THE GENTEEL ART OF CAB DRIVING.

Too Busy Looking for a House Number to Notice the Customer





It is said that when life hands you lemons you should make lemonade.  Life has handed me so many it's a wonder that I don't look like a Pucker Fish.

But it all balances out.  My life started out very nicely thank you.  I was born into a well-to-do family in a beautiful setting on Pittwater north of Sydney.  From the moment I was able to perceive, I fell in love with my surroundings.  Unfortunately you need to physically own something in order to keep it.  My parents owned the place and sold it to retire when I was thirty, married and had moved elsewhere.

I think it's rather a shame that an adult child doesn't get part ownership of parental property, the way spouses do. That would sure keep the population down, wouldn't it?  But I had no say in the matter and all my protestations moved my parents not at all.  I should have learned from experience.  My parents had ignored every protestation I ever made so why change then?

Had I been able to keep the property I would now be worth a fortune.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I would have been sitting on a fortune and working to try and earn enough to eat.  My mistake was not marrying for money.  The trouble is I still couldn't bring myself to do such a thing unless the man was all I dreamed of and, rather importantly, he felt the same about me so that he proposed.

It is also a bit hard to get well-to-do men to take you seriously when you drive a cab for a living no matter how good you look.  They seem to think I'm good for a date and an easy lay. I have dated a couple of men I've met through my job but they soon discover that I'm not easy. I am also amazed that men of a certain age think that you will date them even though they look like the rear end of a fat bull.

Men are attracted to good looking women, any women in fact, but they don't have the slightest inclination to lose weight or wear shoes instead of joggers to dinner and make themselves attractive to us.  Some men must think that women go blind after forty just like men go deaf.

I find it extremely irksome and convenient for them that most men start to go deaf in middle age.  I'm sure it's a deliberate genetic ploy by nature.  It's bad enough that men don't listen until you say something three times, by which time they decide that the annoying noise they won't tune into is nagging.  Then, just to add insult to injury, they go deaf. 

I've also discovered that if men think you have no money, they want nothing to do with you. Most are divorced and have already suffered from STD (Sexually Transmitted Debt) and don't want to again. Perversely, however, there are men who go on the Internet and seek Russian or Asian brides with the whole idea of having the woman financially dependent on them.

They choose such women for two reasons.  They are misguided enough to think that women from certain cultures are more pliant and willing to please a man and also it will be hard for them to survive or leave if they want a divorce.  Women who are older, single and local are overlooked in favour of foreign, younger brides but I'd want nothing to do with such a man any more than he'd want anything to do with me.

So how did I end up driving a cab when I started off so well and thought such a job was somewhere at the bottom of the food chain?  I keep wondering that myself when I'd made all the right moves.  My mother, with whom I finally got on beautifully in the last seven years of her life said to me: "You're unlucky."

I have to say it is one thing we agreed on.  It makes no sense, but then luck doesn't make sense.  We had been discussing how my life had turned out in spite of all the effort I had put in.  How I'm a clever and decent person who didn't cause bad things to happen out of ignorance or unkindness and how things not only didn't go well, they went awry.

When I left school I spent two and a half years at University studying Science and then suddenly dropped my bundle and dropped out.  There was good reason.  I had survived boarding school suffering severe Obsessive Compulsive and Panic Disorder.  I am very clever but could not concentrate on my studies.  I winged through and matriculated simply because I could swat in a matter of weeks and was terrified that if I failed a year, that would mean I'd stay longer in school.  The teachers advised my mother to take me out.  She didn't listen.

After leaving University I had to do something for a living as my parents couldn't understand the need for me to stop and repair by sitting around the house watching midday matinees on television, so I was bundled off to do a short Computer course.  I became a Programmer for one year and decided that if this was living, I didn't much care for it.  The fact is I needed a break.

My boyfriend of four years, whom I had met at University, finally convinced me to marry him and it was in the next five years, when we moved around the country for his work, that I was able to repair.  It wasn't easy for him at all or on our marriage, but it gave me healing space.  I owe him greatly for this time.  After we had our son when we lived in Perth, the final cathartic step to gain my sanity was moving to Hong Kong for three years for my husband's job.  I loved the place so much it simply took over my mind and my spirit and I became strong.

Unfortunately Hong Kong didn't have the same effect on my husband.  Also, in finally flying free of my past, I let my hair down a tad too much and hurt him.  Wounded but wiser we moved back to Australia where I tried to make it up.  Sadly he never forgave me and we remained in Perth, a place I detested, for seven years.  In the end I was beginning to fall apart.  If there is one thing you don't do to someone who has suffered panic disorder and got over it, as well as been trapped in a boarding school they hate, it is to tie them down where they don't want to be.

Panic disorder means it is hard to go out anywhere without being overwhelmed and beginning to panic. I had tied myself down and had then broken free.  Now I was being tied down and I believe it was punishment.  I decided to undertake a degree at this stage because I felt I would soon need to support myself.  I had been doing odd jobs wherever we had traveled and I was able to find work, but I wanted a career.

Our son was still in primary school and I didn't want to take on too stressful a degree so that he would suffer or that would cause me to drop out again.  I had a habit of taking on a course and dropping out since my first time at University.  I could see what my brain was up to.  I was re-dropping my bundle by habit.  I wasn't going to let it get away with that just as I had beaten OCD and panic.  This time I would go the distance.

I chose to do an Arts degree majoring in Communications and Media.  This was a practical degree that would give me employment opportunities.  I completed it at the same time my husband decided to take a job in Brisbane.  What could be better?  I was out of Perth at last and qualified although without experience.

Over the preceding years I had picked up enough secretarial and computer skills to make me proficient. It was just as well.  For the next four years I applied for roles allied to my degree.  I had three interviews in all that time.  It wasn't as easy then either.  Email was just in it's infancy.  Every letter was typed and sent and then you had to wait for the reply by phone or mail.

My marriage broke up and I had to look for secretarial positions.  Even the word had gone out of favour and was now an Administration Assistant, a Personal Assistant or an Executive Assistant.  They were all the same duties but depended on the seniority of the person for whom you worked.

Firstly it was hard to get the work.  On one occasion when I did land a role I worked beside a girl who had also just started.  She was twenty and had arrived in Brisbane the day before. She said she could always get a temporary job the moment she applied anywhere.  I smelt a rat.  I was now forty but looked very young for my age.  Could it be possible there was age discrimination out there?

This is where it gets weird.  My roles were sporadic to say the least.  I had to go to Centrelink to obtain unemployment benefits when I was out of work.  My husband still helped but it wasn't enough.  Apart from the jobs being few and far between I appeared to be jinxed as, without exaggeration, I was figuratively knifed in the back in every office job I did.

