Titbits

Tomorrow we move on north so today was a quiet day as washing needed to be done and the car given a drink prior to the 3 hour drive through to Dijon. Also with supermarkets closing at around noon on a Sunday we need to think ahead and ensure that we have whatever we require until mid morning Monday so we also walked to two supermarkets that were both within 2km of the apartment.

Early evening we took the tram into the city centre and had a meal at the Italian restaurant we had eaten at last Tuesday.

Kms driven today: 5

Some titbits!

Supermarkets - there are various chains in France, the biggest of which seem to be Carrefour, U, Lidl, Aldi & E.Leclerc. Carrefour for example according to Wikipedia has 6336 outlets across France.

As supermarkets are a “relatively” new phenomena and the French towns/cities existed well before they came into vogue, while Carrefour and U in particular have their smaller inner city stores, most supermarkets are on the outskirts of the city which allows them to build very large stores, sufficient to hold say a Pak N’ Save and a Briscoes and also have large areas of off street parking.

The larger sites also have petrol pumps in the car park and the price appears to be significantly less than what one would pay per litre at the motorway stops - anything up to €0.30 less. The price is the price as there also seems to be an absence of supermarket fuel discount vouchers or at least we have never been given one and there aren’t any  signs we have seen to indicate they exist.

Another “feature” is the wide range of organic products available in supermarkets at prices that are not significantly different than the non-organic alternative - maybe €0.20 extra on every €2.00 spent which is a far cry from the add-on in NZ.

As well there are large stand-alone supermarkets selling only organic products, so those who favour the “bio” lifestyle are well catered for.

Villes et Villages Fleuris - when you drive into some towns or villages you may see a sign such as

on which will be between one and four flowers. 

Towns across France can be approved to display such a sign by a national committee who work to strict criteria.

When it was implemented in 1959 it recognised those towns who had developed aesthetic green spaces and floral displays but now it is more about general planning and how it improves the lives of residents and the experience of visitors .

As at 2018 there were 4931 recognised towns and cities across France 257 of which had been awarded 4 flowers.

Saint-Priest-en-Jarez where we are staying is a one flower town and an example of their efforts was seen this morning as we walked to a supermarket