We all know not to drink and drive, but drinking blogging seems a more felicitous combination!
It is Saturday afternoon, we have just had lunch at a local bistro that serves Choucroute de Mer every third Saturday. Seafood Sauerkraut is comprised of three types of fish, most often salmon (the same pink stuff we get in the States), a flaky white fish, and cooked salted Haddock, served on a bed of sauerkraut with a Beurre Blanc. This particular lunch comes with a carafe of red wine, an appetizer, cheese and dessert, all for just shy of 14 Euros. Tables are set up family style and it is part of the pleasure to overhear, then perhaps participate in adjacent conversations, if you are new in town like us. The guys sitting next to us went to grammar school together, now they are retired and they fish and sail together, all about Pierre's age now.
This got me thinking about the nature of being an expat here in the Provinces. (Too) often Expats stick together, which is a kind of life I have never wanted to be a part of, but here for us there isn't even a temptation to do this, as there are no other Americans. This has the effect of making us intriguing to the Locals, and then when they hear that we have come to Brittany from Los Angeles, their curiosity is often magnified, which makes for fun conversations. We are still thinking about what we are doing here......
Our life here is less dramatic than life in LA, there is less "happening", but on a daily basis we are happy and relaxed, which is something neither of us have tired of. Food is a big part of life here, we bought lobsters today to poach in butter later, as we learned to do last night when we watched Masterchef's latest episode on Youtube, maybe our favorite TV show ever.
We watch some American and English TV and films here, just as we often were drawn to more French and European stuff at home......like that, like this.
Neither of us are very motivated to keep up with The News, apart from what Pierre gleans from facebook, and what I find out from the messages I still get from Moveon and the like, so we are not exactly Out of the Loop, but also not saturated with news of events on a daily basis (phew say I). Pierre feels a bit guilty about this, but not me! Likewise we are fairly cogniscent of what is happening here, but we hear about it all quite casually, like we did, driving in the car someplace, or a mention by a friend. When I began my News Blackout after 9/11 I soon found out that nothing too important escaped my notice, no matter how assiduously I was trying to stay away from The News, the important things seeped in, which is good, I was and am still participating in wordly activities though I am having a different experience of it here.
I bought a fantastic rose bush which seems perfectly happy, and we have planted some corn and kale, sunflowers and cucumbers, all in boxes, we'll see what happens. Snails and grasshoppers wreak havoc on tender leaves, although I have a nice natural snail killer which seems to be working. But what munched my cucumber seedlings??? We just got a telescope to look at the night sky when it is clear, which we hope will happen soon..........especially for the Supermoon next week, but it is still cool and often cloudy here, with the sun breaking through for just part of each day.
The daily changes in weather are still interesting, but we are both ready for it to get warmer and sunnier, even I, who thought Ireland had the ideal weather when I visited as a teenager, am tired of the cool damp (but my skin and hair never tires of it!). Well, I didn't move to LA for the weather, neither did I do that here ........ I particularly like change, but it gets boring when a mini group of changes becomes a kind of pattern so you can expect them. Regardless, the momentary variations of the light and sky are hard to tire of, I guess because, like snowflakes, each cloud is different. Yet I wonder if I will tire of that too? Stay tuned!
What your nice natural snail killer is? I have a million fresh french snails every single day on my terrace, brrrrrrrrrrrrr
Posted by: izabela | June 17, 2013 at 11:59 AM