Le Franco Phoney

If you run out of bread at lunchtime in my village, you have to wait until 2:30pm when the first bakery reopens after lunch. In fact, retail hours in France are still at the low levels I remember in Australia in the early eighties. I embrace this now that I’m used to it, but when I first moved to France, I kept forgetting that I couldn’t pop down to the shops on a Sunday or on any evening to grab a block of butter or some other random cooking ingredient. However, things are starting to change around here as pointed out by one of my blog readers, Suzanne (co-incidentally a fellow Aussie who has been living just down the road for about a year — and now a friend), who kindly sent me this photo of a milk filling station, complete with paper towel dispenser for any milk spills, just down the road. She wrote:

We were riding our bikes this morning and came across this self serve milk dispensing machine in Annecy-Le-Vieux. €1 a litre is good and you can even buy empty bottles if you forget to take your own.

I’ve heard about these milk dispensers but I’ve never seen one, so I’m happy that Suzanne snapped away with her camera. Not only can you buy milk at any time of the day or week, but it’s not UHT milk — something of a standard in France for drinking milk. I’ve become used to UHT milk on my cereal and it doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, it’s handy to have stocks at home so I never run out, but I’m wary that if I were to revert to fresh milk now, I may never be able to buy in bulk at the supermarket again. I’d be running out of milk all the time and heading down to Annecy-Le-Vieux for a fresh milk fix. Suddenly, the convenience seems very inconvenient! Now, if one of these stations happened to appear in St Jean de Sixt, I’d no doubt be the most regular customer.

When an English lady called Miranda got in touch to see if I’d be interested in a writers’ retreat just ten minutes from my house, I was hesitant. Okay, I’m a writer and it would give me a break from domestic life to get stuck into some fiction, but I already live in a beautiful part of the world so would it really make that much difference? I went to find out, and I can confidently say that it was worth every cent.

I was greeted by Miranda and Chris from Chalet La Giettaz just on the other side of the Col des Aravis which is the doorway to the Savoie region (La Clusaz is Haute Savoie). I met the lady who was going to crack the whip all weekend, Bidisha, and the three other writers over a tasty, relaxed dinner. As you may gather from this photo, Bidisha is not a harsh person, and the most fierce whip-cracking involved her insisting that we go on a walk to clear our heads on Sunday despite some resistance. I suspect one student may say that the whip only really came out when Bidisha demanded that each student submit 6,000 words of text prior to the weekend for her to critique. Bidisha provided some great feedback and the opportunity to ask questions about the publishing industry and finding an agent.

That might seem trite to someone living in London, but I’m surrounded by French people who speak mostly of snow, sports and cows, so the weekend was really valuable for me to learn about the British publishing industry (where I plan to get published) and writing fiction. Although I can’t say that the idyllic mountain scenery of La Giettaz motivated me to write any more than the idyllic mountain scenery out my window in St Jean de Sixt, the retreat really was a retreat, and the Brits around me seemed suitably satisfied with the views and peacefulness to aid their writing. The retreat enabled me to write for hours, which I’d  fail to do at home (partly thanks to the attention demanded by my cat Bruno and his cream-nagging, small-animal-regurgitating ways), and Bidisha has motivated me to get back to polishing this novel before another year passes me by. Watch this space.

I used this simple phrase the other day when I was in a giant stationery shop: “Je cherche les sacs en papier“. Okay, I should have said “des” not “les” but this basically means: “I’m looking for paper bags”. I wasn’t looking for anything fancy, such as this designer number pictured. No, I’d just like to have some brown paper bags to hold some seeds for the garden over winter and to see if putting my geraniums in paper bags from autumn will indeed keep them alive until next spring. So, after waiting patiently for at least five minutes while the only person serving anyone finished serving the previous customer, then faffed around looking for some important pen, then finally found it and bonjoured me. I asked the paper bag question and got a blank stare. Actually, I tell a lie: her face contorted as she raised one side of her lip and frowned while she jerked her neck back in shock. She didn’t open her mouth so I repeated my request to the contorted face, which remained contorted.

