Tuesday April 26 is a day for trying to solve a problem which has been getting worse by the day.

Usually we have our Tuesday French lesson in the morning.  But today we have changed to the afternoon.  Our teacher, Christine, is busy with a group from Sweden who have come to Saint-Malo.  The Swedes are mostly over the age of 75.  Only the chaperons are under the age of 75.  There are over 50 Swedes in the touring group.  Apparently they spend a few weeks in France every year.  They tour different parts of the country each year and during their tour they take French lessons.  So they are in Saint-Malo this year and are taking French lessons  from the Alliance Française in Saint-Malo.  Christine works for the Alliance Française as her main occupation in her retirement and is one of the teachers for the Swedes.  Hence the change in our schedule.

So we decided to spend the morning trying to solve a problem which has been getting worse by the day.  The problem is with the water flow lever in the shower.  If you turn it toward hot, to get hot water, it should cause the on demand water heater to switch on, heat the water and give you a hot shower.  Unfortunately, over the last week it has become more and more unresponsive.  The on demand water heater is not turning on.  The water heater works fine when you select hot water from the bathroom sink or from the kitchen sink, but not from the shower.  So it is not a problem with the on demand water heater, it is a problem with a component in the lever mechanism in the shower.

Phil thought he would call our plumber, the man who did all the work in the bathroom . But he really messed up the phone message.  In fact he got very discombobulated and left an incoherent message.  So to fix this problem we headed over to the Hotel Quic-En-Groigne.  The co-owner, Michel, uses the same plumber and the plan is for Michel to call the plumber and set up a call on our apartment to check out the problem  When we got to Michel’s hotel he understood our problem.  In fact he said he had the same problem in his shower at his home which is next door to the hotel.  He had the plumber out yesterday to look at the problem and the plumber was to get back with the part to repair the problem.  Michel got hold of the plumber and explained our problem.  The plumber will be stopping by our apartment in the next day or so.  In the mean time we will continue to use our workaround to have hot showers.

After having a coffee at Michel’s we headed to the harbor to see what was going on.  This morning it was pretty quiet.  The Brittany Ferry was docked across the harbor.  The Corsaire Ferry was making its usual trips between Saint-Malo and Dinard.  And the cormorant was at work getting his/her food in the water.  It was good to see the cormorant!

cormorant resting on top of the pole

After lunch we headed to Christine’s house for our French lesson which was scheduled for 2:30PM / 14:30.  On the way to the lesson we walked through the usual parking lot and

Netherlands license plate

spotted a license plate from the Netherland. We also spotted a license plate which we could not immediately identify.  We took a couple of pictures of it to research later in the day.

The French lesson went very well with Christine really taxing Sandy’s brain.  It is really non-stop for 2 hours.  Today it was actually for 2 hours and 15 minutes.  Christine is like the Energizer Bunny.

We got back to the apartment around 5PM / 17:00 and did some home work.  We’ll finish the homework tomorrow.

The researching of the unidentified license plate went very well.  We had taken a picture of a license permit or motor sticker on the front window of the car.  There were words on the sticker, “TEHNIČKI  PREGLED”.  We used Google Translate to identify the language of the words.  They turned out to be Slovene.  So the license plate was from Slovenia.  And the words translated to “Technical Inspection.” It is was their vehicle inspection sticker.

Slovene Technical Inspection sticker

Slovenia license plate