NEEDLING

WHY I WENT TO SEVERAL BARS LAST NIGHT

Morning glory. Head doing okay, all things considered. Did a little bar hopping yesterday evening on account I had made some descent tips at the hotel for once. Europeans in general don’t tip and the hotel industry is not one where people tip. Long gone are the days, if ever they existed, when you took a person up to her room and showed her the closets and bathroom and got a tip for it. That probably only existed in movies. The way we make tips? We work with taximan who when we call them for trips to the airports give us a percentage of the fare. We work with tour operators who when we sell their guided tours or whatever give us a percentage of the fee. That’s how we make tips. The last hotel I worked at a few years ago, we also had a couple of restaurants who gave us so much for every customer we sent them. For this they quickly became the most authentic French restaurant in the neighborhood as far as we were concerned. Last month I sold two parties of museum and guided mishmash Parisian stuff. I got me a nice two bills for it. It’s like free money. Too bad we’re not strictly a tourist hotel. We have mostly a business / government array of customers plus your usual daily come in for a shag customer who wants more than your run of the mill hôtel de passe. In our hotel I’m proud to say, you don’t have to be afraid to take off your shoes and walk barefooted as in some of our neighboring hotels. The sheets are changed daily… and washed. No wads of body dejections laying about underneath the beds and mattresses pouring out of their rubber hats. Bathrooms, toilets, televisions, heat and or air-conditioning in every single room. Unfortunately, tourist is where the money is and tourists is what we get very little of in our hotel. But not any kind of tourist buys into the tour-operator guided overpriced car or bus rides of the city. The Indians, which amazingly we’re getting a lot of these days, love that stuff. The never-been-out-of-America Americans used to gobble all that stuff up. They’ve stopped coming to France though, since George Wanker and his cronies re-baptized French-Fries Freedom-Fries… [anti-war / anti-bush rant goes here] … those kinds of Americans have stopped coming to France. Too bad to. There’s nothing more a receptionist likes to see than an American all dressed up in cowboy boots and cowboy hat walk in through the door of the hotel chewing ya’lls and howdido’s. (I know I’m stereotyping… incredibly enough, I’m not exaggerating…) That’s the kind of prairie grown tourist we like around here. Or the Michael Moore family look-alikes all got up with baggy pants, bermuda shorts, baseball hats (backward for the son, sideways for the dad, just visor for the mom, and goldilocks curled-up bangs for the daughter…) We love them too. And they just looooooove river-boat rides and diners up on the Eiffel Tower. But long gone are those days. Americans have started coming back to France, but usually they’re the more refined anti-Bush crowd (intelligent and better educated by definition) and they prefer to go discover the city on their own, which though bad for my pocket book I perfectly understand and agree with. The Indians are the new financially interesting tourists and they’ve never been to Europe and, like their American counterparts, want to see “all the important stuff” in two days. They want their picture taken next to the Eiffel Tower. That’s all they know about Paris. The Eiffel Tower. Unlike their American counterparts though, they haggle every price, every penny, everything. And we actually have to work for our share of the fee. I’m getting better at it. Two days ago I sold a van-tour of Paris with lunch and a guided walk through the Louvre to a party of three. I told them right away when they started on me, “Since there’s three of us, do you think we could get a little discount?”
“There’s no discussing the price with these people.” [meaning the tour-operator]
“But there’s three of us.”
“Doesn’t make a difference. There’s no haggling. You can’t discuss the price with a tour-operator in France. It’s against the rules.”
“Well… we won’t try, then.”
“Okay.”
“It’s good you told us,” they said without a bit of irony.