JudyB

I definitely go with Busboy on the Cotes du Ventoux Rosés. We've stayed a few times near the foot of Mont Ventoux and developed a taste for them. What's even better is that they do make the trip back home well and still taste nice! The one we brought back last time is Perle de Rosée from Chateau Pesquié (near Mormoiron for anyone visiting the area). I don't know how available their wines are in the UK or USA, but I know that they do seem to be keen on advertising Cotes du Ventoux abroad, so it may be possible to buy them outside France. (If we can't get any in the UK we'll have to wait until September to get some more and we only have one bottle left!) They also do some very nice reds and an interesting Viognier.

I just hope that they don't try to extend this policy to Motorail since that is how we manage to take far too much luggage on holiday with us. (As well as having space to bring back a decent amount of wine of course! ) As has been said I understand why they are worried, but do they really think this will have a practical effect? The really worrying thought for me is that if they follow the logic (?) through they might cancel our fast holiday route to Avignon.

And what Duncan forgot to say is that we had exactly this situation when we were eating dinner as part of a wine-tasting weekend at Center Parcs in England. The waiters poured for the ladies first and then for the men (about 10-12 people on the table). Duncan tasted his wine and said how nice it was and I tasted mine and thought it tasted odd. Further discussion with the person running the weekend showed that the first bottle was corked and the second one was fine... leading to an impromptu discussion of corks vs screw tops from Oz Clarke.

Indeed you do, although I think that yours is the only restaurant where I have seen this. Incidentally, on Friday night the two of us (Duncan and I) got two menus and the wine list in a single pile in front of us on the bar. (This was in a local pub/restaurant and not anywhere with aspirations for Michelen stars etc).

Actually, it's a while since I lived in Cambridge (as a student) too so it may not be referred to as "the Kite" anymore - the original development was in the early eighties. I think that the proper name for the shopping area is the Grafton Centre, but it was built on an area known as The Kite - to the east(ish) of the town centre. A quick search on Google shows the following web site about The Kite if you want more details about the exact area.

I think that this is called "progress" - at least some of the really interesting places got elbowed out by the Kite shopping development and there has been a lot more city centre "improvement" since then... One notable eatery was Waffles - not haut cuisine, but good enjoyable food - they had to move to Castle Hill when the Kite came along, but I think that it has since closed.

On the pricy side in Avignon itself there is Christian Etienne assuming that it is open during your stay. Have a look at Duncan's review of our visit there in September. There are some suggestions for the Avignon area more generally in the Northern Provence thread. Have a nice time - in general we have found that you can eat in all sorts of places round Avignon very well and at reasonable prices.

This is only vaguely related to the comments here, but do you have any opinion on the quality of half-bottles compared with a full size bottle? The reason that I ask is that we had a very nice Vieux Telegraphe CDP 1998 while in France. (See Duncan's review of La Prévôté here). The odd thing was that the half-bottle was less than half the price of the full bottle (€29 vs €84). Does this make sense? Or were we just lucky that the restaurant was trying to get rid of its stock of the half-bottles?

What Duncan didn't say in his post is that the (French) waitress was trying to tell us in English what everything was. For virtually everything else she did an excellent job, but obviously got lost halfway through this one. The one area in the restaurant that Duncan missed was the trip to the toilets: the stairs leading there had an impressive selection of bottled fruit and vegetables. While I'm not sure what all of them were they mostly looked to be bottled tomatoes, of various colours, with at least one bottle of what I think were gherkins. Has anyone else been there and actually know more about what they were? As Duncan said this was a thoroughly enjoyable evening to end our holiday. In addition to the meal itself, Avignon was also celebrating(?) the Côtes du Rhone vendange up in the gardens above the palace. Unfortunately we arrived too late to see the earlier processions for this, but we could hear some of the proceedings while we were eating.

Actually, there was a view from the Mas de Safran, but probably only from my seat, not Duncan's. From the right angles (either through the gate or over the walls) I had a very nice view of the reflected sunset on the surrounding hillsides. Given the apparent lack of inside seating I was also eyeing the black clouds overhead wondering what would happen if it rained, but fortunately we didn't get to find out! Judy

Blinis seems to have closed. I had hoped to go there when we ended up at Fishworks, but we couldn't get an answer on the phone number in the Good Food Guide and Duncan found a link confirming that it had closed. Judy

I don't remember ever getting Chicken Kiev at formal hall, but the people I felt really sorry for were the scholars. At my college we had formal hall *every* night and the scholars were on a rota for going to read grace in Latin. Most of us only bothered to turn up for formal hall once a week (Sundays) so most nights the scholar had to read grace for the fellows and only one or two students. The advantage of this for the scholars was that if the scholar was the only student there the fellows sometimes felt sorry for them and they got to eat at high table. Having eaten at high table a couple of times I can say that this was probably worthwhile. Although the food at formal hall was pretty good the high table food was much better.

I don't know about the innards of credit cards, but I think that problem that you refer to is a general one with magnetic stripe credit cards. We visit France (from the UK) fairly frequently and for a few (2?) years we had problems where they couldn't reliably read my husband's credit card but mine was OK. In some shops the card failed first time, but worked if they persisted. Since the card in question was replaced I don't think we've had any serious problems (once they have been reminded to use the right slot for non-chip cards). My guess is that these problems are due to some degree of misalignment of the magnetic stripe from the norm in both the card and reader. With the French cards using chips they won't be using the magnetic card reader so often so they may not realize if the machine needs to be adjusted.

I think you are right that the French chips are incompatible with the UK ones (and the standard that the rest of Europe is going to use). I believe that the French are supposed to change theirs to be compatible by something like 2005, but I'm not certain of the date. The first time we got caught out trying to buy petrol in France on a Sunday (in 2001) we tried our UK debit cards (which have chips) as well as all of our credit cards and the French machines wouldn't take them.