Freaky Pharmacy

pictures from www.frenchgardening.com

So Halloween has come and gone, and I didn't exactly get to celebrate it as I had intended. France and Switzerland are aware of Halloween; the stores carry some cheap costumes and make-up and fake spider webs, and I even saw pumpkin carving kits in one. But they don't really seem to get it. Christmas cookies are already on sale. Certainly they don't understand pumpkins. They call all squash pumpkins, which I am staunchly opposed to. Butternut squash are wonderful in their own right, but I'd rather stick with lovely sugar pumpkins for making cookies and pies, thank you very much.

But I didn't get to celebrate Halloween and try to educate those around me into the wonders of pumpkin baked goods, because I wasn't feeling well. Instead, my Halloween was devoted to a terror of an entirely different kind: dealing with French pharmacies.

French convenience stores don't carry medicinal items like their American counterparts do. In fact, they stick pretty closely to band-aids, neosporin, and bug spray. I can't even get contact solution there. For anything beyond those basics, pain killers, cold sore treatments, allergy medicine, one has to go to the pharmacy.

Don't get me wrong; the pharmacies are nice places. But I only ever go into them when I'm not feeling well, and therefore don't have a lot of patience for things being completely different than what I'm used to (ie, a la American). Secondly, my limited French rises to haunt me there. I can look up the necessary vocabulary in advance and normally don't have a problem making my request understood. But in pharmacies, the nice person behind the counter is going to try and understand the problem and find the perfect solution for you, and that requires conversation. I don't converse well in French.

But what I thought was a scratch on my face developed into a patch of cold sores, and help was needed if I wanted to continue eating and sleeping in comfort. So I looked up the word for cold sores in French and headed to the pharmacy. When one can plainly see on my face what the problem is, it isn't hard to find the correct product.

Still, cold sores? The week of Halloween? Had I been planning on dressing up like a zombie, that would have been perfect. But . . . I wasn't. Instead, I couldn't smile or laugh for days without my face splitting, which made real what started out as mock glares. Of course, all my office mates had gone to a jamboree and missed this completely, so I was glaring at an empty office.

So, 'tis now November. The proton run has ended for the year, with each of the main experiments having about 5 inverse femtobarns to show for it. Snow is piling up on the mountains and slowly moving down in elevation. The rush for the winter conferences is picking up. And I have some over-due pumpkin baking to do. On to Thanksgiving!