Le Franco Phoney

I was in Sweden last week to visit a friend. She showed me around her hometown of Stockholm and I couldn’t help but compare Sweden with France. Although the hut pictured is similar to the one I took in Switzerland last month, the feet are really unusual and like nothing I’ve seen in any other country. In the background is the city of Stockholm, merely a narrow stretch of water away. Stockholm is made up of a number of islands, and this hut was on the island that houses the Djurgården (a mini animal sanctuary, with antique farm houses and other traditional things), which overlooks the islands with the city centre and the old town, amongst others. I’m impressed that a city can have so much greenery so close to the centre of town.

One big difference is the options available for vegetarians. Of course, I’m comparing a capital city with the French Alps, but I’m not sure even Paris has vegie sausages available for takeaway (as pictured, mixed with mashed potato, salad and sauce). Gone are the tuts from meat eaters, replaced with a smile from the Swedish man who cooked the vegie sausages on a separate grill free of meat. Luxury!

But a lot of things are the same. Raclette, for example. Okay, there was an international food fair on in town, but still, my Swedish friend had just finished telling me that Raclette is not available in Stockholm, and there it was less than 24 hours later, luring people in with its description in English. If you’re interested, it cost about €6 for a plate of the cheesy goodness.

I was amused to see that France isn’t the only country with symbols that need some explanation. Pictured here are some train symbols. The first one could be misconstrued entirely (a gap between the train and the platform), and the second one just screams “No drunken disco dancing”, but it is, of course, remember not to get your hand stuck in the door when the automatic doors close.

Best of all was this chocolate bar called Plopp. Sometimes, in France, I see French words that are amusing when they mean something else in English (almost like “sucre daddy“, but not quite). With Swedish people apparently more fluent in English, I was surprised to see this chocolate bar. Not only does it sound like a excrement, but it kind of resembles the shape and colour too. Thankfully, with a caramel centre, it tasted much better than that.

Pictured is a letterbox down the road from where I live. You can tell it’s a letterbox by the handle, lock and nameplate at the bottom right side of the box/house. To get an idea of the size of the letterbox, there’s a red tulip behind the letterbox, or if you’re more of a measurement person, that door for the letters to go in is around 25cm wide and tall. If you’d like to see a bigger version, click on the image.

At the top we have the Savoyarde coat of arms: this is visible in loads of places in Haute Savoie where the locals are proud of their past, when they were once a separate entity from France with their own duchy. There’s then a bit of a mish-mash of people — women and men in traditional dress selling bread and wheat and other goodies, but down the bottom, there seems to be a mountaineer or musician (or someone dressed in more recent clothes anyway) at the top of the staircase, and more bizarre still is the nativity-looking woman next to the letterbox door who is holding a lamb, with a lamb looking up at her. Regardless, ten out of ten to the creator for getting most things to scale (apart from that huge lantern under the Savoyarde coat of arms), and the inclusion of a cat, some ducklings, some decorative clogs, pretzel and belier (local goat-like sheep thing) all hanging on the walls, mini flowers, logs and wheat, and the tiny love hearts cut out of the wood. I think there’s even a squirrel and a snowman’s head included, amongst a few other tiny objects. I just wish they’d included a miniature letterbox with the house, in the style of the house, with its own miniature letterbox in the same style, and so on until there’s just a tiny dot somewhere on the other side of the road…

My quick jaunt to London last week ended in a visit to the Titanic exhibition at the O2 Arena. It’s such a relief to see an exhibition in my native tongue of English: I don’t miss out on half the stories through not knowing a couple of words, which is often the case when I’m trying to read exhibition notes in French. I took the opportunity to drink in every single piece of written English — something I’m sure I wouldn’t have consciously done years ago. Doing so proved worthwhile because I read stories about passengers aboard the ill-faited ocean liner that years earlier I probably would have walked past to get to the next object display.

The artifacts themselves were fascinating thanks to the stories behind them being explained so well. Some tiny perfume bottles were recovered from the wreckage intact (and left open in a glass box with holes so we could smell their contents): their owner was a perfume dealer trying to make his fortune in America. Lots of other artifacts were just as interesting, and the personal stories were heartwarming and saddening at the same time. A piece of the boat’s metal could be touched, as well as a wall of ice to help us understand why so many who survived the initial sinking then died due to the freezing temperature of the salt water.