I was amenable, hard working and enthusiastic but there is a lemon in every office and something about me cheeses them off.  Some of them were covert while others were outright poisonous.  I was always the new person in the role and would be turfed out at the end of three months.  No one seemed to care that I relied on my job for financial support.  No, humanity doesn't come into it with these types.  All they cared about was the invisible threat I somehow posed.

My partner, whom I met after my husband and I split up, had driven taxis and wanted me to lease one so he could help support us.  My husband and parents had helped me buy a house after the divorce and when I decided to move, I sold it with a view to buying elsewhere. It was far from paid off so I only had so much capital.  Meantime we bought a car and leased the taxi plate with all associated costs that included yearly registration, insurance and maintenance.  Let it be understood that taxi registration is ten times the amount of car registration as is the insurance.

I never did get another house.  The lease went into debt and I had to get a cab licence so I could drive and help reduce it.  Meantime I lived on what capital I had left until there wasn't any.  I also spent a lot flying to Sydney to visit my mother where she lived in a nursing home.

I was at first humiliated to be driving a cab but gradually I felt a lot safer than I did working with vipers in an office.  My garrulous nature also had an outlet at last.  My first customers were groups of school children whose taxi fares were subsidized by the Government as they suffered conditions such as Asperger's Syndrome, Autism and in some cases severe depression.

The group of older primary school boys I drove regularly helped me in their own way to deal with my new job.  They were terrific and we got on wonderfully as a group.  After a year of driving them as well as other customers, I tried office work again.  You know what happened of course so I went back to driving cabs.  Our cab lease was finished and I took my courage in hand and went to a depot and signed on.

I started with two days a week, all that was available, and worked up to five and being a regular.  I'm no longer feeling ashamed.  Now I love this job.  I also feel like I have a workplace and belong to the group at the depot.  It's a great feeling to be accepted in a workplace at last.  Of course I'm a bit of an oddity.  Female drivers are about as scarce as Dodo's but that makes us feel unique, and appreciated.

One thing I've discovered is that people treat you the way you feel about yourself.  I'm respected for what I do and I find women passengers to be the best, the opposite of how it works in an office.  Women appreciate having a woman driver.  Young women want to hire me to drive them at night, but I only drive in the day.  I'm not brave enough to deal with drunks and the other types who come out at night.

At least twice a day I'm asked what a woman like me is doing driving a cab.  I feel like an endless, repeating tape recording, so now I'm writing it down.  I did try office work again a couple of years ago and hated being cooped up indoors.  I also worked with possibly the worst of the backstabbers I had endured.  She was a witch from hell.  She set me up, she lied to the manager, she half filled me in on what to do and loathed the fact that I enjoyed what I did.

It took every ounce of my self control to not let all the tyres on her car down when I left.  I still wish I hadn't shown such restraint.  At any rate I decided I was too old to put up with people like her.  I also decided she was her own worst karma and would make her own life miserable.  As such, revenge was irrelevant.

 

I am safer in the taxi than in an office even with the occasional real knife wielding lunatic.  If you treat people well, they treat you well, even when they have a knife.  It doesn't work in an office but I believe petty jealousy is the reason for a lot of bad behaviour in the work place.

I also believe that whatever you do, you should take pride in it and do it well.  The same applies to cab driving.  A ride in a cab should be a pleasure and if you are foreign to a place, you should be able to trust the driver to know exactly how to get you to your destination the shortest way possible.

Lately this isn't usually the case given the number of overseas students driving cabs for some extra money.  Many don't care about customer service, often don't know how to get to a place and some just plain cheat.  It makes it harder for me to take pride in something that I found hard to accept doing in the first place.

I won't finance my old age doing this job, given my finances, but at least I'm independent and not relying on social security.  Who knows what the future holds anyway?  It's one ride where you don't know exactly where you're heading.  I really wouldn't want to know anyway.

END.

A VOYAGE INTO MY COUNTRY'S PAST.

Captain James Cook had two missions when he set out on the Endeavour from Plymouth in Great Britain in 1769.  One was to take a group of scientists to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti.  He was then to explore and chart the South Pacific and search for the land mass known until then as Terra Australis.

Ships had been bumping into it for a couple of centuries but, like the blind men and the elephant, each had come upon it from a different direction, formed an opinion and left while those who actively sought it missed it completely.

Cook bumped into it on purpose having sussed out its whereabouts from observations made by Abel Tasman on an earlier voyage.  Cook went west after charting New Zealand, which Tasman had discovered, and made land fall at a sandy bay which he named Botany Bay in honour of Joseph Banks, a botanist on board, who merrily tripped about collecting Banksia plants and thus ensured himself a lifetime of honours as well as membership of the prestigious Royal Society.

Cook on his way northwards planted a flag at Possession Island in the Torres Strait after he had actually left the mainland to lay claim to Australia.  It seems a bit odd to stick a flag on a tiny island to lay claim to a very large continent but he probably planted a few more here and there for good measure.  Explorers must have had a sense of honour in those days because anyone could have come and ripped a flag out and replaced it with another.  Ships' logs must have been inarguable for they surely would be the only record of who got where first.  At any rate Cook had laid claim to a continent only second in distance to his home in Britain as the planet Venus.

The British Government thought Australia would be a good base from which protect their interests in the East Indies where they vied for goods and territories with the Dutch, French and Portuguese.  For years, however, nobody really knew what to do with this new acquisition.  It was too far from anywhere to be of much use.  That is, unless you wanted to send something, or somebody as far away as possible.

For years various people in or around the government had suggested that Australia would be a good place to send convicts but it wasn't until the 1780's that Britain's gaols had become so full that many convicts were housed in ships moored in ports.  The conditions were horrendous and the prisoners never saw daylight.

Even those destined for the bright sunlight of Australia could wait on board these floating cesspools for up to a year.

On January 26, 1988 twelve years after Cook had left Australia, Captain Arthur Phillip, a pretty decent guy compared to some later Governors, arrived with three ships at Sydney Harbour.  One was carrying solely women convicts.

There was nowhere to the prisoners could run to escape so they were let ashore and a ration of rum given to each person.  After Arthur Phillip and his officers finished their evening meal aboard, the officers also went ashore.  It should be noted that officers and prisoners, male and female, found niches, nooks and crannies and settled into an all night drunken orgy.

This is how the British put their first mark on Australian soil.  The next morning Captain Phillip admonished one and all saying something along these lines: "Tut, tut, there'll be no more of that sort of thing."

Rum would become the currency of the fledgling nation and whale and seal killing the backbone of its economy until sheep took over.  But in the first five years the colony almost starved.  The first ship with supplies was slow coming from Britain and Phillip finally took a chance and sent one of his ships to Africa to replenish supplies.  Fortunately it came back.

The British weren't fond of fresh fish and preferred the preserved, pickled beef that floated in brine in barrels.  Well you had to be slightly mad venture so far from home and, if that stuff didn't kill you, you must have been hardy.  The first crops only succeeded enough in supplying seed for the next crops.  Eventually the settlers moved inland and hit pay dirt in a place where their crops took hold and yielded plentiful harvests and gradually the colony became self-sufficient.

