A big thank you

My last post was somewhat a call for help with my French, I hadn't intended it to be but sometimes the mind meanders a little, but you my dear readers rose to the challenge in your wonderful comments and in a strange sort of way you have inspired and motivated me into actually doing something about it on a daily basis, in short you have kicked my butt and made me realise it is up to me, I know this but sometimes it takes others to give you a bump start,.. therefore I would like to publicly give credit to you all. below is a list of people whose help has been fantastic along with a link to their blog, please take a look at  them as they are all very interesting in different ways and of  different interest.

A Taste of France - 
https://francetaste.wordpress.com/

Kiwi - Paris Secrets
http://www.parissecrets.com/

Paulita - An Accidental blog
http://paulita-ponderings.blogspot.fr/ 

Janet Brockman 
No blog but a good and faithful friend who said to drink wine to become fluent - good advice in any situation.

Jenny & John - Renovation of a derelict house
http://jennyandjohninbrittany.blogspot.fr/

Vagabonde - Recollections of a Vagabonde
http://avagabonde.blogspot.fr/ 

Once again many thanks for your comments, they are very much appreciated

A Bientot - see you soon

I must try harder

Hello dear readers,

I have to tell you about the house next door, it used to be occupied by a lovely lady who sadly died, it was inherited by her only Daughter, Martine Dijon who is of the Dijon mustard dynasty, now Martine and her husband Dominique (yes that is how he spells it) live in Niort in the deux Sevre and use the house next door for a holiday home... what has all this got to do with me trying harder I hear you ask, well we pretty much hibernate during the winter and although we live in a fairly big village we could go months without seeing anyone, needless to say I don't get much chance to practice my French which is awful at best, my biggest problem is the understanding of the language, the long and short of it is - I must try harder - 
Saturday our part time neighbours came for a visit and I must say we have stayed out of the way to avoid the embarrassing language problem but today I said to John " we must go and speak to them as they are in the garden" out we went and although I struggled we did manage a conversation and enjoyed a glass of red wine with them but I want to be much better than I am hence I must try harder, it seems that it is the story of my life as all my school reports said the same.
I want to be able to converse with my neighbours and everyone else, it is important to our well being in a way, so any spare time I have now I am going to devote it to my French.

I will take any advice I can on this one.

 

Frugally French

Hello dear readers.

In an attempt to be a little more frugal and live a little cheaper life I have been trying to get a bit more organised by meal planning and in the course of doing this there is a knock on effect happening, it has inspired me to organise other area's, first off someone, (now someone is a person who apparently lives in our house but we have never seen,) this someone left the freezer door open and it had started to defrost and so it was a mad rush to save the food and get it defrosted, which we did, this lead to me wanting to clean and sort the fridge which in turn started me on sorting all the kitchen cupboards, this is not like me and John asks "am I getting OCD?" well something is happening but I think it is just me coming out of winter hibernation plus I accidentally came across a video about how people organise and clean their homes, now I am inspired and hope it continues

The fridge is nice and clean and tidy and now I will do it once a week before I go shopping, that way I will know exactly what I have, I also chop things up like peppers and courgettes and put into Tupperware as you are more likely to use them and they last longer.I must say I have less wastage doing this and it cost's me less, win win.

Yes you have guessed it, the next thing I must organise is the ironing, 

Tune in for next episode by clicking on the right "join this site "

Speak soon

 
 

Special Saturday treat

Dear readers, I thought I would share with you a little treat we had yesterday.

But let me digress a little first, our Saturday evening meal is usually if not always a curry ( my dear John's favourite) I like them but not too hot, another favourite accompaniment of John's is Naan bread, now I have searched here in our little bit of France but as yet have not found them so, Saturday just after lunch I decided I would find a recipe and try and make them, Now my track record with dough of any sort is not good, I never seem to be able to get it to rise, my old Gran used to say to make bread you must have lots of patience and I do not have it in mounds if you get my drift, as in I can't wait for it to rise enough and the resulting bread is flat and hard in fact even the birds have been known to snub my bread. anyway I am following a video see here  and have made the dough putting it into a greased bowl to rise when the phone rings...
It is our dear friends from another village who are inviting us to afternoon tea and cake, well we have never been known to refuse an invite especially when it involves cake, the reason behind the invite is that some other mutual friends are visiting and it seemed a good time to get us all together, We had to quickly make ourselves presentable and start out on our journey thinking only of what wonderful cake our friend had concocted (she loves to bake and never disappoints) When we arrived the table was laid and the display of cakes was amazingly mouthwatering, sadly I was so glad to see our friends and chat over so many things that I forgot to take pictures, I am cross with myself for this as she had made so much effort and I would have loved to give her photographic credit, I will apologise and suggest we have a re-run in order to do so.
We stayed until 18h30 mulling over times gone by and times to come, it is so nice that the visiting friends are only really young and we are old fogies but we get on so well, on the drive home I was thinking of my dough and the hours it had to rise with visions of it meeting me at the door, my forced patience had paid off, the dough had risen so well it actually looked like the one in the video, I make the curry (that's another blog me thinks) and start to prepare the Naan bread for cooking, well let me tell you they were so light and fluffy and so much better than any bought ones previously consumed...the moral of the story is have patience when bread making.

