This last week has seen a turn for the better in the weather here and has generally been scorching hot. It has been a slightly irritating hitch in my French holiday, having to go to work every day, but I am trying to maintain the pretence that I am just on a long holiday. To keep up the pretence, I have been strolling back from work in a casual manner (as casual as you can be with a heavy laptop bag) and indulging myself in a huge chocolate ice cream most days whilst sitting in Place Bellecour (as pictured) soaking up the holiday feel, and pretending I am a tourist.
Normally there are not many English speakers in Lyon, but this balance has tipped in the last few weeks as a few more Americans and English have arrived, but more noticeably the balance has shifted because the French have left. I don’t know what came first – do the tourists arrive and the French leave, or the tourists arrive because the French have left?! August in France of course means that everyone winds down a notch and most head for the coast or for their holiday villa somewhere other than the cities. Coming from England, this is all a bit of a change having been used to requests for 2 weeks holiday being met with raised eyebrows as if to say “2 weeks, what could you possibly want to do with 2 weeks off work, you slacker” and 3 weeks of holiday needing sign off from the MD and a bloody good reason! Here, the minimum time off seems to be 2 weeks, with plenty of people departing for 3, which is only reasonable given that most haven’t had more than 2 weeks off since May! (if only I was on a French contract and had that much holiday!).
So, this mostly leaves the English to sweat it out in the, until recently, non air conditioned office. However, the air conditioning has arrived. Now usually you wouldn’t notice air conditioning arrive. It is simply cool or not, there is simply a quiet background hum to an office or not. However, it was with great ceremony and a lot of difficulty that 3 large a/c units arrived the other day, about 4 foot tall and wide and trailing a hell of a lot of cabling and tubing which now snakes around the office in a very “un-health-and-safety-you’d-never-get-away-with-that-in-the-UK” kind of way. Big water cables, bundled up with electricity cables strewn across the floor, a few feet from a flight of stairs. Now if this was the UK, you could be forgiven for hatching up an elaborate incident to claim off the insurance and I am talking big bucks here – after all, how much could you get for tripping over, launching yourself down a flight of stairs whilst being electrocuted? However, I am sure the French would just think you were a clumsy idiot for doing so (and probably quite rightly so) so I am not going to test out the French compensation system just yet. I have a strong suspicion that there isn’t one.
So, back to the air con. The long awaited arrival of these machines hasn’t worked quite as well as we had hoped, due to the fact that half of the office still want their windows open, and the other half want a/c which therefore renders the a/c useless, or very over worked. The second flaw in the plan is the fact that the water tubes for the a/c unit nearest to me actually go out of the window, which obviously now has to be permanently open. No wonder perhaps, that after day 3, two out of the 3 are no longer working. Time to go on holiday perhaps?
