The Morning Paper

One of the great things about living here is the morning newspaper. Each morning I go down to the little boutique and buy a small loaf of super-dense bread. It is wonderful bread, inexpensive and filling. The French disliked it so much that they tried to remove it but once they left the country it made a comeback. For me it's the perfect breakfast, quick and filling. Just add a little butter and fig jam and *zam* it's better than honey balls of hydrogenated glory.

But anyway, I started this post with a reference to the morning paper. This bread, rather than being wrapped in a sheet of bakery paper like it would be in France, is wrapped in a page ripped out of an old newspaper from some random location on the globe. It changes every day and I love seeing what I get. Some days it's in English, some days it's in French, and this week I have learned some interesting things about Spain and Portugal. I can understand the global idea of Spanish and Portuguese because they are similar enough to French and English that I can pick out every 10th word.

This morning was the most unique. I got the weather page out of a paper written in either Spanish or Portuguese. The weather map showed 7 islands in the middle of the ocean somewhere. I am horrible with geography so I was quite at a loss as to what they might be. I kept studying the pictures and found a cloud cover image that showed the islands to be just off what looked like Morocco (fortunately I know what it looks like!)  So I did some research, in the process learning that Western Sahara isn't actually a country, and eventually figured out that they were the Canary Islands, which are technically a part of Spain.

I then read up on the Canary Islands and decided that I would definitely like to go there some day. They have the third largest volcano in the world and two major astronomical observatories. In addition, their weather on August 14th was beautiful!