Sunday roast lunch in Nice

This Sunday, I was in a plane at lunchtime, so wasn't able to have a proper  Sunday lunch. Oddly, Easyjet doesn't stretch to Sunday roasts... Oh for the glory days of flying with 5 course meals and people to shine your shoes while you sleep. (Yes, I know my shoes are more often than not flipflops, so shoeshining may be ineffective. I don't want to hear you polluting my dreams with your harsh reality. Hush.)

But for those of you not stuck in a metal box, hurtling through the sky, who happen to be looking for a good Sunday roast in Nice, may I point you in the direction of The Snug. It's an Irish bar, which doesn't often bode well in continental Europe, where "Irish pubs" spring up haphazardly, usually bearing no more resemblance to a real pub except that they both may serve beer. But it's one of the good Irish bars, in that it serves real food, and real pints, and has friendly staff. So I recommend it.

Its website calls The Snug "Nice's only gastropub", which sounds likely, particularly after the sad closure of the Australian pub near the port. I've been there once so far, and plan to go back again, though. On a Sunday if I possibly can, because the lunch was divine.

I should probably say that The Snug haven't paid me for this blogpost, in money, beer, or food. (Though if you're reading this, guys, and feel inspired...) But there aren't many places I can think of in the South of France that do proper Sunday lunches, so I reckon it's worth highlighting them when I find them!

If you've got other suggestions of places I should visit, do let me know in the comments. I am nothing if not willing to sacrifice for my readers and experiment with Sunday roasts...

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France

France is lovely, and it smells of home. London, not so much.

I'm not dead, I still don't have a working internet connection back in the UK, and this horrible thing called work is taking up a lot of time.

I'm nearly caught up on my jewellery orders (business picks up in the run-up to Christmas, which is nice), and I'm still way behind on my story. I've done 15,000 words, and I need to ideally be up to 25k by the end of the weekend. That's unlikely to happen, but it's not impossible. If I can get up t0 20k, that will be pretty much good enough. That's certainly possible.

Flight was fine - pilot from Easyjet actually understands customer service. Was shocked, but pleased - may write to them and tell them how good he was. Ground staff were utterly fucking appalling - am definitely planning to write to complain about them. Complete and total lack of understanding of basic customer service, or even health and safety principles - shutting a plane load of people in a tiny waiting room, with the heating on full blast, closing all the doors and windows, and then not giving us any information about what's happening and why we're delayed by 40 minutes is utterly unacceptable.

The apology from the pilot - which was polite, informative, specific and sounded fairly sincere - went a long way to making up for the shockingly bad attitude of the gate staff, but since it's a contracted out service, I rather think I might write to Easyjet, urge them not to renew the contract with a company that's so obviously lacking in basic training for its staff.

Incompetence annoys me.

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Back in England

Flight yesterday went ok, apart from the hour's delay. Easyjet provides yet another spectacular service. One day, I'll get a flight that goes perfectly smoothly, and be utterly confused.

So, the beginning of my part-time-expat-ness. I'm going to keep this blog going, at least for a while, not least because I'll want somewhere to document the hassles of flat hunting and part-time-expat-ness. Also, I'm aware that I still haven't written about my wedding day. It's on my list of Things To Do like opening a bank account, finding somewhere to live, buying new work clothes, starting a job, all that sort of thing.

Anyway.

Good Things About England So Far:
Starbucks
Huge hotel rooms
Bacon
The BBC
English books - WH Smith in general
Potentially, the pub, though it has an ominous name
Marks and Spencer

Bad Things About England So Far:
Rain
Cold
Sky (the TV company, not the grey thing looming menacingly above us)
Sky (the grey thing looming menacingly above us, not the TV company)
The trains
The cost of the trains
Rain
Being homeless, so having to carry everything around with me
Did I mention the weather, generally? I think I'm going into shock at the amount of rain and grey and cold and wind. I was on the beach yesterday, ffs, where did it all go so horribly wrong?

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Dear EasyJet...

Dear EasyJet,

Nearly 2 months ago, we volunteered to come off an evening flight from Gatwick to Nice, because you had overbooked it, and had more passengers than seats. You promised us compensation to make up for our increased inconvenience, and we were happy with this arrangement. You managed to get us home the next day, after arranging somewhere for us to spend the night and providing a token amount towards our dinner, which we appreciated.

