Many visitors say that the smell is frightful and that the loos are so badly maintained that they are downright unhygienic. The Americans visiting the Louvre have the right word for it “gross”. They shouldn’t be too surprised; plumbing has never been one of the strong fortés of the French and Parisian apartments are notorious for their bad plumbing and leaks. Over the years, when I’ve managed to peak behind the scenes at various restaurants in France, I’ve been appalled at what I’ve seen, scenes that just wouldn’t pass health and hygiene muster in Ireland or the UK, yet invariably, those restaurants always managed to produce really tasty meals! Perhaps one shouldn’t enquire too much as to what they contained!
More bad news came with the reader survey carried out by Condé Nast magazine; its readers found that the unfriendliest city in the world was Johannesburg, closely followed by Paris. Cannes also got an exceptionally bad rating, with many people reporting that they felt totally underwhelmed after visiting the resort. Monte Carlo fared little better, with one correspondent reporting that the place was the worst advertisement possible for conspicuous consumption. This same survey found that Dublin was the fifth friendliest city in the world and fortunately, the tourists are still piling into Dublin and Ireland.
Yet the bad ratings for France have been no deterrent whatever to its visitor numbers. Last year, over 80 million people came to France and Paris remains the world’s number one tourist destination. Stinky loos, poor service and downright unfriendliness just can’t stop people coming. The numbers for France are way ahead of those for Britain and Germany, which each attract about 30 million visitors a year.
This month of course is an ideal time for visiting Paris and going completely against the grain. Many people say that August in Paris is a complete disaster, but it’s not. There are far fewer people around, while a surprising number of places remain open, so there’s always somewhere handy to eat and drink. We’ve been in Paris on various occasions during August and I must say we’ve always found it a perfect time to visit.
A different kind of Parisian visit has just been highlighted by the American magazine, Vanity Fair. A well-known American biographer, William Stadiem, once did long interviews with Madame Claude, who ran a noted Parisian brothel during the 1960s and 1970s. It attracted many famous customers, including Muammar Gadaffi, the former leader of Libya, and the American actor, Marlon Brando. According to Madame Claude, perhaps its most famous customer, on various occasions, was former US President Kennedy. On one occasion, she said, he asked for a whore who looked like his wife Jacqueline, but who was also “hot”.
The planned book based on the madame’s recollections never got published, but Steinem has just produced a lengthy article based on his researches, in Vanity Fair. It sounds fascinating, a perfect subject for any would-be historian!
Talking of which, a trio have got into big trouble in Pompeii, in southern Italy. The ruins of this town overwhelmed by Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago include a brothel area, with strikingly explicit graphics. The other night, a Frenchman and two Italian women, all in their mid-20s, broke into the ruins with the aim of having sexual shenanigans in the midst of the old brothel in Pompeii. But they were caught by police and have ended up in court on trespassing charges. However, that hasn’t deterred the intrepid trio; they say that still intend to have sex somewhere inside Pompeii!
A recent death in Paris has brought back a host of memories for many people. Raymond Berthillon, who founded the famous ice cream shop of the same name on the Ile St Louis, has died aged 90. He founded it in 1953 and it has been in the family ever since. By general consensus, Berthillon’s ice cream is the best in Paris, while the Ile St Louis itself is a delightful undisturbed island in the middle of the Seine, rather untouched by the modern world in the city of Paris all round it.
While tourists are aiming to get into Paris and France as quickly as they can, French people are having their annual nightmare drives to and from their holiday destinations. The chassé-croisé is the nightmare that happens every weekend at this time of year, when people driving on holidays coincide with those coming back. Last Saturday, it meant over 700 km of traffic jams in many parts of France. There’s another hazard, too.
The other day, a family from Derby in England were driving back from their holiday in Spain. They stopped their camper van for a night’s rest ,just off the motorway close to Bourges in central France. While they slept, a gang of thieves pumped exhaust fumes into the camper van and then stole family belongings worth around €2,000.
Paris has another continuing problem, the gentrification of the city. Property prices there have soared by 165 per cent in the past 20 years and by 30 per cent in just the last five years. Many people can now no longer afford to live in Paris, so that over the past few years, the percentage of working class people living in the city has fallen quite rapidly, from 40 per cent to 27 per cent. In the Haut Marais district, just north of the Marais itself, a property developer is creating an epicurean village with a whole range of food shops and restaurants. Many local residents feel it’s just a real estate ploy and that the ultimate effect will be to make the district too expensive and too posh for them to live in.
Another big development is planned, this time at Yvelines, just west of Paris, where a Dutch company wants to invest €50 million in building an artificial ski resort. Many locals are outraged and one Green politician says that in creating an indoor warehouse with a year round temperature of – five degrees Centigrade, huge amounts of energy will be consumed.
An existing tourist attraction that has fallen into decay is due to get a big revamp, the Grande Arche in La Défense (I have the spelling correct this week!).So hopefully, that will work out as planned. Meanwhile, as bridges in central Paris, especially the Pont des Arts, groan under the weight of lovelocks, the city council is now encouraging visitors to take selfies rather than clip on lovelocks. But in the longer term, lovelocks could be banned in Paris, following the Italian examples in Rome, Florence and Venice.
