Inclement Weather

I had hoped to go skiing again this weekend, but the weather put paid to that. Hurricane force winds arrived from the West during Friday night (I'm blaming the good ol' US of A again) and lashed the SW of France. Bordeaux got it pretty bad and several people died, along with numerous power outages accross the region. In Toulouse it was pretty bad, but by the time I dared to drive out at 1PM on Saturday afternoon, the only damage I saw was that many roads had trees down. Given that they tend not be huge great oaks down here, that wasn't so bad. The reason I'd ventured out was to go shopping instead of skiing though, but the met office had scared enough people to stay at home such that most shops were shut. Given the French tendency to throw a strike at a moment's notice, I shouldn't have been surprised.

I salvaged the rest of the afternoon by meeting up with a recent English starter, and going to one of the city centre's English pubs. Peter Chan used to work at Symbian, knows quite a few of the people I've met during the course of this work, and used to live in Sale - small world gets smaller. The pub was originally named, "The London Pub" and it sure charged centre of London bloody prices, as it was 6 euros for a metric pint (ie 0.88 of a pint = 0.5l). What a ripoff. I guess they can do it to stop people like me and Peter ploughing through their entire difficult to get hold off stock over the course of 1 weekend. The bitter was 2 euros cheaper and made up of the bulk of the afternoon's work, prior to a pizza. We seemed to struggle a bit finding somewhere to eat, because just like the shops, many restaurants had remained closed for the storm. Town had been pretty empty anyway, so a day off wouldn't have cost them much. I couldn't help think that in Newcastle, people would probably have gone swimming rather than give in to the elements, although the winds had been pretty fierce, albeit I sampled the worst of them from either bed or the safety of the garden.

Today around Toulouse was clear up day, where wheely bins were retrieved from the bottom of the roads by people too dim to have wheeled them to safety in advance. There had only been 3 days of storm warnings so easily done I guess. I'd often do a supermarket shop on a Sunday, but here they don't open. I am finding it a tad difficult to get used to the lack of an open all hours culture we enjoy at home. Once the worst of the winter is over in a few weeks, it probably won't matter as the weekends will be better used for something else - like skiing next week perhaps.....

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