Daily Life

Meat is hideously expensive – 26 euros for a roast leg of lamb. There’s lots of offal on offer in the supermarche shelves – tongue, tripe, kidneys, liver etc.

The meat does look like good meat but the price puts me off (al). Cooked chooks are 9 euros which is about $18 in our money. The raw chicken you buy here to cook is really yellow-looking. Looks a bit strange.

I’ve found it hard to look for ingredients that I would usually buy to make recipes. Sometimes it’s easy to recognise what something is by the name being similar but the brands are all different and they’re in French and sometimes you just can’t work it out. However, I am making a concerted effort to try out every single type of chocolate and biscuit and pastry I see in the shops. Particularly that flaky pastry is my fave. The patisseries have the most scrumptious looking cakes and sweets. Although you never know how long they’ve been sitting there. I mean there’s a patisserie on every second street. I find it hard to believe French people eat that much pastry – they would all be fat as houses.

Something else we notice is that everything has chocolate in it. Most of the breakfast cereals have chocolate in them and nutella is a huge seller here. Ordinary muesli is hard to find. Dark chocolate is popular here but none of us likes it.