What I love...

(Lesley)

What I love about France…

-crème brulée: available in the grocery store,

-hearing French everywhere,

-grocery shopping; looking at and trying all the different foods,

-patisserie shops on every main street,

-being near the sea: hearing the waves crashing, walking along the cliffs,  exploring the beaches, planning around the tides…

-hearing my kids and my husband make attempts in French and succeed most of the time,

-cheap wine and cheese,

-finding walnut trees while out walking. We pick a few walnuts up off the ground and bring them back to crack and eat later.

-the warm welcome we get from the French, who have been friendly and helpful  especially once they know we are Canadians (who speak varying levels of French).

-gîtes.  What a great system!  They make good economic sense; are clean, comfortable and are a great alternative to hotels and hostels.

-cheese: there are so many nice, soft, smelly cheeses.

-warm baguettes!

-old uneven paving stones.  I enjoy them, having come from concrete.

-old city centers.  I love the crooked houses that we find all squished together in the center of the old towns.

-the passion of the people. The strikes and demonstrations and how involved the French are about what is going on.  (As of yet, I have not been too inconvenienced by it all, and my attitude may quickly change if I end up involved, delayed or stuck)

What I love about Europe…(France, Begium and UK so far)

 -the lush countryside.  There are flowers and flower boxes all over the place.  The foliage is green and seems to need a lot of trimming.  (I would never be able to keep up with the lawn cutting.  I have trouble keeping up with it at home, and here, well I’d be overgrown, lost and never again found.

-blackberries on the hedges.  Apparently in England it was a really good year for blackberries, well in France too.  I’m still picking and eating them off the hedges when we go walking in late October.

-driving.  Like in the UK, the driving is pretty good in France.  The signage is clear and easy to follow, the other drivers are generally quite competent.  It may get scarier inland, or in more congested areas, but so far in Normandy and Brittany, it has been easy. 

-walks.  There are lots of paths and trails accessible for people to use.

What I love about being away for a year…

-reading what the kids write about in their blogs and hearing what strikes them the most in what they see and hear. 

-doing the home schooling with the kids.  They can accomplish in a half day what I imagine would take them days to do in a regular classroom setting with all the interruptions,

-our life of leisure, not getting up each day just to follow the same routines,

-taking lots of pictures,

-seeing how people live in other parts of the world,

-receiving e-mails with snipits of news from riends and family

-meeting new people and comparing views on the world, ideas etc.