Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Bourgoin-Jallieu - 22nd April

We arrived in Lyon on the 21st, collected the car and made our way to Bourgoin-Jallieu which is our base for the next 10 days while we adventure around the surrounding area. It’s not well known for much but if locals detect you are a Kiwi they assume you have come to visit rugby family as the local rugby team is renowned for employing rugby players from NZ.

After walking around town to find the essentials like the bakery we headed off to the supermarket. French supermarkets are interesting experiences to us because we have no idea what we are buying and even though they dedicate a large portion of the shop to meat and dairy products they sell everything from automotive accessories, clothes, garden equipment and appliances.  At this supermarket, one of the E.Leclerc chain, there are three cheese aisles plus two specialty cheese islands. Rows of cabinets are dedicated to specific type of cheese like Emmental, Brie etc, others to the producing country and even more cabinets dedicated to the presentation of the cheese e.g. sliced, blocks, kid cuts, boxed.

 The next morning we ventured into Bourgoin Jallieu for morning tea. Roger got a shit coffee and a chocolate fondant in custard, I got our first cheese experience: the cheese plate, which was smoked Gouda produced locally from the Fromagerie St Michel. It was served with a fruit/nut paste and burnt baguette. I would have had a hot chocolate but the owner was out of milk. He was also out of bread and left us in charge of the café while he went off to buy some. Roger just casually told all the customers he would be deux minutes of which they were very accepting. Gouda is a Dutch cheese, however there has been a Gouda war going on between Holland and France since the 1960s because France believes they produce and eat more Gouda than Holland. This makes a change from the French and English fighting all the time!.

We burnt off our morning tea with a hour long walk around town collecting information for a geocache based on French writer Frederic Dard. This leads to my Essence of France photo challenge: 1. French writers for eg Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables) and Jules Verne. The geocache brought us to the marble memorial below showing 174 titles of Dard’s 300 books. My little Napoleon features in the photo and in one of his books Napoleon Pommier (apple tree). The book includes Jeremie struggling with monosperm and Felix the biggest cock in France. The humour of the book is such that the reviewer said it will cause your testicles to burst.

On the topic of toilet humour, our accommodation is an apartment close to town with its most interesting feature being the toilet. Our last house on our 2018 French trip had a toilet in the bedroom closet where you knees touched the louver door. This house is slightly upmarket in that the toilet is bigger but in the broom cupboard.