Beware Mondays

Mondays are peculiar days in France. We went to Perigueux on a Monday and found everything closed. Thinking to enjoy a birthday celebration meal before we packed up and drove home, we drove to St Foy le Grande on La Dordogne and found the chosen restaurant closed. Of course! It was Monday. Hasty scratching of heads. Where to eat, if it was Monday?

St Foy offered nothing and the countryside south of the river, around Ligueux, Saussignac and Monestier, though beautiful, offered only closed auberges and restaurants. We drove into a golf resort hotel, which was open - but would not accept us because we were not resident. So, about six restaurants later, we arrived back in Bergerac, where we'd started, heading for the tourist area of the old town. Surely that would be open?

It was, and we had a very nice meal in a restaurant opposite the poissonnerie. I chose lotte saison and hoped it was fish. Whatever it was, it looked delicious, tasted wonderful and when I checked in the dictionary next day, discovered it had been monkfish of the low season. I'd been lucky with my starter, too, in ordering a tartine de legumes. It arrived as an artistically built mound of fresh vegetables: a baby carrot, a slice of red pepper, and paper thin slices of something yellow that may have been fennel, but might not. Something equally thin, almost transparent with faint pink stripes on white, a baby tomato cut precisely so that the inner structure formed the shape of a tiny tree. Delicious!
But the moral of the tale is this - in the Bergerac area of France (I cannot speak for other areas) the food is good, but almost impossible to get on a Monday night!

I thought you might enjoy a pic of me in my tree-felling gear!

Cafe Sydney

The seascape is one aspect of Australia, and the nighttime shot is another - and very different.

There nay be other restaurants with splendid views, but Cafe Sydney is up there with the best.

Sitting on the open air deck overlooking Sydney Harbour, the ocean going cruise liners that nudge up against the dock and the numerous ferries that dart across the water as dusk comes down and the lights go on is a magical experience.

Nor can I think of another city that would name its fine restaurant, with what I think of as tongue in cheek flippancy, as Cafe Sydney.

There is another restaurant in Sydney that sits at the top of a tall tower block and revolves very slowly. I imagine that is a wonderful experience too, but I enjoyed cocktails there in daylight, and anyway, it is so high and so far back in the city that the experience would be less intimate, somehow.

Another surprise about Sydney is the number of hills, valleys and ravines that run through the suburbs. The roads are reminiscent of San Francisco as immortalised in the car chase scene in Bullit, and houses here back onto hillsides that would give those suffering from vertigo the creeps. Children cannot ride their bikes home down the hill in some areas because they'd shoot straight over the edge. Driveways slope at forty-five degrees and worse, and in England such a drive would be an impossibility given the winter frost and ice that would make them into ski slopes. So much for me and my impression that Australia was almost tediously flat. Comes of seeing all those nature programmes of intrepid explorers driving along straight roads across red deserts that stretch - flat as a pancake - to the horizon.