We were staying in the village of Belveze du Razes in the Aude. Mike The Brit and his wife lived in Cailhau, the next village over, where he had his home custom built from the ground up. This, I knew, was no mean feat because he had to deal with a host of contractors, which can be daunting under any circumstances; doing so when you aren’t fluent in the language can be a nightmare. I told him I was impressed.
“Aw, mate,” said Mike, “It’s not that hard, really. You just rub your chin and mutter a bit. And frown. Yeah, frown.That goes a long way”.
I thought that was pretty funny. Funny guy, that Mike The Brit.
Not long after we were on a road trip and ended up in the city of Albi, where I parked in a pay-to-park lot. We entered without incident, but in order to get out we needed to pay one euro for a ticket, a sort of Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card that wasn’t free. Armed with my euro I went to the ticket machine and inserted the coin.
For a few moments nothing happened. Then the machine spat my euro back at me.
I looked closely at the machine, but found no message, no indication of why it was rejected, so I inserted it again. Again, it was spat out. As I retrieved the coin I looked behind me and there was another guy standing there, watching. Being a little flustered and not speaking French very well, all I could do was exchange glances with him, then look at the coin in my hand, which he did too.
He muttered something and frowned, so I did too.
I inserted the coin again, it spat back out, I looked at him, he looked at me, he rubbed his chin and muttered. I did too, then I frowned and so did he.
About this time a gendarme showed up. Apparently having watched us, he looked at the coin in my hand, then looked at me, then the other guy, and he rubbed his chin. So I did too, and the other guy frowned and muttered something.
So far not a word had been spoken, when the gendarme took the coin from me, gave it a rub for good luck and inserted in the machine, which promptly spat it back into his hand.
The gendarme looked at the coin, rubbed his chin, frowned and muttered something, then looked at me, so I frowned and muttered back at him. I could hear the guy behind me muttering and I assume he was rubbing his chin too.
When I looked back I could see that now there were three people standing there, all of us looking at the gendarme and the coin, all of us frowning and muttering.
The cop reached into his pocket, pulled out another euro and slipped it into the machine, which immediately printed and spat out a ticket that he held triumphantly aloft and handed to me after pocketing the recalcitrant euro. All the while the crowd around me muttered in approval and nodded to each other. No one had thus far said a single intelligible word, but I had my ticket and was free to leave the lot.
Heading back to the car where sat Beloved Wife, unaware of the drama that had just unfolded, I couldn’t resist. Waving the ticket overhead, I called out to her with far greater excitement than warranted, “Honey! Honey! Karen, look, look, I’m bi-lingual!”
All she did was frown and mutter something. She’s more fluent in French than me.
France Isn't Paris 
Keep it up!
JB
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Red, this reminds me of when my Better Half and I were self-barging on the Canal du Midi. We moored for a couple of days in Castelnaudary to resupply and do laundry. We washed the clothes at the laundromat up the street, but when Janelle inserted the tokens, nothing happend. After trying several times, we called the telephone number and talked with the attendant’s wife. Upon learning that he was having dinner and we would have to wait, Janelle explained (in French) that we were on the boat, had a load of wet laundry, it was raining with no hope of our clothes drying on the boat, and “la machine a mange mon argent.” Not five minutes later (he must have lived around the corner) he appeared. He looked at the machine, looked at the slot, and like the gendarme, rubbed the coin between his fingers. He inserted the offending coin, and it worked! We thanked him, he shrugged his shoulders in a very Gallic way, puffed his lips slightly, said, “it needed to be warm,” and went back to his dinner.
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Great story Byron. Made me laugh. I guess the incident wasn’t so unusual after all. Castelnaudary is a neat place. There’s a big Foreign Legion base there, and we once went there for the Legion Marathon. through the streets. The place was packed with legionnaires…a real thrill for me, having read a stack of books about the Legion over the years, to see them in person, and en masse. They were, as Karen said, a scary looking lot.
Oh, and if you were in Castelnaudary and didn’t have cassoulet you were probably in violation of a local ordinance.
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