Sorry it was almost too late when I thought about the pictures but it's better than nothing.

Needless to say I had mentioned the Naan bread making and all our friends insisted we do a curry night and I promise to take lots of pictures.

Thanks for reading and please leave a comment 
                           

Is she talking to me

Hi Dear Readers.

I was today sitting and thinking about the whole Supermarket experience in France and one thing that came to mind was the fact that most French women talk to themselves while shopping, I have now got used to it to a certain extent but I must say it still takes me by surprise when the woman standing next to me suddenly starts talking out loud, well you would think she was talking to you, right, and as I don't always catch what they are saying first time I always end up saying " Désolé, excusez-moi" well they just look at me as if I have just encroached on a very private moment and walk away, needless to say I am left feeling quite stupid. (no comments on that subject please) 

I am thinking that I have shrunk back to the British way of shopping, you know going to the supermarket once a week and ending up buying stuff you don't really want or need and I have to ask myself why did we move to France, the answer is that we loved the French way of life, sort of a hark back to times when we were a lot younger and life was so simple, it is very much still like that here in rural France and I feel we should do everything we can to preserve it before it is lost in the name of progress, so our little bit will be to start going to the market once a week and buying bread from the boulangerie just as we used to do, living the French life instead of mirroring our life in UK that we escaped.

A Bientot mon Cher x

Our French life - write it down.

Write it down !

I am not the sort of cook who follows a recipe as I like to be creative in the kitchen, that said there have been many times when I have been creative with a meal and it has been very successful only to find that I can't remember what I did... so now it is my intention to have a notebook as my side kick when my creative juices are flowing so that I can jot it down as I go along and therefore avoiding the disappointment when I try a meal for the second time only to find it is nothing like the delightful meal we experienced first time.

Do you like my little book - well why have a boring notebook when you can have a pretty one.

I am in the process of getting myself organised and trying to do a weekly meal planner, originally the plan was to do a monthly meal planner but we shop weekly, not sure if I want to shop for a whole month, and where would I put it plus I am pretty sure that over a month I would run out of something ( there are some things you can't buy a month's worth of)  I would then have to make an unscheduled trip to the Supermarket, I have never been able to just walk into a shop for one thing without coming out with a dozen others.
So I am doing a folder that will house all my recipes, there will be a list of all the meals we like that will enable me to write up a weeks meals, I can then see what I need for the weeks meals and write a shopping list accordingly, plus I can check what I have in the freezer already.
My memory is getting bad so it means that if it isn't on the list I don't buy it, this is helpful and it means also that I can save some money.

Happy Sunday everyone, I will show you my folder when I have finished it and make sure it works.

La Tour Eiffel

The Eiffel Tower

This is somewhere I would like to visit someday

This is a picture from A fellow bloggers blog, take a look here at her wonderful musings
http://paulita-ponderings.blogspot.fr/
All of us who blog about France do it because we love the country for lots of different reasons and some like myself are lucky, I have lived here for 7 years with my husband John and we are still learning about the wonderful people of France and their way of life, before we lived here we thought that our cultures were very similar or in fact the same but as time has gone on we are beginning to realise that this is not so, as I find the differences I will surely put them on here hopefully for your amusement.
One that comes to mind right now is the lunchtime here, in our part of rural France it is always 12h00 - 14h00 without fail in fact our church bells are rung at midday to tell everyone it is time to stop work and they will always take the full two hours, we see some workers go into the restaurant opposite on the dot of midday and they don't come out until 13h45 ready to walk back to work just down the road, .. now the problem we have is, now we are retired we don't get up until late and then have a leisurely breakfast before we think about doing our jobs, so if those jobs are outside we are just going out when the French are thinking of stopping for lunch, our neighbour once asked " do you not take your lunch at 12h00" so I explained no and why not, she just turned and as she was walking away shaking her head she could be heard muttering ""Bizarre"" so now out of courtesy to our neighbours we tend not to be doing anything outside during the Dejeuner - lunch...

Our French life - Good comment

Below is a comment left by a fellow blogger in reply to my post  
(The cheek of it) I only know her as Vagabonde but you can find her blog here - 
http://avagabonde.blogspot.com/
she has given me permission to print it as many of you may not see it in comments, It gives a good insight into the French culture and gives details of a good book to read, it can only help to know how their minds work
Also a big thank you to Paulita from An Accidental blog for pointing her in my direction.

