Hôtel l’Elysée - taken for a ride!

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Hôtel l'Elysee, Val d'Europe

This is the report that I shared on TripAdvisor about my stay last September in the Hôtel l’Elysée outside Paris, near Disneyland.

I stayed here with my girlfriend for 3 days in September. We chose to stay here because it was a great deal cheaper than the Disneyland “Sequoia Lodge” hotel, which would’ve been our first choice. I think from the pictures and the reviews on TripAdvisor, we’d managed to convince ourselves that although the price for the room was relatively cheap it wasn’t a “cheap hotel”. However, upon first entering the hotel we were quickly disabused of that particular illusion - the hotel smelt like the Ibis Stevenage. Furthermore, the wi-fi, although free, was tortuously slow and there were some unsightly looking marks on the toilet seat.

Which isn’t to say it was all bad. It was conveniently close to Disneyland with a free shuttle service to take us there and there was free wi-fi (albeit slow and buggy with page time-outs). But we had a fantastic time at Disneyland - I recommend going on the “Finding Nemo” rollercoaster which is great fun.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Not unlike the American Embassy, Disneyland Paris is a
little piece of the USA on French soil.

Basically you get what you pay for with this place.

There was one thing however, that really did irk me and which I think merits a complaint. We got terrible service when calling for a cab to take us to the station where we could catch the airport express shuttle. They didn’t call a regular taxi, but some shuttle service, with whom, I’m sure, they have some kind of arrangement. We were already pushing it with time, but we had to wait another 15 minutes for this shuttle service. When we finally were in the shuttle, he didn’t take us direct to our destination, but instead picked-up two other passengers, notwithstanding that we had told him what time we had to be at the station. The driver himself was a caricature of a sleazebag unscrupulous cab-driver, when I complained to him at the end of the trip for getting us to the destination later than we’d asked he tried to blame us for not departing early enough, and then to top it all off when I offered him 50EUR for the fare he pretended not to have any change! It wasn’t until I demanded his name that he finally produced four 10EUR notes. Slimey son of a …

Needless to say we missed our shuttle bus and had to pay another taxi to take us all the way to Charles de Gaulle. This time we found an honest cab-driver from the long cab-rank at the station. The fare ended-up costing 70EUR!

And I’ll leave the story about the easyJet flight and landing at Luton airport for another post!

The Parasites of European Tourism: Awful Restaurants in Top Spots

Image via Samuli Lintula, Wikipedia

For any of the cafés at the Piazza della Signoria, Florence,
expect to pay exorbitant prices.

The greatest problem with going on a tour of the main sites of a new and foreign city is lunch. Where do you go, when you’re hungry from exploring a city that you don’t know very well, you’re miles away from your hotel and you haven’t packed anything to take with you? Occasionally, you find yourself going to familiar fast-food chains just because you’ll know what to expect. But when in Paris, or Florence, or somewhere with a good reputation for food, do you really want to be eating at McDonalds? So you try having a look for a nice restaurant, or café to eat and here comes the real problem: those parasitic restaurateurs that live off of the good culinary reputation of a particular country or city or region to serve you rubbish on a plate and charge the world for it.

Such restaurants and cafés are always to be found in tourist hubs, a pub in Covent Garden, the bistro across from Notre Dame, or the Al Fresco café in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. They survive because they get their traffic not from their own good reputation, but from the reputation of whatever tourist attraction that they are close to. As David Whitley of Grumpy Traveller has commented:

“They know they won’t get repeat trade, they know people on holiday fritter away money at a rate they’d not dream of at home, and they know that the odd upset customer is worth the gain.


“And they’re always the places where service is worst.”

But the corollary that no-one seems to notice about this parasitic practice is that the loser in the end (apart from the unhappy customer) is the reputation of the country or the place that is being so parasitically exploited in this way. So much so that, having visited Tuscany I can honestly tell you that although Florence is such a significant city in European history and although it has such great architecture and the Uffizi and Accademia are unmissable, the entire city is a giant tourist trap, and for the real Tuscan experience I would recommend nearby Lucca, which has its own splendid Piazzas, cathedrals and fountains and a significant and interesting history of its own.

