Life on a Deserted Island Chapter 2 or Culinary and Shaming Guernsey Style

A few weeks ago I published a post about My life on the island of Guernsey, which, to my delight, received very warm responses from the Francophile community. So I decided to continue more or less in the same format of a few short stories, which give you a little more understanding of what life is like here.

Food in Guernsey

If you love fish or seafood, Guernsey is definitely the island for you. It doesn't really matter which restaurant you go to, whether it's a local or a gourmet restaurant, all the fish and seafood will be perfectly fresh and so far I haven't had any failures.

However, even lovers of meat and dairy products did not leave the island hungry, thanks to the cows raised here, which provide milk with a slightly higher fat content, thanks to which the butter of Guernsey Considered the best butter in the world (or at least part of the top three).

And what about the chocolate section? Let's just say that Sharon Heinrich won't have much work here, but the fact that I haven't yet found a chocolatier worthy of the name is compensated for by Guernsey's ice cream, which is made from the fatty milk of local cows and is very tasty. The only culinary drawback I've found so far in Guernsey is in the bread section - I haven't yet found a boulangerie worthy of the name (which won't bother my fans). The Paleo Diet).

And speaking of diets, let's devote a few words to the impact that a meal at a restaurant can have on your wallet. So, to my great delight, I discovered that food in Guernsey is cheaper than in Israel. In most restaurants, you can have lunch or an early dinner (17:00-19:00 PM), each consisting of 3 courses, for a price ranging from 12 pounds for a cheap restaurant (67 NIS) to about 20 pounds (111 NIS) for a more expensive restaurant. Of course, you can also find gourmet restaurants that can be more expensive, but I still promise you that you will have a very hard time finding restaurants that are more expensive than in Israel. But that's not all. In October, there is the Tennerfest, where the best restaurants in Guernsey provide a menu of 2 or even 3 courses for 10 pounds (around 56 NIS). There is no doubt that for a glutton like me, this is excellent news...

So how do you burn calories?

The combination of fine and inexpensive food can be deadly when it comes to your waistline. However, I thought about all this in advance and decided to choose a house for myself on the top of one of the hills in Guernsey, about a 20-minute walk from work. And so every day I find myself climbing the top of the hill on my way home. I must admit that at first it was simply hell. I climbed, panting, feeling every tendon and muscle in my leg and cursing myself for not taking a house closer to the port area, where the office where I work is located. However, within a week or so, the situation slowly began to change. Suddenly, I stopped feeling my legs and was able to climb the hill and even talk on the phone without the people on the other end of the line calling for an intensive care unit for me. And that's it, I was climbing the hills of Guernsey with ease and although I frequent its restaurants quite a bit, I don't think I've gained any weight (I even feel like I've lost a little weight).

Guernsey-style shaming or why you shouldn't drink and drive

And from food let's move on to wine, but before that let me tell you something about the roads in Guernsey. Anyone visiting there for the first time thinks they are nothing less than death traps. Narrow roads (the main road leading from the airport to the capital is the width of a neighborhood road in Holon), dark and winding. Add to that the fact that you can find pedestrians walking on the road itself, since there are no sidewalks, and you ask yourself, how come Guernsey's roads don't turn into a killing field? So after the landlady took me for a walk and didn't understand why I jump to the side like some ninja when I see a car coming in front of me, I asked her exactly the same question. The answer is made up of two parts, British courtesy and the iron fist of the police. In terms of courtesy, there is nothing surprising here. Despite being descendants of pirates, the people of Guernsey are incredibly polite and kind. In terms of the police, there is no doubt that our society has something to learn. They won't stand on a 4-lane highway trying to stop a driver going 120 km/h (perhaps because there simply aren't any such roads in Guernsey), but you'll see them everywhere, making sure to enforce safe driving laws.

And who do the Guernsey police love the most? Those who drink and drive. In Guernsey, as in all of Britain, there is a strong drinking culture, with quite a few pubs and bars where beer and wine are poured like water. And this can of course tempt people to have one too many while having fun. And yet the number of accidents in Guernsey is extremely low (last year, which was considered particularly fatal, 2 people were killed in road accidents). So how do they do it? Like everything in life, the answer is divided into three parts. The first part is education. In quite a few shops and restaurant bathrooms you can find posters of the type you can see below, which explain very well why it is really not a good idea to drink and drive.

The third part deals with effective police enforcement, which I talked about in the previous paragraph, but the most interesting part is the third part. Long before shaming came to Facebook, it had already visited Guernsey. So what does shaming look like in Guernsey? If you are caught drinking and driving, you may not only lose your license, face a hefty fine, and even go to jail. You will also “earn” to appear in the local newspaper. And when I say appear, I don’t mean an anonymous report that the police caught a certain number of drunks who decided to drive over the weekend. I’m talking about the fact that the newspaper publishes the name and address of the person who was caught drinking and driving, and on a small island where everyone knows everyone else, it’s really not advisable to become such a celebrity…

So that's all for now. We hope you liked the post and don't worry, I'll be back to writing about it in the near future. FranceAnd maybe, who knows, maybe I'll do some... A little trip to Paris?