COST OF ENERGY IN FRANCE AND BITS AND BOBS IN BRIEF: #5 AND LAST OF A SERIES

 

* Although France depends more on nuclear power than about any other European country, that has not translated into cheap rates. And the rates have been climbing. In 2023, we used 29% less electricity that we did the previous year, but the bill was only 5% lower. So far this year we've used 10% less than last year, but our bill is 10% higher. Last year, my total bill was just over 2,560USD. This year, our first six months will run just over 1,500USD. So yes. The cost of electricity in France can be painful. If I had to say it. we are wasteful. If it comes to it, I can identify ways to economize. It's getting to be time that we'll have to.

* Another cost of living in France that can be painful is fueling the family car. We own a used Renault diesel. I like Renault because they are still going racing. I like diesel because the motors last longer and the fuel is cheaper. But because France has to import all of its oil, it ain't very cheap at all. When we arrived, I was paying the equivalent of about 5.40USD per gallon. Today, I'm paying 6.80USD. I get 42 MPG, but it's still a hit to the wallet. And France takes climate change seriously. That means that the sale of diesel cars is being phased out and that diesel cars are prohibited from certain cities during bad air days, certain downtowns permanently. But for now, I'm keeping the Renault.

* We heat and cool with a heat pump, so our heating is covered in the electric bill. But we supplement with a wood-fueled fireplace insert. As the cost of electricity and fuel oil has risen, so has firewood. It takes about one cord of firewood to take me through the winter. In the past three years, the price has increased by about a third. I expect that when I order my next cord in a few months, I will pay over 400USD.

* Like everything else, the cost of water has increased, not least because we have been experiencing a lengthy drought, so the water tables are low. And water is essential to the main crop locally, grapes for winemaking . We're paying about 90USD per month for water/sewer, up about 30% over the last couple of years.

* We pay about 60USD monthly for our landline, two cell phones, and 4G wifi. Free calls to the USof A on the landline, but we are more likely to FaceTime or WhatsApp than phone. Just enough data to get by because neither of us are screenheads, particularly when we are out of the house. Fiber was installed throughout the village last year and we signed up. 5G and more data would run us an extra 25USD monthly. We passed on that.

As you can tell if you have been following this series, I have not attempted to present a detailed, all inclusive budget. Just snapshots of the sorts of things that I think might interest folks. Specific questions? I would be happy to answer in the comment section below.

HOBBYHORSING AROUND, THE GREATEST GENERATION, DRUNK DRIVING AND MORE: #23

 

THE GREATEST GENERATION

Friends were taking the ferry from the UK to  France and came across these gents headed for D Day ceremonies. They represent the best of us. If there is such a thing as valor in the ugliness that is war, they are the case study. There's nothing more that needs to be said.

DRUNK DRIVING

I would guess that not many of the boys in that photo are still driving. Certainly not driving and drinking. But consider the case of Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton. Drivers for Jaguar at Le Mass in the 50s, their car was disqualified the day before the race on a technicality. Both men spent the entire night drowning their sorrows in traditional alcohol-fueled fashion only to discover as they greeted the dawn that Jaguar had successfully appealed and their car was ready to go, almost as well-oiled as they were. Twenty-four hours of racing with no sleep and with a raging buzz on lay ahead. As they got ready, they realized that the traditional hangover remedies weren't working. So they tried the last one, hair of the dog. They downed a bottle of brandy and went racing.

They won, I suppose that it proves that there are times when a lack of inhibitions is essential to victory. True story. Google 'Drunk Le Mans' and learn more.

COMPETITIVE HOBBYHORSING

No foolin'. It's a thing. Associations. Governing bodies. Rules. Judging for style and creativity. National championships in several countries. 

They jump fences, they trot and they prance. They push to make hobbyhorsing an Olympic sport. And yes, it's not just kids. The most serious ones are adults.

I have said it before and I will say it again. You can't make shit like that up.

CAITLIN CLARK

Yes. I'm paying a bit of attention to the WNBA because I do love basketball. It's an interesting moment in their sport - maybe the Bird/Magic moment.  I remember how Bill Russel, Bob Cousy and John Havlicek sucked me into men's basketball in the 1960s. We'll see if Caitlin and Angel Reese and the rest of the league can suck in today's generation. 