And the real big-time loser in this parasitic practice is France. To the extent that you might find a columnist in Britain’s “The Independent” fatuously claim that British food is better than French. For an Australian who’d never been Paris, such a claim would be dismissed as ridiculous, just on reputation alone, even more so for an Australian whose experience of British cuisine was the pub-grub of north Hertfordshire. But for my part, as I had been to Paris, I could see that there was some credibility in the columnist’s claim. Unfortunately, France which, since at least the 50s has enjoyed a pre-eminent position in the culinary world, nowadays suffers from such a rash of mediocre restaurants that I can well imagine that around the world, everyday there are hordes of holidaymakers returning from France with a massive sense of disappointment at the much-vaunted “French cuisine” that they’d heard so much about.

Image via Wikipedia

A beautiful view from atop the Cathédrale Notre-Dame 
de Paris, but I'm sure that there aren't any great
restaurants to be seen! Tourist hubs like the Île de la
Cité are no-go zones for good food and good service.

For Paris in particular, the world’s most visited city, with 45 million tourists a year, it is a particular problem, and having visited the city four times, I still can’t recommend a restaurant for my readers for a mind-blowing French-food experience. For that, I would urge readers to visit l’Alchemiste in Saumur in the Loire Valley, a place I never would have found were it not for the recommendation of my hosts when staying at Château de Verrières.

Autumn in the Loire Valley

Image via Tom Häkkinen
The town of Langeais

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Leaf-fall outside the Château de Chenonceau

In October, before returning to Australia, Esther and I went on one last continental excursion from the UK. To a part of France we’d never seen before but wanted to visit. The Loire Valley - a region of vineyards, chateaux and an incredible river.

We stayed in a small boutique hotel in the town of Saumur. It’s a fantastic region, quintessentially French, and Autumn was a perfect time to visit as well. Approaching France, as always, from a literary-historic background, what first attracted me to the Anjou region was the knowledge that this was the homeland of the Angevin Kings of England. Henry II, King Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland. This period in history was singularly important in English history, coming as it did, so shortly after the Norman Invasion and which saw the signing of the Magna Carta.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
The Maze in the grounds of Château de Chenonceau

The first Angevin King, King Henry II of Anjou, who married Eleanor of Aquitaine, presided over a realm that extended from the border with Scotland in the North to the Pyrenees in the South, encompassing much more of France than the King of France, Louis VII actually controlled. The Angevin’s origins amongst the French nobility and historical ties to lands in France were to sow the seeds for the Hundred Years War two centuries later. This was also the period, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, that saw all those fantastic French loan-words enter English, words to do with Gouvernance, Justice and the Court, etc. Not to mention it being the most-romanticised period, a time of troubadours, chivalry, Robin Hood and England’s favourite King: Richard the Lionheart or Richard Coeur de Lion. So I was eager to visit that part of France where the Angevin influence began.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
The Mairie of Chenonceau

But, as I found out, if you’d never read a history book before in your life. You’d still love this part of France. Unlike Provence which is also beautiful, the Loire seems quintessentially French in a way that happily reflects all of your preconceptions. That perfect table at a French cafe, sitting in the dappled sun of plane trees, which you’d hunted Paris up and down for, is in fact much more likely to be found in Tours. Travelling the high-speed rail-link that connects Nantes to Paris, you will come across the most delightful kind of towns, so quaint and picturesque, like the town of Chenonceau, with it’s few streets, Mairie, ecole and bistro, and surrounded by vineyards and woods.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Grape vines - laden with ripe fruit

Our hotel was likewise a fantastically clichéd chateau. It’s gothic dimensions actually intimidating at night. And the Saturday farmer’s market was really alive with all varieties of mushrooms, berries, fruits and vegetables. When buying a punnet of strawberries I asked whether they were grown locally:

« Qu’est-ce que le provenance de ceux-ci ? »
« Trente kilomètres. »

Image via Tom Häkkinen
The Hôtel de Ville, Tours

Thirty kilometres! That’s local. One day, waiting for the train from Chenonceau, the vines heavy with grapes in the vineyard opposite almost tempted me to jump the ditch surrounding the vineyard and sample some. They did look delicious and fat from a bountiful and verdant land.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Picnic on the banks of the Cher: Château de Chenonceau
is visible in the background, whilst mushrooms arise from
the Autumnal earth in the foreground.

