A photo taken while Emily's parents were here visiting - Em tries a French specialty, intense lemon liqueor. Very intense. As in, "Fall backwards from the table and crawl across the floor gasping and groaning for oxygen"-intense. Everything that our friend Marcel makes is so rich that it's in a class unto itself. The man could probably make a cheese sandwich jazzy.I found a funny blog the other day that offers the opposite perspective from mine - SuperFrenchie, the online ramblings of a French fellow living in the US and coping with American culture. His blog is a LOT more popular than this one, but then he gets into all the controversial issues that people love to log on and argue about, like politics, religion, and the best pizza toppings. I tend to avoid that sort of stuff just because I don't want my comments threads to become long strings of ad hominem attacks from both the right (I believe in personal rights and responsibility) and the left (I believe in personal rights and responsibility. Plus, I smoke). I try to be apolitical, or perhaps "realistic", exotic as that term may be in application to politics. I'd describe myself as a left-leaning centrist, but a little world travel quickly illustrates how wildly one's position changes based on local attitudes, since by US standards I'm probably a pinko America-basher (to the O'Reilly's of the world) while in France I seem to be a capitalistic greedmonger (I'd like slightly less stifling regulation of private industry).
I will say, however, that there was a loud cheer in Brittany today when I read that the NSA's illegal wiretapping was just ruled unconstitutional (Well, duh...).
Another, considerably less contentious site that I found recently was Culture Breizh, a tourist-focused site all about Brittany and its culture and history, with a lot of fun photos too. It isn't exactly a deep look at Brittany, but it provides some nice info on the various aspects of Breton culture, from the traditional dress to the modern wackiness of groups like Tri-Yann. A good thing, since Breton musical culture in the US is extraordinarily rare.
In closing, another bit of good news... We've now accumulated enough points from shopping at Super-U for Emily to get a free bicycle!
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1 comment:
Thank you for your bog, Trever, but just one thing regarding the French: please don't be unwilling to overlook what can only be termed as injustice and double standards…
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2008/04/note-to-superfrenchie-readers.html
Needless to say, the very fact that it is hardly a rare occurrence for the French (or for Europeans) to say one thing to Americans' face (reassuring them of their eternal friendship, calling for dialog, or bemoaning alleged American injustices), whether through official channels or in private day-to-day conversations, and then rub their hands together in glee behind Americans' backs in Schadenfreude is one raison d'être for No Pasarán's existence in the first place ("Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…").
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