If I had to guess, I would guess that no matter how good Clark or Reese or any other WNBA player becomes, attendance at WNBA games will diminish over time but settle at better than pre-Clark levels. Think of women's soccer. Even after winning World Cups with some highly visible and compelling athletes to market, league attendance increases over the past decade were driven almost entirely by opening new franchises in more soccer-friendly locales. 

There just are not enough eyes on the WNBA to lift it to major league status. 

CLICKBAIT ABOUT FOOD IN PARIS 

I thought that I saw an interesting article to read in BBC's Good Food newsletter. I was wrong. 

The article was titled Top 20 Foods to Try in Paris. The subtitle was 20 Local Food (sic) to Eat in Paris. 14 of the 20 were generic dishes that are available to me in our little village of 1,750 souls, 800 kilometers from Paris. Baguettes? Eclairs? Steak/frites? Duck confit? Really? Those are not local to Paris. They are foods that are French. Period. Most of the rest of the list had at least some merit - a particular chocolatier, a particular pâtissier, a particular cocktail in a particular bar.

 

Content. Websites need content. Any content will do. The internet has become a dumping ground for lousy writing about inane subjects as vehicles for eyes on advertising. Please. More cat videos. Less crap.

MUSLIM DEATHS AND DISPLACEMENTS

Do you know how many Muslims have been killed, how many Muslim children have starved, how many refugees have been displaced, during the civil war in Syria? 600,000 dead. 80,000 children starved to death, 5,000,000 refugees. Now you know.

Pakistan is preparing send back nearly 1,000,000 refugees from Afghanistan. What do you suppose that the Taliban will do to those folks? Did you even know that many refugees had fled the Taliban into Pakistan in the first place?

Is Sudan on track to become another Somalia? Both countries are Islamic states. Both countries are failed states, tens of thousands dead, millions displaced. 

Who marches against Muslim on Muslim violence? Apparently, violence against Muslims is only worth notice if there are Jews involved.

A TASTE OF LOCAL CULTURAL EVENTS: COST OF LIVING IN FRANCE #4

In the USofA, we lived in the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton metropolitan area. The State Theater in Easton brought in class acts like Preservation Hall Jazz Band, The Beach Boys and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. The century-old, award-winning Bach Choir of Bethlehem is known worldwide. Allentown Symphony Hall supports an orchestra of reasonable repute. Local universities provide an impressive array of concert opportunities. And tiny Godfrey Daniels Coffee House in Bethlehem has hosted artists from Tom Paxton and Townes Van Zandt to John Sebastian and Peter Tork to James Cotton and Odetta in a venue barely seating 100 folkies, 

But we were going to live in the rural, politically very conservative south of France. We knew that big cities were not that far away. And sure enough. ZZ Top, The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen have all recently toured within a drive of two or three hours. to Barcelona and Marseilles or Toulouse. The ticket prices are as you would expect, a couple of hundred USD and up. Same for the opera in Paris - 200USD for a world-class performance of Tosca. Would we have to travel that far just to hear less expensive sounds of music? We quickly learned otherwise. 

Cases in point:

Built about 900 years ago, nestled in woods and fields well off any main road, Chapelle Saint-Germain hosts an annual summer concert series. This year, beginning in July and spaced two or three weeks apart through early September, five concerts are on tap in the small Roman chapel with a dirt floor and about 100 mismatched lawn chairs. Programs range from Bach sonatas presented by the Baroque Ensemble of Toulouse, 15 artists when at full strength, to the Ensemble L'Archerona string trio plus soprano presenting sonatas from the less well-known 17th Century German composer Johann Michael Nicolai. Tickets run about 17.50USD per performance and there's a free tasting of wines from the domain on which the chapel sits.

At the other end of the scale, Catalan conductor/composer/instrumentalist Jordi Savall helms a concert series in the magnificent Cistercian Abbey Fontfroid not far from us. A Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, a UNESCO Artist for Peace, and a Grammy winner, Savall specializes in Early Music but has presented snippets of world music and blues as components of his annual five-night series. Tickets for one evening of this one-of-a-kind series are running between 50 and 60USD this year.

