random things...

It's been a while so I thought I'd rummage through my photos to find some stuff that I'd been saving for posts.  I've given up on photo-documenting things, our camera sucks and I am SO not diligent about taking photos, so you'll have to bear with the lack of images that go with my ramblings.   French lessons are going great and we're feeling less socially/linguistically retarded here in France.  Since I last posted we had a visit from P's cousin Bjorn, and we've been hanging out with friends from school.  You can only imagine the hilarity that comes with a group of internationals communicating in their second/third language.   Random pictures as promised:

 

Typical lunch - a spread of the cheeses, saucisson/jambon or cornichons and pickles that we have kicking around, and we always have these things kicking around.  I generally dislike sandwiches and Paul lives for them, so this is a happy medium - we get all the components of a sandwich (bread, meat, cheese) without being bound by the form.  Crackers (good crackers) are hard to come by here.  The cracker aisle in the grocery store consists of different forms of dried toast, so if that's what you're into, you'd be in dried toast heaven here in France.  

I was missing burgers a while back so we decided to make them.  Hamburger buns don't exist in grocery stores so we had to improvise a little.  The closest thing that I could think of was a brioche.  I'm going to make a generalization here: overall food quality is high in France.  I think people here are specific about what they want and demand a lot out of the food they buy and eat, which really means that a grocer or a store needs to meet those demands.  You can see it in the way customers ask for very specific qualities for the food that they're buying and you can hear it all the time, "I want a crottin that's not too dry", "a baguette that's well cooked", "I want smaller leeks" etc.  After having said that, the burgers turned out pretty lacklustre because of the beef.  Beef is just not as good (meaning tasty and fatty) here as it is back home.  I don't buy/eat beef all that often here and when we do it's usually for stew, and I made beouf à la ficelle one time, in which you boil beef until medium-rare with vegetables.  I know what you're thinking, "boiled beef?", but you just gotta think about cooking beef differently here.

Here's another picture from our window - bored of them yet?  The sunsets and the sun rises have been really beautiful the last few weeks and I tried to do my best with our crappy camera.