You may have guessed by now that this is another rant. I’m sorry. As often as I find a fantastic French person who is patient, friendly and generous with his or her time while I converse in my accent-ridden French, I find at least one who, like this woman, makes bad facial expressions, or huffs or rolls eyes or just walks away as soon a I start speaking. I know my French isn’t too bad because some French people, such as the mechanic (see previous post) who fixed my car told me when I picked it up that my French is great, and I was able to chat for five minutes or so with him about my car, mutual friends and how his sister lives in Australia. Sydney, in fact. She loves it. He dreams of going there one day and seeing the Great Barrier Reef.

Back to the shop. My French friend standing next to me understood me, so he repeated my request to which she immediately replied — looking at him only, of course, rather than that stupid etranger who was disdainfully taking up space with her presence.

If there’s one thing that wears me down and crushes my spirit, it’s that look on someone’s face when they hear my accent and shut off completely. However, an English friend has come up with an explanation. She reckons that English speakers are used to all sorts of accents because so many people revert to English to communicate with people who don’t speak their language. Of course, it’s a generalisation, but maybe all these contorted faces are happening because the French speakers are only tuned into French accents. This would certainly explain the subtitles on TV if someone from Haiti (a country where French is spoken) is speaking French. I mean it’s the same language!

Anyway, the woman explained to my French friend that they have plastic bags and material bags but no paper bags, so it looks like I’ll have to use the large roll of paper that I bought from the very same shop months ago to create my own paper bags.

I remember when I first moved to France that mechanics had a pretty bad reputation for being slow. Indeed, one of my friends had terrible problems with her Volkswagen bus: they changed all sorts of things at two different mechanics but it still ran slowly. When she got it back to England, her mechanic saw straight away that the choke cable was stuck on. She had gone through so much fuel and had paid so much money to have things fixed that weren’t broken!

Thankfully, I found a great mechanic just outside of Annecy (Troc Auto at Grand Epagny if you need one and you’re nearby), and for years, my car and I have been looked after well. That all changed when my fuel pump stopped working on my old Golf. Unable to drive it more than twenty metres before it would just stop, I asked a mechanic just up the road to fix it. That was on a Monday morning just over two weeks ago and my car still isn’t fixed. Somehow, it took him until the following Thursday (eleven days later) to sprout some story about how his mechanic was going on holiday so he didn’t think he’d have time to fix it. It took him ELEVEN DAYS to tell me he didn’t have time! I called almost every day and he kept saying he still didn’t know when the part could be delivered and that he’d call me the next day. He didn’t call once.

I limped my car to a different local mechanic where it’s been ever since. They tell me they’ve replaced the fuel pump, but now they’re waiting on the related burnt-out fuse. We can only be grateful these mechanics aren’t paramedics!

In some countries, having a clean-out means holding a garage sale, but the French do things a bit differently. They hold a vide grenier (empty the attic) in the centre of town, where locals can put their unwanted, pre-loved goodies on display for browsers to buy. I think this is a great idea, as I remember my parents always saying: “We should have a garage sale soon to get rid of all these things we don’t need,” but we only had one when we moved house about ten years later. Providing a date for a communal garage sale gives people a deadline to make a pile of stuff they want to sell. More importantly, browsers can check prices of popular items, such as cowbells and kids’ skis, between the different stands. Apart from those benefits, the vide grenier runs in much the same way as a garage sale: buyers turn up too early; buyers heckle for ridiculously low prices; sellers have items that are missing a price tag; sellers run low on change and demand the correct amount whenever possible from buyers; buyers leave with what they think is a bargain after all that heckling only to find that the item isn’t quite right for the needs, but it will do; and sellers dump the unsold stuff in an unused cupboard at home or the second-hand shop in defeat.

St Jean de Sixt recently held its own vide grenier, pictured below. My years of travel have prevented any build-up in unwanted items (sorry Mum, but those microwave slippers are now with my friend Lilly, although she doesn’t have a microwave at the moment either), so the most I could offer is my cat, Bruno, who is about the only excess I indulge in, and I’d never want to sell him despite the live/dead/regurgitated animals that he likes to drop in the garden or the house. With nothing to sell, I traipsed around the sellers’ tables looking for something a bit different. Some old wooden or metal things were so old that I had no idea what they were for. The escargot tray is always a popular item, leading me to think that this kitchen item is the equivalent in France of the novelty teapot elsewhere. To my utter disappointment, I found nothing, or when I did find something, I couldn’t justify the price. I suspect that most of the sellers had put their prices up expecting the heckle, but numbers like ’99′ are hard enough in French (quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, or ‘four twenty ten nine’ when translated to English). With maths involved in just identifying some of these numbers, it’s no wonder I ran away empty handed!

