Our day in Chambery

Janice and I spent the better part of yesterday in Chambery with several couples from the school. We travelled there to see a radiologist and a doctor as part of the process to get our long-stay visas. Apparently the French are concerned about TB so we all had to get chest x-rays. There was no foolin' around with these doctors. Go in to the room, take all of your clothes off from the waist up, stand in the correct spot, and hold your breath. Bam! picture's taken and you're done. The whole process took less than 2 minutes. They processed about 15 of us in about 60 minutes.

Then, we hand carried our x-rays across town to a doctor who asked us a bunch of questions. After filling out some paperwork he handed each person 2 sheets of paper and said something like, "You can now get your long-stay visas. One copy is for you. One is for the Mayor's office." He never even looked at the x-rays!

I have included a couple of photos of our trip. One thing we all noticed was how dirty Chambery appeared. We felt lucky to be living in Albertville after this trip.

I took this picture while we were driving home. It is along the freeway. You'll notice that the flagger is mechanical. "He" waives his arm up and down to draw the attention of the drivers. At high speed these dummies look pretty realistic.

We were having a hard time finding our way back to the freeway until we saw the sign for the Albertville McDonalds (hiding behind the traffic signal luminaire). Once we saw that we knew we were home-free. (Somebody in the car commented that they must've done that for dumb Americans. Ha!)

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Clean plate part 2

I just couldn't let the ginger and lemon grass go to waste!! It was worth it...the dinner was soo yummy!

in defense,
janice :)

Talk about a clean plate!

Last Tuesday night Janice and I went to dinner. We hadn't had a date for about a week and a half so we decided to take a couple of hours away from the kids to be alone and enjoy a good meal. It has been a little difficult finding a good meal here in Albertville. The food is just similar enough to temp us but just different enough to not be quite what we had hoped for. So, with that in mind we tried a Chinese restaurant called "Hong Kong". We liked the menu (they served Thai food!) so we decided to get a few spicey things (and it was good to finally have something spicey. Apparently the French have spent quite a bit of time in the mid-west??). The dinner was good - but not as good as my date - and it was so good in fact that Janice decided that it would be a good idea to lick her plate clean. Yes, that's right, she eye balled her plate for several seconds all the while stealing glances at the people in the restaurant (wouldn't want to be seen licking the plate now whould she?). Anyway, she finally decided to go for it only to see the owner of the resaurant turn a corner and stare right at her. Caught in the act!!! We sure had a good laugh over that one.

Here's hoping all of your eating experiences are as memorable as the one I just described.

Talk to you later.

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Lover Boy

*HI,

well right now its's 9:23pm and we are listening to adventures in odyssey and getting ready for bed.

i asked tawnee how she liked france she said she liked it but she misses gramma and papa :)

we are all kinda sick right now.... gg

Ethan learns to ride a bike!

Gracey took this video. She worked with Ethan for about 5 minutes and he learned to ride this bike.

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Gracey on the bars

Had some time today so I put this video of Gracey doing her spinning bar routine on the blog. Hope you enjoy it. If I tried this I would throw up!

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I just downloaded some photos from Payton's camera to the blog.




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I think this is the first time I've ever seen a real suit of armor for sale. It's 30% off!

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