Год в дерьме

“Watch this,” he raised his chin a few degrees, turned his head until he made eye contact with the waiter, and called out, “Un crème, s’il vous plait!”

“Un crème, un! ” the waiter barked towards the bar.

“Crème-doesn’t that mean cream?” I asked.

“Yeah, but it’s the name the waiters use for a ‘café au lait’.You've got to use their language. Hasn't anyone told you this yet?"

"No."

"Merde. You are so going to get ripped off. An espresso is 'un express', OK? An espresso with a bit of milk in it is 'une noisette'. A weak black coffee is 'un allonge'. And so on. You use their words and they know you're not a tourist." He took an authoritative sip of his "crème".

I got Jake to repeat the various coffee names and wrote them down on a page he'd torn out of his notebook.

"It's the same thing for beer," Jake said. "Haven't you seen these tourists sat outside cafes with, like, a two-litre flagon of beer?"

"Yeah," I confessed sheepishly. A few weeks earlier, I'd felt like a quick drink on the Champs-Elysées and ended up spending an hour emptying a glass the size of a skyscraper.

"It's because they've asked for 'une bière'. You've got to order 'un demi'. That means a normal, 25-centilitre glass. Kind of like a half-pint. You say that and they know you're not a tourist."

"Right. Brilliant. Un demi." I wrote it down on my list.

"If you don't know this stuff, if you don't prove to them that you're chez toi here, they'll arnack you."

"They'll what?"

"Damn. What do you say? I just said it. Rip you off. It's like carafes."

"Ah, yeah, for water."

"Yeah. Every cafe and restaurant will give you a pitcher of tap water if you want it. But you have to ask for 'une carafe d'eau'. You just ask for 'de 1'eau' and they'll sell you mineral water. Carafe is a kind of password you need to stop you getting arnacked. Ripped off. Damn."

"Et voila." With a spectacular sweep of his arm, the waiter delivered my normal-sized coffee, and a normal-sized bill.

"Merci," I said. I stirred my two lumps of sugar into the frothy coffee and looked up at my reflection in the glass front of the cafe. Yes, I was looking almost as self-satisfied as a Parisian.