For starters, I'll say that we do NOT live in French suburbia, so this is not an entry about how we chose a bad place to live. Outside of our town, things are a little different than what you might imagine the ideal France to be...
On Monday, after going to the university (where the buildings are ugly, but the campus is beautiful), we returned to French suburbia for round number 2 of Ikea. Sadly, it was not our last visit--even this week. We went back for the base to the table and the chairs you saw in a picture in a previous entry. Ikea delivered the other furniture we purchased Thursday morning, but they were out of the bed slats and tabletop, so we went again Friday. (We'll do a separate entry to show you our fabulously furnished apartment). Ikea is set up in EXACTLY the same layout as in the States, so no surprises there.
Tuesday we went to Carrefour, which is a lot like Walmart, even in terms of the clientele. It's definitely not our favorite place, but they do have a lot of useful products, so we will probably go there on occasion. We went even deeper into French suburbia on Wednesday when we needed to go to Leroy Merlin (pronounced LUH WAH MARE LAH, but we prefer to think of it as "Leroy Merlin's") and But (pronounced something like BEW, but Aaron calls it "butt") to find a telephone (which neither had) and a piece to mount the shower head to the wall (which Leroy had). For pictures of French suburbia, please visit your local Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walmart, McDonald’s, or other generic establishments. You’ll get a very similar feel. Perhaps our title of this entry was a little over-the-top; we really didn't face any perils. It was just a lot of wading through huge box stores and masses of people clambering for the cheapest products shipped directly from China.
Glad you like your little town, anyway! So interesting how different things are in France, even though it's "Western" just like the US. :)
ReplyDeleteWe used to have a Carrefour here, but sadly it was sold to another big box chain, so there is now an absence of random French yogurts and vegetables in jars.