Almost French
A review of “Almost French”, the story by Australian journalist Sarah Turnbull of how she came to live in Paris, her struggle to come to terms with a new way of life, and her experiences along the way.
The Common Cold
“I’m just getting over a cold. Well, to me, born and bred in the UK, it was a cold. If I were French, I would refer to it as anything but a rhume. It could be an angine, a laryngite, a bronchite, a rhinite, or even a rhinopharyngite but not a common cold.” Emily Button sneezes her way through the French healthcare system…
Paris: The best small town in Texas
“Writing a city guide for Paris on an amateur travel site is about as useless as attempting to cover London, New York or Tokyo in an article of 1,000 words. Since the arrival of the internet, any such metropolis is the theme of fantastillions (© Hajo) of websites, only exceeded by the huge number of porn sites on the web.” BE’s very own Hajo takes a different approach to describing the French capital – through literature…
One foot in each camp
“We don’t set out deliberately to live in two places at once. It’s just that when it looks like happening, we don’t make a serious effort to stop it. We can’t bring ourselves to abandon one place in favour of the other. An East African childhood gives you big horizons.” Mike Kingdom-Hockings writes about his life in Botswana while his wife is based in France.
Canal Capers
“It was one of these holidays that didn’t exactly run to plan. When we rented a house boat on the Canal du Midi for a week, we imagined sunning ourselves on deck and pottering about on the canal. In the evenings we would stroll to canal-side hostelries to quaff fine wines and scoff gourmet food at rock bottom prices. Yeah, and pigs might fly too.” A week’s boating holiday on the Canal du Midi doesn’t all turn out as imagined!