I can tell you now with absolute certainty that the world is about to come to an end, but you will have to wait until later in the post for the evidence.
We are back in Villefranche-sur-Mer once again. We arrived just before New Years and were delighted to be back. Just to remind you why we might prefer Villefranche to Minneapolis in the winter. Here are a few photos that I took from the balcony of our apartment.
This photo is directly across the bay towards Cap Ferat.
You can see Nellcôte former onetime home of the
Rolling Stones just on the left edge of the photo.
This photo is the lighthouse on Cap Ferat.
A few fishermen returning to port. If you look very
closely you can see a single sea gull crossing the bow.
A sailor returning to his boat.
As you can see the weather is just like Minneapolis in January and the pace of life is rather hectic.
We have been engaged in all of the regular activities that we pursue while we are here - eating good food, drinking French wines, walking, taking French lessons, catching up with old friends, playing pétanque and going from shop to shop to provision for dinner.
We have walked to Beaulieu twice to try to have lunch at the Gran Caffe one of our favorites. While we were unsuccessful both times, we were able to get chocolat chaud at the Gran Caffe once which you may recall is the best in the world. Anyway, the second time we failed, we went instead to have lunch at Le Fabuleux Destin. The name of the restaurant is taken from the movie which in the US is called just Amélie but in France was called le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (the fabulous/legendary destiny/fate of Amélie Poulain).
It is a very nice restaurant located in the big and very fancy marina in Beaulieu-sur-Mer.
Beaulieu is located just east of Villefranche and just west of Monaco. It is about a 2 mile walk from our apartment when you meander as we do. The restaurant is just a couple of doors down from the African Queen which was the subject of a post about a year ago. It is very expensive and very pretentious. I say all of this so that you know that Le Fabuleux Destin is considered a very nice French restaurant.
Well, here is where both the title of this post and the evidence that the end of the world is very near come in. While enjoying our lunch on a beautiful day in a wonderful setting and just as Jane was commenting on having a headache, we noticed in plain view the following:
Yes, that is right. They were serving red, white and rosé wine out of boxes. They didn't even bother to hide the boxes, and they couldn't even bother to put l'accent aigu on the "e" in rosé. I am sure that many times when we have ordered just a pichet or carafe of house wine, it has come out of a box, but the boxes have always been hidden. This experience was even worse than the time in Paris when we noticed a plastic pail (like a gallon sized plastic ice cream container) that contained the béarnaise sauce. So there you have it proof positive that the world will come to an end when even in France at a very nice French restaurant you can be served wine from a box that is in plain sight.
Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal
No comments:
Post a Comment