Le Brewery: bottling

One of the jobs at Le Brewery is bottling up Steve's delicious beer

Me, Christine and Charlotte

Le Brewery

We are now living and working at 'Le Brewery' in Normandy, near...well near nowhere really. We are on a help exchange - the idea is that you go and help people in exchange for food and board, and in this case lots and lots of beer and fun

This is where I spend quite a lot of my time - my new office!

Dan fondling the hops 

This is Steve, le patron, Heath Robinson, the incredible whirlwind

My new favourite toy

Making some signs for the pubs

Paris: Cheap eats in Paris

We spent quite a lot of time trying to find good cheap places to eat - there is some good information here 

Rue des Rossiers is the main thoroughfare through Le Marais and is famous for its fantastic falafels - 5 euros and delicious

Steaming bowls of noodle soup at Pho 76, a Vietnamese restaurant in the 5th at 59 rue Galande. Reasonably priced and extremely tasty

I can't believe how many videos I have made of food!

For the biggest lemon meringue pie you have ever seen head to Le Loir dans la théière on Rue des Rossiers in Le Marais - check it out

Paris: Conversation exchange

In an attempt to practice our French we decided to try and meet some genuine french people to baffle with our 10 sentences that we could remember from school. 

However, meeting french people in Paris isn't such an easy task so we found a website called conversation exchange - you can meet up with people to practice french while they practice english. 

This turned out to be one of the best things that we did in Paris, we met people that I hope will be long term friends. Julien (the cheeseburger) was our first date, we went for a wander around Opera while Julien told us how he thought that British people were completely mad for wanting to feed birds and there is no way that anyone in Paris would ever do such a thing - then we saw this

Hilarous - Julien couldn't believe his eyes!

Another of our dates was with the wonderful Christophe, we met for a brilliant dinner and an evening at Franglish which is like speed dating for conversation - 7 minutes in French and then 7 minutes in English. I did end up resorting to asking people if they had any pets when my french ran out, and almost sang 'sur le pont d'Avignon' at certain desperate moments.

Christophe then invited us to his home for a proper french meal, it was on our last day in Paris and felt like Christmas day. 

Thanks Sebastian - best meal in Paris!

Rasta the french bulldog

We had one of these lemon meringue pies (made by Christophe) each! 

An American phrasebook !???