Today we thought it would be an idea to go shopping for a piece of string (yes, really) as we will soon need a washing line long enough for 4 beach towels. Then B found some more string in his garage (yes, he does have a small man cave). So then it was just matting we needed. We know how to live.
So off to the local hardware store. No matting. No English and just a little French (one word – difficile). We managed to find out that there was a bigger DIY type store on the main road outside town. Back to get Kymi.
On the way we passed one of the many Mini-Mercados in town. They are small with windows you can pass by and miss if you are not looking the right way. We were and we saw fans. It was bloody hot in the van last night, so I wanted one.
We went in. Arkwrights has nothing on it. Every shelf was stuffed and the floorspace covered with stands. There were 3 members of staff, a delivery guy, the 2 of us, another customer and the nutter. You couldn’t move. I managed to indicate to one member of staff the fan in the window. I knocked something off one of the stands and she nearly fell into the window. We backed off. She said something to the boss and went to some shelves. I got in the way of the delivery guy. I moved, he knocked something off the stand behind B. She then knocked something off the shelf near the fans. They produced 2 boxes with different fan options, but one was empty so she had to go back to the window display…. then we indicated (no English, no French and we can still only say hello and thank you) that we would like them to switch them on.
The boss took the 2 fans to the till where the 3rd member of staff was trying to serve the other customer while the delivery guy sidled past again. He stood up to plug in the fan and nearly fell over trying to sit down again as he hit the shelf behind him. He laughed. The nutter started crowing like a cockerel. The fan went on and the lady customer lined up happily in front of it. Mmm, made it hard for us to check it out. Same happened with the second. Till man was grinning away, lady customer really happy as it was – unsurprisingly – boiling in there. B and I sweated some more and chose a fan as quickly as possible. We left sweating and laughing having caused what I suspect was completely normal chaos – except perhaps the “crowing cockerel”…….
Footnote: later we missed the indicated DIY store by going out of town on the wrong road but found another one and bought some mats, then we found the correct place on the way back. We got back to the site and realised we had forgotten gaffer tape. We need that as using clear, full 5 litre water bottles to hold down the awning sidewall has actually caused the sun to focus on the base and melt a hole in it! That didn’t go well then!!
We stopped at the train station too so as to check it out. It looked virtually derelict. I found a timetable on the platform and B found 3 guys having lunch in a small kitchen. No sign of anyone wanting to sell us a ticket. All we needed was tumbleweed to roll down the line…….