marko
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2011
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With apologies to Peter Mayle...
(Just thought I'd break up a horrible week in the market with a fond memory. A bit long but some of you may find it interesting)
One of the nice things about my old job was that our customers and clients were almost always located in interesting and nice locales. We had few opportunities to chase down in Detroit or Cleveland and more of them in California, Hong Kong, or Amsterdam.
Today was no exception.
I had been living in Paris for a few years and my French associate, Daniel (Dahn-yell) and I were visiting customers in Provence France. It was a nice warm sunny spring day and we had arrived to the area early, just around 11 AM. With a few hours to kill before our meeting and Daniel, always looking for something to show-off in his beloved France, we ended up in a tiny, tree lined village. Sorry, but I cannot remember the name of the place. The town was so small that cars were not allowed on most of the streets as they –the cars, were too wide for the streets. You could almost stand in the middle of the road and just about touch the houses on each side.
As we approached town, we arrived upon four very old ladies, dressed in the compulsory head-to-toe black who were walking in the middle of a narrow street; empty plastic gallon jugs in their hands.
Daniel slowed his car to a creep behind them.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Shhhh…just wait…see the bottles?”.
So here was this odd, impromptu little parade. Daniel and me in his shiny new BMW crawling along this barely paved, tree lined road led by four old ladies obliviously chatting away amongst each other. They didn’t know –and probably wouldn’t care if they did know—that we were only 10 feet behind them, rolling along at their snail’s pace.
This went on for about 15 minutes which translated to only a few hundred feet. Good thing the air conditioning worked. I fell asleep for awhile only to find that when I woke the parade was still in full waddle.
Finally, the old ladies hooked a left and ducked into their destination: an old and apparently abandoned gas station.
It wasn’t really abandoned, but the owners had just abandoned the idea of selling gasoline.
“Here we are! Get out!” Daniel commanded with his usual French attitude.
We walked into the gas station to find an enormous stainless steel tank –about as big as a school bus. Sitting on a stool talking to the ladies was an equally old man with a garden hose in his hand. The garden hose was connected on one end to the tank and a regular hose spray nozzle on the other.
From the nozzle, he was filling the empty gallon jugs with –red wine.
Having filled their jugs, chatted for a while, munching on a bit of bread and cheese, the proprietor bid the ladies a cordial and lengthy ‘au revoir’ and then turned his attention to us. He looked at us as though we had just appeared in place, but we had been standing there for maybe 15 minutes.
At this point Daniel went into his ritual French discussion about what kind of wine was in the tank, where it came from, who was the vintner, who the proprietor’s family was, who Daniel was, and so on and so on and so on.
Another ten or fifteen minutes of French jabbering about wine, cheese, bread, weather, politics, food, dogs, cats, cars and –the one subject you can rarely escape in France, World War II.
In the end, the old man handed us juice glasses and, with a bit of flourish hauled out his garden hose, squeezed the nozzle and poured us each a nice juice glass of wine.
The wine was actually pretty good. Very good.
From my experience, you’d pay about $35 for a bottle of this quality.
After another twenty minutes of arguing about the plusses and minuses of the contents of our juice glass, Daniel produced about 20 Euros ($25) and for that tidy sum, the old man loaded two cases (!!) of wine into the trunk of the BMW.
At a buck a bottle, Daniel had made a fairly good score.
“It is nothing…you can get good wine like this all the time around here…for peanuts”.
With our first mission accomplished, we then went about searching the second –and more important part of any French day –lunch.
Somehow, Daniel found a very tiny restaurant –actually the dining/living room in the house of an old lady. The room held five tables. Printed tablecloths, the same juice glasses as the wine man, and freshly cut flowers placed on each table in an old mason jar. I just knew that we were in for a treat.
After more of the compulsory chatter with the old lady, we learned that she was 86 years old and had been up since 4:30 AM cooking a rabbit that her son (he’d have to be about sixty five) had caught the afternoon before.
To make a long story short, the meal was memorable enough to make it into this narrative –25 years later. It was amazingly sweet, fresh and delicious. We ordered a bottle of wine, which, not surprisingly tasted exactly like the wine we had just bought down the street. As we were the only visitors this noon-time, the old lady showed up with her own plate, glass of wine and, uninvited-but most welcome, joined us at our table.
More jabbering in French, more sips of wine, a little more rabbit…
I don’t remember the customer visit that we made afterward; I’m sure it went well.
That night we checked into an amazing little hotel in Aix. Originally, it had something to do with the King of France’s stables. In fact, the hotel was a long stone building, and, only once you were told about the stables, was it obvious that that is exactly what it had been and long since ‘evolved’.
That evolution had been so well done, so completely executed, that to the casual eye, you’d never know that you were going to be sleeping in the exact same space as had been one of the King’s horses. No idea where the King’s men slept in those days.
Each room was as wide as two stables would be and had a ground level entrance which led in from a small private garden area.
So, in this case, the room was really good sized, but had the bed up in a loft area that had been built for that purpose. A spiral staircase against a stone wall lead up to the bed/bath area. The first floor had nice warm and comfortable living area. Stone walls, mahogany woodwork, brass everywhere. It was elegant. I could have lived there for a year.
We had a nice dinner in Aix. Walked around. Stopped for some wine. France!!
