From McTragedy to McTriumph! Today, I pulled up to the McDrive (yes, that is what it is called here) and using NO English successfully ordered duex frites grandes et un moyen coke light c’est tout. I am just so impressed with myself. Now it is only fair to divulge the fact that the McDrive does not use the little box for ordering that we do in the US. It was a face-to-face order placement, which had to have helped.
We are still on the great car hunt for our second voiture. Today we checked out the Pugeout dealership’s selection of l’occassions and decided that on any given day you could walk onto that lot and find a car that would be ok. Not great. Not the best car you’ve ever owned. But ok. So that can be our backup. Now we’ve decided to go test drive the Mercedes A170. That’s either going to make me love it or hate it. We’ll have to see who wins the showdown between the Germans and the French.
Cooking dinner tonight we ran into a little snag. The power went out. Twice. We blew the breaker to the entire house. Twice. Yes, we had several things running: the washer and dryer, the cooktop, lights (yes, dad, the refrigerator was on). At home that would not cause a complete loss of power. Here, we had to go around shutting things off until we could maintain a level that allowed us to finish dinner! Not something I’m used to. We’ve decide that the cooktop is to blame. The big burner which was on to boil the pasta says right on it 3000 watts. I’m not an engineer, but that seems like a lot to me. There was a bright side in the whole outage challenge. It caused the oven to flash a screen we hadn’t seen before… the one that sets the language. Voila! Our oven is now in English. (but still celcius)
I also bothered to translate the settings on the washer and dryer today. The washer is pretty straightforward, although it does ask you to choose the actual water temperature (in celcius) rather than just cold, warm or hot. The dryer lets you choose: super dry, very dry, ready to fold, or ready to iron. I’ve always thought those last two were the same as the first two. Silly me.