Le Franco Phoney

In the lead-up to Christmas day, I was excited to have my very own, real, potted Christmas tree for the first time in my life. Strange, you might think, that someone can reach their thirties and never have had a real Christmas tree despite celebrating the holiday every year of their life, but I guess the heat in Australia always put my Mum off buying a real one, and the reliable plastic one was easy to put up and didn’t drop needles all over the place. The neighbours in Australia had a white Christmas tree, which now seems a bit peculiar, given the warmth of summer had usually kicked in, and while the white Christmas tree sat in their front window, we’d be having water fights on the hot pavement.

Not only had I not ever had a real Christmas tree until last Christmas, but for the previous five years, I had missed out on anything resembling a Christmas tree due to my last few abodes being too small or poorly laid out to fit one in. I was determined to change that last year, and on the first day of December, I was the proud owner of a Canadian pine tree. I decorated it with tinsel, baubles, chocolate bells and my own home-made gingerbread. I marvelled at it every morning and again every afternoon when I turned the lights on. I watered the pot and lovingly laid Christmas presents under this wonderful thing that twinkled and grew right there in my loungeroom. It was there for me when I needed a tree. It still looked lovely on Christmas Day, although some of the gingerbread and chocolates had gone missing by then.

Twelve days later, I knew I should have taken the Christmas tree outside, but it was so pretty, I left it inside. Besides, I needed to find someone who had room to plant it. I didn’t want to take it to the forest and plant it just in case it introduced any non-native tree problems. And I specifically wanted a potted Christmas tree that could be replanted because I always feel so sad when I see these once lovely, proudly decorated trees stripped of all those decorations and tossed on a cold balcony to die and eventually be removed when someone can be bothered. I loved my tree so much that I took my time to find a new home for it, and after a few attempts, a family in La Clusaz offered to take it and plant it in their yard. All I had to do now was undress the decorations from the tree and get it to their yard.

I undressed the tree tonight. In the process, most of the lower branches dropped the few remaining needles that hadn’t already dropped off, while the needles from the upper branches trickled through the tree with every bauble removal. I think the tree is dead. A visiting friend helped me get it outside, and it’s now dumped in the snow, surrounded by its own needles. Accuse me of having an overactive imagination, but seeing that tree out there tonight was like seeing a nearly-dead body, with the needles being the blood leaking from the body. And I feel guilty. I’ve killed the tree that brought me so much happiness in December! Had I found it a home earlier and not been so selfish, the tree might still be alive, nay, thriving today! Instead, I now have a dead tree in my front yard — the one thing that I wanted to avoid doing. Worse still, I know I’ll be cursing it dropping more needles when it goes to the tip in the back of a car. I know a Christmas tree is probably one of the most objectified things in the world, but I wanted to make sure mine would revert back to just a tree once Christmas passed. So, Christmas tree, this is your blog entry, to say thank you for the lovely December, and I’m so sorry for killing you.

Should I just get a plastic tree next year?

Look, I know the French have a bit of a reputation for lots of red tape and striking, but this is ridiculous. Three attempts at progress yesterday failed at every mark.

Attempt 1: Carte Vitale

I applied for my French healthcare card back in March 2009 (and wrote about the nightmare here). I’ve  paid €3,500 for the card’s benefits in 2009, but have yet to receive the card. Calls in July to three separate places (diverted to a new place each time) led to someone saying I should have received a temporary paper card, and a week later, it did show up. It isn’t all that useful and I still have to pay full price for most things. So, another call yesterday — and a referral first to a number for a whole separate area of France, then a referral back to the original number, which the guy actually got wrong anyway —finally led to a woman saying that yes, sometimes it takes years and she really had no way of telling when it will arrive. Meanwhile, I’ve received a 2010 payment request of €4,650! So I’m paying for something I don’t even have, and I’m paying way more than I would claim back in a year anyway. Great. Thank you so much, healthcare people in France. I wonder how much extra stress your ‘healthcare’ causes.

