Supermarkets en France

sunrise

Supermarkets in France are much more tolerant of misshaped vegetables than in the UK. We bought a basket of potatoes the other day and only two of them would have got into Tesco’s racks, yet everyone was firm, fresh and free of eyes. Keep Tesco potatoes a week, even in dark cupboard, and they have eyes sprouting every which way.

Apples are ginormous, with rough, wrinkly skins in some cases, but they taste delicious once peeled. Onions are huge affairs, but bananas are smaller, sometimes greener and come from a French dependency whose name I cannot recall. (I don’t do the shopping – dh does it while I stay back at the mill with Tim, the main reason being that it is too hot to leave him in the car while we both shop. He’d howl if we left him alone at the mill, and though the noise isn’t going to bother anyone, we don’t like to think of him as that stressed because we’ve left him alone in a “strange” place. So I stay and do a general clean up or something until dh returns.)

Meat is different too. French butchers favour different cuts, unfamiliar to us and often in much larger portions than we are used to, with much more fat running through the flesh. I avoid the fish tanks in the larger shops. I appreciate they keep the poor thing “fresh” but it seems barbaric to me to point at one poor crab out of ten or so stumbling around the bottom of a tank and condemn it to death. I’ve never bought one (and never will) so I don’t know if they kill them or give them to you still kicking. All in all it is just as well dh does the grocery shopping.

Supermarketing

view from the balcony

I have complained at odd times on this blog about people in the UK using Americanisms in speech presumably because they think it makes them trendy or cool. Well, it seems the same thing is happening the other about. If you click on the Click, you’ll see some examples of Americans using British expressions. I haven’t quite clued into the Australian equivalent yet, but give me time.

We went supermarket shopping this morning. To my mind there’s nothing more guaranteed to make you feel you are in a different country than gazing at supermarket shelves and seeing strange looking vegetables with even stranger labels. I have to say that the said vegetables, crazy-looking or not, all look bursting with health and freshness. Most of them are grown in Australia. I also looked at the clothes in Kmart because I wanted a warm sweater for the cool mornings, but all I could find were “sweaters” in cotton and nylon mixtures in such a fine weave you’d hardly know you were wearing it. No doubt they’re common in warm climates, but they wouldn’t do the job back in northern England! I found what I wanted in the men’s clothing store across the way, and a third of the price. Colour me happy.

I certainly didn’t need any extra layers yesterday. We repeated our walk along the beach for breakfast at the beach café, and at nine in the morning people were surfing. The sun was beating down and strolling along at the edge of the surf soon got tiring. By the time the café was in sight, we were gasping for a cold drink and a sit down. Coming home was worse, because the sun was stronger than ever. The last mile was up hill and through the Koala reserve, which at least was shady, (no Koalas on view) and then open grassland burned to a crisp in many places. ‘There’s the house,’ we gasped in relief as it came into view and we staggered on as if we’d just survived trekking across the Great Australian Desert.