THE FRENCH ARE STILL THE FRENCH

My wife and I have just returned from a five-day holiday in France where, for the first time, we traveled by coach (bus). We were picked up in Eastbourne at the civilized hour of 11:05 a.m. Sunday by a “feeder” bus which took us to Hythe in Kent, about an hour and a half east of Eastbourne where we combined with other feeder buses to make up a party of thirty to board our Euro-Cruiser. We thought we might go the easy way through the “chunnel” from Dover to Calais, but instead we went by ferry, an hour and a half ride (as opposed to twenty minutes through the tunnel) to Calais and then faced a four-hour ride in our Euro-Cruiser to our destination of Cabourg in Normandy, so we were a tired bunch of puppies by the time we checked into our room at Le Grand Hotel in Cabourg.

Le Grand Hotel is truly grand, the product of la belle epoque, that era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when opulent palaces were the watering places of the rich. Marcel Proust, arguably the best French writer of the twentieth century, used to stay at the Grand in Cabourg with his family and has written many reminiscences of his times in Cabourg. There is even a casino next to the Grand. The beaches are sand but of an almost industrial grade, orangish and gritty, not the most inviting but still popular. We were there after the season, and most of the summer homes are boarded up. A long promenade along the front facing the beach makes for good walks and a vista of the summer mansions with their steep mansard roofs and dormers, often combining stucco and wood beams, similar to Elizabethan houses.

The main shopping street stretches north from a lovely garden and plaza in front of the hotel and has a variety of shops and restaurants where you can purchase, in food and drink, the wonderful cider produced in the area and Calvados, a potent brandy made from apple jack which can knock you on your can, as well as an assortment of cookies, pastries and bread for which Normandy is noted.

The first full day we drove to Mont St. Michel, a two-hour drive south, to see this famous castle built on a steep mount and surrounded by water. At low tide, the water recedes enough for the plethora of buses and cars to drive in park and infest the Mount with visitors. It is magnificent from a distance. Once you start the steep ascent up the cobbled streets, you are in a swarm of tourists and are exposed to an endless row of gift and novelty shops all selling the same tourist items at incredibly high prices. Some of the more avid shoppers in our group claim that every shop had identical prices, so I’m sure a bit of touristic collusion is going on. We found a delightful little inn and had a delicious lunch of les moules avec frites---mussels in shell in a cream sauce accompanied by French fries, all washed down with a delicious rose¢ wine. We were glad to see this picture postcard castle and mountain---but once is enough unless you just love being jostled in mob scenes.

The next day we were on our own in Cabourg and did the shopping/lunch routine. Once again we had mussels, this time in a meuniere sauce with more fries and, this time, bottled water. We had our dinners at the hotel where the food was delicious and creatively served, as the French do so well. The only drawback were the tables and chairs. Some efficiency engineer must have worked long and hard to devise a setting arrangement for thirty with two plus tables jammed together and stuffed almost immovable chairs in which to sit. It was a feat of advanced Yoga and contortion to get a seat, and then moving the chairs was like bench pressing.

The next day we went to Deauville, another exclusive resort town just a few miles from Cobourg. The weather started horribly with teeming rain just after we embarked from the bus. A compatible group of six of us spent forty minutes in a bus stop, trying to shield ourselves with umbrellas. Then we found a small restaurant/bar where we could have a drink and dry off. Fortunately, the weather later cleared and we were able to walk to the center of town where we saw scenic fountains and buildings. Deauville is very upper-class. There were American flags draped all around the main square in honor of an American Film Festival taking place that week. (Deauville is like the Cannes Film Festival of northern France.)

The last day was a wake-up call at 5:30, a quick breakfast, and the long bus ride to Calais where we connected with a noon ferry. Connections were smooth, and the feeder bus deposited us back in Eastbourne by 4:00 p.m.

My rating of coach travel; B-. Our driver was a nice guy, an amusing Yorkshireman, but he was a last-minute substitute for the regular tour driver for this area who was sick, and really didn’t know diddly squat about Normandy. It would have been nice to have had a director with some historical and local knowledge.

How do I rate France? Their politics are miserable and going through major convulsions at the moment. In fact, on the Tuesday they had a “national strike” to protest the new reforms President Sarkozy is trying to implement. The main grievance is raising retirement age from 60 to 62. 60 to 62---can you believe this crap? The poor darlings find it difficult to make such a change and join the rest of the world, which is talking about increasing retirement age everywhere. The people are fine individually. The Normands still fly in the major cities the flags of France, Canada, Great Britan and the U.S.A. in remembrance of D-Day and our liberation. The food makes it all worthwhile---ooh la la.

In other words, the French are still the French. In their own words, le plus qu’il change, le plus le meme: the more things change, the more they are the same!