Sometimes, however, it’s probably better not to understand all the words. Apart from being given a boarding pass complete with a real passenger’s name on the back (you could check the board at the end to see if your passenger survived: mine did but my friend’s did not), the gift shop at the end of the exhibition just seemed to be cashing in on dead people. Okay, you could say the whole exhibition was doing that, but at least it was educational. There was no way I was going to buy a book of recipes served on the Titanic, nor would I relish eating a meal from it. Maybe that’s just me?

One way to cross the road in France is via the Téléphérique du Salève — a cable car that crosses a major highway to take paragliders and sightseers to the top of a cliff.

I get nervous enough in these contraptions when there’s merely a bit of snow beneath them, but this has a road full of fast cars and trucks zooming underneath, and climbs a cliff so high that there’s a huge drop between the cable and the ground. Pictured is the lowest part of the cable car, which ends right next to the road. Quadruple the height to the left and you might get close to the arrival bay.

I’ll probably give this adventure a miss, but if you’re in the area and want to check it out, it’s on the A40 autoroute, just south of the border into Switzerland.

In France, schools tend to teach French grammar and language right through to the end of secondary school. It’s a complicated language so this doesn’t surprise me. What has surprised me is seeing this advertisement for a duty free shop in England with graffiti to correct the poor grammar. Actually, the Oxford Dictionary says “compared to” is interchangeable these days, but even my boss is a stickler for “compared with”, and at least one other person agrees with him.

Whilst most graffiti writers struggle to spell correctly (as pointed out by Crap Graffiti), here we have the opposite: someone angry that the rule of grammar they probably learnt at school has not been adhered to. So, big points to the English(?) person who made this correction, whether the Oxford Dictionary agrees with you or not.

In Queensland, some houses are built off the ground, on stilts. This allows for a breeze to cool down the houses, and every degree helps in such a tropical place. So why on earth are there so many huts in Zermatt that are raised off the ground? Being 1,620 metres from sea level and miles from the equator, Zermatt doesn’t really have a reputation as a tropical haven, yet these huts are dotted around town like ants outside their nest.

A local explained all. The huts are used to store animal feed and sometimes animals during the cold months. One hut we saw had sheep wool hanging out its open slat windows and the local said the sheep had been in there until recently. But that doesn’t explain why the huts are raised off the ground. Apparently, Zermatt has had a rodent problem, so the huts were built off the ground — and often with stone at the base — to prevent the rodents from climbing up into the sheds that stored feed and eating it. The huts are still used to store feed to this day, so they’re obviously doing their job well.

Others have told me that the gap allows snow underneath, for insulation or in case of avalanche, but I don’t see how a hut would survive an avalanche, and I’m not convinced that the ground is any less insulating than a layer of snow. The internet is proving very unhelpful in finding out any more, so please do let me know if I’ve got this all wrong.

That there is a giant Lindt Easter bunny, chained safely to the top of the Täsch train terminal in Switzerland to prevent me from attacking the ears just in case there’s chocolate inside.

As you can see by the name of the train station, I was in Zermatt last weekend, and this station is the last one before Zermatt where you must leave your car, since no cars are allowed in Zermatt itself (apart from small electric cars and buses which people must have hard-to-get permits for). Although excited to go skiing in the fresh powder on the Italian side of Cervino the following day, being welcomed by a giant bunny was a great start to the weekend.

The desperate last ski of the season turned out pretty well, with the sun shining on Sunday and few people on the hill after Saturday’s snow fall, allowing us to take fresh tracks off-piste for most of the day before heading out to more of the many closing parties in town that weekend.

Of course, getting to Zermatt is a bit of a faff unless you arrive by helicopter, with the closest airport being Geneva, four hours away. By car, it took our convoy around the same time from St Jean de Sixt to the Täsch train station, followed by the car parking, car park paying, car unpacking, luggage lugging, train ticket buying, train waiting, train travel, and then travel to accommodation. Driving directly there would have saved a lot of hassle. But this is Zermatt, the holiday home of the rich and famous who do often arrive by helicopter — and the rest of us who just want some decent snow.