Oh you know, just the Friday stuff.

[cerealjoe]

The photos of the amazing road repairs done in Japan in literally a few days after the first quake have been all over the media and I even posted two a while back. Let me tell you about another kind of road works - the French kind. Last month a few signs went up around the Gineste (road connecting Marseille and Cassis through the col de la Gineste, famous road taken during the Marseille-Cassis semi-marathon for which people have to wake up at 5am on a March morning to sign up otherwise the 12000 spots for the run are gone before mid-day... when the race is only at the end of October), these signs said that from the March 30th to April 8th there will be some road works and that traffic could be bad. Today we are the 15th of April and a part of the road has been redone fully, a part has a new covering but has no markings and a part of the road has yet to be redone... and it doesn't look like anything has been done for over a week. Obviously I've never actually witnessed any of the said road works even though I do drive along that road morning and evening and given that the state of the road doesn't seem to change at night I'd like to say that no road works were done at night. That means they have a couple of hours between my morning and evening commute (with a proper break for lunch, I'm sure) to work and now they're not working at all. And this is how road works are done over here! I do still have to point out that the Gineste is one of the finest roads in the area, it's redone almost every single year, clearly a very necessary step to avoid more accidents as in the end it is quite a dangerous sinuous road. So you know, at least hats off for that although I'd love to have the markings back on that middle stretch! Completely changing subjects, discoveries that go awry. In my life there are a few local-ish stores where I know they will have some stuff for me to discover, one of those stores is Monoprix, they seem to be everywhere in Paris (or the MiniMonop' or some kind of version) but in Marseille I know of two and they're awkwardly placed so I don't drop by often unless I'm in the city center. But when I do drop by I usually come out with something I haven't seen before. One day back in February I came with a small can of "Frelon" drink. Honestly I thought the name sounded kind of like "freon" (you know, the good old CFCs and all that). It probably tasted the same. Just looking at this almost makes me gag all over again two months later. Supposedly the taste was pineapple with some other stuff added but this time curiousity really had killed the cat and nailed the coffin in. It was supposed to be a "detox" drink. Not convinced. Especially when you consider that the stuff had some random bits in it, almost pulp-like texture. You gotta give them a few points for the can, you don't see cans like that often around here. Or at least I don't, I don't actually look at cans very often although some of the funky Coke aluminium bottles they come out with for the limited editions are really awesome. I just recently saw one with some old school pin-ups printed on. If I didn't try to limit clutter I'd definitely try to collect a few of those.