French gîte renters demand time change for church bell

Oh I understand that very well. It’s fine until the person you’re speaking to says something back and you don’t understand it and all your plans for a calm, non-panicky conversation go out the window :roll_eyes::face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Happily, face-to-face conversations are a bit easier for me now but phone conversations are still difficult. So much harder when you can’t see the person.

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I (wrongly) rely greatly on Babeth, as Her English is so good we never speak French together, I can shop and 'ave a craic in the pub, buts that’s me lot! :wink:

Some of it so stupid that I find myself assuming it’s a wind-up.

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If the Parisians don’t like the bells at 7 they’d better not visit Egypt when Ramadan is in the summer. The call to prayer is at 4 in the morning sometimes. And it’s a monotonous wail. Then the donkeys start their he hawing and stray dogs bark. Luckily I found it part of the whole adventure and my brother who lived there was used to it.

And the bloke who goes around banging on all the doors shouting “prayer is better than sleep”, the fact that the mosques all have fizzy sound systems and aren’t quite in sync… plus the car-horn workshop and the ice/ noodle/water sellers and the camel-market. I spent 4 months in a poor bit of Cairo (Embaba), many years ago.

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My brother made us take our own water , he said that the water sellers would fill old bottles up anywhere and it wasn’t safe.

I used to drink the water carried around in a big jar on the seller’s back. Also ate the noodles and lentils from the street carts. Never got ill though :relaxed:.
The thing to avoid was ice because you saw the blocks of it actually being dragged along the ground through pools of sewage (a pipe had been broken and nobody had enough wahsta to get it fixed).

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yes…no ice in the g + t