(Just thought I'd break up a horrible week in the market with a fond memory. A bit long but some of you may find it interesting)
One of the nice things about my old job was that our customers and clients were almost always located in interesting and nice locales. We had few opportunities to chase down in Detroit or Cleveland and more of them in California, Hong Kong, or Amsterdam.
Today was no exception.
I had been living in Paris for a few years and my French associate, Daniel (Dahn-yell) and I were visiting customers in Provence France. It was a nice warm sunny spring day and we had arrived to the area early, just around 11 AM. With a few hours to kill before our meeting and Daniel, always looking for something to show-off in his beloved France, we ended up in a tiny, tree lined village. Sorry, but I cannot remember the name of the place. The town was so small that cars were not allowed on most of the streets as they –the cars, were too wide for the streets. You could almost stand in the middle of the road and just about touch the houses on each side.
As we approached town, we arrived upon four very old ladies, dressed in the compulsory head-to-toe black who were walking in the middle of a narrow street; empty plastic gallon jugs in their hands.
Daniel slowed his car to a creep behind them.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Shhhh…just wait…see the bottles?”.
So here was this odd, impromptu little parade. Daniel and me in his shiny new BMW crawling along this barely paved, tree lined road led by four old ladies obliviously chatting away amongst each other. They didn’t know –and probably wouldn’t care if they did know—that we were only 10 feet behind them, rolling along at their snail’s pace.
This went on for about 15 minutes which translated to only a few hundred feet. Good thing the air conditioning worked. I fell asleep for awhile only to find that when I woke the parade was still in full waddle.
Finally, the old ladies hooked a left and ducked into their destination: an old and apparently abandoned gas station.
It wasn’t really abandoned, but the owners had just abandoned the idea of selling gasoline.
“Here we are! Get out!” Daniel commanded with his usual French attitude.
We walked into the gas station to find an enormous stainless steel tank –about as big as a school bus. Sitting on a stool talking to the ladies was an equally old man with a garden hose in his hand. The garden hose was connected on one end to the tank and a regular hose spray nozzle on the other.
From the nozzle, he was filling the empty gallon jugs with –red wine.
Having filled their jugs, chatted for a while, munching on a bit of bread and cheese, the proprietor bid the ladies a cordial and lengthy ‘au revoir’ and then turned his attention to us. He looked at us as though we had just appeared in place, but we had been standing there for maybe 15 minutes.
At this point Daniel went into his ritual French discussion about what kind of wine was in the tank, where it came from, who was the vintner, who the proprietor’s family was, who Daniel was, and so on and so on and so on.
Another ten or fifteen minutes of French jabbering about wine, cheese, bread, weather, politics, food, dogs, cats, cars and –the one subject you can rarely escape in France, World War II.
In the end, the old man handed us juice glasses and, with a bit of flourish hauled out his garden hose, squeezed the nozzle and poured us each a nice juice glass of wine.
The wine was actually pretty good. Very good.
From my experience, you’d pay about $35 for a bottle of this quality.
After another twenty minutes of arguing about the plusses and minuses of the contents of our juice glass, Daniel produced about 20 Euros ($25) and for that tidy sum, the old man loaded two cases (!!) of wine into the trunk of the BMW.
At a buck a bottle, Daniel had made a fairly good score.
“It is nothing…you can get good wine like this all the time around here…for peanuts”.
With our first mission accomplished, we then went about searching the second –and more important part of any French day –lunch.
Somehow, Daniel found a very tiny restaurant –actually the dining/living room in the house of an old lady. The room held five tables. Printed tablecloths, the same juice glasses as the wine man, and freshly cut flowers placed on each table in an old mason jar. I just knew that we were in for a treat.
After more of the compulsory chatter with the old lady, we learned that she was 86 years old and had been up since 4:30 AM cooking a rabbit that her son (he’d have to be about sixty five) had caught the afternoon before.
To make a long story short, the meal was memorable enough to make it into this narrative –25 years later. It was amazingly sweet, fresh and delicious. We ordered a bottle of wine, which, not surprisingly tasted exactly like the wine we had just bought down the street. As we were the only visitors this noon-time, the old lady showed up with her own plate, glass of wine and, uninvited-but most welcome, joined us at our table.
More jabbering in French, more sips of wine, a little more rabbit…
I don’t remember the customer visit that we made afterward; I’m sure it went well.
That night we checked into an amazing little hotel in Aix. Originally, it had something to do with the King of France’s stables. In fact, the hotel was a long stone building, and, only once you were told about the stables, was it obvious that that is exactly what it had been and long since ‘evolved’.
That evolution had been so well done, so completely executed, that to the casual eye, you’d never know that you were going to be sleeping in the exact same space as had been one of the King’s horses. No idea where the King’s men slept in those days.
Each room was as wide as two stables would be and had a ground level entrance which led in from a small private garden area.
So, in this case, the room was really good sized, but had the bed up in a loft area that had been built for that purpose. A spiral staircase against a stone wall lead up to the bed/bath area. The first floor had nice warm and comfortable living area. Stone walls, mahogany woodwork, brass everywhere. It was elegant. I could have lived there for a year.
We had a nice dinner in Aix. Walked around. Stopped for some wine. France!!
