadelphia we used a moving company and they broke thousands of dollars of our things. We gathered all the documents and got quotes etc to make a claim against them only to find out they had declared bankruptcy. Funny, even in bakruptcy all of the contact people were the same. The name had changed though, it was East West Moving now it was West East Moving. Movers are gangsters. Don’t even get me started about what happened when they delivered our stuff.

Luckily this time around we packed our stuff well and got a container of our own and it looks like everything is fine. We were going to have it delivered here in Le Buisson so we could access some things that we needed immediately. We decided that we would ship it to Toulouse and store it there until we move. It will be cheaper than moving it again to Toulouse. Our storage place is under 60 euros a month.

We drove down Tuesday morning, helped unload it, took some of our stuff back to Le Buisson. It was painless. We now have our bicycles. We went for our first bike ride on Friday afternoon.