Today, I spent a lot of time observing French towns in hopes of being able to describe them so I'm now going to take a pass. They are, thus far, almost all exactly the same (large cities excluded as large cities are essentially the same as everywhere else). In each of these hundreds, if not thousands of small towns, there is a church, a school, a bakery, a restaurant, a post office, a pharmacy, a clothing/stuff store, a grocer and sometimes a baby store or a pet store. Larger towns have multiples of one or more of these things and also might have a playground, a couple non-retail businesses and a museum.
The stores are actually almost never open except the grocer and baker. So, for day to day commerce, you have to plan in advance when you are going to shop for a particular thing and there is not a lot of variety. You get what you get. If you want more variety, you drive the hour or so to the closest big city and then everything is open all day and you have your malls, shopping districts, restaurants, etc.
Right around the stores are the apartment buildings and townhouses all smashed together. I have no idea what they look like inside because they usually have the shutters closed and I can't really blame them for that because otherwise one would have no privacy. On the outskirts of the towns are the single family homes which look a lot like the place we are staying. Many of them have swing sets. Then its miles of open space, usually cultivated agricultural land. Then, you come upon another small town which is the same as the last.
I think the main difference between here and the US is that people here (again outside of larger cities) seem to live in self sufficient clusteres that are totally remote from other places. The towns dont blend together via tracts of single family homes the way they do in the US, at least in the places I've lived. And in my experience, the more rural parts of the US are all single family homes. I cant remember getting to a town in the US that was miles away from anything else that had row houses in it.
Oh, and I think I may have to revise my statement from earlier this week about it being more child friendly here. They make it easier to bring baby on adult activities, however there is less to do for babies and young children. The attractions are all connected to this small town approach so you have to kind of come upon them as you are driving around. You cant just Google for "Fun Things to Do with Baby" because the stuff nearby is only frequented by the couple hundred families that live nearby and thus it doesnt register on a search engine even if there is a website. And, everything here (except the pool) seems entirely centered around the school year. So, since school is in session right now, none of the Fairyland type places are open. (Enchanted Forest was closed since its November). I have no idea what parents and nannies do with their infants and toddlers around here. I have seen tons of babies being dragged along with their parents doing adult things, but no babies doing baby things. And, even though the pool is open every day for at least a couple hours, the official baby swim is only once a week (vs every day at the Y at home). So, I think what people do with their little ones is play with them at home and that they dont socialize themselves or socialize their children until preschool which is fine I suppose, but would not work for an ENTJ like me.
On our drive home today we saw a nice playground in one of the small towns around 30 minutes away. I think tomorrow we will try the pool and go to the playground.
No bad song today. However, we did finally identify one of the 4 sounds we actually like that they play on the radio.
We also saw a Coffee Shop named after The Bean!
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