Meanwhile, president Hollande, currently on holiday in the south of France, has turned 60 but the event is being kept very low key. There’s very little to celebrate about in present day France, so his advisers have urged a very low key event, so as not to attract a deluge of negative headlines.
But if you are going on holiday in France and want somewhere different, you could try four places that are all dubbed “Little Venice”. Strasbourg has its delightful canal and river quarter, while nearby Colmar has the same, but on a smaller scale, along the banks of the River Lauch. In the south-east, Annecy is a most delightful place set amid canals, while on the south coast, there’s a more modern version, Port Grimaud, near St Tropez, built in the 1960s.
Also in the south, the Var department has been named the most organic department in France, an accolade well worth having. Close on 20 per cent of land is given over to organic farming and of the 451 farmers working “au naturel”, a large number are growing grapes for organic wine making. The Var is also in the news at the moment for a different reason, the high risk of forest fires, in such places as the Hyeres islands and the hills behind Toulon.
About 50km north of Toulon, there’s a most delightful village called Roqbrussane, which is full of historical artefacts and is brimming with restaurants and places to stay. But the other day, it was the scene of a tragic accident, when a man driving a camper van hit the kerb and went down a slope. As the camper van careered down, it completely disintegrated, killing the unfortunate driver.
There’s another and much more agreeable spectacular sight to see moored at La Segne on the south coast at the moment, the world’s second largest superyacht. It’s really something to behold and its owned by a Russian, Roman Abramovich, owner of the Chelsea FC football club in London.
Over in Bastia in northern Corsica, last Saturday, there was an almighty bust up among supporters at the football match between the local Bastia club and the Olympique club in Marseilles. Over 40 police were hurt in the disturbances, while eight Bastia supporters ended up in hospital. Also last Saturday in Nice, there was chaos in the city centre, when a whole group of pro-Gaza supporters stopped the tramway system, just one of many pro-Palestinian demonstrations in recent days in France, across Europe and in many other parts of the world.
Three builders in Normandy have ended up in court. They were renovating a house in Normandy and found and kept gold bullion and gold coins dating back to the 1920s.The police became suspicious when one of the builders started lodging high value cheques. They’d been selling all their haul to a local coin dealer and the builders as well as the dealer have now been charged with various offences.
Here in Dublin last Saturday afternoon,7,000 people turned out for a pro-Gaza demonstration, which ended up outside the Israeli embassy. Then it turned out that that the Israeli Embassy is being indirectly subsidised by Irish taxpayers. The embassy is in an eight storey high office block, but the state agency that has the block on a very long lease can’t find any other tenants to fill up the rest of the space. The end result is that taxpayers are having to find around €30 million a year to make up for the shortfall in tenants for the rest of the building.
Also in Dublin, after all the recent downpours, many homeless people have been rescued from the streets soaking wet. The Capuchin day centre in Dublin, which feeds many of them, says that immediately after the recent storms, it tried in vain to get official help, but state and local services just weren’t answering the phones, because it was the weekend.
While we’ve been having all this rain, the furore over people in Ireland having to start paying for the water they use is likely to get hot and heavy this autumn, as the charges start coming into effect. I reckon they are going to cause so much controversy that it will probably mean the present coalition government is going to get booted out of office at the next general election. But amid all the controversies, at least we have Rory McIlroy, the world’s number one golfer. What a set of achievements for the 25 year old!
And there’s an interesting online charity auction ongoing at the moment. In the town of Navan the other week, four houses in a terrace caught fire and were burned out. Three of the houses were covered by insurance, so they’re being rebuilt. But the fourth house, owned by a long time community activity and former town councillor, wasn’t, so this big fundraiser is going on to help her rebuild her home. One of the prizes is having Mary Lou McDonald coming to the winner’s home to cook dinner for 10 people, complete with wine, all of which will be served by another celebrity. Mary Lou is the vice president of Sinn Féin and one of the sharpest political operators around, so whoever is the lucky winner of this prize is in for an interesting evening.
Meanwhile, on the foreign front, the Americans have made a hash of things - again. They’ve been dropping food and water from 5,000 metres to the besieged Yazidi people in northern Iraq, but all the parcels have been dropped without parachutes, so they explode when they hit the ground. What a brilliant lack of planning! And of course, the Americans and other western nations have dilly dallied so much in coming to the help of the Yazidi people of northern Iraq that it’s now nearly too late to help them.
Such lack of organisation wasn’t apparent 70 years ago this Friday, August 15, when the Allies invaded the south of France, landing troops at such beaches as those in St Tropez, Fréjus and Saint-Raphael. These landings came just over two months after the landings on June 6, 1944, in Normandy and by the time they were all completed, France was well on the way to being liberated. Yet these days, the liberation of the south of France from Nazi occupation is almost forgotten!