It wasn't the rude bus drivers and waiters and hotel clerks who would get impatient with us at the first sign of an English accent.
We even overcame the mass transit system in spite of the schedule being as unintelligible to the layperson as an Arthur Andersen spreadsheet describing a plate of tangled spaghetti noodles.
No, it was more than that. Language barriers, weather woes, orientation problems... these issues, unpleasant as they are, accompany the traveler on the best of holidays and we dealt with them intrepidly. Piled on top of the usual, though, were extraordinary stressors, and the combination of everything left us homesick and weary to the point where if we could have gotten on a plane home any earlier, we would have.
To back up a little, I should remind the reader that my husband, D, was being wooed by a company located in the South of France. The negotiations, interviews and tests have been ongoing since October, and we've done a lot of excited research, planning, and thinking about the move. This trip was to be the final meeting with HR for that company, and they encouraged D to come to France not only for the interview but for a longer stay in order to get the feel of the place. They suggested he bring his family, too. He took them up on this - after all who would make such a drastic move without knowing all they could about their future life?
So we planned and budgeted and came up with a way to pull it off. We booked hotels, made a list of what we had to discover while we were there, we packed for mild to chilly weather, and set off on the mission. We left December 2nd and I cannot believe that today is only December 9th. It feels like a month went by since that first boarding call in Kingston.
The journey to get there was a gauntlet in and of itself, and we had to travel separately due to the arrangements that D's company had made. I had a 20 hour journey ahead of me which stretched into about 23 due to the missed flight in Frankfurt. The way air travel is handled these days is another post in itself, but let me sum it up this way:
Restaurants institute a policy whereby in order to eat you must let them punch you in the face when you first arrive and then again after you've had your meal. And ooooh yes, they still charge you for it.Nobody would put themselves through that for a meal. - That's how I now feel about air travel.
So there was the travel itself, the weather, the disorientation, the veiled hostility towards foreigners present in most places in the Cote D'Azur (don't get me wrong, there was the odd friendly person .. but it turned out that they were all from other regions of France). There was also the grafitti and the dirt and the tarps & corrugated steel fences that were so abundant and ubiquitous the place had the overall feel of a third world country. Sure, sure - we saw the gigantic yachts in the harbours and walked past the gates of homes that cost into the several millions of Euros -- but where the regular working folks lived (and we would have been regular working folks) was just plain ugly. I mean hold on tight to your purse, walk faster, what's with all these barred windows scary ugly.
We had come to terms with all of this between Friday night and Sunday morning. Sunday morning is when we checked out of the hotel we chose and began our trek to the hotel D's company chose for us which was close to what would have been his office building. And that's when things went as close to the vacation from hell as things can get without involving hospitals or the police (thank God.)
It's a long story and I will someday write it all out, but for now I'll say that one little item no one told us about was that Sunday in the Cote D'Azur resembles a zombie apocalypse. Closed stores, double the prices for any available transport, shoestring services and hardly anywhere to get food. It's sort of 'every man for himself' if you're stupid enough to be out on the streets. Especially if you're and Anglo out on the streets with all of your luggage and an empty stomach trying to travel from one city to another. All I can say is: don't try it. It might be slightly better when it's warm and dry out, but I can't see it being pleasant under any circumstances.
D's company chose a hotel that turned out to be located in a hilly wilderness with very few walking paths, almost no bus service, and no amenities at all. The hotel relied on the neighbouring bigger, nicer hotel as the place they sent their guests for meals. And so, we walked over there. The man at the desk said that their dining room was closed, "only for today.. and it just an hour ago! What a bad coincidence!" Indeed. He suggested we order a pizza. Why hadn't we thought of that??!! We were happy to scoot back to our hotel and do just that.
We returned to the desk clerk at our own hotel and told her our dilemma. She made a big show of searching for Pizza Place menus, clucking and sighing that she just couldn't understand where they'd gone; after a time I asked her to please get on the internet to find the number. So she did, and then she started calling - and then she started sighing and clucking again.
"C'est pas normale!" she said. Apparently, by another strange coincidence none of the pizza places were answering their phones. A few minutes later she told us that they had only been open from 6 to 10 and now it's too late. I asked her to clarify, since it wasn't yet 6 p.m. and a spark of hope had lighted in me.
"Ils ouvrent a 6 ce soir?"
