The Parking Angel
We always have a car in France because of the kinds of places we travel to, often small towns and villages, off the beaten path, away from hordes of tourists, if we can.
This is not to say we do not also use trains, buses and the Metro in the larger cities.
We do use all manner of public transportation when having a car is impractical, as in Paris, of course, and, for example, during our recent stay in Menton for a week.
The intrepid traveller uses local trains and buses, and the metro, to richen the experience of being in the country that he or she is visiting.
The challenges of buying tickets, navigating the schedules and routes, rubbing shoulders with the locals, avoiding getting pick-pocketed, using a smaller ecological footprint, etc. - all these means of moving from one place to another, (including taxis) are adventures too.
Transportation in France also means a lot of walking, whether you really want to or not, actually.
Good for the health too.
Okay, so much for the preamble and free advice, now to the story.
1. Credit Card Stress
or VISA, We Hate You
It is currently early April and we need to book some flights between Paris and Norway in June. Despite all that is available to us - free wifi, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, high level of computer literacy, tons of experience with online transactions, passwords, and patience - the system keeps spitting us out and pissing us off.
We try again the next day, but to no avail, so we drive into Antibes in search of a Travel Agency to buy the airline tickets in the old fashioned way: face-to-face.
2. The Parking Job
or A Just Possible “In”, And An Impossible “Out”
Our fifteen minute drive into Antibes is easy enough, and miraculously, we find a parking spot at the curb in the centre of town.
We are driving a small Peugeot 308, and with it, I have become proficient at parallel parking in very tight spaces, almost as skilled as the locals.
The space available is about a metre (say, 3 ft) longer than our car. I am happy about this, until I hear the young plane tree (a French tree popularized by Napoleon) that is planted in my space. It screams out at me like a banshee when I am just centimetres from backing into it. (This is one of the twelve different multi-frequency alarms our 2017 high-tech Peugeot car is equipped with).
It takes me five or six maneuvers to inch my way into a parking spot that is really only meant for the growing room of Napolean’s tree.
When we are finally out of the car, a guy on a scooter zips right into the non parking spot beside the tree with his front wheel tucked in, a thumb’s width from my bumper.
He is running off, with both helmet and baguette, into a building before I can yell, “MERDE/SHIT!”
I know there is no way I will be able to extricate my car when it is time to leave.
3. The Parking Angel,
or The Little Old Lady on the 3rd Floor Balcony
Just up the street we find the payment kiosk, the robot, where you buy your ticket. Another adventure.
With less than a clear head, because we are very unrelaxed from the way things have been going, we find that this French machine is yet another variation from all the others we have figured out how to use.
Our fumbling, fidgeting, and fighting with each other is interrupted from a voice on high. We are both looking up now, and there, leaning out of her third floor window, is a little old lady speaking to us in her Provençal French about how to use the robot ticket machine.
She has not a word of English, but her body language, gesticulations, facial expressions, and tone of voice are encouraging, and enlightening. But then we came to an impasse, regarding which final buttons to press.
I ask her, “Un peu plus lentement?”
She speaks slower, and we get it.
Then there is clapping. Two people are sitting on a bench just a couple of metres away, waiting for a bus. We have not noticed them watching our exchange with the parking angel. But they have been attentive to how the translation is going, assessing the foreigners’ progress on the learning curve of life in France. The sound of the coins clinking and the ticket printing, brings them to their feet, clapping as if for an encore. The parking angel up above claps. Joanne and I are clapping our hands too.
Three euros for three hours, but because our time will span the standard 2-hour lunch period in France, we get a total of five hours on the ticket, more than enough for our mission for the day, some lunch and exploring the city - or so we think.
4. Agence Voyagers
or The Travel Agency
We soon find an Agence Voyager. There is a client ahead of us, an elderly woman (the parking angel’s sister, maybe) taking forever to arrange a holiday somewhere exotic. After a very long wait in a very short office, well read now in copious amounts of travel brochures, we sit across the desk from lovely, friendly Christianne, whose “just a leetle Eenglish” is at least as good as my petit peu de français.
After about an hour, we are good to go:
for lunch that is, because it will take two hours for the tickets to be ready. Hmmm, why will a Travel Agent’s online transaction take two hours longer than a non Travel Agent’s online transaction? Because we are charged $30 more for the tickets?
5. Maxi-Bazar
or Entrée et Sortie Can Really Mess With Your Mind
After a nice lunch in the old town, time to write a couple of postcards for mom and sister back home who don’t use the Internet, buy stamps at a Tabac, and mail the cards, we have fifteen minutes to spare (parking is soon timing out) to stop at a mini department store - the Maxi Bazar - on my endless search for a yoga mat. (See Ch 2 Menton).
The Maxi Bazar is on the unlikely corner of Hope and Smiles, two doors down from our Agence Voyager.
Mais Non, never heard of a yoga mat or any suggestible facsimile, of course, but Joanne buys a box of mouchoirs/tissue - you know, like Kleenex.
The exit to the store is at the end of a maze. We accept that this is something to do with security. We think the French are obsessed with Sécurité.
Now we are on an entirely different street, on the corner of Brain-Dead and Tears.
After much head-scratching, jay-walking, horn-honking, and spousal-abuse we find the Travel Agency, exactly where it always is, two doors from the entrance to the Bizarre Mart,
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"Or whatever the F it’s called." |
6. Ending with Good News, Bad News,
Good News … Good News
The good news is that we have one minute left on the ticket and baguette-man has buggered off on his mock-motorcycle, giving me the extra few inches I desperately need to extricate our car from the wee box I’m parked in. The bad news is that there are now two Renault delivery vans double parked beside me. But good news overcomes that bad because I am now really pissed off-determined, and I squeeze through.
The really good news is that, now, back in our apartment we restore the loss of body fluids from all the sweat of the day with beaucoup de vin.
Dinner Recommendation: L'Auberge Fleurie, Villeneuve Loubet Village
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