Ici on parle francais -- quelle domage!

Well, here I am, sitting in a hotel room looking out over the rooftops of Grenoble. I am still feeling a bit stunned by the travels, so haven’t truly come to appreciate the virtues of this mid-sized city in the foothills of the French Alps.

My first impressions of Grenoble are: They have the sexiest looking trolley-cars I’ve ever seen and their presence makes me wonder why the hell we bowed down to GM and Firestone Tire and killed most of our streetcar systems in North America, with a few notable exceptions like Toronto, San Francisco, San Diego and New Orleans – ‘A Crosstown Bus Named Desire’ just wouldn’t work; the people here seem to be French, and hence speak accordingly, rendering me appreciative of the fact that I am utterly ‘not’ bilingual, though I try, just to be polite; there is a big ethnic enclave here consisting of assorted Arabic sorts, Armenians, Vietnamese, Thais, and Africans from the various former French colonies; don’t be going into a beanery at 5:30 pm. Expecting to get a meal, mainly because the place won’t be open until 7; don’t tip for service in said eatery, which leaves one with the sneaking suspicion that restaurants must actually pay their servers sufficient to live on – what a concept; don’t expect rapid-fire service, on the other hand; don’t be overtly ‘familiar’ with strangers with your assorted ‘bonjours’ and ‘bonsoirs’, you will be eyed with suspicion; the French must smoke more than all the rest of the world’s citizens combined; and so on and so on.

Our journey from Vancouver to Grenoble was relatively uneventful. The flight to Heathrow on British Airways was quite OK and the skies were so clear over Greenland that I was able to get some fantastic photos of the ice-cap; all of which left me with suspicions about the motivations of the global warming fanatics; whatever is the case, that sucker’s not going to melt within my lifetime so what the hell do I care?

We booked a little hotel near Heathrow and it was perfectly adequate and relatively quiet and, being English, the toilet just flushed when it wanted to, not at one’s own whim. “It’s all in the wrist,” I told Wendy. Since I had lived in England once, I knew the perversities of their loos. By God, I still had the touch. She was very impressed with my cosmopolitan-ness.

The next morning it was out to Heathrow again. Wendy mistakenly booked a mini-cab and we had to pay the rip-off price of three pounds extra over the regular cab fare to the terminal, oh well. I told her we might see someone famous at the airport. And sure enough, we got into a queue, and I recognized the voice of the woman chatting in front of me. It was Maureen Lipmann, who may not be familiar to all, but she is an actress I would put on a near par with Judi Dench and Helen Mirren. I avoid such facile impulses, but it was much more of a thrill to me than seeing some entity like Madonna (though Kate Winslet would have been nice.)

Our flight from London to Lyon took about 1½ hours. From Lyon (which I leaned is France’s second largest city), we caught a very sleek train and headed off to Grenoble – and here I am this Monday morning. Our Internet is not yet hooked up but, if you are reading this, you will know it has been.

More later, mes amis.