Communication

Dawn doesn't seem to break in London in summer. One sort of walks out into the grey at four in the morning and gradually the grey becomes lighter, and it was indeed quite light by the time our Eurostar voyage began, and lighter still by the time we arrived in Paris, after the sun had had and extra almost four hours to shake itself awake.

Full of confidence that I could make myself understood we sauntered up to the Counter at Gare du Nord.

I asked for two tickets to Lunaville.

"Oui, near Nancy" I replied to his query with at least one French word in the sentence and a place name pronounced in at least a recognisable manner. After a few more cheery words, he passed us our tickets and depleted credit card and said something which we thought was "wow you are going on a very long journey" but actually we later deduced translated to: "that will be a very long way to travel in the baggage car, suckers".

It was definitely time for a coffee.

Once again armed with a year of practice, I sauntered up to the counter and asked for a couple of cappuccinos and a chocolate croissant in phonetically perfect French. The young lady not only understood well enough to produce my order perfectly correctly, she probably thought there was enough Frog in me to make me Kermit's older brother.

The self congratulations over my success at passing myself off as a local evaporated quite quickly however, when I handed her a twenty to pay for it all.

I'm not sure exactly what she said to me, but I gather it was something like, "I'm terribly sorry my good man, but you can't pay for things with HongKong dollars here in Paris."

Meanwhile in Lagarde, the boat was immaculate, the repairs seem fine, and the stupendous team at NavigFrance are just as laid back as they were at the end of last season.  

I wonder if they accept Asian currency?

Perhaps we can try to pass it off at Ikea tomorrow.