Only in France

Yesterday we drove out to Vieux-Ferrette, France to go to the cheese shop we couldn't get to a week earlier. The place, Sundgauer Käs Kaller, evidently sends their cheeses all over the world (including, supposedly, the White House when Clinton was President). The thing that I especially liked is that they don't make their own cheese--they are an eleveur de fromages, which I think translates literally as "teacher of cheese". They get cheese from all over the place, and their job is to age it to perfection. Where else but France could such a place not only exist, but make perfect sense? Anyway, the cheese really was great--we ordered a plate of eleven cheeses to taste and ended up buying three (we asked him to write down what we bought, but we unfortunately can't read his writing) and having them for dinner tonight. And on an "it's a small world" note, when we sat down to try our cheese, hanging next to our table was a banner from the Torrey Pines Rotary Club in La Jolla, CA, where I went to college. How does something like that end up in a tiny eleveur de fromages shop in Vieux-Ferrette, France?