Tuesday April 19 is another very sunny day, but today it is getting quite a bit warmer in the afternoon.  Haircuts, French lessons and a visit to the dentist are on the agenda.

Our 9:00 AM haircut appointments have us up and going early.  This is our second visit to this haircut shop this year.  We went quite a few times in 2014 with good results.  The same thing applies this year.  We get really good haircuts and they are consistent, which is important.  The name of the shop is GOMINA Coiffure .

We left the haircut shop at 9:30, just a little behind our normal schedule.  So we hurried to the esplanade Saint-Vincent to get the bus on our way to our French lesson.  We just made it to the bus, mainly because the woman bus driver was nice enough to wait for us.  We changed buses at the gare and got to our tutor Christine’s house at 1 minute to 10.

Christine had her dining room table back in place after having it repaired last week.  So the French lesson was a success.  Sandy had to do a lot of speaking today and she is getting better every week.

We left Christine’s hours at 11:55 and caught our bus at 12:05 as planned.  When we got to the gare / train station, we went to the SCNF ticket counter to buy our tickets for our Friday trip to Rennes.

We got back to the apartment around 12:45 and had a nice lunch.  Phil had a ham sandwich and Sandy had soup due to her tooth problem.

At 14:00 Phil went up to the 4th floor to visit with our neighbor Jean.  In the mean time Sandy worked on writing her thoughts for her visit to the dentist.  She wrote the thoughts out in French so she could share them with the dentist.  There is no guarantee he/she knows any English and Phil’s French will only get her so far. Sandy also took a quick trip to the Carrefour city to buy a couple of items.

A couple of minutes after her return, we got a phone call from the dentist’s office asking if we could get to the office as quickly as possible.  They must have had a cancellation.  We tried hard to get there as quickly as possible, but we missed our bus at the esplanade Saint-Vincent and lost about 15 minutes.  We took our bus as planned, but we knew we had to walk for about 8 minutes to the dentist’s office.  Unfortunately we missed the office and walked past it.  Phil saw a man sitting on his front porch and asked the man for directions.  He pointed us in the right direction.  Merci monsieur!

The dentist’s office was pretty much a normal office.  The assistant who took our appointment call yesterday greeted us and Phil thanked her for being so helpful in setting up the appointment.  We waited in the waiting room for about 5 minutes, then the dentist came to get us and take us to his office.

The dentist’s office has 3 dentists and 2 dental assistants.  In our previous dentist’s office in Springfield Illinois, there was 1 dentist and 4 assistants.

Sandy gave her written thoughts to the dentist. He read them and then escorted her to the dental chair which was in his office.  He took a look at her broken tooth and gave his diagnosis.  He did not think the tooth needed a crown.  Rather he suggested using a resin like material to repair the remaining part of the tooth.  That was great with Sandy.  He suggested doing it right then and Sandy gave her okay.

About 40 minutes later we walked out of the dentist’s office with Sandy having a newly repaired tooth.  Things could not have worked out better for her.  At a later date we’ll write-up a blog entry to discuss our dentist and doctor appointments, how we set them up, how much they cost, and our take on medical issues in France.

On our way back to the apartment we walked past the basin Vauban.  They are setting up for a sail boat race between Plymouth, England and Saint-Malo.  It is a preliminary warm up race.  The real race will be between Plymouth and New York.  There are some racing boats in the basin and more to come tomorrow.  Quite a few marques are being set up to

provide entertainment for people coming to take a look at the boats.

One of the boats is captained by a man from Japan.  He is the first Japanese sailor to participate in the race.  His name is Hiroshi Kitada and his boat is called the KIHO.

We then resumed our walk back to the apartment.  On the way we passed the boules courts by the wall.  The group responsible for the boules courts had worked on the courts to get them ready for the summer.  The courts had new gravel on them and they looked good.  The group was playing boules, trying out the newly refurbished courts.