But I don't want to leave you with the impression that the only music available to us locally in our little corner of France was composed hundreds of years ago. Down the road, in a concert series scheduled for the courtyard of the abbey in Saint Chinian, French sisters will present modern and traditional Celtic music. (Celtic influence in Europe ranges from southern Spain to Scandinavia.) Pianist Marc Olivier Poingt, who has collaborated with the likes of Lee Ritenour (American jazz), Omar Sosa (Cuban jazz) and Gilberto Gil (Brazilian jazz), will play solo. And the Duo Yakaira will lend their piano and accordion to Argentinian tango. Tickets for the series run from 20USD to a suggested minimum contribution of 8USD.

But I don't want to leave you with the impression that the only places to hear music locally are churches. While it's true that churches that are centuries old are particularly satisfactory venues for all sorts of music due to having been designed before the age of electronic amplification, they are not the only concert venues. We've heard New Orleans jazz performed by local French musicians on a boat moored in a canal down the road (free with a food order), Latin jazz played by a skilled combo from Toulouse while nestled among tanks of fermenting juice in a local winery (11USD donation suggested), a bad jazz trio performing on a stage next to a burger joint in a campground on the beautiful Gorge d'Heric (free with food order), and have heard various members of The Gypsy Kings perform twice, once on the lawn of a local chateau (free) and once during a fundraiser in the next town's community room (27.50USD). If you didn't know, The Gypsy Kings are French and the extended family comes from the area of Montpelier, about an hour away.

But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the only cultural outings are music concerts. The cultural arm of regional government also supports children’s shows, magicians, comedians, acrobats, plays and readings. Of course, most is in French, so you will miss nuance if you are not fully fluent. But like reading the newspaper, listening to radio or watching television, exposing yourself to the language in multiple contexts enhances one’s ability to speak and understand your new language.

And I haven’t even mentioned the winery that hosted Nina Simone’s daughter Lisa or the little seaside music festival about an hour away that often has Sting on the bill.

So...

There are cultural opportunities aplenty. All genres. All prices. Locally and in the cities. Never fear. Even in the relative sticks where we live, the French, like Grace Slick, urge you to feed your head.

BIOLUMINESCENT PETUNIAS, MET GALA, MESSI AND MORE: #22

 ODD STUFF

I read. It's silly of me. But I read.

In Rhode Island, it is illegal to wear transparent clothing. So no Met Gala in Rhode Island.

A repeat attempt by the city of Kyle, Texas, to break the world record for the largest gathering of people with one name fell short despite 706 Kyles turning up at a park in that suburb of Austin. The current Guinness record is held by a town in Bosnia that got 2,325 people named Ivan together in 2017. 

And finally, an 81 year-old man has been arrested for busting up windows and windshields in his neighborhood for the past ten years with ball bearings fired from a slingshot. Get off his lawn! 

EDIT: Shortly after his arrest, the gentleman in question died of a heart attack. We'll never know...

BIOLUMINESCENT PETUNIAS

Lede: Scientists from the US, the UK and Russia walk into a bar.

Punch Line: Bioluminescent Petunias.

And there you have it. For a mere 29USD, a garden variety petunia that glows in the dark will be delivered to your door. Spliced genetically with a bioluminescent mushroom, the petunias need no special handling and glow naturally, whether in a light or dark environment. They don't need 'charging'  and they'll glow all night long. That way, you will be constantly reminded that whatever a person can think of, a person can do. And another person will pay for it.

MESSI'S NAPKIN

Speaking of paying for something, a 25 year-old napkin covered with the scribbled terms of a proposed contract with a 13 year-old Lionel Messi sold for just under $1,000,000 recently. There's too much money in the world.

AND FURTHERMORE 

I'm a coward. A visiting friend called the war in Gaza genocide. I said that there were probably war crimes being committed, but not genocide. She said that it was genocide and that perhaps we shouldn't talk about. And in the interest of domestic tranquility, I said, "Okay." 

I'm a coward.

NEWS FLASH

Guilty! Random thoughts:

 

*He'll never go to jail. 

*The Supreme Court will not exonerate him directly. If a lower court vacates the verdict, they simply won't agree to take New York's appeal. If the matter comes before them with the guilty verdict intact, SCOTUS will find a way to return the matter to a sympathetic court that will vacate the verdict, then refuse to take New York's appeal. At some point during the process. Elena's keyboard will burst into flames.

* He will probably be elected President in 2024.

* He will probably not be elected President in 2024.

* The above is not a contradiction. The 2024 election will be such a hot mess that there's no telling who will have won and who lost. 

* Macron is my President.

