Village Temptation

The village had just six stores, a bakery, a newspaper store, a general store, a funeral home a garden store and a butcher. I grew up in this village and never knew much more outside of the virtual borders of my little life.
A small life, in a village where everybody knows everybody's personal business, doesn't really offer much offers of temptation one would think, and yet, temptation does seem to exist. Sometime that red little devil gets a minute more attention on your right shoulder than it's counterpart, the tiny angel on the left shoulder.
Take for example the funeral home, it was right next to Ed's butcher place. I always wondered about that, why on earth would you think of opening a funeral home next to a butcher, it doesn't really make sense, unless of course there is a reason for it. I learned soon that temptation here meant to believe all the horror stories that emanated from this unlikely duo of business places. I mean, like Frances who claims to have found a topaz cut stone inside the sausage she bought at Ed's butcher store.
Ed first claimed it belonged to his wife and he wanted it back, but he was separated from her three years before!!! After much discussion and deliberations in the town council they came to a conclusion that the pig who's karma unfortunately became entangled with the production of the sausage in question must have been from Tim's farm. The butcher's wife now in turn apparently spent many volunteer hours there taking care of Tim's dogs and somehow the pig must have fallen on her ring that she presumably lost when she was romping with the dogs. Other people claimed:"It's not Tim's dogs she was romping with!" But I still think it was the dogs that had done it, and yes, I still don't give a free run on the undertaker next to Ed's on this Topaz issue!
Then there was Frank who swears he found a real gold nugget in the 2 lbs of fresh, mixed ground beef he had bought at Ed's Butcher place. Some believe him, some don't, and then there are these who are tempted to believe the rumours about it having been a gold tooth.. Yeah, right!
Anyhow, see how tempting stories can be?
Ed, our butcher, is a straight forward, no nonsense, big bear of a guy. He really is a sweatheart as my mum swears to, always in his store, taking care of his customers. My mother went by him at least three or four times a week. I always tried to go along as Ed's store had one of those gumball machines that produced big clear see-through plastic balls whith a toy. I used to pull my mother's skirt to get the three coins needed to make this wonder machine operate and produce one of those figuratively speaking golden eggs for me. Each ball would either contain a toy, a puzzle or any other novelty, and remember, to me at that time, most things were "novelties". Sometimes she would give in and give me the coins, if I was persitent enough. It worked especially well, when she was alone in the store and chatting away with Ed.
And then sometimes we would go into the store, she would be chatting with Ed, I would tug her bottom clothing and she would tell me she didn't carry her purse! I would not fall for that, as of course she would have had to have her purse with her else, how would she buy her meat? But just to show how nice Ed was, he would give me some coins from his own pocket so I could get like two and sometimes even enough coins for three of those balls out of the machine whilst he and my mother went to the back to check out the new "sausage and prime extra lean meat" , as Ed used to call it. Secretly, I think though that when they went to the back area, that Ed also pulled my mother's skirt to get his money back as her clothing always seemed out of line when they returned in the store. Only noticed that a couple of times though as playing with my new toys and puzzles which came from the plastic balls were the biggest temptation to me. :-)

Marseilles - Part 2

Ah, La douce France

Just one more on Marseilles... If you have never visited Marseilles, please do if you are ever close by. It is a charming place, lots of history to see, small streets, nice people and even it's own little arena where probably blood flowed many years ago. I actually wished I had had more time to visit more places. As you may have read in my previous post, my visit to Marseilles started off with a blast.

I finally met up with that secretary of my new distributor and first went to her home, in the middle of the city of Marseilles. It was a bit like stepping back in time, she had a very small house, with low roofs, three stories high though and decorated like I have not seen many after... it looked fantastic, a rustic, classic Mediterranean outside row house, a modern inside with all modern equipment and installations you could imagine. Even the guest bathroom was incredibly outfitted with an open oyster as the bath and the sink was a shell with an actual ancient amphora as the tap which when you turned on the taps, would overflow into the shell like sink.

That same Sunday, my distributor then picked me up from her place for us to have the afternoon and dinner at his house. I had just had lunch by the secretary and her husband, so I did not know where I would pack even more food in my stomach.... but hey, you only go to La Douce France a couple of times in your life, so might as well give that Living As A God in France thingie a good chance I thought. So Philippe, our new distributor, picked me up to carry me to his place. He had a then very modern Peugeot Turbo Diesel which amazingly to me performed just as well as any gasoline cars... and of course he was very wanting to show it off too! He then was telling me a bit about living in the Mediterranean area, the lifestyles, the sun, the food, the beaches... hey,Roger, ever been to the Mediterranean beach? Uhm, no, I hadn't actually...oh wow, apparently I HAVE to see this according to Philippe. and that is where we went before tasting the home cooking of Philippe's wife.

