Richard's Reporting

Dispatches from Around the World

Reprinted from TRAVEL WEEKLY MAGAZINE

12.18.06 AND 1.27.07

THE MOST IMPORTANT TRIP OF MY LIFE

Part I of a Two-Part Series

The man’s name is Mr. Wu. I never had the pleasure of meeting him but I did pause to read his letter.

Mr. Wu thanked us for visiting his facility. He hoped we found our stay satisfactory. He explained that he took pride in his work and he asked us to contact him if there were any service problems of any kind. He listed two local mobile numbers. He wished us a wonderful stay in his country and, again, emphasized that we should call him if we need him.

This is only interesting because Mr. Wu is the men’s rest room attendant near Gate # 65 at Hong Kong’s new, amazing construction feat of an airport,  His letter and photo hang on the wall near the exit door.

Mr. Wu symbolizes the rebooting of China. There is a frenzy of excellence, or at least the attempt to achieve excellence, that seems to have permeated many layers of Chinese society. It will take a while for the Chinese to meld their technological aptitude with high degrees of personalized service, but it appears that they have started that journey.

My wife, Angela, and I are at Chep Lap Kok to board a Sichwuan Airlines flight to Chongquing, in the southwestern part of the country. Sitting on the new plane, with its attentive flight crew, I smiled as each flight attendant was personally introduced with a bow to the passengers. Take off and landing were within  thirty seconds of schedule.   

            We are heading to the interior of China to meet and bring home our new, 13-month old baby girl, Briana. Authorities found her abandoned when she was three days old. But she was left in a place where she would surely be found.

We have her picture. We have maps but they are undecipherable. I want to bring you along with us as we experience twelve days in a place for which you can never, adequately prepare. Here are some notes from my journal:

Arrival Chongquing reinforces the rebooting effect, I have already noticed. Every airport we visit is modern and appears to be new. Uniforms are all pressed and staff, though not always smiling, are efficient. The ride from the airport to the city is a Chinese wake-up call.       The landscape was pleasant enough, with some greenery. But there was this haze, this smokey grey darkness that never disappeared. Chongquing has fewer that 1000 hours of sunlight per year, a sort of Chernobyl-lite layer of depression hangs over the place. Looking out my window I saw the skyline, a skyline that seemed to be the size of Manhattan. I was impressed, but then I turned and saw that there were three Manhattans out the other side. The Province of Chongquing and the city house 32 million – it is, by some measures, the most populated place on earth.

Despite this, there were relatively few cars in the downtown area. You could walk in the middle of the street running alongside the Harbor Plaza Hotel and think it was a pedestrian mall.

There was a Starbucks around the corner. All shiny and new with English language signs promoting seasonal tutti-frutti flavors like Gingerbread and Pumpkin Spice. But there were no patrons and when I went back there were no patrons. Who, I wondered, is going to pat $4.50 for a cup of coffee in Chongquing? This store, like so much of central and southern China, is ready and waiting to serve the middle class and the western tourists who surely will be arriving on the next Sichwuan flight. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in three years.

The people who weren’t in Starbucks were one block away north of the main thoroughfare. Here, stall after stall served portions of street food to hundreds of diners at a time. Some of the stalls had set up small folding tables, but, for the most part, diners stood and talked while they nimbly picked at whatever and rice with their chopsticks.

There was large department store blaring Chinese rock music from huge speakers near the entrance. You had to take an escalator up to reach the store. As I entered I realized that the entire store was devoted to cell phone sales. Kiosk after kiosk, display after display, it went on forever. And people were shopping.

It was at this point, after walking the city for hours, that I began to realize there were no Americans, no Europeans, not even Canadians. In fact, except for our foray to the American Consulate at Guangzhou, we never ran into a single westerner. Perhaps they were all at Pizza Hut but we never saw them. In fact, we really never met fluent English-speakers and yet, we got along just fine. All of the food was not wonderful, but the restaurant dinners were. Room service became a kind of game one played and we would guess at what would actually arrive.

But how strange, I thought, that I could wander the largest city on earth and find it totally devoid of American visitors.

If I had wandered down to the riverfront I would have found tourists. Chongquing is the beginning, or end, of cruises along the most picturesque portions of the Yangtze. But few Americans stay a few days, preferring to pre/post in Beijing or Xian.

