This morning I was listening to a song where the lyrics included “I don’t want to be apart from you” which is clear enough to native English speakers, especially when you can see it in writing. As an exercise, I often try to translate in my head phrases that I hear. It went fine until I got to the word “from” which many of you will know in French is de that also means “of” plus at least half a dozen other words in English. Continue reading “No wonder we’re confused”
The weather forecast for today was rain so we planned a relaxing day in. That meant a bit of a sleep in, a leisurely morning with a full pot of coffee to go with a baguette and croissants, and nothing particularly planned for the afternoon. Then the sun came out and Bill said “Let’s go to Italy. There’s a train at 11:32”. Uh oh, the last time he started a sentence with “Let’s…” we ended up moving to France. This turned out to be just an exercise to see if we really could be spontaneous and take advantage of being within a 20-minute walk of the station. Continue reading “In training”
On this most recent trip to Carcassonne we did a lot of window shopping. Once we move we won’t have a car so we used the rental car this time to visit stores on the outskirts of town. All of those will still be accessible to us on a 30 to 45-minute walk or a very quick bus ride that costs 1 euro. The house we’ll be living in is fully furnished down to the knives and forks so there won’t be much other than food that we’ll need to buy on a regular basis. We just figured that since we had the car we might as well use it. Continue reading “Red alert”
You may have read my blog post from last month that Bill bought me a Fitbit® which keeps track of your physical activity including the number of steps you take. Since I currently cover somewhere over 7 miles a day on a treadmill, and we won’t have a gym in France, he wanted to make sure I’d be able to keep track. Thoughtful, huh? Actually it really was and I like it so much he got one for himself and has become more of a fanatic about achieving his daily step quota than I. Continue reading “Fitbit® update”
You’ve probably heard of the apparent contradiction that the French have a low incidence of heart disease despite consuming seemingly large amounts of saturated fats. There is at least one very successful diet book based on this Paradox that includes dairy, red meat, and wine every day. We can confirm from just general observations, at least at traditional gathering points for the locals such as the open-air market, the butcher shop, the seafood vendor, etc. that it continues to be true. Interestingly we saw yesterday that the building that used to house a well-known US based hamburger chain is now a café/brasserie serving individually prepared meals from all fresh ingredients. No one getting fat here! Continue reading “The other French paradox”
This morning the city of Carcassonne held a memorial service to remember all of the innocent people killed in last night’s attacks in Paris. We join them in that moment of silence. Continue reading Moment of silence
We went to Trader Joe’s® today and I’ll let you guess why based on the accompanying photo. You may recall that we’ve been “shopping from the pantry” trying to use up all of the food that we still have stored on the shelves. That policy applies to the wine cellar as well and it would appear that we’ve done a really good job of clearing the shelves down there! If you’ve been to our house you know that these wine racks are typically full just in case a hurricane hits Atlanta and it’s unsafe to drink the water. Continue reading “Running on empty”
Let's Live In France 