By the next century freed prisoners, who were called 'ticket of leave' men or women, were writing and telling their relatives to come to the land of opportunity.  Some were even allocated land to start life afresh. So popular did Australia become that the British government chose increasingly sadistic Governors to run the penal settlements to put terror into the hearts of convicts so they would stop waxing enthusiastic about the place.  Transportation was not to be seen as a bonus and reprieve, and the parade of these sadistic governors who ran our prisons in Tasmania, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay should have put people off, but didn't.

Captain Patrick Logan was head of the penal settlement at Moreton Bay in Queensland.  Suburbs and highways now bear his name but on the night he was murdered when out exploring, the prisoners, on hearing the news, roared with glee and applauded all night.

To read Robert Hughes' "The Fatal Shore" is the biggest eye opener I have ever experienced in regard to Australia.  I am also filled with admiration for those who not only chose to stay after being freed but to those who came voluntarily.  Hughes provides an insight into the anti-class system that arose, not from throwing off the old British class system as I had thought, but from the snobbery that arose between the free settlers, or exclusives, as they were called, and ticket of leave men and women.

Those who came voluntarily did not want to be tarred with the convict brush, however, the crimes of the majority of people who were transported arose from poverty and desperation.  There were definitely re-offenders and hard criminal types who kept breaking laws once freed, or stood up to authority in prison.  These were sent to the dreaded prisons on Norfolk Island and Tasmania.  Such dreadful and inhumane things happened in these places it will forever be a blot on our history.

The bushrangers were mostly escaped convicts and so many became legends and anti-authority figures.  The mind set of Australia arose from those who had been raised under the tyranny of poverty and an unequal class system.  The horizon here was as far reaching in its actual and social possibilities as Britain's was not.

The light of Australia was not only from the sun but from enlightenment, from possibilities and new frontiers.  I am truly proud to be an Australian.  It is a country that just keeps broadening its horizons mentally to fit its extraordinary size.  It has no wars.  It accepts all people and cultures.  I only hope some of these do not bring the mindsets of the wars they have left behind.  This country can be physically cruel and it is not a place for man to set against man.  We have to live in harmony so the land doesn't swallow us whole.  There is no room for aggression or petty antagonisms.

This is the lesson we can learn from the very first settlers, the aboriginals.  They did not abuse the land but lived in harmony with it.  Australia is both a terrible and fragile country.  It is terrible if you take it for granted and go unprepared into its vast interior spaces.  But its green rim is fragile and must be protected and the greatest danger to it is us.

END

IF.....AUSTRALIA HAD BEEN COLONISED 4,000 YEARS AGO BY THE EGYPTIANS.

Throwing a Prawn on the Barbie!

LIFE RECIPE.

Boarding School Fare - a snail in the spinach

   

Cooking seems to be a very popular subject on television right now.  Women's magazines have always included recipe sections and now there are shows like Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules and numerous others.

I've been cooking since my mother decided I should help out in the kitchen.  She didn't know how to cook when she married but she soon learned how to with a vengeance.  In my years at home I never saw a sausage or mashed potato grace our dinner table.  She bought meat weekly from the butcher and ordered exactly the cuts she wanted.

Our steaks always came from scotch fillets and she would roast whole ones as well.  Chicken could  be roasts or so many different casseroles it would make a hen's breast puff with pride.  I grew up in Sydney and my mother made things that I later discovered hadn't been heard of in some other states until thirty years later.  Brisbane was particularly backward cuisine wise and had not heard of cheesecake until the 1970's I believe.  When I arrived there in 1991 I couldn't find brown bread anywhere.  It was like landing in a time warp.

Part of the reason for my mother's success was that my father grew up next door to a French family.  One of the daughters of the household, who was my father's age, became my Godmother.  Her mother, who was always referred to as Madame, shared her French recipes with the younger generation.  My mother's recipe book is full of typed pages in a ring binder.  She gives credit for every recipe in it.  'Madame' is listed under many of the desserts.

No matter how hard I try I can never compete with my mother's cooking.  Some people have 'the gift' and she did.  My ex-husband, blast his hide, also has 'the gift'.  His second wife was double-blessed with it.  When we were still married my husband was an absolute boon when we gave a dinner party.  He would also get all the credit even though I did all the preparation.  For some reason I have always been commended on my salads and, oddly, sandwiches.  I mean any idiot can make these.  Perhaps it is my gift.

There was one little problem, however, with my husband's technique.  While my mother washed every pan after she used it, my husband used every pan in the kitchen and let them pile up in the sink to skyscraper level.  In the open plan kitchen-dining rooms of today guests can see the gargantuan mess so I had to clean the lot up before they arrived.  I would end up a mass of perspiration and just have time to put on my make-up which slid immediately off my face.

I remember a Christmas we spent at my parents' place.  My husband insisted on glazing a ham.  My mother did not like anyone in her kitchen at all.  The trouble with kitchens is that everyone loves to congregate in them.  In the home in which I grew up, the kitchen had a door to the outside and one to our hallway.  It was small to say the least and a thoroughfare into the bargain.

These days kitchens are open plan and attached to a family room.  That solves this age old problem but no kitchen on earth would have been big enough for my mother.  My parents had moved to another state and a house with a much bigger kitchen by the time we celebrated the Christmas in question.

Even so I watched as my mother succumbed to one of her mini nervous breakdowns as my husband entered the kitchen every twenty minutes to glaze the ham.  Mother had these breakdowns on a regular basis.  I'm sure the reason I was turfed off to boarding school at the age of ten was because my mother couldn't cope with her only child, who did everything to please her, taking up space in the house.

Perhaps I should be grateful but at boarding school I suffered through eight years of the most appalling food imaginable.  At school it was possible to leave a fork in the bowl in which the sausages had arrived at a refectory table, pick it up when the fat had set and the bowl come with it.  The delights of afternoon tea were enjoyed all over again when their leftovers from the four previous days turned up in green jelly and opaque pink custard as a trifle for dessert.

At a previous school there was also the mashed pumpkin that was watery mush and had pieces of pumpkin skin left in it.  We named these bits Sister Katherine's fingernails after the woman who prepared it.  It made us gag.  Another treat was the added protein of tiny snails that remained in the spinach and had clung stubbornly on during the washing of the leaves.

I came home from school on Friday nights.  I would have looked forward to this but instead dreaded the meal.  This was because my dear father was a devout Catholic.  My mother was Church of England in name only and not religious in any sense, but she would cook Friday meals according to the Catholic directive of the time.

She would rub this in as she picked me up on Friday afternoon.

"We're having your favourite tonight," she would say.  This was either delusion or downright mean.  "Smoked fish mornay."