RESTAURANTS IN FRANCE: COST OF LIVING - PART 3

One of the great joys of living in France is the simple fact that the French take their food so seriously. I'm not talking only about the highbrow, structured craziness of the Michelin Guide and its star system. There's no doubt that folks looking for a Michelin star or two are serious about food. I'm talking about the local pub that serves lunch to workmen on a weekday as well, the neighborhood restaurant that families visit for a dinner out on a Saturday night. The one thing that they have in common is that, if they don't serve quality ingredients, well-prepared and well-presented, they simply won't last. I don't know if the statistics on the survival of new restaurants are as dire as they are in the USofA. But the restaurants that I enjoy and have enjoyed during my ten-year residence in the region have exhibited remarkable staying power. And those that have left me meh, haven't.

Let's start at the bottom and work our way up.

FAST FOOD

In less than a half hour, I can have me a Big Mac or a Whopper right here in France. Seriously. They look like and they taste like they do in the States. They might actually cost a bit less given the current strength of the dollar against the euro. Not that I'm a regular visitor. We stop at BK maybe once a year if we're out shopping and hungry. I can't abide Mickey D's except for the fries. I've had maybe two batches in ten years. There’s a KFC not far away, too. But I have to say that, having tried a bucket once, I’m not going back. I’m particular about my fried chicken, I can abide KFC in the States, but the French version just didn’t cut it.

Of course the French have their own version of fast food. There's a thing that the French call a taco. It's never seen a tortilla, though. A panini, really. Bread with stuffing. But they call it a taco. I may try one out of desperation if the opportunity presents, but I won't go out of my way. And there are cafeterias and buffets and burger joints in shopping centers and malls and on the highways and they are what they are. 

I've actually visited a couple of burger joints that are worth a second shot. A good burger is, after all, a good burger. Count yourself lucky if you've fond one. The problem is usually the bun. The French don't generally do soft, squishy, white bread buns. Most often, you get a sort of brioche bun that falls apart as soon as you put pressure on it.

Lots of pizza places, mostly inedible. The thin, crispy crusts amount to what I call crackers with toppings. On the other hand, Pizze di Rosa on St. Chinian serves pizza with interesting toppings, with Italian beer, and with a chewy crust to die for. We visit every month or so.

BAR FOOD

Most villages that are more than hamlets support some sort of watering hole, a place to go to at the very least enjoy a pastis after work...or first thing in the morning. It's 5pm somewhere. The best of them serve food, and we are fortunate to have two pretty good exemplars close by, one right in town.

Our Bar 40 serves lunch Monday through Friday and dinner Friday and Saturday night. The lunch menu changes every day and features a starter, a main dish and dessert. Add a glass of wine and pay a total of 20USD more or less. Starters are usually a salad that's a plateful and interestingly constructed or a charcuterie plate. Recent mains have included stir-fried duck, slow cooked lamb, beef stew, chicken stew, and beef tartare. Seafood every Friday. Ice cream or a cheese plate or a dessert of the day to finish. The wine comes from just down the road. What's not to like? 

Dinner on Friday and Saturday nights can be ordered from a menu that includes specialty burgers,  steaks, grilled and fried bits and bobs, and a special or two. Those sorts of menus in that sort of place can run from 18USD to 25USD per person for lunch and 20 to 30USD for dinner including a bottle of local wine. The quality and variety does vary from shockingly good to just average. Never inedible. Well, almost never. Once or twice in ten years.

HIGHWAY/NEIGHBORHOOD RESTAURANTS

Highway rest stops aside, there's a class of French restaurant called a relais. Recently, it seems to have become chic to name an upscale restaurant a relais, but that's not the original meaning. They were and are truck stops on back roads, roads that used to be main roads before the expressway. Mostly in smaller roadside villages, they are known for serving simple, inexpensive meals. Le Relais Bleu in Capestang, the next village over, is a bar/hotel/restaurant on the main road that runs through the south side of town. The website features two-course specials as low as 15USD. And for some reason, the sign out front makes certain that you know when couscous is on the menu.

At the same time, within several blocks of that main road back into town, you can find a dozen restaurants in Capestang, some new, some around when we arrived ten years ago. A restaurant featuring, but not limited to, wood-fire pizza. A restaurant advertising home cooking that folks say really isn't. Seafood and grilled meat and a place for dinner that you really should dress up for. All with distinct personalities and peculiarities.