On our second day in the city we took a short bus ride to the government adoption office to receive our daughter. At this point we had received a photo, a two-age medical report in Chinese, and a one paragraph summary of her life – to date. The office was in an old building next door to an outdoor noodle shop. We walked into a doorway where we found a security guard of the rental variety and a woman selling candy and lottery tickets, past peeling walls, to an elevator that led to the second floor office. When the elevator door opened, we were shocked to fix twenty-four infants, from four different orphanages, playing on the floor. The children of each orphanage were identified by the colors of their pajamas.

Then came the most extraordinary compression of tears, joy, governmental questions, and procedures. It made us dizzy. Then the people who had taken care of our daughter had questions for us and we had to wait for the translator to assist.

I will never forget these moments and I won’t bore you with further details, but there was one small memory of those two hours I want to share with you.

As we were leaving the building, the elderly security guard and the woman selling lottery tickets, wanted to hug our baby goodbye. They thanked us for coming to China. There were tears in their eyes.

But these people must have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of infants pass them in the narrow hallway as new parents left the building. Yet, they cared enough to cry with joy with us. That image will never leave my mind.

The next day we found the secret door that opened off a corridor in the rear of our hotel lobby. It opened to a surrealistic shopping experience, six floors of beautiful shops, each floor arranged by category, with two floors on top for fine dining. I say surrealistic because so much of it was illusion.

I headed for the men’s section and saw the Armani sign in the distance. But when I got really close it turned out to say Anmani. Versichee also had a store.

Most of the stores had a single employee. There was a department store anchor. We did some shopping but could not detect a single store employee who knew even a smattering of English.

I loved Chongquing at dusk, when the sky darkened from heavy grey to fog-shrouded black. Flashes of neon punctuated the night soup, miles of neon  cast a glow on the walking streets that circled the Victory Monument, a well-lit clock tower that signifies the defeat of the Kuomintang forces in 1949. The area is packed with people and you get the sense, at dusk that they are there simply because they can. There are no large gatherings, just groups of friends. Dating couples are in short supply. Young children seem absent from this canvas. There are so few baby strollers that ours draws stares from virtually every passerby. More than a few of the older women lean down to rearrange our daughter’s blanket; several kiss her on her forehead. It gets darker, the neon flashes continue, the stream of people never slows, and I am coming to realize that the Chinese people may just be the warmest people I have ever encountered in my travels.

A LETTER FROM GUANGZHOU

Part Two of a Two-Part Series

Guangzhou is a great walking city and one takes a certain comfort in what one hopes will be the familiarity of Cantonese cuisine.

The city is home to the U.S. Consulate and when one adopts, there are certain formalities that culminate in a mass swearing in by a government official.

We had five days in Guangzhou for exploring until the swearing in and the issuance of our daughter’s Chinese passport.

Most adoptive couples stay at the White Swan Hotel, a non-descript white tower with a lobby that looks as though it was designed by the same team who designed your town’s largest Chinese restaurant. The décor is accentuated by a floating antiquities sale that fills the lobby area with beautiful screens and lacquered chests,

A number of local businesses have developed around the hotel, each of them catering to American and British visitors with time on their hands and the need for infant clothing.

By this time we had started a list of apparent Chinese “laws” one of which appears to outlaw the concept of “browsing”. Walk into any store and a salesperson will hover just off your right collarbone. They never try to hard sell but they are there to assist – should you need it.

My forays got me into some trouble almost immediately. I saw a kiosk selling Christmas decorations. Some were black and some were red. I picked out a lovely hanging box in black metal and was looking forward to hanging it on my tree when the salesperson threw out the word “funeral”. Wrong kiosk.

We were staying at the Holiday Inn, a new hotel, and surely one of the chain’s centerpiece properties. You enter the hotel through an arcade filled with small shops and food stands. Everywhere we looked in Guangzhou you saw people eating. Notice I did not say slurping, one of the stereotypes that just didn’t pan out. We saw relatively little slurping or spitting. But each of the food stalls seemed to be doing quite well and you could not walk through the crowds that gathered in front of the small gas stoves and woks without feeling that you had ingested at least half of what was being consumed.

The arcade entrance to the plush Holiday Inn was directly across from a stand that sold one item only – pig intestines on rice. It made you enter and depart the hotel in a hurry, actions that really must have reinforced the doorman’s opinion that Americans are crazy.

What I liked most about the Holiday Inn was the fact that room service really did not understand English. That made ordering fun and we came to accept the fact that we were going to be tasting things that one doesn’t find at the local take-out in Peoria.

We had upgraded our selves to a suite – we thought an extra $58 for a six-night stay was reasonable. It came with an entertainment center – of the human kind. Next to our hotel was a massive condo construction project. It was being built, as these things are, floor by floor and the construction was not only right outside our window but it was only two floors below our room.

