I am back from yet another horrible trip fearing for my life in france, a few people asked me how i enjoyed it, so i thought i'd sum it up for those of you who have never been there to explain just why I like my nice house in an english city instead of a horrible village in the middle of brittany (part of france for those who don't know there is a world outside their borders)
the first major difference is safety from criminals, where in a breton village the police station normally opens for an hour a month to deal with a report of a lost cat, our police stations here are much more proactive often processing hundreds of hardened criminals a day to make the city a much safer place
of course it's not all about crime, the food is different as well - where they have italians in their pizzarias cooking italian pizzas, we are much more fortunate and we have english teenagers throwing our pizzas in to the oven - the extra cheesy taste makes all the difference, i wouldn't settle for anything less than the best of englands lower classes throwing my pizza on the floor, they are by far the best at it
one other thing that is noticeably different about plymouth is the night life - on a typical night here at about 2-3am many of the chavs start making their way home from the clubs (high as kites of course) - it is too dangerous to walk certain unlit streets, that's an entire hour a day that you should seriously avoid the unlit streets for fear of injury... however the town i was staying in they typically turn the street lights off at 23:30ish, that leaves a good 5 or 6 hours until it starts to get light outside, during that time it is extremely dangerous to walk the streets for fear or tripping over something... i feel much safer here in our nicely lit streets
but it's not all bad, there are some good things about Brittany - i'll get back to you on that
(btw for the record it took my parents months of trying before they convinced me to let them pay for me to go over there again because it is so damn boring there, someones cat getting lost literally is the highlight of the week, no wonder they prefer to watch the english news instead of local news...)
