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Or was it Rome? Well, whatever 
This side of the family and your humble writer spent a few days in the middle of the nowhere in France earlier this week. I must confess now and tell you that apart from having been to Paris twice before for short breaks, I didn’t/don’t know much about France or the French. Okay, yes, I know the basic stuff, the topical stuff (the Bastille, Les Miserable, the garlic, café olé, etc), and just a couple of words / sentences in the language.
This visit has surprised me both positively and negatively, but not negatively in a nasty way, just in a “well, I wasn’t expecting that” way.
The positives:
- The countryside is awesomely beautiful. We were staying in a tiny village called Charmé, about 50 miles southwest of Poitiers. It was so rustic, so old-school. And the fields surrounding it were equally gorgeous. A shame that we went in September and not in August, as the massive fields of sunflowers were already dead (We thought at the time that they dry the sunflowers on the spot and then collect them to take the seeds out of them, to sell them as “pipas”, but I am not sure this is the final destination of those sunflowers…) . I wish we had had more time to go for walks… the flat terrain was asking for it!
- The people seemed very nice. I personally didn’t have much interaction with the locals (I don’t speak a word!), but I could see that everybody was nice and nobody seemed to mind “those 6 foreigners / English” who landed in their quiet village to spend a few days. The neighbours were kind to us, the shopkeepers as well, and only in one occasion we had “looks” from the locals (and that is because we DID look like tourists!! – you know, shorts and sandals, and all that)
- The big supermarkets are more like the Spanish ones than the British ones, and I loved it. We went to a “L’Eclerc” and to an Auchan and I so wished we had those shops here in the UK. There was so much variety of everything, and the fish counter in the L’Eclerc was A W E S O M E. It was a proper fishmonger who was allowed to set up shop just outside the tills in the big supermarket… If only I could find something like that here….. 
The negatives:
- What’s all that about shops closing all day Sunday AND Monday? And the restaurants as well? You could tell that the area wasn’t a tourist one. No chance in a million years would a shop owner or a restaurateur close when there are tourists around! And where are the bars? I didn’t see a single one… And when the restaurants are actually open, they don’t accept more clients after 8:30! I honestly believed that the French were more similar to the Spanish than to the Brits, but no, it looks like they like their dinner quite early too (you would struggle to find a restaurant in Spain that serves you dinner before 8:30!)
- I was quite upset to see quite a lot of people hunting in the fields around Charmé. I don’t know what they were hunting, birds probably, but seeing them with the guns and the hunting dogs upset me quite a bit. I know this is nothing to hold against the French “per sé”, since the same thing happens in Spain and the UK, and any other country in the world, I would assume… It’s just something that I hadn’t seen in the flesh for a long time and caught me unprepared.
All in all it was a good holiday. I suppose it could have been better (weather, open restaurants, etc), but it was also a “cheap” holiday, so I can’t complain too much.
Here are a few photos:
The first time I made tiramisú I knew from the start that coffee wouldn’t be an important ingredient in the recipe as most recipes tell you. I don’t like coffee that much. I can tolerate a very milky latte if I feel very sleepy and I need the caffeine. But that’s about it.
I have now made “my” tiramisú around 6 or 7 times, and it is always delicious. Everytime
The difference between “my” tiramisú and any other recipe that you can find on the internet is not only the amount of coffee, but also the fact that I put Baileys on it. Lots of Baileys.
Jon and I decided that it would be fun to record me making one and afterwards we uploaded it to youtube! I wonder if it’ll get superpopular and people will start putting Baileys into their tiramisús, and who knows, maybe one day in a hundred year’s time or something like that, people would actually think that Baileys was always part of the recipe
And here’s the video:
Jon and I enjoyed the experience of making the video so much, that we may do it again with a different recipe
My in-laws will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this weekend. This is such an achievement… Forty years together seems a concept so foreign and strange for me, coming from a “broken home” environment myself (I never met my father).
They don’t really want a present, but I thought I’d make them a scrapbook page with lots of old photos that would remind them of these last 40 years together. So I managed to get hold of tons of their old pictures. And something that I love doing is looking at old pictures! So this was a present for me too I still haven’t started the scrapbook page, but I’ve got a very good idea of what I am going to do. (News on this will come soon on my crafty blog)
The thing is, by looking at those old pictures an idea came to my mind. I suddenly wished that we were in the 70s or 80s again. Families seemed to be closer together, children were children (meaning that they would be “naughty” sometimes, but they would never even think about doing some of the barbarities that children do nowadays – my husband was telling me the other night about this 4 year old who is terrorising and vandalising this lady’s car, and the mother of the child just laughs it off by saying “he’s such a devil, isn’t he?“). Family time wasn’t something that you had to make time for, but it was just the natural thing.
Of course I am generalising, and not all families were like that in the past. There’s always been broken families, disruptive children and abusive parents, but those were the exceptions and not the norm. Nowadays it is quite rare to find a married couple who has been together for more than 20 years and still love each other. It happens, I know, but in this case this is the exception and not the norm.
The way that society has evolved has made it too easy to just break up and not stick together. Which in a way it’s a great thing (I hate how women in the old days had to stick with abusive husbands just because you couldn’t even think of leaving him, let alone getting divorced!), but it is also creating a way of thinking where giving up is not frowned upon any more. And people won’t even think twice to leave what could be a very good relationship at the first sight of trouble. It looks like communication isn’t there any more, and rather than talk things over, leaving your couple is the easy thing to do. What a shame.
So I wish my in-laws many more years of blessed and happy marriage, 40 is just the beginning! They are definitely a role model to follow. They love each other, they love their children and all their family. And this will continue to be so for many years to come!
