Talbert Pipes Life in France Adventures Three Years On Christmas of 2004, the year we started having fun Three Years On 2004 was not the best of years for many people. In fact, I think it's been best described as "the year the Love Shack burned down", as any B-52's fan can tell you. For us, however, it has been transformative. Our third year here kicked off with Herbignac finally getting ADSL and kept getting better. Unfortunately, this presented a quandary for writing this article, because smooth sailing is boring reading. I'll try and cover the basics of this third year in as lively a manner as possible, however. I've been told that it takes three years to get settled in another country, and that seems to be true. Year one was, "AHHHHHH. I want to go home!" If our second year here was the, "Thank god, now I can find the tasty milk" year, the third year has been, "Check what's on the satellite tonight while I run into the village for some of that honey mead I like, and later we can go grab dinner at the oceanfront créperie". In short, this was the year that life changed from a tenuous existence in an alien land to (relatively) normal day-to-day life again. We are moving from total unfamiliarity back towards the sort of casual mastery of our environment that non-travellers have but aren't aware of. As I mentioned above, the third year kicked off with the arrival of the long-awaited ADSL, so I finally had a net connection comparable to what I'd enjoyed in the US four years earlier. Even better, our connection was rapidly upgraded, starting at 1024K and boosting to an 8 meg connection within only a few months. This opened the internet world back up again, and through it, the rest of the world. We could read news, browse websites, download big files, and all the rest. This gave us the ability to purchase and download audiobooks online, which was perfectly timed to go with our new wireless headphones for the workshop. Of course, there were still odd encounters, like the time we met the fellow pictured above. We were out walking on the cliffs overlooking the ocean at St. Marc and came across this parrot sitting in a tree, natural as can be. Closer look showed a couple of Amazon Greens as well, all obviously tame and talking but not tethered in any way. Fortunately some locals walked by at the time (we were debating about whether they had escaped from a zoo, and if-and how-we should call the animal catchers) and they informed us that the birds were pets of a local family. They were allowed complete free flight around the cliffs, and knew to come and go by the upstairs windows of the house. We've gotten used to surpises now, though, and tend to take things like this in stride. Better yet, we've picked up on better ways to get things done, such as visiting Nantes by parking at the huge garages on the outskirts, then taking the tram into the maze-like downtown. HUGE improvement over driving around getting lost! As shown in the picture to the right, we've adapted fast to July 14th as Independance Day, since it's exactly like the 4th back in the US, right down to how it is celebrated (fairs and fireworks). Those bread sticks I'm holding are called Chi-Chi's - crunchy buttery bread rolled in powdered sugar, and hellishly delicious. On to PAGE TWO