Cultural Difference Between France and Britain No. 72 - Port

Today's cultural difference came to light last night when I ordered a port (porto) towards the end of dinner. In Britain I have only ever drunk port after dinner*. So it seemed natural to take a port with my café after dinner.

The french were aghast! Every last one of them thought I was mad for having port after food and that I'd completely lost it because I was taking it with my coffee.

It was as though I had made an incredibly serious faux pas like having sherry before 5, red wine with fish or passing the port to the right. All of which are understandably as grave as high treason or killing a swan.

Even the waitress was gob smacked. She had to ask twice to confirm she has heard correctly. I felt like she was asking me something like "Are you sure you would like ketchup with your chocolate cake?"

Port in france is seen as an apéritif, like Ricard or Pastis, both of which are taken with ice. Thus there was two ice cubes in my port glass which needed to be promptly removed.

Even with all that the port was exactly what I needed.

*Obviously excluding "certain" times at Uni, if you know what I mean.

3:09:55 Berlin Marathon 2011

Just thought I'd quickly shout out to everyone that my gross time for the Berlin Marathon 2011 was 3 hours 9 minutes and (about) 55 seconds. My actual time will be about 30 second less.

I'll try and write a full race report in the next couple of days.

Photos of georgie and her career path

I guess that when most people get a dog they have some reason for doing so or have some plans in their mind what they envision to be doing with their dog.

Some might want a dog to guard their property, others want one to collect shot birds, some want a companion, even collect the newspaper each day and, judging by the number of people that have stopped and talked to me while I'm walking G, meet new people.

Mine is insurance in case I go blind. A bit like practising writing with one's left hand in case one breaks one's right one (interesting you are more likely to break your weaker arm because we naturally put out our weaker hand to stop our fall so if it breaks it isn't as bad, meaning that if you become more dexterus with your weaker hand you are more likely to break the stronger one. So totally pointless really).

It took me 8 months to realise Only is an anagram of Lyon 

Only joking. What I want her to do is run with me and do other such active things. Things like sky diving, skiing (definitely watch that one), climbing, base jumping, swimming with dolphins, skateboarding, gymnastics, yoga and parkour(and here). Or a more realistic list of running, cycling, canoeing, trail running, shooting, golf, camping and pretend solders.

Whereas Sophie's list would more likely consist of shopping, looking cute, sitting outside cafés together, picnics and being quite when she paints.

As that our options for things to do are greatly increased with a car one of our priorities is to get G used to the car. To this end we drove with her to the grand parc de miribel jondage and had a picnic there. We also took her into the lake and got her to swim her about. She could not have been more amazing. We even got her to sit and eat a chicken we were eating.

A lot of these things I have to wait until she has finished growing to do.

But below is a link to the facebook album of her. Anybody should be able to see it. And the picture in the article is from our walk this morning where we took in two food markets, a trip on the tram, coffee, patisserie and specaloo at a café and loads of other dogs.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1936271939294.105829.1617210007&l=379108a908

How think must these walls be?

Bless my soul, puppies cry and whine loud at night. Or so I thought.

There we were, the first night, ready to go to bed nice and early and we say to ourselves that Georgie will have to sleep in the hall. Literally seconds after we had closed the door to our bedroom she started whining and we thought to ourselves "that isn't that bad." She only got louder.

She started howling and scratching at the door. I must confess we only lasted 15 minutes. I went out, didn't give her any love just stood there to make sure she knew we were still there and she ran to my feet and laid down over my feet. Luckily I have a heart of stone because otherwise I would have been like butter in her paws.

So I left her in the hall and went back to bed. Yes! She stayed quite. Well for the time being. I therefore fell asleep but was awoken about an hour later by what I can be described as an impressive amount of noise from such a small dog. The situation was really concerning me. Not the dog but annoying the neighbours, I was sure I heard someone knock on a wall somewhere to signal to us to be quiet. So we let her in, she slept on a pillow on the floor at the foot of our bed and not a sound all night.

So the next evening I wanted to apologise to the neighbours and explain we have a dog, she is new, noisy for a bit bla bla bla. But the only ones who were in were a family with a baby and a child directly below us. They said that they had heard nothing and they then started apologising to us for any noise their baby make. I replied we hadn't heard a thing. Yet when I was walking down the stairs yesterday I heard said baby crying away as they do (very audible in the stairwell), but I had heard none of it in the flat. Same thing happened with the flat directly next to us: they heard nothing. Ergo sound travels through the doors but nothing penetrates these walls.

So it's ear plugs in tonight. Obviously it might be obvious to ask why can't she just sleep in the bedroom. Well from the second night she starting trying to jump up onto the bed, which seeing that she can't reach it is very annoying because she gets her paws onto the bed, whines and pulls the sheets a bit. We did keep pushing her away but she only stopped when she got tired. And it will not be very long until she can just jump straight up.

An addition to the house hold - Georgie

So some of you might have seen from my Facebook status that Sophie and I have a dog.

She is a black cocker and is 2 months old (DOB 3/4/11). We have called her Georgie (couldn't call her Patrick, David or Andrew0. We bought her in the market this morning.

You can find some more pictures of her on Facebook if you want. Obviously we will be uploading more as she gets older.

She currently feels very happy in the hall with her bed under my desk. But she is slowly but surely exploring the rest of the flat. I am so glad that I'm not doing this on my own because soph seems to know all those things that need to be done to train a puppy. Simple things like getting her urinate on paper and she seems (more or less) to piss there now.

Obviously she has been whining a bit but it is imperative that one doesn't pander to her complaining. Sophie has warned me that tonight is going to be brutal because she will almost certainly be crying in the hall way but that the best thing that we can do is to leave her.

Just now she has downed her whole bowl of water is looks like she is really bloated, evidently she doesn't know how to pace herself. This is going to be a huge learning curve.

France 11: Amur leopards

I have of late been taking my lunch in the Parc de la Tête d'Or which is the Park of the Head of Gold or Golden Head Park. And today I had a stroll around the zoo which I had been to before though I didn't see all of it. I thought that I would take a few pictures and post them here. The first is an amur leopard which was just strolling up and down his cage. There was a dad next to me explaining to his son why the tiger was bored/angry (can't remember which). The second are a pair of lemurs. All very cute.

I then had a walk around the botanical gardens. Obviously it is spring so there wasn't too much out but there was an amazing blossom tree (3) which, as I was taking a picture, had a very small number of blossoms (Blossom is the term for the flowers on a stone fruit tree) being taken away by the breeze to make a very serine moment.

Next I saw some bluebells (4) which always reminds me of the woods at Pangbourne which at this time of year would be sea of blue. 

And lastly some daffodils (5). Who can't like daffodils. The best part about the zoo is that it is free and it is on the door step of work.

Right after that interlude I'm of to go and do some very manly things like drink some beer while watching a football match, fart and cut down a tree with just an axe while singing The Lumberjack Song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpxQp3Hy5nk)