Quand on vous refile un citron...

Northeast New Brunwsick was a lot of fun for us.  We're staying in Caraquet, New Brunswick, which has a very strong French Canadian / Acadian influence.  (according to Wikipedia, 98.5% of the population speak French and less than 1/2 of those folks are bilingual.)  Signs for all businesses, road signs, and everything else is in French.  I only took 2 years of French lessons in High School so it's been a bit of a challange.  But we're doing reasonably well.

Every time I greeted someone I acknowledged them with both English and French so they realized I'm not from around here.  At one of our stops, Chuck and I ended up talking with a couple who have lived here all their lives.  To our luck they were bilingual and we had a nice conversation with us trying to use French and them using English.

The trip to the supermarket was lots of fun.  One staff member and I spoke about what a specific sign meant - turns out the cooked lobsters/ homard cuire for sale in the store were not cooked on location, rather somewhere in town / marche.  She said folks are very particular about where and how the lobsters are cooked.

Some of the oddities in this region though include milk and mail.  Milk can be bought in a 4 Liter bag.  That's right, a bag.  It also comes in plastic bottles, but a bag.  And the cost of milk is a case of sticker shock for us - $6 - $8 depending on where you shop.

The other interesting oddity is the mail.  Instead of the carrier going house to house like most U.S. neighborhoods, we saw multiple community mailboxes - some in the middle of a town, others out along the roads through the villages.

I was happy with how well we got around in this region.  Although it's not where I would want to settle down, I feel I could visit it several times and get by.

As for the title of today's blog....