It looks a lot like summer now

It is really warm an nice. Today, I was choosing between short trousers and T-shirt or jeans and a shirt. Now, I am always a little conservative so I played it safe, but it was too warm. Tonight, we have dinner on the terasse for the first time with our neighbours and that is something extra. Our Chinese Wisteria is really big this year and will cover one half of the pergola in the end of the summer, but the other part where we have a vine is the less well-off. Our friend, that is winegrowers say that we have to spray it against parasites to make it survive.

The two lemon trees that we thought were dead seem to have survived so perhaps we can get our own slices of lemon for the drinks this year also.

The major event of the week was a 220 year anniversary in Balaruc les Bains at Restaurant La Grand Large. It was our neighbour who became 60, their two friends who became 80. Our neighbours have just came back from a 10 days trip to Vietnam and it was a fantastic experience. One of the other ladies is just planning this summer's sailing in the Mediterranean with her husband who is a dedicated sailor and also 80+.

The food was fantastic as always. I got the absolute best carpaccio of beef I have eaten. They served it with sliced black olives, rings of leeks, generous slices of parmesan cheese, chopped tomatoes with coriander and a fantastic olive oil. As always in Balaruc I just had just a grilled fish. Very tasty and fresh. The other in the party had duck livers and a lot of fresh seafood. When one of the ladies would eat their Razor clam, which is a 15 cm long hard clam in form as a knife. Inside, there is this white animal, looking like a worm. You could see that it was fresh by how the thing tried to run away from the plate when it was released from the shell. Our friend caught it however with the fork and ate it.

When one sits there looking over the sea full of sailing boats eating the most fantastic lunch one feel good but have to think about what this would cost in Sweden. I read in a Gothenburg newspaper that the average price for a main course range between 30-50 Euros in the better restaurants. Here the most expensive four-course lunch was 35 Euro and the second most expensive was 26 euros.

I talked with our Norwegian neighbours today. It is 6 families who have purchased a large house together. Now they are stuck here because of ash-cloud so they had to go back home to Norway in their French mini-bus. They were loading a pallet of wine into the mini-bus to bring home. I wondered how they would be able to pass the Norwegian border with that load. The should however pay duty for it. 50 Norwegian kronor (60 Euros) per bottle including duty, VAT, tax and also some sort but fictitious transport tax that would have been paid by the freighter if they had not brought it home on "own wheels". Since I think they had more than 600 bottles it will be quite a lot.