Wednesday. No school on Wednesday. That means I have to figure out how to entertain Kaitlyn. Ok.
We went into town (St Martin d’Uriage) and checked out the playground. It was teeming with kids, but no parents. And these were little kids… some I recognized from Kaitlyn’s class! The equipment on the playground paled in comparison to the parks we’re used to at home, but it was better than the stuff we had in our neighborhood. There is a teeter-totter, some of those bouncy metal animals, a small slide and one of those human-powered carousels. It’s the kind you run around pushing then jump on, if you can. Kaitlyn loved that. It didn’t love her. It got going too fast a couple of times and when she couldn’t keep up she fell. The second time she landed on her rear, she had enough.
I’d decided to hit the playground because next to in on Wednesdays is an open-air market. I don’t know if it’s always the same people selling things. There were two veggie vendors, a pizza truck, a fromagerie truck, a fish truck, and a guy making food. I think there may have been someone selling bread, too. We hit the first vegetable stand and picked out some things.
We parked by the town’s pool, so we could walk a little bit. (plus, the market takes up most of the town parking lot) On our way into town, an older lady smiled at Kaitlyn and said bonjour, mademoiselle! On our way out of town, an older gentleman sitting along a wall said morning. I’m really yet to encounter these rude French that all the culture books warn of. Maybe it’s an advantage to a small town…
Not ones to follow the lower your standards advice… we had a full afternoon.
Bill came home from work early so we could go look for car #2. Two hours later, we bought a Mercedes A180. Two hours and ten minutes later, I was hit with a horrible case of buyers remorse. But standing there in the dealer’s showroom debating what to do, Bill said he thought for the same price we could go get a Pugeout with more features. And I thought, but for the money, I don’t want a Pugeout, I like this car. So we bought it. Hasty? Probably. But as Bill has pointed out, it cost us a lot less than that Quest minivan we had that ended up being a big loser. What’s my new car like? It is silver (a negative now we have two silver cars), four doors, really big trunk area (it isn’t a trunk, it’s kinda like a mini-mini van in the back… think RAV-4 or CR-V), you sit up real high which makes it easy for a short person to see, reverse is funky so you cannot put the car in reverse by mistake, the driver cannot control the power windows in the back (and hopefully a young passenger will not figure that out, or she will find herself riding in the middle back there!). We don’t get to pick up the car until next Thursday, so I’ll be able to point out every cool thing and every shortcoming soon enough.
While maybe we should have left the dealer to have our heads examined, instead we went to have our physical exams required for our cartes de soujour. That was at the French equivalent of the health department. It looked like you’d expect. Very bland. No magazines. Posters telling you things like don’t smoke when you’re pregnant and eat fruits and veggies and practice safe sex. We started with chest ex-rays. Then we saw a nurse who weighed us, measured our height then checked our eyes. Bill had on his glasses and I had on my contacts, but that didn’t seem to matter. Naturally, we passed the eye exams with flying colors. I apparently didn’t pass the weight/height exam because after checking some little wheel of fortune, she told me she had to test my blood sugar for diabetes. How accurate a test. (isn’t it supposed to require fasting?) She pricked my finger and measured my blood sugar. It’s fine. I knew that, I’ve had myself tested. I’m chubby but not diabetic. The last stop was with the doctor. He asked if we have any existing health problems, if we smoke (actually, he only asked Bill that), listened to our hearts, took our blood pressure, checked the ex-rays and sent us on our ways. I’m not sure just what would cause one to fail such a test.