Tag: Americans in Carcassonne

Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port

Last year while we were staying in France’s Basque country we made a day trip to the Atlantic coastal town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and enjoyed it so much that we recently returned there to spend some more time. Having said that, in addition to revisiting many of the places we had seen on that first trip we also used it as a base for a trip into the Pyrenees mountains. We knew the name of this “other” Saint-Jean destination because walkers on the Camino pass through Carcassonne on their way there and now we were going to visit it ourselves.

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Life in France

Christopher, plumber

We had a leak. Based on the water that was slowly advancing across our living room floor we anticipated that it was coming from the outdoor faucet that perhaps had frozen in some unusually cold winter weather and was only now making itself known. By chance a plumber who had been here before was working just two doors up from us so he stopped in but couldn’t determine the source. A call to someone else whom a neighbor had recommended brought a plumber equipped with sound detection gear that he used to trace the pipe from the point in the living room (photo to the left) where we were seeing the water all the way back to the bathroom tub where the leak actually originated…inside the wall, of course.

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Life in France

The green worm

Learning French is easy—they said. After all, 60% of the words in English have their origin in France. If you can pronounce ver as in “very” you’re well on your way. Just take a look at this sentence: Le ver vert va vers le verre vert that might be translated as “The green worm goes towards the green glass” and with one simple sound you’ve made a really useful comment. The language learning experts at Berlitz put French at position 7 on their list of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn, just after Italian and right before Swedish. Visitors to Carcassonne, Ed and Cherri, said that they had been using Duolingo for about 2 years so when I saw an article about a study on this program’s effectiveness, I wanted to see the results.

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Travel in France & beyond

Swiss express trains

Poet T. S. Eliot said, “The journey not the arrival matters” and we would tend to agree. Naturally when we’re planning a vacation it’s typically the destination that first catches our eye. There are two TV travel programs that we watch weekly to get ideas of where we might want to visit and our process is always the same: when an attractive location appears on the screen, Bill pauses the video, with the image hopefully displaying the spelling of the city and then we see if it has a train station. With that confirmed it goes on our “Want to See” list for further investigation. On occasion, however, it will be a particularly interesting train that’s featured and that was definitely the case with Switzerland, where it ended up being three different trains.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Matterhorn view

It didn’t take more than a glance at a photo similar to the one across the top of today’s blog post to convince me that we had to return to Switzerland. We had been there for a week last July, mostly in Geneva, but this time we were going to be on the opposite end of the lake and beyond, enjoying spectacular views while riding luxurious trains through mountain passes and across aqueducts in the Alps. Those details I’ll save for next week while today we’ll concentrate on our 4 stopover cities that definitely have name recognition: St. Moritz, Zermatt, Interlaken, and Montreux.

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Life in France

Undercover boss

Get your handkerchiefs ready—we’re going to talk about Undercover Boss. If you’ve never seen the American version of this reality TV show, the concept is that the head of a huge corporation is disguised to pass as a trainee in various positions throughout the company in hopes of learning what is or is not working for the employees and the firm. To explain the presence of the TV cameras, a video production team is supposedly charged with documenting the experiences of this “newbie”. The participants are then summoned to headquarters where they believe that they will provide an evaluation of this worker’s performance and potential as a new-hire. In reality they meet the boss, out of disguise, and hear how she or he felt the employee did. There are at least a dozen countries that have their own adaptation of this program, including France, so we wanted to see how our local one compares with the US.

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Life in France

Supermarket sweep

When we used to come to France on a regular basis for vacation it was always fun to rent a house or an apartment and pretend that we lived here. Part of the charade was stocking the refrigerator and if we happened to arrive on a market day then that just added to the illusion that we were genuine locals as we went from stall to stall picking up fresh produce. More often than not, however, we ended up going to the supermarket which always meant guessing how something was going to be labeled, how it might be packaged, or even where it would be displayed. Now we’re used to seeing eggs and milk (UHT) displayed side by side on unrefrigerated shelves but at the time it was quite the novelty for us. Prices weren’t a major concern since we simply wanted to get the food bought so that the sightseeing could begin but now as residents, comparison shopping is important.

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