Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Carcassonne - 15th May

Today we rested from our long day attending and travelling to and from the rugby, which also included drying off and washing our wet clothes, not only from the rain at the end, but from our car being surrounded by a deep puddle at the Park n Ride.
The significance of the Pink Panther picture above is that at the rugby instead of ‘kiss cam’ they had ‘sleep cam’; anybody caught napping appeared on the big screen to the sound of the Pink Panther theme tune.  

We did however manage today to walk twice into town as mini-breaks from Roger catching up on the website posts, hence the reason there were two days loaded at the same time. We discovered that because the shops were open on Saturday most of them are closed on Monday, even the churches. More importantly we now know where there is a superette, sewing shop, railway station and a better bakery with a person who wants to practise her English. The first day we went to a bakery that doubles as a café and had no customers just a tired lady annoyed we got her off her stool.

Today’s bakery had a queue, nice food, good selection and the lady won Roger over by telling him he had good French, pfff. [Ed: Ahh, oui, oui...]
The photo below is of the lock near the train station on the Canal du Midi, the canal isn’t looking its finest due to rain.

Cheese Experience No.24 Lactose: yesterday we reached the 1/3 completion mark of our soixante neuf cheese experiences, in other words 23 down, 46 to go. For my mother who is lactose intolerant, today’s facts are for her.

1. Lactose is a milk sugar and has to be broken down before the human body can consume it
2. Aged cheese can be eaten by lactose intolerant people because cheese has helpful bacteria that break down the lactose during the aging process.
3. Younger cheese should be avoided unless you can produce your own lactose enzymes
4. The ability to produce your own lactose enzymes declines in your later years
5. However some nationalities are better at staying healthy with large cheese consumption i.e. the French.
6. I’ll apologise now if you take any of my words of wisdom as gospel and die.

Essence of France Photo Challenge No.10 - La Tricolor; the National Flag of France. In English it is the tri-colour; blue, white and red vertical stripes, not to be confused with the Netherlands horizontal stripes of the same colours.
The French do patriotism very well and their flag is important to them. Here are a few examples of what we have seen to date.

• Flag over load is a common feature



• The entertainment is tri-colour



• The memorials have tri-colour flowers


• Random tackiness

And lastly a quote from Thomas Jefferson “every man has two countries: his own and France”.