46 - J moins sept - Dax, Castets, & Hossegor

 Monday, 29 January 2024

Turns out that having that afternoon cup of coffee on Sunday may not have been the best choice for me: I had a tough time falling asleep and I think I came away with about 3 hours of sleep 🥱.  Fortunately, a couple cups of coffee had me right as rain 😅

I dropped my friend off at the Dax train station before heading to work.  She'll be spending a few days in Paris and I wish her bon courage on her own adventure in France!  I'm so glad that she could come to visit and see the SW of France, even if only briefly.   The peanut butter M&Ms she brought over were well received at the office!  

Help yourself!

My email account got migrated from the legacy company to the new merged company email address over the weekend; so I was off to a slow start following the instructions to update my accounts and then find where my synced files got migrated too.  I was thinking to myself that this wasn't a great time for me to have migrated; but to be fair, I would have thought that no matter when they migrated me.  As someone who's job is about making changes (incremental and sometimes drastic) to existing processes, I suppose it's important to keep these things in perspective.  On the other hand, I now have a new file folder titled "Microsoft Onedrive is DUMB".  Perspective.

I stopped by the hotel reception to buy a few laundry tokens and to thank the manager for the extra set of linens for the pullout couch.  He's so great, he even threw in a bottle of wine offert with my laundry tokens.   

Tuesday, 30 January 2024

The big news today is that I saw the protest of les agriculteurs.  They had gathered in the middle of the roundabout just by the factory; there wasn't any really impediment to traffic but the police were there all the same to ensure traffic kept flowing.  By the end of the day, they had taken their tractors either back to the farm or onwards to Paris cause I didn't see them on the commute home.  

Braised chicken leg at lunch, was quite tasty in the supreme/creme sauce

Vive la revolution!

Dinner was at a place called Bistro Balneise, which is situated right on Lac Hossegor.  Since the restaurant was just next to an oyster farm, il fallait que je mange des huitres.  The lake is brackish so I liked that the oysters weren't super salty; I'd say they had just the right amount of saltwater.  

When I mentioned my weekend and how many people were shopping, I learned that the "Soldes" I'd been seeing in many store fronts is a seasonal sale happening only twice a year.  

Une coupe folle / A crazy cup for dessert

Wednesday, 31 January 2024

A good day at work today; despite a lot of meetings, I felt pretty productive.  Maybe that's related to the meetings being about documents and analyses I'd done 😅  My ability to stay awake in a meeting is pretty proportional to how relevant it is to me or things I've done so I was pretty attentive today.

Ate lunch at Carine's today.  I'm not sure if I'll be free to have lunch there again so I brought some Reese's cups as a thank you and good bye gift.  I'd forgotten that people at the office trying them for the first time often ate the wax paper wrapper; the serveuse's discovery was a good, albeit too-late, reminder to issue a warning about the candy having two wrappers 😅.  The food was delicious as usual and I discovered they have an intern server this week; the details of how an internship works in the service industry isn't something I wanted to delve into just then but he seemed pretty capable at following instructions.  

At lunch I struck up a conversation with another diner, turns out she was a Belgian living in Spain and visiting an affiliate of my company in Castets.  Over the course of the plat and dessert I learned about the Belge number system (fifty, sixty, seventy, 4x20, ninety in lieu of fifty, sixty, sixty +10, 4x20, 4x20+10), differences in the number of passes during la bise (kiss greeting) between countries, about the region around Valencia, and managed to convince her that Raleigh NC isn't "nulle part".  

Dinner was at Mojo Cafe with the guys from AIGP.  I haven't been back to Mojo Cafe since my first week in France; the food poisoning that caught me later that night had me wondering if it'd been the restaurant's fault.  Anyhow, seems like I survived the meal this time.  I'll add that the pina colada there was really tasty but also très dosé.  One guy mentioned that the place has a MOF (Meilleur Ouvrier de France) at the bar and thus the place is known for its cocktails.  I also learned that today is my "J moins 7", one week away from my last day.  "J" is for "jours" but "J" in French is pronounced like the English "G" so in America today would be my G moins sept.  

I didn't expect the tartiflette plat to be so huge; but very tasty

I ended up taking a doggy bag home.