I hated that dish.  I repeatedly told her so and I don't know if she kept forgetting or it was dad's favourite and she got us mixed up.  I hate fish period, but smoked, orange skinned fish in a cheese sauce was almost enough to make me jump out of the car and go back to school.

The real treat was her Sour Cherry Pie.  She refused to write the recipe down and when I asked for it years later she had forgotten how she did it.  I said I'd try to make it and she gave me a vague guide.  I never tried to follow her instructions.  I just wasn't going to ruin perfection.

Mum was an innovative cook as well.  She would prepare well ahead and freeze meals so she could always cater for visitors.  On weekends our house was often full of friends and family.  On one of these occasions I must have been out with my future husband and came home to a house full of people.  Everyone was in our very large living room eating fork food from a plate.  It turned out it was a Spinach Pie.

Given my memory of spinach from school I point blank refused to try it even though everyone exhorted me to do so.  It was delicious they said.  After ten minutes I gave in and said I'd try a bite.

I never looked back and the recipe has become one of my favourites.  It is called French Onion Tart of all things.  The French Onion part comes from the addition of a packet of dry French Onion soup to the ingredients.  The actual pie is packed to the gunnels with chopped spinach, three eggs, ham, cheddar and some cream, to which I'm usually allergic, but it's cooked to the point that it doesn't upset me.

Once I would buy spinach leaves, wash and finely chop these in a blender then drain the liquid.  Now it's available, I just buy the finely chopped frozen kind making the dish so much easier.  It's placed in a shortcrust pie crust, which I also used to make, but now just buy, then sprinkled with more cheese and baked in a Pyrex pie dish.

On one occasion I spent a good part of the day making this dish for a couple who were coming to dinner.  All went fine and it was cooked to perfection.  I don't know what I had previously cooked on a hot plate but I forgot it was still hot.  I took the pie out of the oven and gently placed it on the hotplate that I thought was cool.  A few seconds later came the sound of an explosion.  Pie and Pyrex went everywhere.

We bought Kentucky Fried and cleaned up the kitchen.  I have never put anything on a hotplate since before checking the temperature.  It also isn't wise to put a hot Pyrex dish in the sink and run water over it.  I tend to think Pyrex can handle anything but it doesn't tolerate fools.

One of my mother's other great recipes is Madame's Chocolate Mousse.  Real French Chocolate Mousse has no cream in it.  The cream is added, whipped, as a side dish.  Only cheats put cream in a true Chocolate Mousse.  I should admit that I am lactose intolerant and the only cream I can tolerate has been cooked to a temperature where it has broken down such as in the Spinach Pie.

My mother also made beautiful lamb stews but pork was never her favourite.  Pork was once the most expensive meat to buy in Australia but she also found it too dry to casserole although we did occasionally have pork roasts.

My mother kept her appetite for food for her lifetime and was still enjoying food when she lived in a nursing home.  I am sadly losing my appetite.  I am still young but can eat only a little.  I must have a very slow metabolism.  In fact it is probably very efficient but dulls my interest in food.  It simply isn't worth going to a restaurant now.  The most I can consume is an entrée and that's it.

This year I went to my son's place for Christmas.  I was invited for an early dinner.  In the late afternoon the table was spread with dips and snacks.  Everyone ate with gay abandon except me.  I didn't eat, saving for dinner which came three hours later.  I told my son to only invite me for one meal at any time.

I remember a delightful, birdlike, old lady at my mother's nursing home looking at her Christmas lunch.  She said: "I don't even want to eat anymore."  It is tragic to run out of appetite before you die.  In old age, if there is nothing left to you, no sex, no travel, no independence, at least there is food.  It is the final affront not to be able to enjoy what is so life giving.

There are people in the world without enough to eat and sadly there are people who, with food available to them, simply can't eat anymore.  Food is one of life's great pleasures as well as vital to sustain life.  It is wonderful to think that something so necessary can also give such pleasure.

I am also impressed by the fact that humans have turned food into an art form.  It began with subsistence and, when we found a way to store food and have plenty, it became a source of creativity.  We humans are an interesting lot in that we apply art to what is necessary and basic.

Imagine if we had to thresh the wheat, milk a cow to make butter, grow sugar cane and reduce it to sugar grains, raise hens for eggs, just to make a cake.  Cooking shows how far we have come in the sense of how we gather and store foodstuffs.  It is not trivial.  It is a tribute to human ingenuity.

You know how it feels when the electricity goes off and we are plunged into darkness?  We are lost for anything to do.   There are no woodstoves to cook on.  People used to read by candlelight or go to bed.  Life revolved around the sun and fire.  Growing and gathering the ingredients to cook a meal is no mean feat.  A simple recipe requires ingredients from an extraordinary number of sources.

When man was in his infancy he hunted for meat, killed it and ate it raw.  He may have supplemented this with the fruit and berries.  Wheat was a long time coming.  So was sugar; thousands of years in fact.

Next time you make a recipe, consider where the ingredients come from and wonder at how far the human being has come in gathering food for survival.  For something this vital to be raised to an art form is tribute to how well humans have not only adapted to survival but stated in no uncertain terms: we can go one better.  We have enough to make food flavoursome and interesting.

Wouldn't it be a shame if recipes became a sign of the lack of foresight of the human condition?  If, when the world's population reached the level where there is mass starvation, the idea of a recipe may become tribute to the lack of thought about sustaining the future?  As if it was the equivalent of: "Let them eat cake".

I like to see the human race as having the common sense to ensure its survival.  This is going to require a recipe with a whole different set of ingredients but I'm sure we're up to it.  We just need to harvest a few more of our brain cells and add them to the mix and then survival will be assured.

END

THE CATCH-22 OF TRAVEL.

"Calvin and Hobbes Go Exploring"- Cartoon by Bill Watterson

We get stale in the same place for years no matter how much we find to do or how busy our lives become.  I live in a lovely city but I need a break from it from time to time.  Travel blows a fresh breeze through my mind.  It almost literally feels like it and I feel invigorated and refreshed.

I guess brain cells need to take in something different from time to time to exercise them or they go onto automatic.  Just imagine all those tiny cells yawning as they channel the same information when you go through the same routine day after day.  No wonder they start to make you edgy for change.  They decide to revolt and give you a hard time: "Let's go on a holiday, we're bored," they nag me.

They don't seem to let up even when they know I haven't the money.  They just work on making me testier and testier until I have to have a word with them or threaten them with sedation.   So in order to shut them up while I'm attempting to save enough to go away I've taken up this blog to challenge them a little.  It's quieted them down a bit, or rather it's giving them something new to do, but I can still hear them whinging in the background even as I write this.  In order to placate them a little, I'm writing about travel.

The trouble with planning a trip to a place you've never been is that you need to have been there to do it properly.  It's the Catch-22 of travel.  Yes, I know there are travel agents, brochures and friends who have done the trip and can tell you about their experiences.