In other words, in a small village of 3,500 souls, you can find a restaurant serving pretty much whatever you are in the mood to be eating. Keep in mind though, Capestang is on the Canal du Midi and is a popular vacation-home spot and tourist destination for boaters. That creates a little extra choice...and a little extra price. Still, an enjoyable, multi-course lunch generally comes in under 30 - 35USD per person with a glass of wine. Dinner, including a bottle, more like 40 - 50USD and up.

A STEP UP

We always have a restaurant or two that we save for special occasions, not necessarily a favorite or the most creative, but the one that can guarantee a satisfactory, relatively upscale dining experience at a reasonable price. In our neck of the woods, that could mean Auberge de la Croisade. With views over the Canal du Midi and an outdoor terrace, a glass-enclosed sun porch, and a well-appointed interior dining room, many friends celebrate birthdays and anniversaries there. Quality slipped a while back, but a new chef redeemed the restaurant's reputation. A three-course dinner menu starts at about 40USD per person plus drinks. More extensive tasting formulas and choosing from the menu is also possible.

Another favorite, Le Chat Qui Peche features a dinner menu composed mostly of hefty tapas, plates that feature interesting tastes meant to be combined to form a meal or shared around the table. With drinks, it's easy to spend 50USD per person. Always satisfactory mouth-tingling tidbits.

EXPERIENCES

And then there are the special places, not meant for everyone, even some of your friends. Our special place is the Auberge de Madale, about an hour's drive north up in the hills. Chef/Owner Stefan puts out a fixed price, fixed menu, five course lunch and dinner with wine included for about 50USD per person. Worth twice as much and indeed, you will pay twice that much for a similar meal in many places. Reservations only. The menu changes every two weeks and is posted on the internet. We're headed there next week. All of the below and more during three amazing hours of culinary delight:

Pork consomme with fresh herbs and asparagus tempura,

Pea and shallot tart with wild garlic sorbet,

Trout cannelloni,

Roasted duck breast,

Black Forest chocolate with cherries and kirsch,

Coffee and a homemade marshmallow,

 

Not everyone finds a medley like that attractive. Too fussy, one table mate said.  We don't find it so. Tasting menus are just that, diverse tastes and textures presented together, sometimes on the same plate. And did you notice? Wild garlic sorbet? You find it hard to believe that would work? Let me tell you. I thought the same about cauliflower sorbet. It worked.

THE REST

Asian Indian restaurants and Thai food trucks and and a place where servers wearing Levis and lumberjack flannels weave around statues of cowboys and Indians. Crepes can be filled with whatever you can imagine - savory and sweet. Chinese buffet? Check. Kebab joints? Check. Farms that raise the chickens that they roast on a spit in the fireplace, ten at a time? Check.

Mediterranean seafood deserves its own page if that's your sweet spot. Oysters and shrimp and mussels and clams and all sorts of little shelled creatures unfortunate enough to taste good to those willing to dig them out. Not my thing, though. My thing is grilled meat, Spain is just down the road, and the lamb chops are perfection, time after time..  

IN SUM

If eating is your thing, France is your place.

LONGYOU CAVES, WASHINGTON AND CHERRIES, CATALINA ISLAND AND MORE: #21

LONGYOU CAVES

Amazing recent archeological find in China. Follow the link above to a Wiki that's startling in its brevity given the scope of the mystery. Check out the YouTube videos. It's as if the pyramids were built underground, the Egyptians left no record of their having been built, and there was no above ground evidence of their very existence. Huge amounts of stone had to have been excavated to create underground spaces covering over 300,000 sq ft, but there's no evidence of where the debris went. None of the local structures utilize matching stone. And, at only 2,000 years old (if current dating is correct), the idea that the meticulous Chinese bureaucracy failed to mention their construction truly boggles the mind.

WASHINGTON AND THE EVIDENCE

An archeologist poking around in the dirt basement of Mount Vernon found a couple of bottles of cherries. Still moisture inside. Smelled like cherry blossoms. Experts confirm that the bottles are probably 250 years old. The folks that run the museum that is George Washington's home on the Potomac will tell you that the story of a young George chopping down a cherry tree is pure myth. They lie. I think that the two bottles buried in the basement tell us that George's father was preserving the evidence should George ever change his story. It's the sort of thing that my dad would have done.