I went for a walk the other morning and found a mannequin being serenaded by another mannequin. I stopped to have a look at the silent scene and drank in the detail. As you can see from the photo below, the mannequin on the ladder is holding a real guitar. But wait, there’s more.

Apart from the girl on the balcony being serenaded, there’s a newly-married couple of mannequins behind the pretty little chalet with all those lovely, well-maintained flowers. The bride seems to have no hair or face, but the groom is decked out well with a top hat and a scarf around his neck. But wait, there’s more. A baby is sitting with a woman who, let’s face it, is dressed in much the same way as the baby. Who knows why the baby is propped on a log or why there’s a married couple with a bald bride in amongst the serenading couple’s scene. I just love the randomness of the scenes that regularly appear in this cluster of gardens and buildings.

And it’s great to know that the scene-setter has not given up; during the summer holidays, some of the mannequins were vandalised. They were placed head first in a water tank with their legs sticking out. Maybe this is why the bride’s face is blank — her features washed away by water. In a wave of crime the same weekend, some number plates were stolen and some houses, including mine, were strawberried. Someone threw strawberries at houses, causing no damage but a lovely smell. I’m pleased that even when vandalism does strike here in St Jean de Sixt, it’s not on the scale of what I’ve seen in the cities I’ve lived in.

Anyway, the little chalet pictured is no doubt just a storage shed. Is this not the most ornate and well-decorated storage shed that has ever existed? May the mannequins and flowers continue.

Local French people just don’t understand my excitement when I visit a place like the Mer de Glace in Chamonix. The rounded ‘mountains’ of the Australian Alps are really no comparison to the breathtaking sight of this glacier and its jagged mountainous cradle. That brown on the glacier is dirt and rocks that have fallen from the old banks of the glacier when it was bigger. Getting here was half the fun as it involved taking the Montvers-Mer de Glace rack and pinion railway, which has an additional spiky rail down the centre to keep traction I guess. It weaves up a summit with fantastic views on both sides and the occasional tunnel to protect the track from avalanches in winters. The railway itself was finished in 1909 despite the opposition from locals back in 1905 when work began.

My friends and I were all too excited to have a look around before heading down towards the ice cave. Although there’s a gondola/bubble/eauf (depending on your country) to take you most of the way down, we chose to walk, stopping for a picnic lunch on the way. The walk down involves a lot of steps and signs showing where the glacier used to be more than a hundred years ago and even just three years ago, with its thickness shrinking by up to four metres every year. This means that the staircase opposite the glacier has to be extended down every year, and the ramp to the ice cave works like a plane ramp at an airport gate. Each year, the ice cave is re-drilled because the glacier is of course moving downstream. This one moves up to 120 metres per year at the top. Massive white sheets are placed on top of the ice cave to reflect the sun’s heat and ensure minimal ice loss. One is just visible on in the top right corner of the photo showing the outside entrance to the ice cave. Inside, the cave is not as cold as I expected, and the walls are dimpled, but very smooth. Bubbles of air hundreds of years old are trapped within the ice and I had a strong inclination to lick the wall (which I resisted).

We climbed the 350 steps back to the gondola (when it was build in 1960 and again replaced in 1988, it must have met the ice cave entrance), which we took back to the top to save a very long, steep walk back up the hill. Our late start to the day meant we ran out of time to visit the other attractions at the top, such as the alpine fauna museum, lots of walks with great views of the next valley over, and the museum inside the Montvers Grand hotel, which was built before the railway in 1880. People used to get there via mule transport! So, if you’re interested in going, I suggest you get there early and save yourself the long queue that we endured at the ticket office to maximise your time in this truly amazing place. And with the price of the railway ticket, a picnic lunch really is the way forward.