There are also travel shows on television but I have come to avoid these with religious zeal.  At first I couldn't figure out what bugged me about them, apart from the obvious, which is that the presenters are paid to travel all over the world.  This is my idea of a dream job except for the size of camera they have to lug around.

Eventually I figured out why they annoy me.  It is because presenters are people from my own country, or from a similar cultural background,  whose familiar language and manner overlay and obscure the cultural impact of the place they are covering.  It's like adding too much salt to a meal.  The subtle flavours beneath are overwhelmed by something stronger and thoroughly domestic with which you're all too familiar.

The presenters, although very professional and upbeat, also deliver their reports in a patois developed for the show.  This has the effect of causing them to come across as variations of one another and, by progression, the place they are covering suffers the same fate. 

Even with these factors taken into account a television travelogue can only cater to two senses; sight and sound.  It can't convey the cultural vibe, the atmosphere or the smell.  We use all five senses when we travel and so even the best show can't do more than show and tell.

The hotels, facilities and restaurants that appear on them also usually offer free accommodation and services to the presenters.  There's nothing like free advertising is there?  So you aren't going to hear the presenter say: "God the smell around here makes me want to puke", or "The locals all have their hands out begging and look like they want to cut my throat", or "It's so hot here I can't wait to get home."  What we get, therefore is a Pollyanna version of the place.

They will also decide what to film in order to portray the aspects of the destination they are there to promote.  All the different shots or videos are then edited to form a smooth dialogue, knitting together the pertinent pieces .  A travelogue might concentrate on hotels, local shopping and places of interest to the tourist.  I doubt that you'll catch a news item or a mugging happening in the background while the crew is filming.  If it did happen I bet you wouldn't get to see it.

Even on a large screen television you are limited to a miniature view of the whole.  I mean you can't just spin your head around and see everything as the presenter can.   Film only shows bits and pieces of places not the vistas surrounding them.  For instance, over the years I've watched television series and films set in London, however, nothing on the screen prepared me for what I experienced when I was actually there or its flatness or greyness.

The best part of travel is experiencing the unknown with every one of your senses.  If we've never been somewhere before, to arrive in the midst of it is almost like being reborn.  We have no familiar points of reference.  We don't know which corner to turn next or where anything is.  We can feel lost but renewed.  We can discover things again.  Naturally we go prepared, but imagine if you were sent there in the way Scottie in the Star Trek series beams Captain Kirk to a planet.

Imagine you landed like that in the middle of Paris as a complete newcomer.  What do you do?  You've probably seen films set there, you've seen pictures of the place, you've heard about it but you don't have a map and you probably don't speak the language.  You can't just cut and edit to the next hotel.  You have to figure out where one is and physically get there.  Some people would find this to be an exciting challenge, some others might panic, but not one of them would be bored.

Travel lets us become like a child again because it allows us to take in something new, which in our everyday environment rarely happens.  I think that's why travel satisfies us.  It has the effect of making us feel something that we haven't in years and also relieves the boredom of the same old, same old.

Travel also educates us as to how different other cultures can be.  A traveller from Australia or the US might think that asking a direct question of someone in a foreign country is perfectly fine, only to discover they are considered rude.  Many a traveller has had the dubious thrill of being tossed in gaol for doing something they consider innocent.  Travellers are always prone to greater danger through ignorance but that's the risk of exploration.  In fact the explorers of old seemed to be people who were addicted to danger.  Boredom drives people to extremes and that's why it's best to let off steam regularly.

I feel sorry for business people I talk to who say things like: "Oh, I travel overseas a lot for business but I'm just there for a few days.  I only see the airport and the office".  I bet these people have very unhappy brain cells or they've scared them into submission.

I'm building up quite a head of steam at the moment and my brain cells are almost in revolt.  I think I'm hearing talk of a union being formed in their mutterings.  I can only hope someone pays me to travel somewhere soon or I win some money.  I don't really care where I travel to, I just have to shut the little guys up.

END

BULLYVILLE.

 

I had my reservations about writing this post.  Even the memory makes me shudder, but I overcame my reticence and here it is.

Bullies exist everywhere and always will.  They are like the algae that spontaneously grows
in a perfectly clean and chemically balanced swimming pool, or the scum that rises to the top of a pond. They come in all age groups, ages and genders.

When my husband, son and I moved to a country town for my husband's work, each of us experienced it first hand.  The place was a coastal town in Victoria, close to the border with South Australia.  My husband took the position because he was trying to appease me after taking a job in Perth for the second time when he knew I hated the place.  His company offered him a post in this town where he would be Project Manager on the site of an Aluminium Refinery's upgrade.

You know those movies where an innocent family moves into a haunted house and nothing but trouble ensues?  Well the whole town, which shall remain nameless, was creepy.  As well as an Aluminium refinery it boasted an abattoir and a port that existed exclusively for loading and unloading sheep destined for slaughter.

Also in this town was a clique of company wives who made that other creepy movie, "The Stepford Wives" look tame.  To top this off, and the real cherry on top of the cake, was the stupidest school principal who ever held that position.  The whole atmosphere was bad, as was the miserable cold and wet weather.

As if an omen for what was to come, we rented a house in a cul-de-sac near the centre of town.  The real estate agent told us on no account to open the oven before they had the place cleaned.  The last tenants had left a roast lamb in there and the smell was beyond description. They would have it removed before we moved in.

But we were in a hurry.  How bad could a dead roast possibly smell?  Nothing prepared us for what emanated from the oven when we opened the door to evict the deceased beast ourselves.  We had never smelled anything like it.  We slammed the oven door shut and fled from the house.  Perhaps the evil of the place had even made an old roast smell like the pit of hell.  It was very strange indeed.

Once the lamb was properly exorcised we took possession.  Our son started in the local primary school, my husband went to work and I busied myself studying for my Communications degree externally after having started it at Murdoch University in Western Australia.

The previous Project Manager had been single and, in this incestuous town, the wife of the second in command had become Queen Bee of the company's other wives.  This situation was strange in itself but existed because the refinery's owners had a club for the wives of their employees in the town.  What this company had, our little company apparently had to have also.  They would meet for lunch once a month in a restaurant and the bill was paid by the company.

Without ever being aware of it I became the new Queen Bee.  The first I knew of this was when a persistent knock sounded at the door of the house we had rented.  Queen Bee Number Two was there to visit.  I was in a rush to finish an assignment before collecting my son from school.  She would not take the hint that I was otherwise busy and stayed for three hours.  She was there to feel me out.  Was I interested in usurping her role?  She didn't ask this straight out but I got the drift.

When I was growing up no one called in at your house without phoning first, unless they were close friends, neighbours or people who knew that they were always welcome.  For this woman to impose herself on my hospitality for so long without so much as a 'by your leave' absolutely amazed me.