CATALINA ISLAND 

A century ago, 18 mule deer were imported to Catalina Island off the SoCal coast. They began doing what deer do. They mated and they grazed. Now there are a couple of thousand mule deer on the island. And now, plant and flower species unique to Catalina Island, found nowhere else in the world, are threatened with extinction by this non-native, invasive species of deer with no natural predators.

The folks responsible for managing Channel Islands National Park want to remove the deer from the environment that they are devastating. After study, they have decided to shoot the deer from helicopters. It may not the way that I would do it. I would favor a controlled hunt. But it has to be done and the Park Service made a choice. I can't wait to hear what the local community of environmentalists has to say. In a somewhat similar case in my home state of New Jersey, it was so hard to convince folks that thinning a herd in a state park was necessary that deer died of starvation before hunters were allowed to come in and thin the herd. Compassion can have unintended consequences.

SPEAKING OF COMPASSION

A doe-eyed child stares into the camera. The caption solicits money for food for starving Gaza children. By itself, this meme proves two things. Charities have learned to use research to maximize donations. And compassion is driven by the popularity of the cause. 

Studies show that when you put forward a picture of one child in distress and ask people how much they would donate, they come up with a number based on their own resources and the depth of their empathy. Add a second child, and the number diminishes. Show a camp full of children and the empathic impulse can be overwhelmed, leading to a feeling of helplessness. So to maximize donations, one good picture of one hungry child. 

80,000 children have died of starvation during the Syrian civil war in the last decade. 80,000. Children. Have. Starved. To. Death. Thousands more have succumbed to diseases like diphtheria. Thousands more from violence. Who marches for them, for the 600,000 dead Syrians in total, for the 4,000,000 Syrian refugees? Who marches for the 300,000 civilian dead in the Yemeni civil war? I am not pretending that the plight of civilians in Gaza is not dire. But I have to wonder why, over the past decade, Arab on Arab violence towards children is given a pass while the effects of the October 7 declaration of war by Hamas has caused international condemnation of Israel's response.

I suppose that the answer, if it's not outright antisemitism, is that Israel is viewed as a European construct, so the violence is white-on-color violence. But 60% of Israelis trace their heritage not to Europe but to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. And the non-Jewish Arab population since 1948, when 150,000 Arabs remained in Israel, has grown to over 2,000,000 Arabs who live, work, and vote there today. Hardly apartheid.

In my opinion, the reason for the misguided demonstrations is the rise of solipsistic thinking, the belief that truth is personal rather than revealed through discourse. The demonstrators do not want to hear that, while Israelis build shelters to protect civilians from rockets and mortars, Hamas builds tunnels under civilian homes, hospitals and schools to protect themselves with human shields. Evil.

We can only hope that we are witnessing the death throes of Iran as its internal and external critics take action against its barbarity and the barbarity of those groups that Iran sponsors - Hamas and Hezbollah and ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Houthis. Just imagine living with those folks as your neighbors. Imagine the constant shellings and the suicide bombers. Now imagine what the real justice would be in holding the real evil accountable while Israel struggles alone against a Caliphate that will, if it manages erase Israel, come swords bared for Europe and the Americas next.

COST OF LIVING IN FRANCE: PART 2 - GROCERIES

 

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

It's France that we are talking about, after all. That I put HOUSING and TRANSPORTATION ahead of FOOD may seem evidence of mistaken priorities, but I assure you that I have a full appreciation of the various forms and flavors of cuisine that I have enjoyed here. Cathey is a talented multi-cultural cook with a well-stocked pantry. Even with the sacrifice of piles of cookbooks and magazines left behind during our move across the Pond, her bookcase today in the pantry behind the kitchen grows and overflows, And we dine at the houses of friends who are equally talented in the kitchen. Everyone has access to fresh ingredients, mostly sourced locally. When we dine out, we have been here long enough to know where to find good bar food, comfortable mid-range restaurants, fine dining, and unique experiences. Let's see if I can make it all sound as good as it really is.

I don't mean to come across as starry eyed, though. Life ain't all strawberries and champagne. (I knew that was bad wording as soon as I typed it. It's strawberry season, for one. French strawberries are as sweet as candy and available at peak for a very short time. Like right now. And the wine...) Anyway, below you will find aspects of grocery shopping in France that are less than ideal. We'll start with that and move on from there.

