I bought some rather fantastic stripy gloves, we ate vast quantities of scary cheese and apple tart and fish, we went on an excellent trip to the seaside (to Honfleur and Etretat, which are in the middle of the northern coast of France) for a few days
(where we ate fish and mussels and oysters galore and walked around on grim stony beaches and goggled at the cliffs. Oh, and we saw the Pont de Normandie, which is this ginormous bridge over the mouth of the Seine, which happens to look almost exactly like the ANZAC bridge in Sydney, which was nice).
I was forced by assorted French relatives of Reto's to drag out my non-existent French-speaking skills (honed during the several years of French classes I had in high school where there was only me and one other person in the class and we didn't have a teacher and somehow we had also not been enrolled in the correspondence course that we were supposed to be in, so needless to say I really can't speak any French at all), and also to eat frogs' legs (which were great. And extremely garlicky, which was also great).On other matters, I had no idea that there was such a dearth of nice coffee in France (I don't really have such strong opinions on what is nice coffee and what isn't, but everything I had was horrible), and I had no idea that so many of the character names in the French version of Asterix were so crap (you would think that the original language would have the best names, but no. Getafix, for example, is called Panoramix in French (which is crap. He is called Miraculix in German, though, which is great), and Unhygenix is called Ordralfbetix (as in alphabetical order, not funny or relevant). Happily, Dogmatix is called Idefix in French and in German, which is great although obviously not as great as Dogmatix. Which obviously has the advantage of having "dog" in it).
(weird enormous human-bird-combo skeleton in the grounds of the palace of Versailles. Anyone know what it's all about?)
5 comments:
Sounds like you had fun. So what DOES frogs legs taste like? Chicken?
Oh, and Idefix and Miraculix are the same in Danish.
They tasted mainly like garlic, actually. Or garlicky chicken. The most distressing thing about them was that they looked like legs. Like someone had chopped the legs off a poor innocent bouncy frog, garlicked them up and then served them to me. And apparently it's polite to eat them with your fingers (or at least that's what we did), which is always fun.
How did the oysters compare with Australian ones?
I think and have always thought that getafix is the best name for a herbalist.. and Unhgenix.. for a chef perfect! I tell you those translators were I am sure getting on the green :)
I think Miraculix is better than Getafix, but I think Unhygenix is definitely better than all those crap foreign options..
And the oysters? I think I have high standards after all those yummy Batemans Bay ones. Sigh.. Oh, although in other news I see it is Belgian Week soon at the local english pub in Aarau, so I might take the opportunity to drink Stella and eat a bunch o mussels (which seems to be basically all that Belgian Week involves).
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