So with the vineyards, the local produce, the cute little towns with their municipal buildings and symbols of the Republic, as well the chateaux and the history, I couldn’t imagine a better place to visit.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
The gothic lines of Château de Verrières come alive at night.

Whatever Happened to the Rude French?



Image via Tom Häkkinen
Disneyland Paris

Disneyland Paris is not really in Paris. In fact, it’s not really in France at all. Like the U.S. Embassy, Disneyland Paris is a little piece of America in the centre of Europe (Val d’Europe to be precise). And it is populated by a kind of Euromerican, typical American suburban families, except that they hail from the Netherlands, or Germany or Italy or England.

And the most frustrating thing about Disneyland Paris is that it’s almost impossible to speak French there. Unless that is, you speak very fast and very fluently, or unless someone is trying to rip you off. The worst people there are the smug service staff who work at hotel receptions, McDonald’s counters and other places never frequented by le vrai français. These are people who can speak 5 different languages with varying degrees of fluency and they take delight in correcting your broken French and then proceeding to talk down to you in English. And if you’ve ever been talked down to by someone serving you French fries at McDonalds you’ll know it’s not a fantastic feeling.

In fact, if you wish to maintain your dignity with these smug gits the best thing to do is to begin in English from the get go – without so much as a “parlez-vous anglais?” or even a “do you speak English?” – and simply expect them to know what you’re talking about. But, having some small proficiency in French I can never bring myself to take this philistine route. So I begin in French and feel under intense pressure not to give myself away as a native English speaker – even if this means nodding in agreement and replying “oui, d’accord” when in fact I have no idea what the other person has just said to me. Because just a single “pardon?” will straight-away give me away – upon hearing this word, the smug-git-member-of-staff will immediately narrow his or her eyes at me and re-evaluate his or her initial impression:

« Hmm, ceci n’est pas un vrai français – il est un anglais, en déguisement d’un français – ceci est un imposteur ! »

And so inevitably the smug git’s next response will be “Ingleesh? Yass?” and he or she will say so with a decidedly superior tone.

At times I wish I could wear a shirt or carry a sign that read:

« Je suis un idiot. Parlez-moi lentement – pas en anglais ! »

I would actually be grateful if people would speak to me slowly like an idiot and not immediately switch to English for my benefit. Because the thing is I can speak French, having been learning on-and-off for the better part of five years I have by now a decent working vocabulary, I just find it difficult to hear the words when native French speakers speak so fast. If only French people came with subtitles below them that would be the ideal solution – unfortunately this isn't the case.

The last thing is, often-times, the smug-git-member-of-staff’s English won’t be near as much cause for feeling superior as he or she might think it is. And this sometimes causes problems, as I remember upon seeing a member of staff yelling “French fries, you want French fries” at a poor customer once, when from my position back in the queue I could see that wasn’t what she wanted at all.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Does this monument not posses a certain...
arrogance?

Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned rude Frenchman of the type you are still likely to find in an SNCF office when your ticket has been cancelled? You know, the type who will suddenly turn cold and unhelpful even after the meekest and most humble of “parlez-vous anglais?”. Or who will pretend not to know English out of spite if he or she doesn’t like your attitude. Whatever happened to that famous French arrogance which made the country great. Because, whilst these service assistants can be smug and pretentious and even sometimes snobbish and cliqueish it takes real arrogance to know how to speak English perfectly and yet not do so just because you'd rather speak French. And a whole sort of "je ne sais quoi" or "savoir vivre" or "jeu d'esprit" accompanies that kind of arrogance.

It's in fact not altogether unlike the arrogance of those writers who refuse to translate quotations from foreign languages!