GROCERY SHOPPING

Shopping for groceries in France is the same as in the States, except when it's different. No fresh corn tortillas. Nearly every supermarket carries that El Paso brand stuff and people have said that they have dined in authentic Tex-Mex restaurants in the region. Maybe so, but they don't buy their corn tortillas at the super. Karo Syrup requires a substitute unless your sister brings a jug in her suitcase...like she brings the tortillas. Every supermarket has a bakery, but none of them bake bagels. There are shops that say that they bake bagels but they don't even make an approximation of a bagel. Just toroidal-shaped brioche.

The point is that there are specific food items that are just not available, or are only available in certain places under certain circumstances. That having been said, there are no really vital dietary components missing from the shelves and for those that are hard to find, there are workarounds.

Meanwhile, your grocery shopping choices here in the south of France are practically limitless given that our village is within 25 minutes from the urban center of one city of about 50,000 and a second of 75,000. You'll find hypermarkets, supermarkets, specialty markets, village shops, butcher shops, bakeries, ethnic grocers, farmers markets, roadside stands and more. Take your pick. Get panko at the Asia Market, pita in the Arab quarter (if you don't make it at home), and fresh spring rolls from the food truck in the Sunday market.

And remember, the French demand information. Is the product organic? What's the country of origin? What's the price per kilo? Stuff that you'd like to know but that's not readily available in the USofA.

During COVID, there were folks who never left our little village. We have a bakery, two butcher shops, a convenience-sized store that's affiliated with one of the supers, and a tabac that sells fruits and veggies, milk and other essentials. (Tabacs are stores licensed to sell tobacco and cigarettes. They usually sell newspapers and magazines., postcards, and sundry other stuff at the whim of the owners.) So we are fairly well self sufficient. But let's get down to prices.

It's hard for me, ten years out from our move, to have a true understanding of the difference in the cost of groceries between the USofA and France. Cathey's sister Connie lives in Houston and provides commentary, though. There's a chain here called Grand Frais that specializes in fresh fruits and veggies, high-end meats and cheeses and seafood, as well as imported specialty items. Connie says that a bag of veggies that might cost the equivalent of 30 or 40USD in Grand Frais would come to well over 100USD in Houston.

The baguette at the bakery 100 yards away, fresh baked and warm, costs a few pennies over 1.00USD. Leaf lettuce, dense and full, might be 1.25USD a head, less in season. And here might be a good time to talk about seasonal eating. The Mediterranean climate allows for a long growing season. We are in easy reach of the gardens of Spain and Italy and Greece. And North Africa is a quick ferry ride away. So while we are particularly fond of those items that are in season outside our back door, most fruits and veggies are in season somewhere close by, not a continent away, and grown for their taste and not their ability to survive shipping. 

From the weekly circulars of a couple of our favorite supers:

Tomatoes - 1.50USD/pound

Yellow Onions - .35USD/pound 

Cucumbers - .50USD/pound

Shallots - 1.00USD/pound

Boneless Pork Loin - 3.00USD/pound

Chicken Thighs - 1.75USD/pound

We're not impressed with French beef, grass fed and almost game meat. Not marbled at all. I just purchased a pound of ground beef from the local butcher, put in the hopper in front of me, and had to request that fat be added. The best beef is imported from the UK or Ireland, readily available and not terribly expensive in comparison to the USofA. On the other hand, lamb and pork are to die for and cheap as chips in comparison.

Other stuff that you buy at a supermarket might be a tad more expensive, but not always comparable in quality, although strides are being made. We no longer require travelers to bring us zip-lock bags. The plastic wrap has improved considerably. But aluminum foil still needs work.

Of course, the grocery stores sell beer and wine, but we usually buy our wine direct from the producers. We seldom pay more than 8.00USD for a bottle of fine sipping rosé, 10.00USD for fine whites, 15.00USD for a serious red. Beer is beer from 3.00USD for local commercial brew to 8.00USD for a good craft beer. I generally don't drink alcohol during the day, depending on 2 liter bottles of low-glucide fruit drink at 1.00USD a bottle.

Enough. You get the picture. Yes, there are street markets that generally have fresher, more locally produced fare - meats, cheeses, fruits and veggies, baked goods and the like. Not always cheaper, though. All in all, I stand by my earlier statement: A couple can retire comfortably in France on two average Social Security Retirement checks.

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