French ‘Customer Service’ – Version 295 and counting ….

La Gaude

Sarah and David have only been in Tourettes for about a year, arriving fromJuan Les Pins last December. It was Wednesday so lunch was called for and I decided to show them La Guardiole, a small restaurant in La Gaude, a village about 20 minutes away.

You wouldn’t find La Guardiole unless you knew it was there, located as it is down a tiny lane in a tiny village which has a bypass to keep the traffic well away. I’d been going there for years with some people from IBM who have a large lab in the area but it had been about a year since my last visit so another trip was overdue.

I’d told Sarah and David that La Guardiole’s speciality was Sanglier (wild boar) stew and as they’d never tried it, they were looking forward to a plateful however on the day we went, there was no Sanglier to be seen but that was the least of our problems.

I’d phoned in the morning to make sure it was open (you’re never sure in France !) and when the patron/owner said it was, I said, ‘can I book a table?’. ‘Yes’, was the reply and the phone was put down. No request for how many diners and what time – the phone was just replaced! I thought maybe I should have said ‘I want to book a table for four people at 1pm’, but it’s normal for a restaurant to be polite and ask, but then I remembered that La Guardiole wasn’t the friendliest place – great food – crap service.

The dingy, rustic interior of La Guardiole

Anyway, we arrived at about 12.45 and le patron seemed to know I was the earlier caller. There was a table for four on their small terrace and it was in full sun but J was cold so we were informed (by J) we’d be dining inside. Once inside, J decided that she’d like to dine outside so I was dispatched to get the table.

‘Can we eat at that table’, I asked le patron. ‘Non’, and then as a very late afterthought, he added that it was reserved. We ordered our food and wine inside; David and Sarah had hunter shot rabbit, J had a seafood tagliatelle, whilst I had the lamb. It was all delicious, but the waitress walking about with a face which could have stopped a Nice tram in its tracks, did not add to the ambience – what ambience!

David and I popped outside for a cigarette. ‘You want a table over there’, the waitress suggested with a tone in her voice which meant it was a command. ‘Nope, we’re fine here’, I said and off she stomped with a face like thunder.

Back inside we ordered desserts. I ordered the chocolate fondant with a boule of vanilla ice cream. No ice cream appeared and when I reminded our dear waitress a few minutes later, it was like reminding J she’s on a diet – there’s a flicker of recognition of what you’ve said but the brain refuses to process the information! I never did get my ice cream.

Then it was coffee time. I ordered three white coffees and a mint tea (for J). The waitress huffed at the thought of actually filling a teapot with hot water whilst David and I went to get a table outside. J and Sarah had just joined us when the waitress in a supreme act of sarcasm said, “don’t you want to sit at that table in the sun?” ‘No thanks – we’re happy here’, was the reply.

Something made me go back inside to check what the waitress was doing and sure enough she was preparing three small, French coffees. “We’d like Café Cremes”, I reminded her. Well, it was if I'd asked her to run down the street naked shouting 'free cafe cremes'. The look would have killed a lesser man but I've been there before and even have the t-shirt so it didn't faze me at all.

The IBM Laboratory at La Guade

In the meantime, David had sneakily gone off to pay the bill but I knew the coffees were not on the final total so I went back in and offered some money. ‘On the house’, le patron said and with that he got on with pouring the remaining wine in used carafes into one which he would no doubt sell that evening.

In summary, if you want a really good, rustic meal at very low prices, La Guardiole is the place to go but don’t expect service with a smile.

    

Beer and an Economics Lesson

Suppose that once a month, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all of them comes to £100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes and claim State benefits, it would go something like this;

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay £1.
The sixth would pay £3.
The seventh would pay £7.
The eighth would pay £12.
The ninth would pay £18.
And the tenth man (the richest) would pay £59.

So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every month and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until, one day, the owner caused them a little problem. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your weekly beer by £20.” Drinks for the ten men would now cost just £80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free but what about the other six men; the paying customers? How could they divide the £20 windfall so that everyone would get his fair share? They realised that £20 divided by six is £3.33 but if they subtracted that from everybody’s share then not only would the first four men still be drinking for free but the fifth and sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So the bar owner suggested a different system. The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing.
The sixth man paid £2 instead of £3 .
The seventh paid £5 instead of £7.
The eighth paid £9 instead of £12.
The ninth paid £14 instead of £18.
And the tenth man now paid £49 instead of £59. 
Each of the last six was better off than before with the first four continuing to drink for free.