The Search for the Perfect French Restaurant (3 of 3)

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Travelling "First Class" on the TGV

The gripping finale to a tale of adventure, intrigue and gluttony.


Part 3 of 3

Chapitre Trois - in which our adventurers head to Paris, encountering on the way trains en grève and the angry gods of Eyjafjallajökull in far away Iceland rain down a cloud of ash upon Europe, leaving our gourmands-errant stranded in Paris and unable to return to England.

We left Avignon with four “First Class” tickets to Paris on the superfast Trains à Grande Vitesse (TGV). A train which has clocked speeds of upwards of 574 km/h and in whose first class cabins we were expecting, to quote from the Rail Europe website “drop-down tables suitable for laptops”, “powerpoints” and “extra legroom and larger seats equipped with power recline”.

Arriving in the cathedral-like Avignon Gare TGV we found a ourselves amidst some form of popular unrest. The CGT and SUD-Rail workers had stopped work in protest over planned redundancies. We could forget about “extra legroom” - we were given new tickets on a train at a different time and everyone was bundled together, sitting on the steps, sitting on our suitcases in the aisles, in fact if you were sitting at all you were lucky. The French word complet doesn’t seem to me to sufficiently convey how packed it was. Thus for two and a half hours, whizzing by at 200km/h we sat in the aisles and on the steps of the train. Sporadically, from my standing position on the train steps I was able to lean over some seated passengers and armpit over their heads shove my camera against the window. I have some photos of the countryside we would have enjoyed.

On our last evening before flying back to London, we found that we still hadn’t found le repas parfait, only had some tantalising glimpses of existence, a nice tagine at Au 35 Rue Jacob, outstanding chocolates, croissants, viennoiseries, cafés aux laits - but the perfect meal? Not yet. We had one meal left, we thought we’d try Le Pré Aux Clercs in St. Germain des Prés.

Le Pré Aux Clercs is a nice restaurant in a nice part of Paris, bookstores are open till midnight and there are cool looking Jazz clubs on every street corner. The restaurant was bustling, a good sign and the service was good notwithstanding being a group of noisy Anglophones, something which doesn’t always predispose one to receiving excellent service in France. But there was something missing, the food and wine were both very nice - but the place lacked the je ne sais quoi necessary to make le repas parfait. So, happily we walked home on a full stomach and contented, but I still felt a tinge of sadness that we had never found le repas parfait.

Image via Tom Häkkinen
Admiring Le Louvre

The next morning we packed our bags and readied ourselves to leave. My aunt and Esther’s mum went to a cafe to have one last café au lait as only the Parisians can make them and Esther and I crossed the Seine to Le Louvre to have one last look at my favourite building in the Universe. As we were admiring Renaissance architecture at its finest Esther received a call from her mum: apparently there had been a volcano in Iceland and flights were being grounded. Esther and I laughed together in the Paris sunshine of the Tuileries as we returned circuitously to our hotel

“Imagine if our flight was cancelled from this volcano. First strikes and then a volcano.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be funny.”

Well, I suppose it was a bit funny, in retrospect. Rumbling away in far off Iceland an angry Eyjafjallajökull had spewed forth an ash cloud through fire and ice that had grounded flights all over northern Europe. It would seem that Hephaestus the old god of artisans had sought revenge on the fact that human industry no longer made sacrifices to him and thus sent a cloud of ash to ground the European aviation industry.

Returning to the hotel we found out that our flight was delayed, indefinitely. We were in fact fortunate that my aunt’s sister (also my aunt) had warned her about the volcano because I’m sure it would have been chaos had we found out about it upon arriving at the airport. So there we were stranded in Paris. When we went to the nearest Air France office the staff there were less than useless, more or less directing us to a local SNCF office. The SNCF offices in turn were already full of angry Frenchmen whose train tickets had been cancelled due to the strikes. Hearing rumours that Calais was fast filling up with stranded Englishmen, we instead bought tickets to Dieppe, hoping to be able to procure passage on the Dieppe to Newhaven ferry.

