Winter is here!

Winter has finally arrived at Tarbes. Today is one of the coldest days this year in Tarbes - at least to me, it is.
When I left for my french class yesterday it was -4 degrees with strong wind chill. It was snowing tiny little granules of snow - perfectly formed little round balls that were so beautiful to look at. Needless to say I was frozen by the time I walked into my class. My Russian classmates were laughing at the thunderous expression on my face when I walked in - they know this is my first French winter and like to tease me about the cold.

Thursday afternoons are my time off from Lucas for a couple of hours, so after dropping Lucas at the creche, I went to the Asian Grocer in town to see if they had some CNY stuff. The owners are Laotian Chinese but are not big on CNY. However I was delighted to find fresh tofu (I asked where its from, and got a weird look back and a curt "France") and ham choy (pickled vegetables). The tofu was a bit expensive - I paid 3,50 euro and the ham choy (from Thailand) was 2 euro.
I also bought honey pomelo from LIDL for 1,49 euro which I thought was a steal until I opened the pomelo today and found that it was rotten inside. What a huge disappointment! I am going to go exchange it for another one tonight.

If I thought yesterday was cold, today was farking cold (pardon my french... hehehehhehehe).  And according to the meteo, its going to get even colder this weekend so the CNY steamboat was a great idea after all!

I hope that Roger will be able to make it for dinner tomorrow night. His cancer has come back with a vengence and has spread to his brain. He is getting forgetful and has recently twice, lost his house keys and once he got locked out with a pot of pasta boiling on the stove last week. He is still upbeat and optimistic and is adamant that no one treats him like an invalid. He has not let his sister or his daughter know about his condition and wants to keep it that way. In a lot of ways we are also his family as he is the only paternal grandfather Lucas has ever known, and we see him a lot more than his daughter or sister.