My name is David, or Alex, depending on whether you’re talking to my friends or family. Nothing to do with identity theft, more to do with Welsh family tradition. Gemma is my girlfriend, and she’s the reason we’re here. She’s studying French and Spanish in university, and for three glorious months in the winter of 2009 we get to live in Toulouse. I decided to go with her after spending two years in a call centre job. I had nothing to lose.
N.B. I don’t speak French.
Observations 1
Dog poo is still very much en vogue in France. I’ve yet to encounter white dog poo, but it’s only a matter of time.
Shopping centres in France smell like wee drying on cheese, without exception.
I have an irresistible, juvenile urge to laugh at product names. Gayelord Mincir, Knacki Ball (a testicle-flavoured Pot Noodle), Master Cream. The only thing better than a dodgy product name is a dodgy shop front: Speed Rabbit Pizza and the incomparable Supermarche Tropical Afro Dom Tom.
It's funny...
The baguette sleeve says ‘pain’. I stare at my pain, and then I eat my pain. My pain is dry. Little line drawings of windmills accompany the pain, blowing crumbs of pain in my pained face. The hotel room is cheap and totally featureless. It reminds me of Gaza. Gemma is in the shower, no doubt wrestling with the curtain. It’s made of some kind of ultra-static polyester. A lint roller would lose in a fight with it. A week has passed since we arrived, a week where the ratio of expense to enjoyment has been so inversely proportional as to seem like a sick joke. Today we run the gauntlet. The hotel is fully booked and we are meeting our potential new landlord, a man by the name of M. Bigot.
The level of bureaucracy has been staggering. So far we’ve provided M. Bigot with almost twenty documents detailing our personal circumstances, plus identical copies of the same documents from my dad. If M. Bigot so wished, he could perform identity theft of the highest order. I’m not just referring to casual plundering of bank accounts and the registration of several mobile phone contracts – no – M. Bigot could guess what colour socks I’m wearing. It’s symptomatic of the French condition. They adore paperwork. It’s dangerous to generalise about a culture and a nation (something I will undoubtedly do several hundred times over during the course of this book) but I’ve yet to meet a native who balks at forms. Forms which must be filled in with red pen, presuming blood is unavailable, in triplicate, photocopied, faxed, scanned and e-mailed in several different guises. If you want to throw a zip file in there for giggles, oblige yourself.
This is the paperwork we had to fill in to write this blog
Nothing will be frowned upon so long as it adds to the overall decimation of rainforests. I’m not someone who likes to do things the quick and easy way. I’m prone to confusing professionalism with pedantry, but I know where to draw the line. Unlike M. Bigot, for whom drawing a line entails only the demarkation of yet another part of the form. Perhaps the only thing more annoying than the endless administrative procedures is the speed at which said procedures are performed. Almost nothing in France is done on time. Walk through any shopping centre half an hour after opening time and all the shutters will be halfway closed. McDonalds, that bastion of ruthless capitalist efficiency, has queues leading out the door as patrons argue the toss with increasingly lackadaisical McServers about how many free sachets of McKetchup they’re entitled to. Above even this is the propensity for the French to write cheques. This combined pursuit involves wasting time and filling in forms. Formidable.
Remarkably, the lease is completed that day and we move in.
French taxis. More dangerous than Afghanistan
On the way Gemma has had to negotiate a difficult exchange with an irate taxi driver who has charged us 15 euros for taking our extraordinarily bulky suitcases roughly eleven metres down the road. To put this expense in perspective, a cab ride through central London during rush hour not one year previously cost me nearly a third less, but because I speak about as much French as Basil Fawlty, I am relegated to the position of commoner fool. All I manage is a shrug as the driver mutters something in his rear-view mirror about having to lift our suitcases into the boot of his car. He stops about 100 metres short of our destination, claiming this is as far as our available funds will take us. I’ll be clear on this: he stops, at traffic lights, on the Toulouse ring road, one of the busiest roads in the city. Launching our suitcases and bags on to the pavement, he swipes the cash from my hand and is gone, like the ghost who walks. What a bastard.
David's Taxi driver
Still, our apartment is quite wonderful. But you don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about the day a woman used her infant child to steal my drink from me.
So, can you help out David? Can you tell him about the fun places to do in Toulouse over the next couple of months that will cost the least money and keep him entertained enough to keep writing here!! Leave a comment and let him know….
