Following the gendarme from Saint-Tropez

Not much remains from the charm of the French Riviéra seen in the Louis de Funés movies of the 1960’s. Though the landscape and the sea is still beautiful, industrial scale tourism has done away with charm. Endless traffic jams and innumerable people on the beach, with hardly any fish in the sea. Saint-Tropez is known as a holiday resort of the jet-set, but 2-3 star hotels cost no more than in Budapest and we might easily find ourselves paying more in a Hortobágy restaurant than here. However, the jet-set are also here, as we can see form the boats in the harbour. You can bump into a celebrity anytime, like we have bumped into Fernando Alonso in a side street. The French begin their day in the bakery shops. A half kilo baguette costs under HUF 200. Supermarkets open at half past eight and are closed on Sundays. French frozen food sold in a store called Picard is delicious. Fresh products stored at 2-3 Celsius degrees are however, far more popular and look incomparably more attractive than similar products in Hungarian stores… Local wines are excellent and the 5 litre bag in box packaging is surprisingly popular. Ouzo is called Pastis here and consumed with water and ice. Its flavour reminds me of Odol mouthwash. The freshness and flavour of fruits is quite unimaginable for consumers accustomed to the products offered by Hungarian hyper markets. Though a wide range of seafood is sold, most of it is imported, as local waters have been over fished a long time ago. There is an enormous Géant hyper market near Saint-Tropez with a floor space of 10,000 square meters. Its Cafeteria is enormously popular, illustrating that demand for cheap meals is also substantial in such an elegant place. There are also Spar stores, a funny sight among the palm trees – at least for our eyes. Proxi stores are typical examples of a chain composed of small shops, where you can buy anything you need on your way home from the beach. They remind me of the Csemege store in Siófok in the 1970’s and this makes me feel homesick…