Now, before you get too excited about beach babes and mono-kini's, I would have to disappoint you as it was already November in theyear and really, although not freezing, temperatures between 15 and 19 degrees are not really sunbathing times. But I was still amazed about the beach, in particular it's size!!!

Philippe had told me about miles and miles long and hundreds of meters wide beaches, and he did not exaggerate.... those beaches were HUUUUGE ! I could just imagine being there in summer time.

Hey, Roger, want to go and driver on the beach? The sand was well packed, it had been raining the day before, so actually, the sand was more like a straight concrete now than loose sand.... so there we went, onto the beach. Our car was the only car, no people in sight... so Philippe shows me the ropes about driving, nah, make that racing on the beach in the winter Mediterranean. So that is how you spend you free time on a Sunday there...

WHOOOOPPPP BOOooom>>>> the car comes to a sudden stop. What on earth was that.... we looked at each other and although the motor was running, we weren't going anywhere again, it's like we were stuck, immobile, somehow?

So I tell him to stop giving gas and I got out of the car by opening the passenger door and throwing my left leg out. Something was not right here.... it was as I suddenly was trying to get out of a Maseratti or something, the car seemed so low to the ground... the sand... oh, my gosh... the car wheel was stuck in loose sand, and it being a front wheel driven car, it was just spinning loose in the sand. Apparently, after the rains, wind dried up some of the sands and heaped them up and if you hit those spots, well, basically your car gets stuck...as simple as that.

I told Philippe to try and reverse, nope, no help there...oh, geez, back wheel has also sunk into the sand...and yep, in fact, all four wheels had sank into the sand, so basically, the car was resting with it's whole under carriage on the sand, the wheels spinning in the mud of sand.

HA! Ok, a little summary here... we are on a deserted beach, car stuck in the sand, no thing like a cell phone, probably like 20 miles from the closest house and uh, nobody around.... Solution? Well, we find some planks or rubbish to put it under the wheels so the get some grip and we drive ourselves out, right? So we both go looking for anything we can find that would give the wheels more grip that just the loose sands. In walking for like half an hour we do finally spot somebody on the beach, fishing... we explain our predicament and with a smirk he says that when he goes home, he will call the fire department to pull us out, or maybe we will get lucky and meet up with a bulldozer or a tractor on the beach he says, followed with some good gut busting laughter. When he wiped away the tear in his eye from laughing (he claims it was the wind and the sand) he hands us a little scoop which he uses to dig up worms on the beach to use as bait. He tells us that the realistically only way to get the car out would be to basically dig it out. Don't forget, he adds, tide is coming up, so waiting on the fire department on a Sunday just may not be your best option if you love your Peugeot Turbo Diesel!

He explains....first wheel, dig out next to it so you can insert the instrument, which you use when changing a wheel, under the car to lift the whole car up as far as you can, then fill the space under the wheel with whatever stuff you find on the beach, the lower the car again.

Then proceed with the next wheel, and the next and the fourth one, only to start over with the first and all the others a second time to get all four wheels leveled with the beach. Then you want to find even more scrap on the beach to lay out a pathway from where your car is to the harder sand areas.... et voila....simple!

Yeah, right, simple.... i call it a combination of IRON MAN competition, weightlifting, rowing (which simulates the digging) and hey, let's add jazzercise to the mix cause if you see the weirdest angels we were working at... buuuuttt, it worked, we actually got the car out, just the two of us. It took us about three and a half hours to do so, but we did it.

We both agreed to make this a compulsory activity for any new team members in our companies...hahaha, because team building is exactly what we did that day. We are still friends today although we live far away from each other now. And let me tell you, that lunch I had had by his secretary, looooong gone by the time we finally arrived for dinner by his wife. Never been so appreciative for a nice meal after a good days work.

Regarding the fisherman who was probably still wiping tears from the wind gusts (yeah right), well, those tears were probably even rolling more and harder after we left to start digging out the car, because uhm, tides? Well, tides in the Mediterranean are only a couple of cms, not more than an inch or two...so the water would never have reached the car anyhow....

I sincerely hope the fisherman caught a shark that was stronger than him and that he had to pull and tug to fight the shark for at least 3 or 4 hours to avoid being pulled into the sea himslef! Ha, tides!!!

