France

This is the part of the blog in which I attempt to keep expressions like "cheese/garlic-eating surrender-monkey" to a minimum. It could be hard, but here goes...

We had two weeks in Paris to begin with, in an apartment at the pointy bit of one of those French apartment buildings. I don't have a photo, but you know what I mean, the apartment at the top where the roof starts to angle in. Perfect for little Frenchmen stunted by years of passive smoking from Mum's cigarillos, but occassionally dangerous if you happen to be this side of five foot tall.

We visited the local market early in the piece and stocked the fridge with plenty of cheese and vegetables and other things massively subsidised by the European Union. This was a welcome change to the now customary trip to the supermarket for just enough packet pasta to last until we have to pack our bags again. We also nailed an alarming number of three-course meals in the city's restaurants, largely made possible by the French menu-reading skills of Bron's friend from school, John and his partner, Bec, who paid us a visit from London.

On one particularly frenetic day of tourism, we visited Versaille and the Eiffel Tower with John and Bec. Here are the obligatory snaps:

Actually, before I go on, I should tell you about our little run-in with the gardener-extraordinaire and former male stripper, Jamie Durie. Well there's not too much to it, really - we were walking in the palace grounds and heard some whiney accent, looked up, and there was the tanned midget generously carrying his crew's camera tripod. Can anyone tell me whether they've seen a special episode of "Backyard Blitz" in which Jurie gets the bobcat out and replaces the manicured grandeur of Versaille with a patio and a Japanese water feature?

But I digress...

John and Bec graciously agreed to photograph us several times in front of this hulking brown metail thing, but I think I'll need to spend some time in photoshop adding a bit more light to the sky and erasing a few busloads of fellow tourists.

I manage to offend our temporary neighbours back at the apartment. We had some mail sent to us there - some train tickets and a birthday card for Bron from my Mum and Dad. Well, I was getting a bit eager to see that the goods had arrived, and reached into the locked mail box behind the main entrance door one day. I just assumed that this was fair game. But no, a housekeeper is employed to take mail from this locked box once a day and place it in individual mail boxes nearby, as I later found out. As I was fossicking through the now-retrieved mail, an old lady neighbour started looking concerned at this grave incursion into her private life and wagged her finger in my face, uttering the words "faux pas". I got the meaning of that. Word travelled fast through the apartment, and soon everyone was upbraiding me for this grande faux pas. The bloody cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.

My beloved former work colleagues gave Bron and I Paris musuem passes as a going-away present, and we loaded up on Paris culture with these lucrative bits of cardboard. Well, Bron did. I, meanwhile, went for a long bus journey through the suburbs to find the aerospace museum, to look at the Corcorde:


We also went to the ballet for Bron's birthday. It happened to the be the last night for some celebrated dancer, who, despite stacking it during the performance, received an extended round of applause at the end. Which he proceeded to milk for a further twenty-five minutes. Just as the curtain was falling, it rose again, and a further fifteen minutes of applause followed. By this stage, I was trying to find a match to set the smoke alarms off. On he went. It was about midnight by the time we ate that night.

After Paris, we headed down to Aix-en-Provence for a few days of country air. While I could pontificate about the beauty of provincial France, you have "Getaway" for that purpose, so I will instead bore you with the knowledge that I discovered the "macro" setting on my camera and spent a lot of timing taking pictures of flowers, like this:


We took a day trip to Marseille and were suitably impressed with the architecture, such as:


As we prepared to fly from Marseille to London, we got a taste of the long-established Britain-France national insult trading contest. In the departure lounge, the French informed us that our plane was delayed due to "UK air regulations". Okay, no worries, I've got some euros to blow on a stinking cup of Nescafe, I thought. After we eventually boarded the plane, the British crew apologised for the hold-up, citing "today's French air traffic controller's strike". Who to believe? I'm going with the Brits.