Now if you know anyone in the building trades, you might suggest that they pay their union dues on time. In fact, they may want to pay a little extra. On the work site out our window, a beehive of activity that fascinated our daughter, a great deal was done by hand. During breaks, the workman, and women, simply lay down where they were. Fortunately they didn’t clang their steel all night long. The site closed at 4:00 Am., allowing us about two and a half hours before it all began again.

I loved walking the streets of Guangzhou. One right turn out the hotel door, just to the right was a narrow street that looked like it might have come from a period movie. Two blocks of shops selling fish, fish in tanks, fish in metal tubs, and goldfish of every hue. They were packaged in tiny plastic bags. Further down the street was a large family that sold nothing but scorpions – of the live variety. They were mixed up in large pots just prior to the sale. Used for a delectable local soup I am told. Next came the puppy venders. With the strictly enforced rules on one child per family, the Chinese have taken to buying exotic small dogs to carry in their shopping carts.

In the middle of the street, a woman taught her child how to do math on an old abacus, as they sat at a small wooden bench. Everyone walked around them.

People did not smile at us. But they smiled back if we made the first move and always they came up to see our baby. If her forehead was covered by her blanket, they would stoop down and fold the blanket back so they could see her features.. Her eyebrows arch upwards in the corners – a point of great discussion and joy to the Chinese.

Continuing down the street we came to a pedestrian overpass over a six-lane highway. On the other side we found older buildings, some clearly built in a British colonial style with shady streets. A Chinese actress was filming a commercial in the middle of one street. We discovered a Chinese School of massage and enjoyed a one and a half-hour massage for $10.00. The only disconcerting thing about the massage was that it was a semi-private room and an earnest young manager would keep walking in asking if “ok” “ok”. I was having a hard time pretending that I was in Bali.

Leaving my massage, I passed leafy parks where practitioners of Tai Chi went through their exercises.

But I haven’t told you where you end up if you leave the Holiday Inn and turn left instead of right. Continuing out of the arcade, past the pig intestine store, you come to a huge walking street that goes on for miles. Someone in Guangzhou has clearly paid the electric bill because neon signs and billboards blanket the night sky in ways that Vegas can only imagine. The streets are surprisingly clean. The young people are well dressed and animated. Music blares from the storefronts. Jewelry shops predominate. Side streets have the best food stalls. I try to talk with the owners of a tea shop and they show me the tines where they keep the really good stuff. A shop nearby sells medicinal herbs in liquid form. This means a few ounces from a large jar holding the entrails of a snake or worse. The liquid is thought to be healing but it all has to ferment for a while.

I take an escalator up to see what McDonald’s is up to. The frantic crew is practicing crowd control, leading customers to hidden, available seats as soon as they order.

Eight years ago, I was traveling in Hong Kong with a group that included an executive of McDonald’s. He invited me to dinner with the head of their operations in China. At that time, he pointed out, China had fifteen cities with a population of more than a million. “And we’re only in one. So, yes, the potential is really great.”

Walking the streets of Guangzhou with a Chinese baby offers a perspective few tourists would ever get. We were constantly approached by well wishers. As new parents of a Chinese girl, we felt that we were somehow invited to see and feel the soul of China. Every few minutes brought a new encounter despite the relative shyness of the population.

I thank each of the hundreds, perhaps, thousands, of Chinese who offered the thumbs up sign to us as we moved, with our pink baby stroller and its occupant, through the exciting, clean, frantic streets of their city.

Contributing Editor Richard Turen owns Churchill and Turen, a vacation-planning firm in Naperville, Illinois. He has been named to the Conde Nast list of The World’s Top Travel Specialists since the list began. Contact him at rturen@travelweekly.com

A LETTER FROM SHANGHAI

Shanghai, China

When Aldous Huxley said that “travel helps you discover that everyone is wrong about other countries”, he must have had Shanghai in mind.

This sprawling, trendy, waterfront, super-charged, gem of a city has an “electricity rating” of 98%, surpassed only by Hong Kong. The energy level in the streets sweeps you up. The changes taking place are almost impossible to comprehend.

Shanghai is where it’s happening. When the Shanghai Financial Center is completed in 2008, it will be the world’s tallest building. The Maglev is a reality so you can travel at speeds of 430 km on a train that levitates.

And, of course, the Olympics are coming to China.