It was in fact a pleasant and mostly uneventful journey to Dieppe, past Normandy meadows filled with cows and occasionally sheep. Arriving at the train station in Dieppe, LD Lines had organised representatives to be present at the train station to organise a bus to take us from our hotels to the ferry at five o’clock the next morning. This self-same representative dropped us off herself at our hotel, Mercure Hotel La Présidence. So we strolled along the waterfront at Dieppe admiring the ancient castle, and we headed into the market area and bought some cheese and butter to take back with us to our house in England. After a long day we retired to our hotels defeated and resigned ourselves to the hotel restaurant - having no energy to hunt out the perfect jolie brasserie for our stay.

Finally, where we least expected it, on a circuitous detour to a town we never would have visited were it not for the intervention of an angry Icelandic volcano, we found ourselves seated at a round table enjoying le repas parfait. Sitting by the sea, enjoying a bon vin, although I didn’t care to take note of the name, discussing and laughing about the crazy circumstances that led to our arrival in this town and happy in the knowledge that we were safely on track to arrive home, we finally realised the most important components of le repas parfait as the waiters brought beautifully dressed plates to our tables with vegetables sliced thin as paper, sauce drizzled around the plate and tender pieces of beef, duck and chicken on our respective meals. I don’t recall the names of the meals, because the perfect meal is not about filet de boeuf à l’ecorce d’orange or vermicelles dores aux baies roses, le repas parfait is about company, comfort and not having a care in the world.

Image via Wikipedia

Dieppe Castle

To be sure, the restaurant La Présidence is a Michelin-recommended restaurant, run by head chef David Limare formerly of La Cote Saint-Jacques (3 Michelin stars) and the Responsable de la Restauration is Patrick Pollet member of the Disciples Escoffier. These details do help a little.

Italian wine: "Probably tastes like vinegar" (So what hope for Australian?)

A snippet of French attitudes towards wine: Australian wines are popular in Britain - but in what esteem are they held in France? The opportunity to consult a French waiter presented itself when dining at a restaurant in Nice when we popped over for the February half-term break.

It wasn't one of those jolly little brasseries that have that typical bistro atmosphere so unique to France because Esther wanted to visit an upmarket place to enjoy pretentious French cuisine at it's best. Being Nice, it had a strong Italian influence, and the waiter serving me the Italian wine I ordered (the only wine that I could afford) disdainfully remarked (in English) that it probably tastes like vinegar - 'Italian wine's not that good'.

So later in the meal I braced myself and asked his opinion of Australian wine. His reply was that he didn't know - he'd never tasted it - but he thought he knew someone who might have tried it before. (Yes thought he knew someone who might have tried it - very re-assuring). Thus although popular with the un-discerning English, it would seem Australian wine has barely made a dent in France. And furthermore, as Australian wine-growing has such a strong Italian heritage, the waiter's disdain for Italian wines wouldn't bode well for the popularity of Australian wine either. But before the end of the meal, the waiter returned, he'd consulted his 'friend' who'd tried Australian wine - apparently "he says it's quite good".

Tentatively I would conclude, the base Australian attitude to winning at everything works. Sure it's crass and vulgar - like Ricky Ponting's team of sore losers and even worse winners. But perhaps through a trophy culture and lots of wine-tastings, Australian wine might surpass it's "humble" Italian origins. Although of course, like cosmopolitan Britain's "food culture" it's not built on a solid foundation of long-standing traditions. Australia doesn't do long-standing traditions; unless you want to count its history of racism or the decrepit old Labor party.

In comparison, I don't think Italian wine-makers would be particularly bothered that a waiter in France doesn't rate their wine; winning trophies isn't the reason why Italians make wine. Likewise although the French are universally acknowledged as the masters of wine-making, they are so not because that's a stated goal of French wine-makers; rather they are so because they have a long infatuation with wine that dates as far back as Julius Caesar's observation that it was known for a Gaul to trade a slave for a single amphora of wine. The French will continue to produce and drink their own wine regardless of how it is perceived by the outside world.

In that case will the "winning" attitude last? Or will Australian wine-making success, built on the shaky foundation of a 1980s fad for 'haute cuisine', fall as meteorically as it has risen?

Only time will tell...