De retour!

Mike gives France a big thumbs up!

Well I'm back after a week in France, and yet more wrangling with French bureaucracy/administration!

I had arrived in France on the Wednesday, hoping to be able to:

a) Buy my train ticket to Paris from the machine with my card
and
b) Pay a cheque into my account and use the money when I arrived.

How wrong I was. My payment was refused, and then when I tried to pay the cheque into a machine, the card was retained, supposedly at my request. When I questioned this in the branch, I was told that my card had surely been cancelled due to lack of use, and that, at least in theory, I would be able to get it reinstated and returned the next day. I told them that there was no way I could wait a week and collect a new card from Montpellier (which is in the south of France, whereas I was a few hundred miles away), as even disregarding the distance, I was travelling back to England within a week. They told me to phone the branch to get a fax sent over to start the procedure, and to come back the next day, when they would phone a call centre, and get this whole damn mess sorted out. And pronto.

I returned home and phoned the bank (obviously, I didn't get through to my branch, rather a national call centre), and explained my predicament. The wonderful lady said she understood my predicament, and that she would 'faire le necessaire', i.e. that she would do what was needed to get it sorted. Brilliant, I thought.

Needless to say (again), the next day when I returned to the branch, the lady said that my card had not been reinstated, in fact, the branch had faxed to say that a new card had been ordered and sent to, you guessed it, Montpellier. Needless to say (haha), I am now cancelling my account with LCL, never to return again. The evil swines.

On a brighter note, I had a fabulous week in Paris, which, as do most stays in France for me, involved a lot of food and drink (and a little running, remember I am supposed to be in training, see my other blog for details), including making a roast dinner for some frenchies! I explained as best I could that this would be far from a traditional roast, especially given that I was:

a) Rolling some sort of faux chicken 'joint' from 6 chicken breasts
and
b) not in possession of any gravy powder (apparently impossible to obtain even in cosmopolitan Paris, especially on a monday [shrugs gallically])

I also told them not to tell anyone that I had done it this way. Ever. The English have enough of a bad reputation regarding food as it is. They were, however, fascinated to see a yorkshire pudding being prepared ('Oh yes, it'll rise. No, it's supposed to look like that. Honest.'). I was shooed out of the way of the glass oven door so my friends could watch the spectacle.

Paris also brought me my first sight of the "Rando du dimanche" (organised by the mayor, Bertrand Delanoë), which we noticed was underway when a policeman on a bike shut down one of the streets in front of us by furiously blowing his whistle, followed by several yellow-shirted instructors, and close behind by some 200-odd rollerbladers, at which point the police and the instructors sped off to the next junction. It looked like great fun, though I can't imagine it happening in Leeds (imagine the hills!).

The last big moment of drama came on the flight back to Leeds. We were told before take-off that the weather conditions on both sides of the channel meant that there could be a little turbulence before reaching cruising altitude and upon landing. Leaving Paris was fine, and it was pretty much unbroken cloud before beginning the descent towards Leeds. As we crossed the city, it started to get a little bumpy, but I was too busy looking out for the university, our house and any other recognisable landmarks. As we got up to the north of Leeds, it started to get noticeably worse, and by the time we reached Asda (fairly close to the airport), things were getting pretty bad. The air hostess had already been on to reassure us that it was normal and nothing to worry about. I would say we were about 5 seconds from landing (I could clearly see the airport car park) when things were so bad that the pilot whacked on the power, and pulled us back up. At this point, the plane was going up and down/side to side/all over the place. The stewardess kindly informed us that 'as you may be aware, the pilot has been unable to land at Leeds-Bradford airport', and that he would contact us shortly. Apart from worrying whether we had soiled our grundies, we were a little concerned that they might have been taking us to Manchester or Doncaster, which was further exacerbated by the pilot saying that he was being 'rerouted' by air traffic control. Turns out he was just going around for another go, which was much smoother' and the landing was accompanied by a little round of applause from the passengers! Pretty scary stuff.

Need a holiday after all that!