I have just ordered the book too and will let you all know how I find it

I came here after writing a comment on An Accidental Blog. Your post gave me a good laugh. You see, that is the French culture. I just finished a book, sent to me by a friend, about an American woman who married a French man and talks about all these cultural differences – you should read it, it is funny – it is by Harriet Welty Rochefort and called “French Toast: An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French” – I saw that you can get it secondhand on Amazon France. You see the French will take advantages like this, because for them it is normal. It is the same in banks, at the post office or going on an airplane – everyone does it. I am French, raised in Paris (now living near Atlanta, GA.) I was so surprised while studying in London to see people “queuing” at the bus stop! In Paris we had to get tickets with numbers – don’t know if they still do it. What you should have said, in French, and very polite “excusez-moi madame, je ne savais pas que vous aviez tants de choses – nous sommes pressés, alors nous reprenons notre place” (excuse me, madam, I didn’t know you had so many items, we are in a hurry, so we are taking our place back.” Voila! And that would have been OK, no problem. With us French, you need to put your foot down! 

You will get many cultural shocks like this. I did also in the US. I’ll give you an example: I remember the first time I went to a Thanksgiving dinner at American people’s home and they said “grace” before dinner – I was surprised as in all my years growing up in Paris I had never heard it (although you living in the Mayenne I think, they may be more religious.) But wait - then each guest had a Bible on top of their plates – we were supposed to read a verse from it. Well, being from very “laic” (secular) Paris I was shocked beyond belief and thought they were fanatics – I said I did not feel well and escaped. Then later I found out that most Americans are super religious and it’s OK for them to pray in public or with foreign guests at dinner, without knowing if the guests are religious or even what religion or no religion (certainly not done in France!) So every country has its particular culture. Bonne chance!

Have a very happy Easter x

The cheek of it

 Friday 18th March 2016
Today we were doing our shopping in Super U Craon, we were waiting at the till when this young woman trotted up behind us with some baby clothes and a gift box for them, we had quite a bit of shopping and as it was lunchtime I was aware that she might be on a lunch break and being kindness itself I said she could go first if she liked, as we moved our trolley out of her way, she thanked us very gracefully then called her husband who was waiting at the next till with his/their trolley which was loaded up even higher than ours, I was gobsmacked in fact I said as much to John, he said you will be if you ever do that again..I mean did she think that was the right thing to do, would you have done that if a French person had made the same gesture?

 

In fact when I look back over the whole shopping experience of today, 3 times I was pushed out of the way and once as I was walking in a straight line a woman blocked my path in order to get something she wanted, this is the norm here especially at lunchtime, ... yes I know what it is like to be on a lunch break and having to juggle shopping but at the same time eating properly, the thing is the majority of workers here get 2 hours,  in UK sometimes you are lucky to get 1 hour but I don't think I have ever been this rude, when in Rome and all that.

On the subject of workers here, I was talking to a friend who works here (she is still young) and she was saying that normally bank holidays are taken off on the actual day and not the nearest Monday but this year due to it being a leap year all the bank holidays have fallen on a Sunday so the workers are not happy as it means they have lost at least 8 days holiday and they don't get a day in lieu, watch this space it will mean more strikes...

Speak soon lovely's

Our French Life - The sun has got his hat off

It is 16th March and the sun is shining so we are in the garden ( well eating lunch at the moment ) John is marking out the patio to put up the Pergola that we have bought to replace the Gazebo we bought last year that promptly blew down and got totally twisted in the Mistral winds that whip across the bottom of the garden, so in the hopes that this solid wooden framework if properly secured in the ground will be the last thing we have to erect for our Jacuzzi, we thought that once up we could actually make wooden sides and put a corrugated perspex roof on to allow the sun and light in, therefore we would be able to jump in the hot tub well into the Autumn and also leave it out over winter and not have to lug it upstairs.

           And so we start

I have of course been supervising, John says it is me being bossy. more pics as we erect it.

Almost done

But the really good news of the day and I am so pleased to tell you that yesterday John overcame is awful phobia with needles and had injections in his knees for his Arthritis, and today he is like a spring chicken, I have to keep telling him to slow down and take it gently but it is the first time he has been pain free for so long and it feels like we have won the Euro millions, and it is all thanks to the health service here which is second to none, everything is done as soon as it is needed, he even had his x-rays given to him on a cd, how cool is that..vive le France..

Now if you haven't joined my blog yet please jump on board as I love to have you as my shipmates on this journey, go to the side where it says join and sign up there, thanks in advance, Roz x