It's now 2 months later. Mid-April. You still haven't given us our compensation payment, let alone refunded the costs incurred of getting between the hotel you chose for us and the airport (no, that bus wasn't free. It wasn't even cheap.) or the costs of our numerous international phone calls to your Customer Service helpline - with the consequent phone tree and long periods on hold - to find out what's happening. Needless to say, while your Customer Service people are very friendly, they haven't been able to actually help. They aren't in a position to process our payments, sadly. I still don't know what exactly the hold-up is, except that it's apparently something to do with your staff in Gatwick.

Hopefully, you'll manage to sort it out soon; if you make promises of compensation to mitigate inconvenience, it doesn't help your customer relations at all if you don't actually follow through on those promises. Or if you make your customers have to keep spending money to contact you to repeatedly find out that nothing's happening. It rather negatively affects the goodwill we had towards you, as demonstrated by us volunteering to inconvenience ourselves to make your life easier. We won't be doing that again, given your subsequent handling of the situation.

Yours sincerely,

An increasingly dissatisfied customer

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TAD - Day 21: argentium sterling silver and sardonyx earrings

Shameless copying of Friday's earrings, but in silver this time. My argentium wire finally turned up, so I thought I'd make use of it! Sadly lacking in ideas after this weekend, which turned out longer than I was expecting - they overbooked our flight back home yesterday evening, and since we weren't bothered about an extra night in the UK, we volunteered to move to a flight this morning; the girls who were otherwise not going to be able to fly were crying and looked like they needed to get to France much more than we did!

It was actually a fairly good night - there were four of us volunteers, the airline put us up in a hotel and gave us some money for dinner, and supposedly are giving us £100 each compensation for being nice, which is useful - I'll believe it when I see it...

Anyway, earrings:

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from thing-a-day 2010

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Christmas, Part 4: the UK

I think we're up to Part 4 now. The UK can be summed up pretty quickly:

God-awful flight over there. We left an hour and a half, 2 hours late. Got diverted via Liverpool, because we didn't have enough fuel to carry on circling Manchester. Got told we were going to be bussed back to Manchester with our luggage. Then got told we weren't going to be bussed back, because we weren't allowed off the plane. We weren't, apparently, allowed off the plane, because we had flown in from a non-EU country, and Liverpool airport apparently doesn't have any customs and immigration staff available midway through a Monday afternoon.

A long hour or two later, we were refuelled and ready to fly back to Manchester, but Manchester was shut again because of the cold. Easyjet handed out water. Still no explanation at all in any language other than English as to what was happening - I explained to the couple behind me who spoke very little English, and who were utterly confused. No one on staff spoke any French, so they wouldn't do an announcement. My friends were still waiting for me in Manchester, ostensibly for lunch. As the afternoon wore on, lunch looked less and less likely.

Finally we took off and landed in Manchester at about 5pm. (Not quite the 12:30 promised - does anyone know if Easyjet owe me money or something? I'm doubting it, but you never know...) Finally got into town, had a drink with friends and we all went to Leeds to find our hotel and have dinner. I was shattered by this point, so undoubtedly made crap company over the evening - thank you, Jenny and Fran for putting up with me nonetheless! And the curry was awesome - I miss curry!

The next day we went to London, where we stayed in a really cool hotel near Old Street. Can't remember its name, but the staff were fantastic. Met up with my old boss for lunch, did a lot of reading by the fire in the hotel, generally did very little, until it was time to go to Paul's family for Christmas Eve. Oh, and went to the dentist. Where I found out that ten years of neglect and ignorance hadn't really damaged my teeth nearly as much as I had feared, and all I need is 2 appointments of gum torture and cleaning, and I should be back to normal again. Fabulous.

Christmas was fun - I discovered I am crap at Scrabble, which wasn't really a surprise. Lunch was lovely, as ever, and I got a fabulous Christmas present. He is now sitting on the breakfast bar near the non-working telly. Boxing Day was lovely, too - we go to see all of Paul's extended family, and it's nice (unlike our extended family, who plot ways to kill each other when we're in the same room for more than 5 minutes. No, really.)

The day after Boxing Day, we went back to France, on the Eurostar. Which had started working again by then, thankfully. We were a little worried, given Eurostar's recent history of total collapse in bad weather, but they'd sorted it all out by the time we were travelling. Which is nice.

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