What i miss... and what i would miss...

I do love where I live but I would also like to take a few minutes to remember what I miss about home – here goes- in no particular order :

• Big bottles of Tobasco sauce (they only have little bottles here, i go through them way too fast; and the don’t have the green tobasco) and just in general the large variety of hot sauces offered at any grocery store.

• Any type of food delivered to your door (in Rouen i have the choice of pizza or sushi – not the largest selection admittedly)

• Shots – the good lord knows, and my good friends, that I love a good tasty shot from time to time. And really, who doesn’t need a tequila night from time to time? (people here are too reasonable; it goes along with their “Descartes” way of doing things
  
  
• which brings me to tequila - Mexico is not next door. You can't even find the good stuff. The best I can get is José gold. can you imagine? What's a girl to do during margarita season?!?
  

• 24 hour anything and everything (maybe if the larger cities in France adopted this they wouldn’t still have an almost 10 percent unemployment rate; huummmm...)

• Diners-especially 24 hour diners at three in the morning- and especially skillets. Three words, yum yum yum. And especially in an attempt to thwart the potential hangover, as well as for greasy hangover relief food. Croissants don’t do squat for hangovers ladies and gentlemen.

• Cosmopolitains- yum, yum, yum, yum (they don't have the cranberry juice, or cranberries over here)

• Thanksgiving – and reasonably big sized turkeys. I told my bucher to get me the biggest he could find, it was a measly 3.4 kilos. That’s about seven pounds. It was a runt.

• More and more smoke free places – i like clean air. Period.

• Mexian food – most notably the enormous bags of good authentic chips and salsa you can find.

• No T.V. tax - yes it is known that the french love to tax; so they have a t.v. tax as well. every year every household must pay 120 euros for the right to have a t.v. Of course they say it' s to help provide us with quality programs (well last tuesday they did show Bowling for Columbine). But in the end i hate paying just because i have a television.
  

• cheap stuff - if you ever need anything; whatever it is you can always find a cheaper version of it somewhere. not always the case here.
  

And inversely here’s what I would miss if i lived in the states:

• Perrier – and they even have another type of water called Eau de Perrier; the bubbles are finer and less sharp. Yes I'm addicted.

• The georgous church down the street from me and the park behind it – the church has flying buttresses and everything

• Homeopathic medicine – you can find it at any pharmacy and pharmacies are everywhere; and it’s cheap!

• A large variety of political parties; it makes politics so much more interesting and less.... two dimentional if you know what i mean.

• The Sunday market by my house – I take my little red apple covered, grandama, wheely cart and go just about every Sunday. Fruits, vegetables, cheese, snails, eggs, junk, antiques, clothes, knick knacks, butter, fish, huge walls of spitting chickens roasting on their rotissery racks, recipe advice from the produce sellers, furniture (the desk my computer is sitting on is wood, old and from the market), crooked bronze candle holders, seafood, garlic (at least four different types), salad (at least six different types), organic wine, oysters, farm fresh squeezed apple juice, bread (countless types), plants, teas, mussels, flowers, soap, running into friends, and when the weather permits sitting ouside in the sun and having a crisp glass of white, and the best of the best, what i wait all year for: the first cherries of the season piled up high in enormous pyramids and each one a little shiny peace of heaven.

• Do i even need to mention champagne and wine? didn't think so

• L'apero - Aperitif in franglais - the infamous before dinner drink with little snack-y type things. oh how i do love l'apero.