Le Franco Phoney

On my way back to La Clusaz, my travel partner and I decided to stop in at Reims. This, of course, is pronounced as “Rahz” in French. Someone once explained how this is logical, but I’ve forgotten. Apparently in French, it is actually logical. It has something to do with the agreement of the “ei” with the “m”, producing the “ah” sound.

Anyway, my French travel friend, on crutches, needed a hotel room without stairs. We had lots of stuff with us including a paraglider, which we didn’t want to leave in the car, so we went to the tourist office to ask for a hotel that had close parking and no staircases, and not necessarily in the centre of town.

Now, fair enough if the tourist office lady had misunderstood just one of our needs, but she failed on every single one of them! The hotel was situated on a pedestrianised street in the centre of town, with a long, narrow staircase just to get to the reception, and no on-street parking in the closest road to the pedestrianised zone.

How did this happen? The woman we spoke to was very generous, giving us lots of tourist books and maps along with calling the hotel to reserve our place. She acknowledged the crutches and even joked about how someone one crutches could use a paraglider. We didn’t mention the wakeboard in the car (the reason for the crutches).

Luckily, the man at the hotel was very nice, giving us a more expensive room at no extra cost on the same floor as reception so that we didn’t have to climb another two staircases to get to the room reserved for us. Better still, we didn’t have to walk far for dinner: the pedestrianised street was full of restaurants from all around the world. We made good use of it after lugging heavy bags up that narrow, steep staircase!

I’ve been in the north of France this week and I’ve noticed something about French food. Yes, it’s acclaimed as carefully crafted cuisine, created by chefs who take great pride in their work, but there is at least one exception and I believe I’ve found it. Melted cheese is, in fact, at the heart of French cuisine! Please hear me out before you protest.

I live in Haute Savoie, and prior to that, Savoie. Fondue Savoyarde is on most, if not all, local menus in both regions. Although the Swiss and the Savoyardes still dispute who has the best fondue and where it originated, I think everyone would agree that Savoie and Haute Savoie are the leading departments for cheese in France.

But wait: what about Nord-Pas-de-Calais? It’s nowhere near any mountains and it’s by the sea. You’d think restaurateurs would scoff at cheese in favour of delicious and abundant seafood. Seafood is indeed always on the menu, but so is cheese — melted. It’s a bowl of warm cheese with some bread swimming in it. You can choose whether or not a slice of ham and an egg is added. This dish is in competition with fondue for several reasons. First of all, it’s melted cheese with bread and meat, except everything has already been dunked into the cheese for you. Secondly, although the French have made it theirs (as the Swiss would also argue about fondue), it was originally a British dish. Which dish? Welsh rarebit!

If you’re not familiar with Welsh rarebit, it’s basically cheese on toast with a few things added to the cheese, like Worcestershire sauce and beer. The French dish, Welsh, is served with Worcestershire sauce, and from what I can tell, the cheese they use (something called ‘Chester’, which tastes a lot like Cheddar to me), beer is also added to the cheese before it’s ladeled onto a lonely slice of baguette sitting at the bottom of a big bowl.

Known by my friends as the Queen of Fondue, I was somewhat surprised when the Welsh beat me. The one pictured was my lunch, and I felt sick for most of the afternoon despite not finishing it off. This is by far the most stodgy meal I’ve eaten. It beats fry-ups and it beats the Austrian kaiserschmarren (huge steamed dumpling covered in custard). After my meal of melted cheese, dinner was a salad, and even that was a struggle. And there I was thinking that French cuisine was renouned for its refined chefs’ attention to detail. No problem for me though: stodge is great!

For anyone considering a move to La Clusaz, please note that these foods are not available when dining out:

• Chinese
• Mexican
• Greek
• Indian
• Japanese
• British fat chips (from a fish’n'chips shop)
• basically, anything else that doesn’t revolve around cheese, potatoes and meat

Thankfully, England is well-stocked, and I took full advantage. The food was great, and so was the shopping. However, the queueing was not. When buying a bikini and a sun dress — both of which, ironically, I’d rarely wear (if ever!) in England, I spent more time waiting in queues to try things on than I spent looking for them. I queued for tables at restaurants, toilets, changing rooms, to speak with literary agents and even when picking up a pizza (it went cold). Normally, at least two toilets are vacant. Nobody notices. Similarly, the changing room attendant will watch the people line up, wait for someone finished to exit a changing room, count the rejected clothes, hang them up to be returned to the shop, and — oh, wait a minute: another person has come out so there are now two vacant changing rooms but nobody is allowed in yet because the attendant is still checking the exiting people’s clothes and hanging them up, and has not thought about giving those waiting the correct token for the number of items they’re taking in so that the queue can move without these hold-ups. I guess I’ve lived away from England for long enough now for this to bother me once more. It’s needless queueing, but the English have grown up with it, so they seem far more tolerant than me. And don’t even get me started on the restaurant that couldn’t seat us, nor take a booking for an hour’s time, nor call us when a table became available since they couldn’t reserve it an hour in advance.