Attempt 2: fuel for heating

At the start of December, a man delivered heating fuel. I have a 600 litre tank, plus two 200 litre barrel reserves. He couldn’t get his fuel filler hose into the 600 litre tank, so he filled the two smaller reserves, said the whole setup was dangerous and refused to come back to fill up again. He said he’d get someone from the company to come and have a look at it. At the start of January, with the fuel line going down quickly, a call to the company was short and sweet with the woman saying that no worries, someone would be having a look very soon. Amazingly, I received a call from them yesterday! They called me. They called me. I explained nobody had been to check out the danger and then she asked me to explain the whole thing. I did so, then she said thanks and goodbye. Before she could hang up, I asked her if that meant somebody would be visiting and she said no, it wasn’t up to their company: they just deliver the fuel. I explained that in January, the person on the other end of the phone said someone from the same company would come to check and she agreed that someone would come. I don’t know if I was more confused with her inability to stick to one story or if she just didn’t have a clue what I was saying in French. She’s going to speak to the fuel filler guy and call back today, she said…

Attempt 3: car registration change of address

Now, you might think that this would be easy, but it is not. Rewind: when I finally sent the letter from my old landlord (which he gave me two months later) to say I had left his place, my home/car insurance company asked for proof that I had also changed my address on my car registration (carte grise in French). I hadn’t even thought of that, so I went down yesterday afternoon, prepared after reading what I needed to take with me, to visit the prefecture in Annecy. I had ID, a bill in my name, my old car registration, and the long change of address form that I had to fill out. I’d noticed on their website that they were closed the day before yesterday for some ‘exceptional’ reason, but the web site said nothing about yesterday or any other day in the future. I drove in the snow to Annecy, parked the car and walked in a near blizzard to get to the prefecture. When I got there, it was closed. There was a notice on the door saying that from September 2009, the office would only be open in the mornings. Their website did not mention this. How can their website not mention this? In addition, when I do get around to changing my address, I will have to pay for the privilege and attach new number plates to my car. I moved five minutes down the road from my old house. Is this not overkill?

What really bothers me is that the French tax office sent me a form ten days before Christmas demanding tax information before the end of the year. They expect such a quick response from me, yet here I am still waiting for any and every administrative function to actually function in my favour. I don’t even know if they received anything from my accountant: I couldn’t get hold of him on the phone, so I e-mailed him an explanation and sent the forms to him, hoping he’d do something. He’s on holiday until next week, but that’s okay: the tax office haven’t sent anything else, so I’m wondering if perhaps it’s just a standard of communication in France, and in actual fact, they mean they want my tax details before the end of 2010. I’ll keep you posted.

A blog reader, Carmen, got in touch with me a while back with a great question which I’ve been meaning to blog about ever since. She asked about the integration between the French and the British, as she’s noticed that some friends in the valley of Chamonix only seem to mix with other Brits. She asked: “Is Chamonix Valley the worst Alps area for this kind of divide or are there others with a more integrated expat/local community?” Here comes a serious post, so if you’re here for light entertainment, you might prefer to check my post about rural fairs or dodgy translation or crazy people or chairlift queueing. For those of you left, here’s my reply for Carmen.

I’m happy to say that there are plenty of places in the Alps where the expats integrate with the locals, including right where I live. Although I’ve never lived in Chamonix, I did spend many winters in the Méribel valley — in the more residential Les Allues, and before that, Brides les Bains. Some of those in the community of expats never bothered to be friendly towards seasonnaires such as myself even though I returned year after year. I didn’t live there in summers, so I guess it wasn’t worth their time to invest in my friendship. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t hold it against any of them and I do have friends who live there permanently. It’s impossible to befriend all the seasonnaires. I guess many of them just weren’t my type and vice versa. C’est la vie.

It’s the same with the French. Some expats will gel with some French and some French will gel with some expats, but at the end of the day, expats have some things in common with each other that the French don’t — language and culture are the two big ones that spring to mind — and so it’s not surprising that the two communities tend to hang out separately (but not necessarily always).

I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. I have both French friends and expat friends, and I would say the divide lies directly with the language and comfort: my French friends who can speak English are my best French friends because we can communicate easily, while my non-English speaking French friends politely put up with my dodgy French, of which they have to second-guess the meaning, and I can never feel totally relaxed with them because I’m so busy concentrating on understanding what they’re saying. Also, it’s really hard to go to a party filled with French people and try to chat with music pumping in the background. I get embarrassed asking someone three times what they said, and still not actually hearing it properly to respond as expected. I hope to be able to in the future, but I imagine it will take years to fill my French vocabulary to the point that I can speak French with as much ease as English, and I think many expats—certainly my friends here—feel the same. In the mean time, I still do go to French-speaking parties, but I enjoy the ones filled with English speakers more because we can communicate.

