Something

As Good As Anything I Suppose.

I've got to post something so that French crap isn't the first post on the page. Actually I really enjoyed learning the French language, and studying the culture. I took 3 years of it in high school, but you wouldn't know it. I've retained very little of the language. This was way back in the late 80's when people didn't talk all that bad about France.

My teacher, the most delightful man, had gone to France on a teacher exchange program the year prior so he had many interesting stories to tell about living in France. This was back when teachers weren't all a bunch of commie socialists, so he was quite honest about the downfalls of Socialism.

He was even somewhat forgiving about how the French teacher left his house. See, they switched everything, including homes. It seems she had an aversion to taking out the trash, and went about piling it up in his garage for the entire year that she was here. I point blank asked him why she would do such a horrendous thing, and he was quite honest when he said, "She thought we had too much, she did it because she was mad about how much we Americans have." I'm not lying about this people. That was the answer he gave me.

Thankfully, while he had good things to say, he was quite honest when he relayed his experiences. This is how I learned that, at that time anyway maybe it has changed by now, French people only bath so often. It was the hot water, you see, it was expensive to heat the water. Probably still is, who knows. I had a similar experience in Japan. We had to actually warm up the water before we could use it, thanks to their ingenuity the water was warm within a matter of minutes with a simple flip of a switch. Although I bathed every day, we only used hot water for our showers, the rest of the time it was washing dishes in cold, washing clothes in cold, and although we had a dryer, the Japanese dryer is completely useless.

How useless? Well, it takes twice as long to dry half a load, and it is also too costly to operate. Pretty much everyone hangs their clothes on their balconey to dry, even in the humid climate of Okinawa they seemed to dry faster than in that little dryer. So, when in Rome. That's what we did too. And shocker of shockers we're still alive to talk about it. It was upon the advice of an American who had married an Okinawan that we met early on in our stay there, he knew how to get by financially living on the Japanese economy. We took the advice, it served us well.

Well the dog passing gas under the desk tells me it is time to bring this post to an end. Perhaps she is hinting around that I do something a little more productive like refill the food and water bowls, or a general clean up around the house which is nearly in shambles as I write this. Ha! Who am I kidding? I'm not cleaning tonight. Me too tired.