Day 8: Galled by the Gauls

Rocking the world.

My mother bought some stretchy Spanish pants in Palma yesterday. Today, she decided to wear them for the first time. Trust me, it is an awkward moment when a son is asked to give advice to a mother on her choice of pants. All I could think of saying was that if they work for Cher, Tina Turner and Mick Jagger, then why not for you!

I promised to take a rock album cover photo of her when I got the chance. It was going to be an interesting day.

Sète

This morning I realised that this is Tuesday, so we must have arrived in a place called Sète in the south of France. Once ashore, it didn’t take long to discover that France is remarkably different from Spain in many ways. Besides the language, here everybody smokes, drives around in cars covered in dents and scratches and there is rather a lot of dog shit on the pavements.

Sète (pronounced set) really is a charming place to visit and we had a lot of fun walking over the bridges crossing the canals. It’s easy to see why it is often described as the 'Little Venice of the Languedoc'. A fleet of fishing boats and trawlers line the quay and there is a bustle of working life here.

A nice French  cafe

After our morning hike to the viewpoint and back, it was nice to sit and enjoy life in one of the cafes in the centre. The café we chose actually turned out to be one of those places in France where you are punished for not speaking the local language fluently. 

My French is a little rusty and I made the mistake of ordering two cafe Americanos. The waitress with typical Gallic indifference eventually placed two very sad cups of black gritty coffee in front of us and a bill for EUR 3:40. 

Although I was a little nonplussed about this interpretation of American coffee, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves observing the other customers in the café. It was wonderful to see a typical French café with real French people in it, excluding of course the Finglishman and the woman with the stretchy pants.

Unfortunately, the waitress had decided that as we were not the kind of clientele her establishment catered for, she would not encourage us to come again. Unlike the other more respectable customers, we were not offered a complementary glass of water with our coffee and when I paid the bill with a five Euro note, the waitress decided not to bother bringing back the change.

Now, for me this was just an entertaining contrast to the sycophantic service we have been having on board the Saga Sapphire cruise ship for the past week. I was certainly not going to make a fuss over a couple of Euros and I enjoyed smiling at the waitress every time she walked passed, knowing that she knew that we knew that she had ripped us off. I do love the French.

The only potential fly in the ointment here actually came from my mother. Inspired, perhaps, by a new found strength from those stretchy pants, she wanted to have a go at the surly waitress. She told me that as a Yorkshire woman, she believed that there are some things that must never go unsung. And that particular French waitress had most certainly crossed the line. 

Now this would all have ended quite dramatically until I reminded her that shouting in English in a café in the south of France would achieve absolutely nothing; and besides it was my 2 Euros anyway and I thought it had all been worth it.