Some might say it would be faster if expats communicated more in French and therefore integrated more with the French, but I think it’s human nature for a lot of us to feel the need to communicate more than the basics if someone is to be a true friend. And I guess in resorts such as Méribel, Chamonix and Morzine, the expat community is so big that it’s a bit harder to meet any non-English speaking French people at all. For example, most bars in Méribel (and plenty of other resorts) are run by English companies with English menus and English staff, and English tourists walk into the shops expecting shopkeepers to reply to them in English. This is partly what prompted me to settle in a smaller resort: a French friend, Gael, who runs Oxygene board shop with his sister in Méribel, said to me one night when I tried to speak French: “Oh just speak in English will you.” His English is perfect, so it made sense. It didn’t help me though. Living in a resort with so many English speakers made it difficult for me to find anyone who wanted to speak French with me. Here in the Aravis valley, many locals have to put up with my bad French because it’s still better than their English.

So Carmen, to answer your question, I don’t know if Chamonix has the worst divide for expats to natives, but it’s probably one of the harder places to get between the two communities. I do know that unless I gel instantly with an English-speaking seasonnaire, I’d prefer to befriend a French speaker who lives here permanently, but that choice would be harder to make in a bigger resort where more expats live.

Candide Thovex, who allegedly fell out with the La Clusaz Tourist Office a few years ago, ending the his Candide Invitational (now replaced with the La Clusaz Free Sessions), has proved once again that he’s still got it.

A few days ago, Candide won the Redbull Linecatcher 2010 competition. This was his first competition entry since breaking his back two seasons ago on the Big Bertha jump at his own Candide Invitational competition. Here’s a quick video showing one of his runs and the three tricks he did that helped him win the Redbull competition:

Candide spent a lot of time in places other than La Clusaz last year, but his absence has made the hearts of locals grow fonder, not weaker: he was busy shaking people’s hands in the car park of La Balme last week. The day was over, and it was cold, but he still hung around chatting to kids and adults alike until finally they all seemed satisfied with their Candide time and he could go. I’m hoping he gets more time to ride in La Clusaz this year as he’s not only a nice guy, but an inspiration to watch on the snow.

St Jean de Sixt is quite a small village. It has a fruit & veg shop, a convenience store (called “8 to 8″, but actually, it’s more like 9.30 to 7 with at least a two hour closure for lunch, closed on public holidays and possibly Sundays and sometimes just if it’s quiet, and perhaps it should be renamed an inconvenience store), a tourist office, TWO ski shops and two bakeries. It’s the village nested between the ski resorts of La Clusaz and Le Grand Bornand, although perhaps some would argue that it’s a ski resort itself, as it boasts a few drag lifts and has its own ski lift company.

Regardless, St Jean de Sixt is not a big town. Yesterday, I decided to try out the free bus service (free to resident card holders or people with a season lift pass for Les Aravis—La Clusaz and Le Grand Bornand). The bus was on time in both directions and the connection to La Balme once I was in La Clusaz was conveniently timely. After a day on the slopes, the bus dropped me off once more in St Jean de Sixt. Within metres of the bus stop, a kebab van had appeared. It was open, although its number plate and signs suggested the van was normally stationed down by the southern coast of France. Still, I was impressed that I’m living in a place big enough to have a kebab shop, even if it’s just for the winter. As I walked home, I noticed that the van driver had plugged in an electrical cable. It trailed about ten metres from the van, around a corner, along a car park and finally, wedged under a closed door of the public toilets. I wondered if anyone had opened the door, pulled out the cord and watched the man in the van saying: “Bah, qu’est-ce que…putain” and shaking his fist, then chuckling as the plug-puller plugged the cable back in. I honestly can’t imagine anything more sinister.

Today, I was in a car with a friend who also lives in St Jean. I told him about the kebab van and he was very excited. After our afternoon on the slopes, he decided he deserved a kebab for his dinner. We drove down to where the van had been but it was gone. GONE.  I think I ruined my friend’s day, with the excitement, then disappointment of the fallacy of a kebab shop much closer than ever before to his home. He wants it to come back. Will it be back? Or did too many people pull the cable from the power socket in the public toilets for it to make him smile anymore? If you’re out there, kebab man, please come back.

