Les singes de reddition qui mangent du fromage


Also a cheese eater.

We went to Dieppe two weekends ago. After a four hour ferry ride, we arrived at the dock, searched for the customs building, gave up and waltzed out into the city. Ha. Some impressions from the trip:

• French food is both delicious and cheap
• You can eat chocolate crepe for lunch and have wine at breakfast and no one really cares
• Actually, in many cases, wine is cheaper than water, so what the heck
• Brandishing a meter-long baguette over your shoulder like a baseball bat is entirely normal.
• The average pain au chocolat costs about 70 (Euro) cents = CAN$1.10
• French food is, on the whole, better than English food
• My gosh I miss French food
• French boys often have boundary issues (re: wolf-whistling, circling hotel parking lot to gawk at girls in hotel lobby, etc.)
• Especially the sailors (re: boob-grabbage, impromptu kissing, etc.)
• French people are, as a whole, very nice. They are neither surrender...ers, nor monkeys, although they do eat a lot of cheese. Though the English might disagree.

Dieppe is a beautiful little town; loads of shops and restaurants. We were only there for one night, but people managed to buy their own weight in wine...and they drank about half of it on the ferry ride back to England. Harry and Ron (as I like to call them. More on my secret nicknames later) got completely plastered from a large portion of their 24 bottles of wine, and I half expected them to tipple off the boat.

This weekend we had a history trip to London (Southall & Westminster) and a British Studies trip to Portsmouth Harbour. Thirty degrees in London that day, eeeyow! Kobuta turned into roast pork. Highly inappropriate because Southall is an Indian/Bengali area and home to the largest Sikh temple outside of India. Ate a jalebi (deep-fried honey dough pretzel thing yum), which was free because I only wanted to buy one (just wanted to try it, 10 pence each). I think the guy in the store was taken aback by my ridiculously small order feminine wiles, so he just gave me the damn thing and waved me out the door. I love my frugal heritage.

Oh, and a film crew was hanging around the Castle all week to film a promotional video (heavily censored...no mentioning of other universities please), so they came with us to London. They also "requested" that our history tutorial be held outside, on the lawn in front of the Castle. We were reluctant, even though it was a sunny warm day, because that lawn is covered in goosepoop. Bleugh.

Anyway. Back to Portsmouth. A different vision of French-English relations. The major exihibit was the HMS Victory, commanded by the very brilliant, very short Lord Horatio Nelson in 1805 to punch the French & Spanish fleet in the mouth. Unfortunately, Lord Nelson died in the battle, 4 hours after being shot by a French sniper. Probably because Nelson was wearing more bling than the love child of Donald Trump and 50 Cent. Surprisingly, lots of French tourists come to see the ship; the site is pretty tactful, with less "Hey, look how bad we beat the French!" and more "You pretend to be a British sailor and we'll pretend to saw your leg off."

However, some resentment is still fostered:

Picnic table set up next to the Victory. Ironically, it was also next to a cart that sold crepes.