Another foggy night here in Dax

Thursday, 1 February 2024

I had an interesting task today: the hotel manager asked me for some advice.  He forwarded me an email exchange he'd had with somebody regarding buying a fancy car: supposedly the vehicle was in Arizona and in excellent condition.  The price seemed low to me but the manager wanted to be sure so he asked me to take a look at the title card the guy had sent a picture of.  Fortunately, I was able to phone a friend who phoned a dad who confirmed that the price was just waaaaay too low for this deal to be legitimate. Even if the piece of paper looked legitimate, there's no way someone would sell a car for 1/3 - 1/2 the fair market value.  Sadly, the gérant won't be getting his discount Ferrari but at least he didn't get scammed.  I found it neat that he was willing to ask his American friend to smell the deal; he was already skeptical of the deal too but I think he just needed an objective 3rd party to say so.  

For lunch today, I made a quick stop by the bakery La Fargue in Castets where I got a sandwich, a chocolatine, and a pastis Landais to share.

The pastis was really good: deliciously soft brioche with a light vanilla flavor and pearl sugar atop

I wanted to make a special note about how bakeries can do some amazing things with wax paper: either spinning the ends of the bag to tightly seal your pastry or create a nifty little sling for your baguette.

Dinner was by myself at Chez Nous; the other guy who was going to join me called out because he wasn't feeling well.  I still had a good time seeing the guys who run the place, dining on a great 3 courses, and then performing piteously in a game of Blindtest (guess the music quickly).  I was going to add a few pictures of my meal here but decided not to when after I got home I ended up seeing it again myself 🤢.  I think that's strike two (and possible three) for Mojo Cafe, where I became sick the day after eating there (the other guy who called out also ate there with me).  

Friday, 2 February 2024

Fortunately, it seems that whatever had afflicted me last night seems to have passed enough that I could go to work without any major deleterious effects; though I wasn't particularly hungry.  At the security gate, I encountered last night's no-show who confirmed he had also spent the evening vomiting.  That seals Mojo's fate for me: only drinks there, never food.  Orrr probably better to just avoid the place in general.

Given how few days I have left, I'd planned to put more of my American candy (the Reese's cups I came over with have survived and I'd barely dented the other bag of peanut butter M&Ms) up for grabs in the refectory but found someone had already brought a bunch of croissants and chocolatines to celebrate someone's birthday.  I guess the candy stays with me for a few more days...  And despite being unsure of my stomach, I soldiered on and ate a chocolatine to participate in the festivities.

Help yourself!  Except you, Chabot, you know what you did 🤣

It was a good, productive day; though I didn't quite get the time to work on my monthly report for January.  It's strange, I would typically review my emails to parse together what I had done the previous month without a thought about what I did outside of work; if not for the report needing to be about work stuff, I could just point my boss to this blog to explain what I was busy doing in January 😂

There was a group of 6 of us that went out to lunch today to O'Saveurs de Carrine, which was a sweet gesture since I'd mentioned the other day that I'd thought my lunch on Wednesday might be my last meal there this trip.  I enjoyed the meal with company even if I barely spoke during it; I'm not sure what it is but in larger groups I need to spend more energy focusing to follow the conversation (at least in French).  I suppose it doesn't help that a group of 6 can have two different conversations going, and then add atop that that the restaurant was noire du monde and quite loud; it made me wonder if I have an issue with aural overstimulation.  

My Friday evening activity was something that's been on the backburner list for a while but I'm glad I checked it off: I visited one of the thermes in Dax.  Specifically, I visited the Therems Sorceo, which is attached to the Best Western Hotel (about a mile away from my place) where I stayed in both 2017 and 2018.  The facility had some really beautiful pools equipped with water & air jets plus a couple saunas.  It was quite relaxing and for 8€ an hour a very reasonable visit.  The pools were warm but never quite hot tub temperature; I found some of the jets too tenderizing for my sides but still fun in short spurts.  Both saunas were scented (one was "Tahiti" and the other pine) and operated at ~83C, by the end of 15 minutes in each I was quite drenched; if not for the cold pool (18C, which is actually warmer than my New Years dip in Biarritz) I likely would've passed on the second sauna session.  

The changing light colors in the pools were a welcome effect while bathing

Dinner was chez moi to start working through the remaining food items I have in the house: tonight was the cabbage and a chunk of cecina (salted beef) I'd picked up in Pamplona.  The cecina is ridiculously salty but very tasty.  Looking over the remaining wares, it might be a struggle to finish but it's certainly possible to eat the larder before I leave.