Feeling hot, hot, hot!

It has been hot in Lyon ever since I got back from my holiday and I have not been able to much more than moan about how hot it is and debate whether I should move into the fridge.

A good indicator of the temperature is the chicken man in the Croix Rousse market. He has one of those rotisserie stalls that you buy ready roasted chickens from. In the winter he is Mr Popular amongst the other stallholders who seem to all drop by and have a chat with him. I'm sure the length of the chat is in direct ratio as to how cold it is. However if you walk past the stall in the summer it appears to be unmanned. Then you notice him about 3 stalls down having a chat with the cheese man or the fish man, who have refrigerated trailers for their products! Yesterday he appeared to be having a long chat with one of the meat guys so it must have been hot.

The French seem to have an aversion to aircon though and maybe for good reason as it is always rumoured that the machines are great breeding grounds for nasty things that can make you ill. 'La clim' is a constant source of debate in the gym between those who want it and those who don't. However doing Body Pump or Zumba when it's 37° without aircon is most unpleasant, so you can make an educated guess as to which side I am on!

This afternoon my friend and I met at the ice cream place in Place Sathonay to cool down with an ice cream and catch up on the summer news. We managed to cool down a lot because as we sat and chatted(and had our ice creams) the clouds rolled in, the wind picked up and the rain started to fall.

Tis the season to eat cherries, fa la la la la la la la la!

The market is inundated with summer fruits. There are piles of strawberries and now the cherries have arrived! A few early peaches and nectarines are appearing as well a couple of cantaloupe melons…yum.

It has been over a week since I was last able to go to the market in Croix Rousse and a rare weekday off work and I was able to wander through the Tuesday market today and the changes in the produce on sale seem very dramatic.
It is lovely shopping in a seasonal market and you can get very smug and all eco friendly about it. There are some market stalls run by local producers – these are easily identifiable as the produce tends to be unwashed, limited and displayed in old wooden crates. By buying from these farmers you know that what you are getting has been locally produced and has low food miles and therefore low carbon footprints. However you do get to a point in mid February when you have been looking at the same fruit and veg for several months (potatoes, pumpkin, leeks, apples, pears and quinces) and being eco friendly isn’t so attractive.
Then suddenly there is a splash of red amongst the browns and oranges of winter and the first strawberries have arrived. OK, so they come from Spain, but that is only over the Pyrenees, what the heck and you just have to buy them.

Now the soft fruit season is really getting started. There will be cherries galore for the next few weeks, which you can even buy in various states of ripeness, as well as French kiwis (which seems an odd thing to write), strawberries and raspberries. Then as the cherry season wanes the peaches, nectarines and finally the apricots will arrive. The French still make a lot of jams and preserves and will buy kilos of fruit and the supermarkets will sell preserving kits and kilner jars. One enterprising stallholder has a clafoutis recipe written on a tatty piece of cardboard box proudly displayed next to her cherries.

Then seemingly, within a blink of an eye, it will all be over and as the weather turns cooler, pumpkins and other autumn foods will start making a reappearance and apples will seem a novelty and worth buying again.

Anyway, today I brought some cherries and I may make a clafoutis, provided I don’t eat them all first.

"C'est pas ouis, c'est oui."

For reasons that I haven't gone into and probably won't, I came out to France not speaking much more French than Bonjour. It seemed like a good idea at the time....

I have learnt quite a bit since then and am at that stage where I can understand a lot of what is going on around me but by the time I have formulated what I wanted to say to contribute to the conversation about giving up smoking, everyone has moved onto a different topic and is now discussing the merits of the cotes de rhone 06 over the bordeaux 08. It's wine, drink it!!!

The first French I learnt was market French, we have an amazing street market in Croix Rousse, it really is a gastronomical marvel. I know everyone will get defensive over their particular local markets but the sheer size and breadth of this one has to be seen to be believed. Through listening to other customers, I have learnt to ask for specific weights and measures of different items.

I then signed up for an intensive French course at a local language school and did 10 hours a week for two months. I took in a lot but as I was not using this on a daily basis it didn't become a habit to use. (At the time I was a nanny for an English family)

I then made the easy decision to stay in France and found a job in a bilingual creche. Easy peasy - I am a qualified childcarer and was being employed to speak English to the children. However it has been the place where I have learnt most French and I would like to give a big thanks to the French staff who have patiently listened while I got my tenses muddled up and done their best to understand my accent (which they are now quite complementary off)I still have a way to go, but these girls have given me the confidence to go out into the big wide world and use my beginners French. It is thanks to them that I was able to hold a long conversation in the chemists today about why a particular medicine wasn't working for me.

My other teachers have been the children, a lot of them come from bilingual households and, because we are in France their first language is French. Through them I have seen the way they learn a language more clearly and have been able to apply this to how I learn. Believe me it is so much easier than learning verb tables. I often use expressions were I don't know the literal translation but do know the context and spend hours looking up words in the dictionary and eventually realizing it is two words strung together or spelt differently than I imagined.
I am dyslexic and am now only realizing that it is possible to learn another language when I had struggled at school because teachers were more obsessed about spelling than working out whether I had understood the process or the concept being taught. I now know so much about words and their entomology and how they work together, it is truly an enriching experience, though I am still a long way off playing scrabble for 'fun'.

However, having said all that, it is still, quite hard to take a two and a half year old correcting you for saying 'Ouais' (Yeah) instead of 'Oui' (Yes).