I have been to a fair number of cities that were preparing for the Olympics. But no other city has a game plan that is so clear and so outrageous in its scope. Tens of thousands of people will be relocated. They will be given a choice of a 200,000 Yuan allowance or a new place in the suburbs. The new place will be twice the size but they will be at least a half hour out of the city. This is not a huge problem because transportation to and from the city will be subsidized. 

Young people have been lining up at designated sites to donate strands of their hair to the Olympics. The purpose is to create a 2,008 meter long replica of the five circle Olympic logo out of resident’s locks.. They now have all the black hair they need. They are looking for a bit of brown for coloring.

When I was a child I was told to eat my peas because “children are starving in China.” Now, American kids might justifiably be told, “eat what is on your plate, or the Chinese will eat both their food and yours.”

With the advent of some private ownership, and the introduction of meaningful health and education reforms, China remains enigmatic to the western visitor. Shanghai and Hong Kong are very different places then Beijing or Guangzhou. The American visitor will want to poke beneath the surface of the typical historical orientation to try to figure out what is really going on in this place.

I tried to do this for a few days. And the best I could come up with is that Shanghai may just be the ultimate Socialist state gamble. Right now, it appears that they have large portions of the citizenry on their side. But they have had to adjust.

Yesterday, I spent several hours in the 5-story, modern Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center. Boring name, fascinating place. The highlight of this museum is on the third floor which houses a massive model of present-day Shanghai and the city as it will appear in the year 2020. Occupying the space of a basketball court, the entire city is modeled in exquisite detail. Residents can actually see what their neighborhood will look like thirteen years in the future.

Locals refer to the city as “the rainforest.” If you are walking underneath an off ice building the air conditioners will be dripping down on you. If you are passing an apartment building, you may feel the wet drops falling off the drying laundry.

Many of the residential buildings are so-called “one-soup” apartments. This means that the in-laws are so close in a nearby apartment that the same bowl of soup will still be hot when it is brought over.

In fact, the laundry was not fitting in with the city’s progressive, new image so the government forbids the hanging of laundry during daylight hours,

The Chinese population complained that their dishwashers do not work properly – they must hang their laundry in full view of the nice visitors strolling the Bund. The government considered the fact that Chinese dishwashers really are not worthy of the Maytag man. So a compromise was announced. It is now ok to hang laundry outside as long as they are not undergarments.

The streets are clogged with traffic. Buick and VW are the most popular brands, with factories in the suburbs. But there are 8.9 million bicycles and more than 90,000 taxis competing with the cars. It cost $5,000 to buy a license plate but that has not really cut down on traffic.

Visitors are interested in the “one child” policy. It is a complicated subject. Abortion is legal. Doctors are not permitted to give out gender information to perspective parents. Violating the one-child rule will often mean a fine equal to 15% of all of the mother’s money and property. Parents who have no siblings, can, under certain circumstances, have two children.

Nothing is easy here. Just to read a newspaper you would have to know 2,000 or so Chinese characters. To read serious literature you would need to know about 6,000 characters.

This is a country that does not allow its citizens to get CNN or BBC news. They certainly aren’t watching Fox. Teachers average $12,000 per year, a waitress or a construction worker will average about $4,000 but many get food and lodging.

The tests to get into University are difficult. There are four subjects – Chinese – English – Math and a 4th that varies based on specialization,

It is getting late and it should be dark. But the city fathers have mandated that every office tower in Shanghai keep its lights on until 10:30pm. The glow of millions of lights and the spotlights that illuminate the front of nearly every important building, serve to remind visitors that Shanghai is fully emerged from its historical closet. The great Chinese experiment will continue or fail here as the lights beckon the world to watch.  

A LETTER FROM BEIJING

I have not arrived in Beijing on the wings of an angel. I flew United.

The service upstairs on the 747 was great, unless, of course, you’ve flown one of those Asian carriers that actually understands the concept of customer service.

Then there’s this thing I have about the age of the aircraft. I like to fly planes that are younger then the flight attendants.

I am ensconced at the Peninsula, an oasis of tranquility near the Wangfujing district. It is an exciting part of town and the visitor can wander down ancient alleyways called “hutongs” where local workers hover over stands dispensing fried donuts, sautéed chicken feet, and herbed teas the color of the Ganges.  Every block or two was a barber wielding a swinging set of scissors.

Walking these streets I experienced the latest tourist scam. Americans are approached by “university students” eager to practice English and to share what “life is really like here in Beijing”. The visitor enjoys the conversation until it is revealed that the university student is a starving artist with a run-down apartment that doubles as an art studio. The artist lairs are filled with the Chinese equivalent of Elvis-on-velvet art, the kind sold in the parking lots of gas stations just off the interstate in the States.