I was naïve enough to think other people were brought up with the same standards that I was.  I learned a lot on my travels with my husband and one of these was that courtesy had gone out the door.  It is a hard lesson to grow up with standards and find them littered like broken china wherever you go because the world was changing and not for the better.  I had always felt that good manners arose from consideration for others and common sense.  I was wrong.

After this episode, however much I tried to discourage her, QBII did not let up.  Perhaps my resistance drove her on.  In the meantime the ladies of the cul-de-sac had their very own Queen Bee.  She held a tea party to greet me to which all the women in the street were invited.  I thought it was a lovely gesture but had a vague sense of unease.  This was not really my thing.

Then I was invited by the company Queen Bee Number Two to a baby shower for one of the employee's wives.  The expectant mother was, to put it mildly, a bogon of the first order.  I am not a snob but I soon learned to be.  She eyed me as I entered the room as if deciding how she would skin me alive.  I sat through this horror party attempting to be both convivial and invisible at the same time.  After surviving this I did my best to hide from the lot of them.

Apart from these unusual social forays behind the Looking Glass, I found unpaid work at the Community Radio station which allied nicely with my degree.  My husband was busy with his work and our son at the Primary School.  I don't remember exactly when things started to go wrong for our son, or perhaps he hid it for a while.

A boy in a grade a year ahead of him, who also lived in our street, the son of the very mother who had given the tea party, started bullying him.  He would do things like tell him to stand in a shrub or he would hit him.  He had plenty of back up too.  My son attempted to comply with this bully's demands and, naturally, he still got hit.

What is a mother to do?  Will her son look like a wuss if she shows up at the school immediately?  How did I advise him to handle it while I harboured a desire to kill the little monster who would dare touch my son?  His father was very busy at the refinery being knifed in the back himself so I felt I should handle the matter.

I gave it two weeks.  Son was upset but not damaged.  Then I made an appointment to see the principal.  In his office I asked him how it was possible that my son could be bullied under the noses of teachers?  Wasn't there supervision of the playground?

It seemed the teachers couldn't be everywhere at once but naturally they tried to supervise.  But this is when it got weird.  The principal started to wax enthusiastically about the bully.  He said such things as: "Bradley is such a bright boy, I'd really like to put him in a higher grade where he could be more intellectually challenged."

He kept on along this line for some time while I attempted to overcome yet another feeling of unreality and lift my jaw off the ground to where it had fallen.  I don't have to tell you what mothers are like.  It is a wonder I didn't throttle this moron.

Instead I hissed: "I'd teach him some manners first," before storming out of his office.

If this happened today I'd be able to report him to the Department of Education.  Fortunately for him, I've forgotten his worthless name.  I also like to imagine what might have happened to Bradley.  I like to think he is in gaol or a drug dealer or both.  My son became a Veterinary Surgeon.  What some school principals may see as a child's creative frustration channeled into aggression may just be a lack of intelligence or empathy.

It is worth noting that whenever the principal caught sight of me around this small town afterwards he would hide.  I was once in the Video shop and he hid out of sight behind some shelves.  Such was the fine stuff in charge of little minds.

My next course of action was the one I didn't want to take.  I had to talk to the bully's mother and father.  Father was at work or hiding inside the house, so I spoke to the most ferocious member of any family, the mother.  We had that in common at least.

I informed her of events as delicately as possible but she didn't take kindly to what I had to say.  Her little bully had never bullied anyone.  In fact my son had bullied her younger son.  That remark was so utterly ludicrous, and no I didn't have wool over my eyes, I realised she was either deluded or that attack was the best means defense.

After this she ordered all the cul-de-sac women to ostracise me.  Even the two who were decent types did so out of fear because they lived there permanently.  If they thought this bothered me one iota, it did not.  I had work to do on my studies and at the radio station, which allowed me to remain unaffected by this nonsense.

Now my husband and I looked around at other schools in the area.  The choice was limited to another public primary and one Catholic school.  The Catholic one seemed more promising as we felt there would be better discipline.  In the meantime bully backed off having been outed.

My husband, however, was going through a campaign of resistance at work.  These guys just didn't want to let the new Project Manager in, even though the previous one had left of his own accord.  Obviously the second in command had his eyes on the job and had been overlooked.

I also didn't make myself popular with the General Manager who drove from his office in Adelaide to make his visits to site.  He was Iranian and married to an Australian woman.  On one occasion he took my husband and I out to dinner and, in the course of conversation, boasted that he had driven his high powered car at 140 kilometres an hour for most of the journey.

By this time I was fed up with idiots and let him have it in no uncertain terms.  I have no patience with fools who put the lives of others at risk because of their egos.  The town had finally pushed me to the limit and I simply didn't hold my tongue.

I wasn't popular and did my husband no favour with his company.  The whole town had a bad vibe and I wondered if everyone in it was possessed.  In the end the best course of action was to leave and go back to Perth of course.  Well, I'd almost escaped it once, I would again, but nothing was worth letting our son grow up in that environment.

Our family had lived in many places but, to this day, this town seems like something out of a horror movie.  I treasure my memories, good and bad, but if there is one I would cheerfully delete, it is this one.

END.

TRAVEL TRAVAIL.

 

The French word for "work" is "travail", which is so like our English word "travel".  The similarity is fitting because often, no matter how hard you try to enjoy yourself when you take a trip, it feels like hard work.  It is also fair to make the comparison in this post because it is about my trip to that wonderfully egocentric, bloody-minded country of the Gauls.

My trip to France was in the late '90's, but don't think anything in France changes.  That's the beauty of the place.  In World War 2 the French had the Resistance.  They still resist almost everything.

I think that all the three and four star hotels my partner and I stayed at in France used "Fawlty Towers", John Cleese's television show of the '70's about a hotel in England, as a training video for their staff.

First I will describe the route we traveled on our three week journey.  We began with four days in Paris then hired a car and found our way to Versailles.  We then headed to the Loire district at a leisurely pace.   After exploring this area for a few days my partner began to head East.  I will explain why further on.  We went through the French Alps on the Route Napoleon until I was able to redirect him towards the south.

We stopped at Grasse for a day and then moved on to stay at St. Paul de Vence where we based ourselves for three days.  We moved on to Juan-les-Pins and from there explored Nice and made a quick trip to Monaco.  Later we discovered we could not leave the car in Nice and return to Paris by the TGV (Train Grand Vitesse) without paying a great deal more to the hire car company.  My partner drove up the Autoroute at speed for two days as France flitted past.  We spent the last three days in Paris.  Now, onto the trip.

Part of the exploring that you do when you travel to distant shores is into the personality of your partner.  You may discover that the person with whom you have lived for years is not Dr. Jekyll but Mr. Hyde.  This is a man who refuses to suffer from jet lag whether he is traveling from East to West or the other way around.