In France, the 6th of January, Epiphany, is celebrated with a sweet treat. La galette des Rois (wafer of the kings) is a puff pastry pie-like thing with a layer of almond paste, known as frangipane, sandwiched between the pastry. It’s a special cake because it contains a porcelain figurine (now usually something plastic), which entitles the finder to be king of the household for the day.

Some history of the cake can be found here, but I’d prefer to talk about the here and now. Pictured is my very own wafer of the kings, which I bought at the local bakery yesterday. As you can see, it’s more like a pie than a wafer, and you get more than just a baked good when you buy this beast. Apart from the hidden figurine, the cake also comes with a cardboard crown for whoever finds the figurine to wear for the day. It also comes in this cool paper bag which allows the pie to be lightly heated in a microwave without losing its crispness.

My bag contained logos from the Savoyarde region. You can see there’s the Savoie coat of arms in the centre, a skier on the left, a local flower, a chalet (hidden by the galette), a bottle of booze with the same coat of arms, and just out of the the shot is a kid with a ladder because the Savoyardes used to be very poor and they would send their kids away to work as chimney sweeps in big cities. I don’t know why the yellow thing at the top has elephants sticking out of it. This must be a Savoyarde memento I’ve yet to familiarise myself with.

The great thing about this pie is that you don’t have to carry it flat. It’s so dense, it’s like a giant biscuit, and I guess that’s why the bag works so well. I carried this one to a friend’s place last night and we cut it up and ate all but two pieces. The hidden figurine is still hidden (hopefully). Maybe it’s an elephant sticking out of a yellow thing. Can anyone tell me what that’s about? None of the French people here seem to know.

As I type this, I’m hearing cars toot their horns at midday on New Year’s Day. I guess they’re excited about 2010 because they’re tooting familiar chants. Perhaps they’re just on their way home from their night out, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were drunk. Like anywhere in the world, the French Alps has its fair share of idiot drivers who take to the roads and put other people’s lives at risk. When I lived in the Meribel valley many years ago, the local police would stop suspicious cars and tell the driver to get out and leave their car there. I never heard of anyone charged with drinking and driving, but I did hear of the ’second gear’ rule, where, if drunk, you simply stay in second gear, which slows the car down to be a bit more in sync with the drunk driver’s reflexes and according to those drivers, will prevent an accident or at least minimise any damage.

Meanwhile, in La Clusaz, word gets around in the pubs if the police are stopping cars leaving town. Those who have lost their license can still buy a little two-stroke car that sounds like a lawn mover and goes at about the same speed. These cars, an old but popular model here pictured, need no license to drive! When you see these cars on the road, you know you want to be as far away from the driver as possible. The drivers could be drunk and may have bought the car because they lost their license for that reason. On top of that, they’re likely to cause accidents when they’re pushing their car to the limit of 45km/h in a 90 zone. They certainly cause traffic build-ups. But I digress. Last winter, a drunk driver in La Clusaz stopped to pick up three hitchhikers. Hitching is common in all age groups here because the buses seem to stop as soon as the sun goes down. And so, these three hitchhikers were school kids. The guy driving didn’t notice a huge bend in the road and drove straight into a tree down an embankment at high speed. He survived. The three kids did not. The loss of three local kids spun the locals into action. There was talk of some sort of car pooling last summer, but I don’t know if that ever took off. I did notice, however, that St Jean De Sixt declared ‘Operation Red Nose’ on New Year’s Eve, offering a lift home to anyone who called the central number. Volunteers drove (hopefully not in the lawnmower cars), and hopefully made the roads a bit safer for everyone.

Happy New Year. May it safer than some of the roads around here.

My pre-Christmas shopping included a visit to a small indoor shopping centre, complete with Santa and his photographer. Most of the times I’ve seen Santa in a shopping centre, he has a lovely big chair which he looks as out of place sitting on as he does in his acrylic beard, and the kids flock in wonderment and oblivion to have a photo with the big man in red.

This particular Santa wasn’t all that different, but he had a lavish black velvet couch instead. He’d lure the kids over with a wave and sure enough, the kids would beg their parents for a photo and out comes the cash. But then I noticed something a bit different. Santa was out of the picture altogether! The photographer had asked a little girl to remove her big outdoor coat, then daintily arranged her scarf and told her how to pose on the ornate black velvet couch. Santa was busy luring the kids while the photographer snapped away. The photographer clearly knows his market: the parents were loving these photos of their kids posing happily on the couch and buying them on the spot from what they could see on the photographer’s view finder.

