Does Anybody Still Check This Blog?

… or any blogs for that matter? Or have you been waiting patiently while watching Katia’s video below?
I don’t know why, I’m suddenly feeling a bit of nostalgia writing a post on this forgotten blog that doesn’t even belong to me anymore. Maybe I should organize a well thought-of amazing return. But I’m way too lazy for this, so I’ll wait another year, and then we’ll see.

Quick recap of the past year and a half:

I started a diet, lost 10 kilos and probably as much hair, became the king of zumba, joined a new theater group and became quite involved in it, continued roaming the internet with my partners in crime Katia and Kyliemac, visited 5 new countries and, rest assured, became increasingly obnoxious.

So if this blog still happens to be in your RSS feeds, I’d love to hear from you too.

Ciao

Crap Story Teller

Characters: A Frog and his 3 year old nephew

Time: Bedtime, a few weeks ago.

Subject: I insist to tell him a bedtime story. I am the only one convinced of my bedtime-story-telling art. That’s what it sounded like…

Me: Once upon a time there was a little girl…

Nephew: (interrups me abruptly) Did she have a Wii?

Me: no she didn’t. She lived many years ago and there was no Wii at that time.

Nephew: (sad look expressing genuine empathy for the afore mentioned little girl): oh!

Me: So once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a very cold country. There was a lot of snow on the trees and big white bears in the woods. The place was called…

Nephew: the North Pole!!!

Me: How do you know about the north pole? You’re only 3!

Nephew: Duh! That’s where Santa lives.

Me: Oh well, of course, I should’ve thought about it.

Nephew: Duh!

cOZins

I have just received an email from an American woman who is doing some genealogical research on my family (on my mother’s side). And guess what? Firstly I hear that I have cousins in Iowa (!?) and that one of them played one of Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz 1939 original version!! I mean, how totally and utterly cool is that?

This is going to be a great year.

I wish you a fwab one too.

WTF is that?

Apparently some people think I need to relax. I know I’ve always been in need of a thorough and lengthy psycho-analysis, but I didn’t know people saw me as a stressed out person. Obviously, the people who got me this present for Christmas are worried about me.
It took me a while to figure out what this object was for. It is supposed to make you feel better, that’s all I can say. And it’s not a sex device although it’s all I could think about and hoped for when I opened it.

Let’s see how wild your imagination is. Please let me know what you think it is. I’ll give you the answer tomorrow.

PS: If you already know what it is then I’ll seriously start worrying about you.

 

Dipping my hard baguette…

As you know, I loooove cultural differences and clichés. I just love to sit with a bunch of foreigners and hear them moan and nag about the French. I love being in a country and hear what people’s opinion about the French is. The worse the cliché is, the better it is and the happier I get. I have already posted a few of the comments I heard during my various trips, but here are some more specific things I heard while hanging out with Brits. Through my job, I’ve had the chance to meet a lot of British people and for some some strange reason, they seem to ask a lot of questions about aspects of French culture I had never really thought were either interesting or relevant.

When you ask a French person what they know about England, they will tell you about the nasty food, the pale looking red-haired people, the rain, the Queen, hooligans and the fact that we call them Roast Beefs, although nobody really knows why. But apart from tha, not much else.

One cliché the English have about the French is that we are supposedly more refined than other Europeans… This is quite funny to hear, because when you know French people, you realize there must have been a huge misunderstanding somewhere or else, French marketing must function very well somehow. Because, Brits are, according to me, extremely refined… in their questions at least. Let me explain…

Let’s have a look at some of the recent questions I’ve heard from Brits: Why do French people make hard crust on their baguettes when they eventually dip and therefore soften the bread in their coffee? I had honestly never seen it that way, and actually thought they had a point. But I just wonder why would anyone even come up with such a question.

Another example is: why are coffee cups so small and croissants so large? Why not readjust the size of both in order to facilitate the dipping of the croissant into the cup? Aren’t French people annoyed at the coffee entirely disappearing in the croissant or on the café table? I honestly don’t know. I swear I had never thought about that.

Neither had I thought of why we still do our grocery shopping at the butcher’s, the baker’s etc…, i.e so many different stores when everything could easily be gathered in one place? Seriously, I don’t know. There are supermarkets all over the place here, and more and more people use them, but still, a few ingredients just have to be purchased in special stores. That’s just the way it is.

French and British people used to be enemies. We were basically at war for centuries (until a former French prime-minister, Edith Cresson, called the English male-population: faggots (not as in cigarettes)… a terrible insult ouch! But at the same time the Brits represent the largest foreign population on French soil. They roam most villages in Normandy and Dordogne, live with us all year round and still get so happy when they get together and moan about the French who can’t drive, have no sense of humour, never work, smell bad, constantly cheat on their wives and drink like there’s no tomorrow. Whether they live in the UK, France or anywhere else, Brits have this really clear point of view about the French. And when they get together and fire one cliché after the other, I just sit there and enjoy. And sometimes, when I’ve drunk like there’s no tomorrow, I wonder why French people never talk about the Brits? Does that say something about the French or about the English?

Wedding Belles

The picture below was taken in August 1977. The baby is my little sister. The little boy with the scary outfit next to her is me. I was 5.

This tiny baby who can barely open her eyes has two children now and is GETTING MARRIED TOMORROW!

And I’m her bestman.

My third time as a bestman. Don’t know why people keep on choosing me for this. Especially that two of these three marriages have ended up in a divorce since then.

Do you think I should’ve told my sister about that before she asked me to be her maid of honor bestman?

Have a great weekend.

Tout sur ma mère

Non, je ne vais pas vous faire tout un plat sur le cinéma espagnol. En revanche, j’invite les francophones parmi vous à se rendre sur le site de Marsoupiote, oui, vous savez, celle qui s’avère être ma mère également. Toujours aussi pédagogue, celle-ci vous a préparé un petit précis de français parlé par les pieds-noirs qui devrait vous mettre dans l’ambiance soirée chaude à l’ombre des palmiers, petit pastis à la main et couscous à venir. Histoire de réchauffer un peu vos petites fesses en ce mois de novembre glacial. Allez donc lui passer un petit bonjour. Elle vous fera peut-être une petite kémia ou quelques montecaos tout en vous parlant de sa voisine jayouyos et de son zboub.

For a few seconds, I thought she was dead… again!

For the second time in the past 5 years, I’ve had to fear for the life of my little-Air-France-air-hostess-sister.
First you hear about an Air France flight going down in Toronto. Then you ask yourself: “where did she say she’d go today?”, while you’re still trying to figure this out, you feel your blood banging in you fingertips and toes and your heart ends up in your stomach area for a while. Finally you remember she had called in sick that day ’cause she’d just found out she was pregnant… again!