Whooping it up avec les gay garcons!

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Well, as expected, the ‘wedding’ celebrations of the gay boys, Olivier and Julien, was everything we could have wished for, and the highlight of our brief visit to France! Firstly, the celebration took place in a castle (Chateau de Montvillargenne) in a town called Chantilly, about an hour north of Paris, which in itself was a highlight as it was absolutely magnificent. The boys had booked out the entire chateau for the whole weekend, and all guests stayed there at a significantly reduced rate. The party went on from early evening Saturday to almost breakfast the following day, with some 100 well-wishers certainly knowing how to celebrate in style. Joan and I were virtually the only ‘oldies’ at the function, and the fact that we, along with Greta, came from the other side of the globe to help them celebrate almost gave us celebrity status amongst the guests, and we were certainly never lacking for good French company throughout the night. While a good proportion of the guests were gay, they certainly all weren’t, and both categories mixed well throughout the night. Apart from one of the overtly gay boys appearing around 3am in Greta’s evening dress (and no, she wasn’t wearing his clothes!), you’ll have to be satisfied with the saying “What goes on tour stays on tour”, but trust me it was a great night and certainly an interesting experience for us foreign guests.

The French leg of our trip didn’t start well. We were ‘bumped’ from our flight from HK to Paris as Swiss Air had overbooked, and they put us on a Cathay flight instead. While this arrived in Paris earlier than our scheduled flight, it meant we missed our planned pickup from the airport by Olivier, and we just had to spend longer walking the streets as we arrived early morning and couldn’t get into our hotel till early afternoon. To add insult to injury, we were held up getting ticketing in HK, so we had no chance for duty-free and in fact had to rush for our plane. My letter of complaint was met with the stock standard letter of apology, but no compensation for our inconvenience or out of pocket – poor show, Swiss Air!

Paris, as always, was lots of fun, and no matter how tired you are after a flight, I find you never tire of taking in the atmosphere of the central city area, which we did for a couple of days. Then, for two days prior to the wedding, we took ourselves up north to the Somme region, near the Belgian border, where Joan’s grandfather had served in WW1. It was great to taste a bit of the French countryside, and we managed to get ourselves on a tour of the key Aussie battlefield locations (with a group called ‘True Blue Digger Tours’ no less – can’t you feel the cultural cringe!), which was ironically led by a lady of original German background. It was interesting to hear the history, and see the sights, but after a couple of days, we were somewhat ‘war-memorialled’ out, and happy to make it to Chantilly for the big party.

We actually arrived a day early, and found Chantilly a particularly attractive little town, with a most impressive castle as the main tourist attraction. We spent quite some time tripping around there, both inside and out in the extensive gardens, as well as taking in some of the other gardens and sights in the town. We had a horrible scare the morning of the party. Greta was travelling alone and had been visiting some friends in Florence and had planned to catch the overnight train from Florence to Paris the night before the gig, where she was to meet up with some other guests and catch the train up to Chantilly by lunchtime on the big day. Olivier called us mid-morning to advise that Greta had not shown up as planned, and when questioned, the train people advised there was no record of her having caught the train in Florence. We didn’t know the people she was with in Florence and we knew her mobile had run out of gas, so we had no leads on where to even start searching for her. After a couple of hours of panic, I must admit that memories of that poor girl found murdered in Dubrovnik a couple of years floated through my mind (and we were in Croatia at that particular time), and in those circumstances, you tend to imagine the worst. Fortunately, it was just that the train was two hours late into Paris and she was indeed on it, so there was some poor communication somewhere. Poor old Olivier was beside himself by the time we got the news (he wears his heart very much on his sleeve) and it had the potential to have been a real dampener to their celebrations that night.

One thing that we noted in general in France was that they seemed much friendlier towards English-speaking tourists than since I first visited France in the 1970s, and I think that is primarily a function of a generational change and the world becoming more global. Certainly there was no lack of hospitality amongst the guest during the big party. The day after the party focussed on brunch celebrations at the chateau, which for some strange reason were a more muted affair, followed by a late afternoon flight for Joan and myself to Belfast for our first visit to Northern Ireland.

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