Clichés Fulfilled and Denied!

Cliché Fulfilled: French girls are adorable!
In Paris they really do walk around in those dark pea-coats with broad lapels, bangs over their pretty eyes, and most importantly they really do speak in that adorable French accent! Whether they’re speaking in French or English, they have that… adorable French sound.
The adorable cliché doesn’t mean I wish I was there without Jenn, or anything like that, It’s more of a perfect architectural addition. A reminder, like the Eiffel Tower or the Triumphal Arch, that we’re actually in Paris.

Cliché Denied: The Rude French Waiter.
We ate in restaurants and cafes throughout Paris, and Avignon, as well as one lunch each in Marsailles, and Lille. We were simply unable to fulfill our tourist experience of having a rude French waiter! Everyone was extremely nice! Those who didn’t speak any English were infinitely patient with my crappy French, and when that didn’t work, we received no attitude at all when reduced to pointing at the menu and smiling.

I am so pissed at those stupid stupid nice French waiters ruining our vacation by not giving us our expected rude French waiter experience.

We did have one waiter in a wonderful classic café in Vienna. We thought at first that he was angry at us, but by the end of our coffee there (and what wonderful Viennese coffee it was!) it became clear that what we read as him being angry was simply his demeanor.
He ended up chatting and giving us sightseeing advice, his eyes completely twinkling and happy, while his stoic face and Schwarzenegger accent would have given us no clue that he didn’t hate us!

Cliché Fulfilled: French laissez faire / Prussian authority and order.

Our Eurail tickets were open passes requiring us to fill in the appropriate dates before boarding and have them validated by the conductor as he takes tickets.
We learned that we were supposed to fill in the dates before boarding in the course of a long and patronizing lecture held by a German train conductor who made clear that he would be within his rights to require us to pay the ticket price in cash. We were required to thank him for his benevolent magnificence as well as for his sage lesson.

One Austrian conductor very patiently held a small lecture concerning the day/month order I was supposed to have used in filling out the pass (in fairness, I did indeed screw this up). On another Austrian train (I think, Jenn can correct the country if I’ve confused this) a dude in black fatigues who may have been a conductor, a cop, or some other DIA (douchebag in authority) assumed that we must be in the wrong car, since we’d seated ourselves in first class. It was with no small level of satisfaction that we began to produce our first class passes! Alas and alack, simply us SAYING we had first class passage was enough. I suppose nobody lies to a Prussian DIA in black fatigues.

The French train conductors, on the other hand, couldn’t give a shit about our tickets. That was true in Britain too, but since there’s not such a cliché about Britsh laissez faire, I didn’t include it in this headline.