But, once outside the bar, the men began to compare their savings. “I only got £1 out of the £20 saving,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, “but he got £10!”

“Yes, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a £1 too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more benefit than me!”

“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get £10 back, when I only got £2? The rich get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison, “we didn’t get anything at all. This new tax system exploits the poor!”

So, the nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. Funnily enough, the next month the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had their beers without him. But when it came to pay for their drinks, they discovered something important – they didn’t have enough money between all of them to pay for even half the bill.

That’s how our tax system works. The people who already pay the highest taxes do tend to get the most benefit from tax reliefs and reductions. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy and they just might not show up anymore.

PS - But then an Eastern European guy turns up in the bar flashing wads of cash. He says he's just come over on the back of a lorry with his wife but has left his fifteen kids at home on the family farm. He says he gets so much money to pay for a house, for not having a job, for being injured so he couldn't work even if he found a job, and to cap it all his wife gets Child Benefit for their fifteen kids even if they are being fed and housed back in their home country. He cannot believe his luck so buys everybody a drink!   


PPS - apologies for the rogue formatting of the text - good old Google again I'm afraid.

A German Sunday

The Abu Dhabi GP Circuit

Nope – you’re not having a case of Groundhog Day. Yesterday’s posting was ‘A German Saturday’ but as with many social events out here they carry on and in this case it carried well into Sunday and dare I say it, Monday!

It was as we were leaving Rheiner’s on Saturday after the jeep trip that I asked the throwaway question ‘what are you doing tomorrow?’ ‘Watching the Grand Prix with some friends’, was the reply. And without another thought, probably due to the myrtle liqueur, I invited them over to Le Brin and before I’d reached home I was texting some other friends and inviting them also. It was going to be a Grand Prix Sunday.

I got a roaring log fire going, J made two delicious pizzas, I did my deep-fried sage leaves and also made a chocolate brioche bread and butter pudding. The wine, beer and soft drinks were all readied and at 1pm the guests arrived and after a quick lunch we trooped down into the bar to watch the race on the big screen. It was only then that I realised what a mistake I’d made.

Now for those of you who are not GP nuts, there was a very slim chance that Lewis Hamilton (the Brit boy) could win the world championship during this, the last race of the season but it was a long shot – he’d have to win and hope all the other contenders pulled out or pulled up.

Fernando Alonso

There was the greasy Spaniard, Fernando Alonso, who ‘shopped’ his McLaren team a couple of years ago  to the FIA and cost them a $50m fine. He was the favourite, leading the title race by 7 points. All he had to do was finish in front of Mark Webber, the likeable Australian but he had to finish no lower than 4^th place in doing so if a guy called Vettel won the race.Vettel was the outsider, a young German (called baby Schumi after Michael Schumacher) who trailed back in 4^th place. He had to win and hope Alonso and Webber were well down the pack at the finish.

I hadn’t thought about it but as the race started, Rheiner strated screaming for Vettel which was bad enough but his friend, Phil, was screaming for Alonso, he was a Ferrari man. This was war!

Sarah and I were shouting for Hamilton and although he was second, it still wasn’t good enough. He needed to win the race and hope all the others fell by the wayside – which unfortunately didn’t happen. Schumacher crashed out early on which caused some mirth amongst the Brits but from the start, the young Vettel had roared off into the lead and that’s how it stayed. Alonso could still have won the championship but his team made a huge tactical error with his pit stop and the poor Spaniard was released back into traffic, and he remained down in 7^th place – not good enough on the day. And so the title went to the German Vettel which caused a great deal of shouting from Rheiner and quite a bit of booing from the Brits.

Vettel, the young German celebrates his win

At the end though and after yet another glass of wine, we all shook hands and Rheiner was congratulated on his countryman’s success. He was like a dog with two sets of bollocks!

After the race we headed over to Tan and Angie’s which hasn’t happened for quite a while and put the world to rights. Several hours later I woke up on my lounge floor covered with a blanket and with an almighty headache. To say Monday was a quiet day was an understatement!

A German Saturday

One of Rheiner's Jeeps

It was heading for another normal Saturday. I’d do a bit in the garden and then about midday, I’d have lunch and then sit down and watch the footie for the rest of the afternoon - but J had other ideas. “We’re off to Rheiner’s – he’s taking us up into the mountains in his jeeps.”

