Easter: The Good

Happy Easter, everyone!

Easter is pretty big holiday around here. Most businesses and banks take both Friday and Monday off, making it a four-day weekend. Even CERN closes for the holiday, though by "closes" I mean that the restaurants and post office and UBS branch and bureaucratic stuff is all shut down and no official meetings are held. The experiments still run, and they took a huge amount of data over the weekend.

I worked--that's part of being a grad student, after all. But it was Easter, and so I also indulged in a few treats. For myself, I got the classic Lindt chocolate Easter bunny shown above. For everyone else, I baked.

Some of it even turned out.

J'aime la France , mais . . .

images from www.harvestwizard.com

I love France.

One day I hope to learn how to live there.

Invariably when living in a foreign country, things fail to work as I would expect. For me, this seems to happen with a depressing frequency in buying produce. I mean from the grocery store, not from a farmers' market. I can handle buying bread or pastries, even fish from the poissonerie, but somehow I have had a depressing amount of trouble figuring out how to buy things like fresh apples.

For comparison's sake, first remind yourself how produce-buying works in the US. You find a plastic bag provided by the store, and fill it with the desired amount of fruits or vegetables of one kind. You then take that bag with you to the register, where the cashier weighs the produce and calculates the cost. In France, the first part of this process, selecting and bagging your produce, works exactly the same. Here, however, customers must find the scales located somewhere in the produce section and weigh their bunches of bananas and bags of tomatoes themselves, by selecting the correct pictogram from the list. A little sticker is printed out to adhere to the bag with the final price.

Well, except for things that aren't sold by weight, anyway. Bundles or things sold by number don't need to be weighed.