I was having a bit of a down week with my cultural fatigue and N was starting to get a little burned out as well. We went to a cheese factory in the morning with our host director Babette (do you love her name already? because I do.), which is awesome for all of the lactose intolerant people in our group. I swear, there's something about CU students and studying abroad in France that just synergizes with being totally incapable of digesting lactose. Useful! So N tried the cheeses that he could and I tried a little bit of everything, it smelled abhorrently foul, we got some free souvenirs and take-home cheese, and then we left to get lunch and hang out for a bit. It's not that the cheese factory wasn't really cool, but it was a little underwhelming, and thus not the point of this post.
So that's when our day soured as we settled into a flamboyant café for, well, a café. We got two absurdly bad coffees so typical of France in general, but particularly Annecy, and sat in the sun, so it was a little less than ideal. The quality of the coffee was perhaps the worst in the whole city, but you know, sometimes you can't let the little details get you down. So after a couple of minutes of coffee, N finishing his, me choking mine down in desperate need of caffeine, he threw his newspaper at me, saying "I think there's a tennis article, why don't you read it?" and proceeded to run to allow his lactose intolerance to take its inevitable course. Brilliant. Twenty minutes of almost blinding myself trying to read an article in the sun without sunglasses on (quel jour to wear regular glasses) later and N sits back down, and we proceed to wait approximately forever to pay. The café manager/owner didn't come back out again, so I ended up going inside to pay, wherein I discovered that to compensate for the awful coffee, they only charge people half-price for it. That works, sort of. Not that I would go back.
So then we started to wander around Annecy looking for something to eat, none of the sandwiches we passed looking particularly appealing, with both of us hungry and a little hypoglycemic. N was getting particularly sick of being a ringleader, that is to say making decisions, and so we ended up sitting at a crêperie that had a decent-looking menu but was unfortunately situated on the most touristic side of the river. Oh well, lunch was to be had. So we took our sweet, sweet time trying to find something palatable on the menu to eat and finally ordered. Without really paying too much attention, as happens when I get too hungry, I ordered a Danish crepe, and N ordered a Niçoise salad. Now, here's the deal, in France, normally a Danish crepe means that you have salmon, a light, tasteless cream sauce, and citrus in your crepe. We got our food to discover, lo and behold, that N's Niçoise salad was actually a cream dressing-covered monstrosity and that my crepe was perhaps the worst piece of food ever. It was death on a plate.
Let me describe this for you. Imagine you are eating a crepe. Now imagine that crepe to be just a little bit too thick, a little bit rubbery, and a little bit spongy all at the same time. It's probably not extremely fresh, or was simply not well looked after while cooking. It's a little too brown. You've squeezed a healthy amount of citrus on it, expecting it to add the perfect, fresh zest to your bite. You bite into the crepe, only to discover that it is the textural equivalent of the combination of insulation packing foam and flan, has a mild hint of lemon mixed into an almost untraceable cream sauce...followed by the saltiest black caviar ever known to man. We're talking more salt than the Dead Sea here. One bite and you might go into cardiac arrest because of your blood pressure.
It was bad. So bad, in fact, that I managed to con N into taking a bite, which he physically gagged on. We had a moment of understanding without looking at each other and knew that we could not possibly eat that food. There was no way. The problem with this is that sending the food back was also not an option, we were going to have to pay for it and leave, because there was no turning around. This is extremely rude even in America, the land of the nagging asshole customer, but an almost ideological affront to French culture. You're offending everyone and everything by doing so. After what seemed like an eternity of waiting in almost maniacal laughter, we finally got the waitress, who was every bit as displeased as we had anticipated she would be. We weren't necessarily anticipating our bill to be thrown at us, but we could accept it. We paid, N left a 7€ tip, something unheard of in France, and then we ended up getting a sandwich anyway.
Lesson learned.
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