You may recall Rheiner – he’s the ‘partner’ of our friend Wendy and over the last few months we’ve become friends. When we went to his summer BBQ (http://tomsfrenchblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/red-barons-ball-it-wasnt-his-party.html )  he spent quite a bit of time with me showing me his fleet of German military jeeps and told me that he loved nothing more than getting in them and driving up into the mountains – which is exactly what we did on Saturday.

The convoy departed with Rheiner senior driving our jeep and Rheiner junior (his son) driving the second vehicle – both military green, open to the elements and built to withstand a war. And boy, these things were noisy. In the lanes around Tourettes, you could definitely hear them before you saw them.

The Village of Cipieres

Forty minutes later we were in the village of Cipieres, another of those tiny hamlets stuck on the side of a mountain and at 4,500ft, quite high up. With a population of only 350 people, it is small even by Provence standards and it seems that you only go to Cipieres for one thing – the German Restaurant!

It was a gorgeous day and we started off by having drinks outside in the town square before going inside where the menu had only one choice – Choucroute, which is a French version of dressed sauerkraut, dressed meaning that it is a plate piled high with meats, sausages and potatoes, and of course mountains of sauerkraut.

There were ten of us and when Margareta, the owner and chef, brought us a platter of choucroute, I thought it was quite a lot for ten people but that was just one of two platters which ended up on the table – these Germans have big appetites!

A Plate of Choucroute

It was quite delicious and very filling but despite everyone sitting back in their seats when the last sausage had disappeared, they all sat forward again when Margareta brought out a huge, communal bowl of chocolate mousse. Then it was coffees and a huge bottle of home made Myrtle liqueur which tasted more like cough medicine than an alcoholic drink.

Back in the jeeps we headed off down the mountain pausing at an almost impossible, rocky slope to try the jeep’s off-road capabilities. Maybe it was the steepness of the track or maybe it was four bodies full of choucroute but the Jeep just couldn’t manage it much to Rheiner’s disgust.

Not an afternoon I had planned but very enjoyable nonetheless.

Plane Crash in Tourrettes

Nothing much happens in Tourrettes. There are no drunks in the streets at closing time, probably because all the bars close at 8pm! You never see any yobs standing around the street corners and there certainly arn’t any muggings of old ladies. It’s just a quiet, sleepy backwater and long may it stay that way.

But that changed on Friday when Tourrettes became front page news.

Last Friday I posted a blog about the village’s Remembrance Day service, or Armistice Day as it’s called in France. At precisely 12 noon when the church bells were sounding for the laying of the flowers at the memorial, I heard a low flying plane. My first thought was that it was the French Air Force and that it was immaculate timing to be able to fly over the village square at exactly 12 noon, but then it occurred to me that it was a light plane, not something the Air Force would be flying.

From my own experience of flying light aircraft, it struck me that it was very low and indeed it was so unusually low that I noticed quite a few people at the memorial look up at it as it flew over.

After the service ended and we sat in the Bar des Sports having lunch, numerous emergency vehicles passed by and given that we were sitting within one metre of the road, the sirens and horns made it quite difficult to talk. I joked that maybe Guy had set fire to the house, but after about 10 vehicles roared past it became obvious that this was something big. The perfume factory maybe? An explosion at the quarry?

The plane crashed in the hills outside the village

The next morning (Friday), I received an e-mail from the Tourrettes information service saying that a light plane had crashed and that three local men had perished.

Emergency Services at the crash scene

Here is the short report from Riviera Radio: Three locals were killed yesterday when a light plane crashed near Tourettes-sur-Loup. The single-engine plane took off yesterday from Cannes airport, headed along the coast to Menton, then headed inland towards Tourettes. The plane came down just after midday in a wooded area, away from homes. The pilot of the plane was a retired man from the village, who had offered a friend a sight-seeing flight to celebrate his 50^th birthday. The third man was a local shepherd. An enquiry is underway into the cause of the crash.

It appears that local hunters witnessed the plane coming down and were able to direct the emergency services to the exact spot. Their testimony will be crucial in working out what happened.

The following link will take you to the report in the Nice Matin where my pictures come from.

What an unpleasant way to end Armistice Day.

 http://www.nicematin.com/article/cote-dazur/un-accident-davion-fait-trois-morts-a-tourrettes