Category: Life in France

Life in France

The Christmas markets of Berlin

Depending upon where you look on the City of Berlin’s official website, there are “over 60 Christmas markets”, “over 100”, exactly 63, or 73, and on one list we counted 97. I suppose it doesn’t really matter since any one of those figures would be a lot and we had only a week in Germany’s capital. How do you decide which ones to see? Luckily, there are plenty of websites devoted to “the best” and surprisingly there was enough agreement among them to choose a top 10. I’ll put that list below, with a brief description of each market, but then the photos in the gallery will speak for themselves.

Continue reading “The Christmas markets of Berlin”
Unknown's avatarBob2 Comments
Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Back to Madrid

Returning to a city that you’ve already visited has its advantages: you can revisit some favorite spots, explore some new ones that you missed before, and discover others that you didn’t even know existed. That was the case when our English friends Pete and Gaynor suggested meeting up in Spain, as we had done with them in previous years in Belgium, Switzerland, and the Channel Islands. They had already seen us in Carcassonne soon after we moved here, so we all liked the idea of meeting up elsewhere in Europe for another adventure. Madrid seemed to be the logical choice, since they could fly there non-stop and we could take a direct train from Narbonne.

Continue reading “Back to Madrid”
Unknown's avatarBob4 Comments
Life in France

Halloween: north meets south

Our neighbor is creative. Sarah and family moved here from Brittany and brought with them a professional style crêpière so it wasn’t long before we got invited to their re-creation of a Restaurant Crêperie in their kitchen, complete with umbrellas for decoration to represent their frequently wet weather. The galettes had filling choices of ham, egg, sauteed onions, and cheese. For the dessert crêpes we could select sugar, honey, salted caramel or chocolate sauce, jams, and a hazelnut spread. Cups of cold cider were plentiful throughout the meal. While all of that was fairly traditional, her Halloween party foods were even more imaginative, starting with what Bill and I called “lady fingers” but Sarah labeled even more menacingly as les doigts de sorcières, witches’ fingers that you see at the top of this post. That’s their carved butternut squash, above to the left. A few more photos follow.

Continue reading “Halloween: north meets south”
Unknown's avatarBob4 Comments
Life in France

Now, that’s strange

Every morning, Bill and I look at a variety of news and information sources online from both sides of the Atlantic. Often I’m simply scanning the headlines but whenever the words Les Américains pop up in a French story then that requires more investigation. Such was the case with the website StarsInsider that generally highlights topics including health, food, and travel. What in the world could be the “30 strange things in Europe according to Americans”? This was going to be a fun article to read.

Continue reading “Now, that’s strange”
Unknown's avatarBob10 Comments
Life in France

Mistaken identity

When Bill and I speak French it’s clear that we’re not native speakers and it will probably always be like that. Even when we get to the point that the words flow as easily as they do in English there will still be slight nuances that will give us away. We’ve been mistaken for German, Italian, English, Irish, Canadian, and Romanian but never American. I was thrilled with the latest guess, Moroccan, because the people we know who moved from Morocco to Carcassonne sound to us as if they’ve always lived here. That made me wonder where most of the immigrants to France come from and the government’s Office of Statistics had the answer.

Continue reading “Mistaken identity”
Unknown's avatarBob14 Comments
Life in France

To your health

France 3 is technically one television channel yet it’s really made up of stations from each of the country’s 13 mainland regions and even those might be split into two or three parts. It’s kind of like PBS in the US with one nationwide channel that’s enhanced by local stories originating from state or city affiliates. Their mission statement includes, “France 3 reflects the diversity of economic, social and cultural life in the regions and through regional offshoots, including prime time, whose programs can be picked up nationally.” It’s thanks to that “national” reference that we found out about a newly-opened business in the north of France. The program carried the subtitle “A bar in a retirement home to make the residents smile again.”

Continue reading “To your health”
Unknown's avatarBob2 Comments
Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Athens in 4 days

Every year my brother and sister-in-law go sailing and always invite us along for the ride. It’s definitely not a rowboat on a pond; these are cruising class yachts with a crew in destinations including the Caribbean, Fiji, and this year Greece. Since they were going to fly into Athens, we all agreed that meeting up for several days in the capital would give us the time to catch up with each other and to explore a new city. With our travel agent hats firmly in place, Bill and I began the planning of how we were going to get to the Hellenic Republic, where we would stay, and what we would see. A future blog post will highlight the journey there while today I wanted to describe our visit and provide some tips to anyone who might want to vacation there as well.

Continue reading “Athens in 4 days”
Unknown's avatarBob7 Comments