So, my suitcase is stacked with new clothes and lots of Haloumi cheese (unavailable in my region of France). I will not miss the queueing in England, but I’m already missing the food.

One thing I forgot to talk about after the Defi Foly was this photo. It’s a tractor and it has a cable attached. Leading up to the tractor’s collection bucket at the front is a little pathway. The tractor was placed in this position especially for the Defi Foly event, but it has nothing to do with the contestants in wetsuits. So what is it for? What would your guess be? Click on the photo for a close-up of the image if you need to. When you think you know what it is, check against the correct answer below the photo.

So, what did you think it was? A cable for a TV camera to slide along to catch all the action? A dodgy electricity cable set-up to keep the beers in the beer tent fridges cold? A flying fox? Yes, that’s right: it’s a flying fox. In previous years, the flying fox has looked somewhat more permanent, but that all changed this year when they decided to just haul up a tractor for the weekend and hope that the little bit of green foam would stop anybody from hitting the rather large metal contraption behind it, complete with snow chains despite the lack of snow. Apart from the green foam, the only other ’safety’ feature is the red netting fence on either side to prevent people accidentally walking into the path of a person sliding down the line.

And this is why I love where I live in France: La Clusaz has somehow never escaped the era of my childhood, where fun came first and overdone safety was further down the list. I have another example of this from the Defi Foly. On the other side of our marquee was a display of birds of prey. They each had a little perch to which they were tethered, but the only thing between them and everyone else were a few bits of 10cm-wide tape, made into a fence by being wrapped around some hip-height poles stuck into the ground. Nobody seemed worried about the possibility of a dog running under the tape and trying to scoff a bird, and actually, none of the dogs tried. The birds didn’t seem worried, and everyone enjoyed their view of the birds without being hampered by chicken wire or anything else you’d expect to see in more safety-conscious places. Vive la France!

Apologies for not writing sooner: I’ve been working in London recently. And boy, have I noticed the differences between London and La Clusaz. They might begin with the same letter of the alphabet, but they’re at opposite ends of the scale for population, cleanliness and food. Upon arrival at Gatwick Airport, I bought a bottle of water. The guy who served me wiped his snotty nose with the back of his hand, then touched my water to scan it without any sort of greeting, then sneezed without covering his mouth before handing me my change. Okay, it wasn’t a great start to my trip to London, particularly considering the swine flu concerns in the media, but it can only get better, right?

Not so. I was slightly bolstered with a Krispy Kreme donut — something impossible to find in La Clusaz. The happiness incited by the tasty treat was as short-lived as the donut thanks to the bus journey to my accommodation. A man was wandering around the bustling bus stop, ranting about the Polish and the Russians and “people!” in general. He walked up and down constantly, and I was glad when my bus arrived. Unfortunately, he was waiting for the same bus. For the entire journey, he shouted things such as: “When I’m alright, you’re alright, but when I’m not alright, I want to KILL, and I’m NOT ALRIGHT right now.”

Things did improve however, when I realised how technologically advanced London is. Not only can you top up your mobile phone credit at any cash machine, but you can use your mobile phone to pay precisely for just the time you spend in a parking spot, saving you any money lost to overestimating your stay on the old coin-printed style of ticket. I felt like a complete country bumpkin at my own surprise at these technologies. That, however, was days ago, and after a quick trip to Cambridge, I’m now in Brighton. There’s a whole separate blog entry right there! I do miss France and patisseries, but what’s not to love about fry-ups and Cheddar cheese.

A friend and I were chatting about becoming a local in La Clusaz. She’s from further North, but she corrected me when I said I believed it took three generations before a family is considered a local in La Clusaz. “No,” she said, “that’s three generations in the cemetery.” Based on this, and previous experiences which I’ve written about, I do not expect to be known by name or face around town. So imagine my surprise when a local who I have never met knew who I was and where I lived.

Okay, perhaps it’s not surprising that she knows where I live: she’s a real estate agent in La Clusaz. However, I’ve never walked into her agency before and as it’s not on the main road, nor even at ground level, so I’ve never even walked past. I was merely accompanying a friend to the agency, but I took the opportunity to ask about the availability of any apartments slightly bigger than my tiny apartment. As I started to explain where I lived to give her an idea of the size I was after, she smiled, interrupted me how tiny my bedroom is. She went on to tell me who my landlord was and roughly how long I had lived in my apartment.

So, do the locals talk about the foreigners who live in their town even though they don’t know them? Have I been gossiped about? Or is she just a very good real estate agent who knows her geography and potential clients very well? I don’t think I’ll ever really know. Probably best that way.