Nah, whoever you were, Mr. fisherman, thanks for the little spade and the good advice, you earned your laughter! Living like God in France, yeah, well, seems like God has a good sense of humor! ;-)

Marseilles - Part 1

Does it ever happen to you, you're most definitely heading someplace, but for your life you can't imagine why anymore? OK, so it has happened to me, more than once and some situations more embarrassing than others.

I like to call these situations deja-knowns.... which really indicates, well, an "I have deja ( French for already) known what I was supposed to be doing at some point, but really, beat me to a frazzle, I really, really can not recall what that thing just was right now" kinda thing.

And these things can manifest themselves in many different ways and situations. For example, and here we go.... once upon a time I had to fly to Marseilles in France for a meeting with our newest distributor. I was working for an American Multinational dealing in plastics. Actually plastic granules which are then moulded or blown into anything plastic you would use in daily life. We had distributors all over Europe, one being our newest point of sale, Marseilles in southern France.

My mother had taught me a neat little trick for when traveling. She is Swedish speaking and taught me three words to remember when traveling, and if you repeat these just before you leave home, then most of the possibly biggest troubles on your trip are immediately avoided, and those words were "Passport, Pengar och Piljet".

The three "P"'s of preparation for a trip meaning "Passport" (travel documents), "Pengar" (which is Money in Swedish) and "Piljet". This last one is a squeeze already, by those Swedes, as it should actually be "Biljet" (which means Ticket), but that word obviously starts with a B...and doesn't work within the three P's again...so just for that they wrote it with a P, those brave rascals!

Oh geez....this is getting complicated you might think...but it really isn't... Just think in English of Passport, Pennies and Picket ...hey it's not only the Swedish who are allowed some Creative Writing!!!.... Ticket doesn't start with a P, so we adapt as well!

Now, if you repeat those three words before leaving the house, you'll just have avoided the three biggest possible problems when traveling as without those three you're in trouble before even having decently started your trip.

And you know what, it mostly works.... like I said, me, the business man, multi million deals on the table, had to fly to Marseille in France.... and just before I stepped into my car I did my mother's little thing by thinking to myself: Passport, Pennies and Picket ! Yep, got everything with me, so off I went.

Is the system waterproof? Well, no, it is still possible to forget to pack socks or underwear or even your whole suit, but all of those are "relatively" easy to replace when forgotten on a trip. Most of us have been there, right?

Now that I am starting to go towards my 45th year of existence on my island here, I even came up with a FOURTH "P" that one should check before leaving home.... Pills !!! Another harder one to replace when in a foreign country if you forget them at home.

But back to the story here, I am ready to go.... I have my Passport, my Pennies and "Picket" with me, so off to the airport, reasonably confident that I will be OK and reach my new distributor fairly easy in Marseille !

Airport, no problem, check-in...well, uhm...check!.... the flight itself, a breeze...Marseille airport, well, I know my French, Passport control..no sweat, got that one down! Customs...nothing to declare...and yes, I had my "Pennies" to pay for the taxi to get me to my distributor. Well, did not really need to go to the distributor for business the day that I arrived as it was Sunday, but he had invited me to come over to his house for dinner that same afternoon, after dropping my luggage at the hotel.

Right, so we'll just tell the taxi driver to first go, uhm, to the uhm...hotel? What hotel? I actually had no clue what hotel to go to, and was already sitting in the taxi... ok, so there was a first problem, and uhm, coming to think of it.... where on earth does my distributor live, where is his home? I had no clue! So here I was with my freaking Passport, my stupid Pennies and Oh Gee... my Picket, in a foreign country, sitting in a taxi and no clue where to go. So you say, well, call the distributor....but it's Sunday, isn't it, so nobody in the office.... and this story is almost from before the cell phone era... so now what?

Well, finally I made that expensive telephone booth international call, got my mother on the phone who knew the brother of the aunt of my secretary, who in turn knew the phone number of one of the secretaries of my new distributor and that is how I finally found out what hotel to go to and where my distributor would be picking me up for evening dinner.

So, Passport, Pennies and Picket will save you from some big embarrassments, but can not save you from just natural stupidity as I found out myself. When I returned back home I told my mother to write the Swedish papers to revisit those three Swedish P's of traveling by first of all adding a fourth for "Pills" and to please come up with another P for people so stupid they don't even know where they are going!

Friday Flash

Learned about Twitter's Friday Flash #FF this week...and kind of liked the idea...so will keep this BLOG for exactly that... hope you enjoy, come check here again on Friday, July 9th 2010 for my first DOUBLE post.