Where I am in France often reminds me of my childhood in Australia: everyone seems a bit more relaxed and the pace is a bit slower. But my childhood photos with Santa usually involved a Santa who looked younger than my mum, sweating in the summer heat with all that padding, a sibling with closed eyes or a tongue poked out, and a very bored photographer using a tripod to take the same photo angle over and over again. In fact, I hassled my mum to dig up this old photo of me with my brothers and Santa to illustrate just how bored the photographer (and Santa) must be. Time with Santa was limited and there was never an option of more than one photo. So here’s a tip to Santa’s photographers worldwide: get that camera off the tripod and work it! Parents will love you for it and you’ll make a load more cash. Not that Christmas has anything to do with commercialism, obviously.

Reputations. England has the reputation of simply closing down when snow settles on the roads. France somehow manages to keep on going. Certainly, here in the Alps, a typical local driver tackles snow as just another winter obstacle on the roads filled with the slow cars of tourists (why not overtake on a corner?), speed humps (who bothers slowing down?), late-night drunks (what alcohol limit?) and iced up windows (why drive with a fully defrosted windscreen when you can have the novelty of a peephole instead?). However, the Alps are equipped for snow: local council tractors and trucks scrape the snow off the road regularly; cars are required by law to be equipped with snow tyres and/or chains in many areas; the locals have lots of experience in driving in the snow, and the tow trucks are on standby for any accidents.

Meanwhile, in England, train networks, major roads and airports have closed for days because they can’t deal with the snow. Actually, the snow seems to turn to ice faster and for longer in England. Tragically, a bus hit some ice in the South of England and at least two people died and many more were injured. When the first emergency services car arrived, it too hit the ice and crashed into the overturned bus. While the European Alps benefit from all those services mentioned above, the average Brit is left skating on thin ice, literally. And even with all these services, I’ve seen some extremely bad driving in the past few days. I’ve lost count of the cars with snow chains on even though the roads are now totally clear of snow. A day earlier when the roads were snowy, a man shook his fist at me (leaving me bemused and amused rather than angry) after I didn’t just stop my car while he and his family walked up my side of the road (I drove beside them while no cars came from the other direction). Hello: when you’re driving up a hill on slippery snow and you stop, chances are you might not get going again. It’s a road: walk on the side of it and not in the middle, especially when the roads are slippery. I should have shaken my fist back at him. That same day, I drove along a road and there was a tow-truck winching up a smashed car. It had smashed into the side of the road. Three hours later,  the tow-truck was still there — winching a different car which had smashed into another car which was waiting for a tow truck.

After seeing all this, I can’t help but wonder if England has the right idea.

Johnny even features on Zippo lighters.

Well, not really, at least, not offensive to me, but apparently offensive to at least some French people. Time to rewind. Do you know who Johnny Hallyday is? In France, he’s touted as the French Elvis and indeed, he’s loved as much — if not more — than The King. Johnny’s getting on a bit now, but the post office proudly displays the Johnny stamps you can buy for your Christmas cards, or indeed as part of your stamp collection. Each year, a new Johnny DVD is released just in time for Christmas. In fact, as I walked through a supermarket the other day, I saw a man grinning and shaking his head at a television which was screening Johnny live in concert. I could just tell this guy was thinking “bah oui, he izz just too gooood.”

You may also be aware that Johnny had to cancel last-ever tour after some back surgery in France last month resulted in further surgery in the US (where he spends lots of time, apparently, because he’s not recognised). He was in so much pain that he was placed in an artificial coma for several days. French TV was all over it. Copenhagen climate summit? It barely got a mention, with Johnny being the first headline on every news programme. The latest news, now that Johnny is back from coma-land, is that he will be suing his French surgeon who allegedly bodged the initial operation. Fans in France were so upset about Johnny’s pain that the very same surgeon was attacked and beaten. That also made the news, but only because it had something to do with Johnny.

So, where’s the joke in all this? I overheard a French couple talking the other day when Johnny was put into the coma. The man, with a playful grin, said to his wife: “So, did you hear? Johnny Hallyday is dead.” She glared at him, paused, then said: “There are some things you just don’t joke about.” That was the end of the discussion. She was, of course, right. Nobody in their right mind would joke about Johnny being dead unless they want the same lynching that his surgeon received. Indeed, I was too scared to even publish this before Johnny came out of his coma just in case. Long live the king!