He can fall asleep in an air plane seat for the whole time it takes to travel half way around the globe and then will not sleep for the next three weeks at the times you need to, chiefly night time.

The same person will not eat dinner when you are hungry but insist on waiting until you find a hotel to stay the night, even if the kitchen has closed.  He was a boon to every pharmacy that we passed in France as he caused me such stomach spasms that I needed constant medication.  I don't know if the French still don't put Codeine in their over-the-counter analgesics but at that time, caffeine was used instead.  I love Codeine.  It is an upper far superior caffeine and I needed upping.

When our plane from Australia landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, Hyde's sister, who only spoke Polish and French, picked us up.  They hadn't seen each other for ten years.  If I thought Hyde was perverse, I hadn't taken into account the familial strain.  To be tactful his sister's arrangements went cockeyed at light speed.

As we whizzed past the Eiffel Tower, I excitedly pointed to it and asked if we could slow down.  She ignored me.  I suggested to Hyde that this was the kind of thing I had come to see.  I was admonished and reminded he hadn't seen his sister for years.  They continued yabbering away in Polish and ignoring me and she failed to point out any sights. Nothing about our trip was pre-booked.  We had decided to wing it.  That week we were meant to stay at an apartment his sister, who lives in Paris, had arranged free of charge. 

This accommodation wasn't yet available and she had placed us in a hotel that was at the intersection of five streets, not air-conditioned and incredibly noisy.  I lay down and attempted to sleep while they went somewhere.  When they returned they found me about to leave the hotel with luggage in hand.  I said I was going to find a quieter place where I could sleep.

Apparently this was terribly rude of me.  Like her brother she didn't understand the meaning of jet lag.  I didn't care.  I simply walked off and they trailed after me.  Soon we found a three star place in St. Germaine with a room available.  I asked for one at the back so it would be quiet.  There ensconced I again attempted sleep.

The Mr. Hyde part of my partner's character went into full swing.  He deserted me as I once again attempted to sleep off my jet lag.  We hadn't even been in Paris ten hours and he took off with the room's only key.  Still unable to fall asleep I had great need of some wine and, having arranged to get in and out of the room with the help of a porter, I bought a bottle and came back to find there was no way to open it.  The French aren't big on providing things and that includes bottle openers, glasses or cups.

I also didn't know the French word for corkscrew.  Having located my dictionary I looked it up and then made another excursion to the shops.  Luckily I managed to buy a '"tire-bouchon" but it was fairly basic .  So was the cork.  Back in the room as I attempted to pull it out, it broke into pieces.

Never has one person wanted a drink so much.  For over an hour I gouged at the cork.  I thought of breaking the bottle but I decided drinking from it might have resulted in disaster to my intestines.  I hadn't counted on my partner having the same effect as our trip continued.  Finally I broke through and drank straight from the bottle.  Needless to say my partner didn't receive the warmest welcome on his return.

We spent time with the sister in those first days but it was necessary for me to talk to her in French as she spoke no English, and I spoke no Polish.   After four days of this linguistic triangle, and trying to understand her Polish accented French, I was more jet lagged than when I had arrived.  She also insisted we walk 'a few metres' to a restaurant instead of taking a cab, for which I'd offered to pay.  Some three kilometres later and sick with jet lag and hunger, I burst into tears and went back to the hotel by cab.

A curious thing about the French is that they don't tell you anything in any language.  We took a cab to the Louvre on a Tuesday.  Not only did the driver dump us at the rear so that we had to walk a long distance to the front, when we reached it, we found it was closed.  It is always closed on Tuesdays as are many things in France as we later discovered.

We also went to the Eiffel Tower.  Do you think there is an obvious sign that shows in which of its four feet the entrance resides?  It may be better now but we weren't the only tourists wandering about trying to find it.  Once we got to the top the view was disappointing.  Paris is flat, the buildings not very tall and on this day it was hazy.  Well, it is still Paris and no one said it needed hills.  A tourist should have no expectations.

I am used to the view of Sydney Harbour and also, having lived in Hong Kong, its amazing views from the Peak and also those from the ferry when crossing Victoria Harbour.  Paris has other attributes and one of these is its history.

At last we hired a car and headed out of Paris alone.  The free apartment hadn't eventuated and maybe that was for the best.  We spent a few days in the Loire district seeing chateaux such as the magnificent Chateau Chenonceau and Chaumont-sur-Loire.  We based ourselves in a hotel in Charolais, a quaint old village in the Loire district.  There were lovely gardens and a little brook, however trucks roared through its narrow street during the daytime.  At night you could walk through the streets when it was quiet.  We stayed there twice, once on our way south and again on our way back to Paris.  This lovely village helped make our trip.

In the foyer of the hotel in Charolais, I had my first experience of sensor taps.  As soon as I entered the Ladies toilets on the ground floor of the hotel the faucets of all the three hand basins started flowing at once and I was nowhere near them.  I felt as if I was being applauded.

We drove eastwards again and found a  superb chateau that was now a hotel and the most beautiful place we stayed on our trip.  It wasn't the friendliest but it was magnificent.  We stayed two nights and on the second decided to eat in our room as we had eaten out the night before and wanted to save some money.

We asked for pate and toast to be sent to our room.  It is never easy to ask the French for such a thing.  They look at you as if you are a maggot crawling out of food.  The next morning we paid the bill.  I almost fell over when I saw the cost of the snack of the previous evening.  It came to AUD$100.  "Mais," I objected, "il etait pate seulement."

"Non," replied the chatelaine, "il etait foie gras."

In other words it was pate from zee liver of zee goose.  Well that cooked mine and our budget.  So beware of the beautiful chateau with la snooty chatelaine Francaise or yours will be too.

I knew about chateaux before I arrived in France but not about their wonderful gardens.  Surprises are the best thing about travel; the experiences you're not expecting that happen on foreign soil and make them even more exotic.

I really wanted to see the old parts of France; the villages, some ruins, the chateaux and finally Avignon and the south.  But all did not go as I had planned.  Mr. Hyde had seen all of Europe when he had lived in Poland and he drove our hire car as I wasn't used to driving on the right.  He tried to trick me and kept driving East.  I could have explored more of the Loire district before heading south, but that was not his evil plan.

We started to head across the French Alps.  He was attempting to get to Poland but kept denying it.  In my opinion, once you've seen one mountain, you've seen them all. Also it was chilly up there even in September.  Mr. Hyde hadn't brought a sweater with him so he wore one of mine.

Every half hour he would insist on opening his window and smoking a cigarette.  I would freeze but fortunately my body, already wracked by stomach spasms, couldn't handle getting pneumonia on top.

The Alps, however, did hold one or two surprises.  One was a place called Sisteron.  It is a natural pass through cliffs and the rock formations are amazing.  Atop one side high on a cliff perched the ruin of a building, either a monastery or a fortress.  As usual, there was no real information and it hadn't been mentioned in the various books I had studied before leaving.