"Non, non. Closed. Open only seeks to ten zees morning."
What? We were getting paranoid. Could all of these pas normale coincidences actually be due to the fact that we are English? What kind of pizza place is open from 6 am to 10 am? Surely that couldn't be right. Surely it made more sense that the whole of the South of France was conspiring to starve us to death.
After exhausting all other options, our intrepid desk clerk sent us out hiking with a vague reference to a restaurant somewhere within 15 minutes that is probably open. We set out hopefully, however after walking for fifteen minutes in the freezing cold rain, crossing snaking highways that thankfully were almost deserted and jumping over rocky gullies with still no sign of life and no way to be sure which direction we should be going (there's that language barrier again), we turned around and headed back. I had pocketed six little cookies that had been given to us the day before with our coffee (there's another whole post right there.. the French drink a lot of coffee.. just not a lot in any one cup.)
Back at the hotel D got in to a hot shower but as soon as he moved the shower head, it fell off the wall. We were defeated. We didn't even tell the clerk since I was unwilling to try and piece together the French that would be required to explain it, and neither of us were up for moving our bags again. I had my shower anyway - I couldn't wet more than one part of my body at a time but at least it was warm in there.
After the showers it was still only 3:00 in the afternoon. The rest of the day didn't go any better, although we did eventually get food and we did eventually fall asleep that night - both with a lot of effort. It is so exhausting recounting this that I cannot bear to write out the details. The next morning was to be D's interview and you can probably guess what kind of feelings he had towards the company by that point in time.
He left at 10:30 to meet his potential employer, and his day there was supposed to last until 3 in the afternoon. By 11:45 he was back in our hotel room, packing up his things. He had turned them down flat - and not just because of our rotten experience in the region, but get this:
They told him that the company would deduct 23% of his pay off the top for the benefits package! And then, of course, the government would have its hand out for taxes, too! The numbers they had given us were completely wrong. We had budgeted according to bringing home 23% more than he would actually get.
It was the straw that broke the camel's back.
For the next 24 hours we were shell shocked. Poor D I think had it worse - he had the stress of the interview to contend with, and then its aftermath. I think his hopes at the outset were far higher than mine, too, meaning that the crash, for him, was much much more demoralizing. Before we had left for France I was already quite leery of the whole business. As a result he felt that he alone had gotten us into a mess. I hope that I provided him some comfort - I certainly tried to. It wasn't any fault of his.. we both wanted a change - a new adventure! And the planning had been fun. This wasn't a mess, really - it was just an experience. We owed it to ourselves to go and see, and it's no one's fault that we didn't like what we saw.
In the end though I think we both got a lot out of the trip. It was worth it for us to get the proverbial bucket of water thrown in our faces and come out of the trance we've kind of been living in for a couple of years. The grass is not always greener somewhere else. Appreciate what you've got. And seize every day.
Those phrases are worn-out for a reason. Disappointments? C'est normale.
As they say in the south of France, "Ciao."
3 comments:
Sad that it didn't work out. But, at least you tried. Had you not done so, there could have been that nagging doubt. It's a huge move. As a child, my family moved from Europe to here---everything we owned had to fit into a few trunks or get left behind. I recall the feeling. I hope D is doing okay too. Take care.
Yeah, it's a scary thought, leaving everything you know. We thought we were up for it, and I think had it been in Paris instead of the more traditional, old-school south, we would have fared a lot better. We were in Paris in 2008 and found it to be friendly, clean and easy to navigate. Full of interest & culture and people of all types. The South was very homogenous - so much so that the people really all started to look alike. I kept thinking I saw the same three men everywhere we went. And are they ever FRENCH. sounds stupid to say, but it's not like Paris where they know some English and don't seem to mind when an Anglo stumbles with their language. They also have a strange accent down there that is absent in Paris. they tend to over pronouce the ends of their words which makes it sound like they are adding in little words all over the place.
Nice isn't "nees" to them. It's "Nee-Suh" Carte wouldn't be 'cart,' instead they say "Car-tuh" Very confusing to someone used to Quebec french. It comes out as a virtually different language. I had no trouble communicating with the one cabbie we had and in the end of the conversation I found out why: he was from Paris.
Thanks for your well wishes for myself and D. Much appreciated. :)
This was a great post, you both will laugh at everything that happened soon, probably sooner that you think. Always go for dreams if you can.
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