I did manage to meet a fair number of authentic students but only because I politely asked to see ID. After a while, I noticed that they all seemed to talk with the same phrases. Several told me that Beijing is “very good, I think, because things are getting harmonious and we have good order.” I saw a lot of “good order” when I looked up at the CCTV cameras and the soldiers patrolling.

Even the young people in western dress felt the need for structure. One engineering student from Beijing University told me that “we like making money, yes, but never without good order. We do not want to be exactly like you.”

So I went looking for good order in the area around Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. As I walked along a path leading to the outer walls, I noticed a young woman on crutches who had talked back to a policeman. He seemed not to want to arrest her but as the path cleared to the wide boulevard just in front of the Square, three trucks pulled up. The woman was thrown to the ground and hurled into the back of one of the trucks, which quickly sped away..

The director of this was a soldier I called “hardcore’. I watched as he pulled people off of buses for searches by his associates. He also stopped walkers who looked, somehow, suspicious. It was the last day of the People’s Congress and security was high.

Finally, I tucked my notebook in my pocket and entered the Forbidden City’s South Gate.

Three hours later, I decided to walk back to my hotel. Just before turning onto Wangfujing, I bought an ice tea and sat on a park bench near the main bus stop. It was a sunny afternoon and a parade of bicycles, carts, and traffic streamed by. Perfect people watching. Suddenly I felt a presence, looked up, and saw “hardcore” approaching.

He came up to my bench, peered down at me, and asked “Where you from?”

“Not far from Wrigley Field”, I replied, “States.”

He stared at me. “You watch too much” he said as he threw me his best sneer and walked away. No doubt he would finish the sunny day by assuring that all was “in good order.”

WHAT FLYING STRESS?

Escaping from Siberia

On February 4th, a Monday, dense fog shrouded the Chicago area, making the city look something like Dresden after the bombing.

But I wasn’t worried. I was not scheduled to fly out until Wednesday. It was a trip that would take me to the least southern part of the south, the bottom of Florida.

It has been a rough winter. Thirty years earlier, I was brought to Chicago in a corporate move after years in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. It took a while to get accustomed to the weather, but I’ve always loved winter and the people who live in America’s best functioning major city got to me quickly. I became a Chicagoan through and through.

Of course ,I live nowhere near the city. In fact, I live nowhere near my office, which is located in Chicago’s largest suburb. No, I drive almost an hour from remote Kendall County. It is an area of some growth but farmland still dominates the landscape. We live on a dead end road in the woods. So when I heard that heavy snow was forecast for my departure on Wednesday, I began to wonder if the limo that would take me to the airport would be able to make it down our road. Would the flights operate?

On Tuesday, the forecast worsened, something major was coming, and Chicago’s big shoulders might, like mighty Atlas, shrug under the onslaught of eight to twelve inches of snow.

I called my airline of choice at 4:00 pm. There was no way I was going to be able to get out on Wednesday, could I possibly fly on Thursday?

Now, at this point, you might imagine that my airline of choice would be Cathay Pacific, Singapore, or Emirates, airlines I have, in other forums, rated as the very best in the world. Add Virgin Atlantic and Qatar to that list. Or, since I am based in Chicago, is my “airline of choice” American or United? They are fine airlines.

But, no, my “airline of choice” is Southwest. And, once again, they demonstrated why.

A peppy reservation agent answered the phone on the second ring. She listened to what I wanted to do and responded:

“Oh Mr. Turen we don’t want you to risk driving to the airport in this weather. I will be happy to change your flight to Thursday or any other day that you wish, and Southwest will honor your fare.” I was confirmed immediately on the same flight a day later.

On Thursday, the limo arrived. A local farmer, Mr. Hill, had plowed our driveway. The roads near my house were bad but Chicago’s road crews love challenges and they work all night. The tollways were clear with very little traffic.

O’Hare had cancelled just over 1,000 flights on Wednesday and the news had carried scenes of thousands of stranded passengers sleeping on cots in the terminals. You may have seen the pictures. The TV weather people were actually fondling their dopplers.

So what would I find at Chicago’s smaller Midway Airport, the local home of Southwest?

I found no waiting at check-in. The Southwest curbside check-in guys walked out to the limo to get my bags. Southwest had pressed dozens of extra staff into service and cleared the backlog from the previous day. The runways had been cleared.