The other surprise was a restaurant, the Hotel de la Poste Corps.  It was in a small village, on the Route Napoleon, Place de Mairie, that appeared as we rounded a corner.  There were two buses outside it.  We were in need of a coffee and a little something to eat so we went in.

It was full of very portly German tourists and they were there to feast.  A caravan of silver trays paraded past us to an area below where the Germans were seated.  The trays were so long that each was carried by four waiters.  The array of food on them was like nothing I have seen before or since.

It seemed a crime to ask for mere cake so we ordered a hot dessert of crepes in chocolate sauce which was magnificent.  We stayed for a while and watched the banquet below us.  Just as we decided to leave the Germans stood en masse and began to depart so we let them go ahead rather than be crushed.

The chef stood by the exit to bid everyone farewell.  When our turn came I thought he would know we were just stray tourists but he took me by both hands and kissed me on either cheek.  Nobody else had received this treatment and both Mr. Hyde and I were astonished.  Perhaps it was  because I was the only slim woman there.

It's those kind of things that really make a trip.  I often wonder if you should return to a place that has given you such enjoyment but I believe you shouldn't.  If you've had a terrific time and been surprised once, the next time can never live up to it again as the element of surprise has gone.

Later, having managed to re-route Mr. Hyde southward again, we arrived at a lovely town called St. Paul de Vence.  We spent two nights there and explored the surrounding areas. 

This town had the original fortress town within it.  The old town's buildings were constructed of stone and winding cobbled paths ran between them.  There were flowers on creeping vines everywhere and its buildings were full of art and craft galleries.  If I could have afforded any, these were the type of things I would have liked to buy, but I did have the pleasure of looking.

We went on to Monaco after St. Paul de Vence.  Approaching it from the winding roads above is one of the most stunning views I have ever seen and I would love to go back.  Every person there looked as if they had fallen out of the pages of a magazine.  There wasn't a woman over a size ten in the place.  We parked and walked around near the marina in the evening but I had traveled all day and looked like something the cat had dragged in.  I just wasn't going to be seen like that or eat out there.  We agreed we would return later when we were refreshed and had changed.  Due to a mix up with the hire car, we never did.

The next few nights we stayed at a villa hotel in St. Juan-les-Pins.  From there we did day trips, one to Nice which was lovely.  My stomach spasms, however, had increased to the point where we called the medical insurance company with which we had taken out cover for the trip; one that guaranteed an English speaking doctor in an emergency.  A female doctor arrived at our hotel and her grasp of English was non-existent.  I had to make do with my French and I had never learned anything to explain stomach spasms.  She got the drift and gave me some pills she had on her.  They were actually quite good.

We returned to St. Paul de Vence and the hotel we stayed at previously.  The only room available was an attic room and we took it.  We could only stand erect in one small section.  The rest of the time we stooped or lay on the bed.

We planned to go down to Monaco again but first phoned the hire car company to arrange to drop off the car so we could take the TGV back to Paris.  The chatelaine was an English woman married to the French proprietor.  She phoned on our behalf and discovered there was a penalty for not getting the car back to Paris.

We made it back there in time to return the car only stopping for on night to stay at the lovely hotel in Charolais again.  Once we reached Paris we stayed at the same hotel as before in St. Germaine.  On one our last nights we found a French, French restaurant nearby.  With my adequate French I ordered a lamb dish and specified that it must not have a cream sauce.

Naturally it arrived swimming in the stuff as if it was born in it.  I called the waiter who was the archetypal French kind, portly with black hair slicked down, a moustache and a sneer.  On informing him that I had asked for the dish without cream, he snorted, picked up the plate as if I had stolen it in the first place and stomped into the kitchen.  He stomped back some time later with the lamb "sans crème".  It was as if a lactose intolerant tourist had absolutely no right to be in France if she could not eat their magnificent food.

One thing the French do well is conserve power.  In many hotels the hallways are unlit.  You need to push a switch, when you can find it, that gives you about thirty seconds to find your room.  Notre Dame Cathedral is dim inside in the daytime and there is also no lighting until someone puts a coin in a slot.  The lighting doesn't stay on long so it's best to work in relay with other tourists so you can look around and take some photos.

There also isn't much lighting used in the Palace of Versailles and you are not permitted to take photos with a flash.  It is said bursts of bright light gradually damage the décor and artworks.  This is also true in the Louvre.

The gardens at Versailles aren't as beautiful, in my opinion, as those surrounding other lesser chateaux.  The worst part of Versailles, however, were the toilets that you pay to use.  French toilets are problematic at the best of times, but these catered to many tourists and were dirty, smelly and not the best memory of my trip.

Good and bad memories both make a trip and, had we traveled on a pre-arranged tour, there is a lot we would have missed.  Although doing it on your own can be stressful, it's more of an adventure and the unexpected really adds another dimension to the experience.

On the subject of shopping, I didn't find it any better in France than here in Australia.  I can hear you say, "Oh, you must be joking."  No, I'm not.  Not only that, Australian cafes were superior in their variety of food if not in their sense of superiority.  In fact frites (now I know why they are called French fries) were available in the cafes there which I found amazing.

I did try to shop for clothes and shoes and to find something different to what is on offer in Australia, but to no avail.  I went through department stores, along the boutiques of the Champs Elysees, past the couturiers and I looked in every shoe shop I passed.  In Nice I finally bought two pairs of shoes but in the end I didn't buy much at all.

Before leaving Paris I just had to buy something that would be a memento of the trip.  In a Limoges shop I found just the thing.  It was a candle holder made of  delicate, bisque white porcelain made by Bernardaud, an allied company of Limoges.  It was about ten centimetres in diameter and made up of a dome that sits on a small plate.  The plate holds a jasmine scented tea candle.  The dome had been engraved by laser with the great landmarks of Paris and, when lit from inside by the candle, they look three-dimensional.  The candle lights up the thin shell of the dome and it makes it glow.  It cost me AUD$110 and must have been one of the first of its kind.

A few years later in Australia I found just such a dome again, a number of them in fact, with different engravings.  The inside was glazed white but that was the only difference.  It was manufactured by the Japanese and cost AUD$12 but I still treasure the one I bought in France.  It also has "Limoges, Bernardaud, France", stamped underneath.

We had to move hotels on our last two nights in Paris as our room had been booked in advance for that time.  Fortunately we found an even nicer hotel nearby.  The last night in Paris, Hyde's sister came over when I was safely asleep.  I really didn't wish to see her again. They spent the entire night in the lobby smoking and talking.  Hyde didn't sleep at all.  The concierge at the desk for the night was probably treated to more smoke inhalation than he had ever had in his life up to that time.  Poles can really smoke.  Of course Hyde fell asleep on the journey home even though we were crammed into the plane like sardines.

Perhaps I should take up smoking too.  He seems to cope with things better than I do.

END.