The Road to Burgundy by Ray Walker

Author:Ray Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“I’M HERE.”

“You’re where?”

“The train station.”

“Now? It’s nine thirty at night. Your train was supposed to be here at four in the afternoon. Yesterday!”

“Long story.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

As promised, minutes later, Fabrice picked me up. I didn’t know him too well—I’d run into him at the Beaune Chamber of Commerce during my first visit with Christian in January. Overhearing my frustration with the agent assigned to help me with setting up a French business—along with my horrible French and complete miscomprehension of the convoluted bureaucracy—he’d offered to explain how to navigate the system.

In my mind, it was a miracle anyone could start a business in France. You couldn’t get to step C without first completing step B, but there was no tackling step B without steps E and F. For example, if you weren’t from the European Union or you didn’t have a visa to work in France, you weren’t eligible to create a business. To get the visa, you needed to be a student or be employed. I couldn’t very well get a visa from an employer because the whole point was to be my own.

Whenever I tried asking for help, everyone at the agency said they could tell me only about their individual department. If I needed instructions on how to fulfill what their department required, they still didn’t have any idea how to answer my questions. They’d call their colleagues, their bosses, and I still wouldn’t get anywhere. My situation just wasn’t in the training books, and no one had seen anything like it on their desks before.

As a higher-up at the Chamber of Commerce, Fabrice had a good understanding about how everything tied together. And if there was something he didn’t know how to do, he knew the person to call. Things that had taken me months to untangle in California took him a matter of minutes. I was so grateful for his help that I invited him over to my birthday dinner while we were staying at the gîte. We got on so well that he took a personal interest in finding a winery location for me after we left France; and while I scoured the Internet for listings from California, Fabrice sent me leads on eighteen locations for rent. A few of them seemed like they’d work perfectly. He invited me to stay in his house in Chagny if I ever came back, so his was the first number I called when I booked my ticket.

Fabrice was different from most of my other friends. He was in his early forties, and his blond hair was coiffed in what was clearly an expensive haircut. He was vain, spoke English with a surly high street British accent, and lived in a large old house in Chagny, just a few kilometers from the celebrated wine village Chassagne-Montrachet. His house was filled with antiques, old theater playbills, paintings from the eighteenth century, and an eccentric collection of doorknobs and knockers. Eccentric as he was, he was my first French friend and a good one at that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.