In the main terminal, huge pizzas was just coming out of the ovens, the lamb and feta sandwiches were warming, and a few TSA’s and Chicago’s finest were lined up for some Chicago-style dogs piled high with healthy, salad kind of stuff.

It was 10:30 in the morning,  the time when lunch in Chicago officially begins. Our Mayor decided some years ago that fliers out of Midway ought to be offered some of the best of the ethnic and “Chicago-style” foods for which the city is famous. So each and every one of my Southwest flights involves a wonderful picnic put together from the myriad of options in the terminal.

At the gate, the agent was extremely apologetic. Our departure was going to be delayed by about nine minutes.

We boarded our 737-700, still showing signs of newness, and were promptly instructed that the flight would be full so “I would like everyone to formally introduce themselves to the losers in the middle seat.” The lead flight attendant also mentioned that “if you really depend on my demonstration to operate your seat belt, please don’t try driving when we arrive in Ft. Myers.”

The pilot twice apologized for the nine-minute delay and promised that he would try to find some tailwinds to make up for the delay.

Hours after one of the worst snowstorms in recent years, our plane took off. No hassles – no problems and genuinely nice people every step of the way, all of whom actually seemed to enjoy working for their airline. My airline. .

Quite frankly,  I don’t see what the big deal is about flying these days.

Pilot Ron found the tailwind and we arrived at the gate two minutes ahead of schedule.

A KISS IS JUST A KISS

The French are struggling with the results of a new study that says that only 54% of American visitors are satisfied with the welcome they received in France.

This is a perception problem that should be easy to fix. Clearly, the French need something symbolic, like a lei greeting, to demonstrate how happy they are to welcome visitors to their  little corner of the world.

So I have recommended that the French Tourism authorities patent the “French Kiss” and make certain that all visiting Americans receive one at the airport or the cruise pier. This would make arriving passengers feel really special.

Every once in a while a French movie star could be driven out to the airport to kiss arriving tourists. Perhaps a “French Kiss” photo could be given to every arriving guest.

The Junior Minister for Tourism, who is a fully-grown adult, Luc Chatel, is very concerned about the fact that Spain and Italy are both scoring higher on hospitality surveys.

The image of grumpy taxi drivers and arrogant waiters is hurting France and the future impact of a drop in both European and American visitors is taken quite seriously these days.

More people visit France on vacation then any other nation on earth. And the World Tourism Association is predicting a tourism boom that will have worldwide repercussions. They are predicting, according to a recent release from Agence France Presse, that the number of travelers worldwide will actually double in the next twelve years. That there will be winners and losers in this epic struggle to win the hearts and minds of prospective tourists has not escaped the French. They are looking to begin improving even the little things like the way the immigration officer welcomes you at the airport, to the bathing habits of those who drive the nation’s taxis. This is a war and there are untold billions at stake.

One study has particularly rankled the French. A study of attitudes toward tourists by the Maison de la France showed that Italy was significantly “friendlier and warmer” then France. The French and the Italians are more then soccer rivals. Some old scores are just never going to be settled by the European Union. The French detest loosing anything to the Italians. The notion that Italian pasta actually passes for cuisine in some quarters, is insult enough.

Still another study, a report by the Committee for the Modernization of the French Hotel Trade, finds cause for concern in the deterioration of the nation’s more then 18,000 hotels with official ratings. The report identifies declining profits and poorly paid staff as major impediments to improvement.

In the cities of France, one gets the impression that there is one hotel consultant and he or she is  rather overworked. AFP reports that one in four hotels are said to be in a state of “disrepair” and about one in four guests complains about rude service. Of course the positive side of that is that if two couples are traveling together, only one member of the group will actually be insulted by front desk staff.

It is hard to change perceptions. I am thrilled to see that Bill O and Rush to the contrary, Americans are returning to France. I can still see the villages, smell the fields of lavender, and recall the simple pleasures of a proper cassoulet and a glass of silky smooth Burgundy.  It is one of my two or three favorite countries on earth, and I despair when I hear about “troubles” in the internal tourism plumbing of a land so-blessed.

I keep remembering that France is the most visited place on earth. The 78 million annual visitors are not idiots. They have come to France for a reason. For many reasons. The French do not naturally smile. They are a dour lot. But they have given the world the greatest of gifts. They know how to live and they understand that “living” means anticipating the smallest of pleasures on a daily basis. Somewhere in France, millions are looking forward to this evening’s dinner with a sense of adventure and detail that we can only envy from afar.

But you know what? I think the French Kiss thing is really all they need to do.

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