Blogs from France, Europe - page 1568

I am currently in Paris. My mind and body is completely exhausted....no, not from running around to places and speaking a different language. It is from these two women that I feel like I have been dragging all over with me and pushing through metro stops and telling waiters that they dont want tomatoes on their food and trying to explain the way to say the word "merci." The only peace I find is when I drop them off at some gift-shop-concentrated areas where the unbrellas depicting Monet's garden and Eiffel Tower shaped wine bottles are abundant.... a.k.a old lady paradise! Then I go off on my own. I have been around the Sorbonne and Latin Quarter in the afternoon twice now, and I think it's my favourite spot. Sitting in cafes writing or wandering around ... read more

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Winnie and I are master chefs! I guess just being in the general vicinity of the greatest food in the world has been enough for us. Who needs to take classes when the talent is innate? Ok, maybe we are not THAT good, but we did make an incredible quiche and yummy salmon the other night. It was really funny actually, we looked up all these words that the recipe had and still had no clue what we were doing. We had to “blonde” the crust, which we took to mean make it golden brown, and it also called for a seeding of the zucchini….we ignored this, do people really seed zucchini or just the French? Regardless, our improvisations and interpretations resulted in a fantastic creation that I can only hope to replicate again later. Winnie ... read more

24/9/05 Saturday - The flight from Singapore to London was marred by the bad attitude of the British Airways flight attendants. Did they ever smile? No. Do they have a chip on their shoulder because we think Qantas is better? Yes. On arrival at Heathrow, we had to take separate flights to Paris. This was due to Lorenza having booked her passage some months later than Uncle Robert and I. So, Lorenza had a two hour wait at Heathrow, while Uncle Robert and I did the same at Charles de Gaul. Uncle Robert and I passed the time tuning our ears and brains into French, talking with a guy from Senegal. He was waiting for a connecting flight to Algeria. He had a brother working as a chef in Sydney. We also got to observe two ... read more

Egg #2. It's me again, with a little update from La Rochelle, on the West coast of France about half way up. Unfortunately I don’t have any near death experiences to tell you about this time, but I’ll do my best to make something up if I feel that its getting a bit tame. La Rochelle is a med sized harbour town. How to describe La Rochelle?……. I’d say: nautical, fresh, pretty, well maintained, sunny, pleasant, nautical, white, nautical, bright, breezy, nautical. And just erring slightly on the side of ‘retirement home’. So, what’s with the nautical malarky? (readers voice). Well, to say that Portland Bill and Captain Pugwash probably went to school here could be the understatement of the year. There’s a port here called ‘Les Minimes’ ……… more like ‘Les Maximes’ - there’s at ... read more