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Finally we have left the tiny gîte in Varaignes, and have moved to a much larger, and plusher, gîte in Thézac, about a half hour north of Lauzerte. The extra space, and the extra time, will hopefully mean more time to write, especially here.

And of course, a large part of France shuts down entirely over the holiday period. Next Tuesday everyone should be back in the office. Which is a good thing, but frustrating when you’re trying to plan a big project.

And we’ve discovered that the name E.Leclerc is French for Walmart. I mean, just look at this 319 € chair:

It’s been pointed out that our upbeat reporting from France, especially with respect to food, only really reflects our experience in a fairly small part of the country. We’ve been assured that lot of France has really crummy vegetables and fruit. (And I’ll admit that as tempting as 4 € bottles of wine may be, the truth is that a lot of them are really pretty unpalatable.)

And of course if, as we seem to be doing, you sleep late and get out the door even later in the morning you invariably run headlong into the 12:30 to 14:00 shut down of nearly every business that you might need to visit.

And, even worse, it seems that the brand-spanking new ADSL Orange internet in our new home may only be capable of a miserable 1-2 mps download speed. Thankfully our cel phones have 150+ gigs of data each month, and much, much faster speeds. And because European cel plans are a fraction of the price of those in Canada, it’s actually reasonable to rely on cel data for everything.

I do not miss Rogers, Telus, or Bell!