France Voila travel and French tourism, lodging rentals and accommodation services

1. Paris #1
2. Paris #2 - the "Top 20"
3. French bread
4. Competition Results - Free flights from Ryanair
5. Insurance
6. Car rentals
7. Nizas - A plastic barrel !!
8. Paris notes

A lot of this issue is about Paris, in fact it is written from Paris. I am sitting in an apartment in rue Dauphine, which is in the heart of the "rive gauche" and one of the busiest streets in Paris. From my front door I can walk to the Louvre or Notre Dame in under 5 minutes, within 100 yards of my front door there are 32 cafes, bistros and restaurants (I just counted them) and directly below me is a night club called "American Strip", it opens at midnight and closes at 7 in the morning, I have no idea what they do there (honestly!!). My apartment faces an inner courtyard and, amazingly, it is always completely quiet and peaceful, I even have plants and flowers.

Regular readers will know that I live nearly 500 miles south of Paris in Nizas, a small farming village in the south of France near the Mediterranean where the traffic is mainly tractors working in the surrounding vineyards and the only noise we hear at night is a nightingale who lives in the tree opposite. Tourism is just beginning to be noticed in Nizas and the new mayor of Nizas has even added a member to his team in charge of tourism.

The contrast between Paris and Nizas is obvious, but I am pleased to find many similarities. The people are just as polite and helpful, the food is as good and excellent value. Of course there is much more variety and the buildings, galleries and museums are fantastic.

Why am I here? France Telecom can take of lot of credit for that. Our business is focused on finding good vacation rental accommodation in France and offering this through our web sites like ...

We started this just to rent our own apartments in our rambling medieval fortified house in Nizas, but to develop a successful website takes time and money and we added some more properties which our neighbours had and now we are adding properties all over France. To do this I am on-line for up to 15 hours a day. In France this is very expensive due to the monopoly that France Telecom have, my phone bill in Nizas is often over 3000 francs a month (about $400) and it is slow and unreliable. We had reached the point where I needed an office in a city with cable or high speed lines where I could keep connected.

We have also expanded to help us in our aim to provide information about France and French property. Anyway, I ended up in Paris where the Internet connection is 378Ff a month ($50) and there is a strong community of people developing Internet services. So now I am commuting from Nizas to Paris each week. This is surprisingly quick and cheap. The TGV train takes just over 4 hours (soon to be 3 hours) and costs about 300 francs ($40). It is without doubt the best way to travel in France. Quiet, comfortable, the food is good and not expensive and I can still work on a laptop computer and use the phone.

But my main reason for this move is "Chez Frog". Since December we have been working on the launch of an in depth and informative on-line magazine...

The problems I had with phone lines, communications and building a team were making it very difficult to produce this in Nizas, so I started talking to people in Paris about working together. The outcome is a completely new company called -- "Chez Frog" ...

My new business partner Adrian Leeds and I are now developing the French Property Digest to be a more important and stronger publication and we have immediately taken over the publishing an established series of on-line books and guides. The first of these are now on-line for download at...

On June 1st we will add 4 more guides which are ready and also in planning and production we have over 30 more we will offer before the end of the year.

This guide is always up to the minute. The guide lists over 180 "Good value" restaurants in Paris. Restaurants are which constantly changing, go out of business, go from good to bad in a few weeks or just disappear. I am sure some places were portals from another planet which one evening just vanished into another dimension with all the diners. (I have often confidently gone to a place I once knew well to find no trace of it ever having existed and a completely different business set up in the same premises.)

With over 180 recommended restaurants under her belt (literally) this "Top 20" only represents those which give good value for money. The guide covers a range of prices, from 75 francs for 3 course including wine, and a variety of venues. Only the best get added, I know this as I have been lucky enough recently to have had to accompany Adrian on this vital research, and out of 8 places we have eaten at, although all were good, only one was added to the list as giving good value.

The guide includes practical tips and the "do's and dont's" of eating in Paris, one tip alone will more than save you the cost of the guide.

To give you a "taste" of Paris, the "Leeds Favorite Top 20 Good Value Paris Restaurants" guide is available by download (or we will e-mail you an attachment) for only $17.95 - we give a full money back guarantee if you are not completely satisfied. You can also buy the full guide on-line to all 182 recommended Paris restaurants for $28.95.

Remember the guides are constantly updated and reviewed, being only available as an electronic guide (you can order a CD if you prefer), these guides are always "fresh", a printed guide is at least 6 months out of date when you buy it due to the delays in printing and delivery.

Bread in France is a subject of the greatest importance. One of the main causes or the French revolution was the increases in the price of bread and the way that prices, taxes and distribution of bread was controlled. Today the price of the basic baguette is still officially controlled and to change this by one centime needs a directive from the government. So, to make a profit the bakers have to sell special bread at a higher, non controlled, price and for the French (who are always very careful with their money) to pay more this bread has to be good - it is.

I don't know how many different types of bread there are, I have counted over 50, but every baker makes their bread differently, every region has different varieties and there is a whole language of bread types which vary from place to place. This could be the subject of a new guide, "A dictionary of French Bread" or "Use Your Loaf".

From the lightest pastries which demand to be eaten within 5 minutes of baking to solid black bread which is sold by the kilo and which I am sure you could build a house with, there is a bread for every occasion and for every taste. When you come to France do try different bakers and different breads, you can ask for a degustation (tasting) and the baker will be impressed and very helpful, but don't do this if there are a lot of people waiting in line on a Sunday morning.

To enter you had to visit some of our sites and answer questions about France. There was a tie breaker, which is lucky as a number of entrants got the answers right.

They had the nearest answers to the tie breaker question for the number of hectolitres in the wine cuve, the answer is 280, the original photo is on the answers page.

All runners up who were within 100 hectolitres of the correct answer will get a special prize, we will write to you all as soon as possible.

We constantly remind travelers to check that they have adequate travel insurance, we can offer it from our sites (we do make a commission and it helps us to keep our services up-to-date) or you can get it from you travel agent, do compare prices and do check the items covered, but do make sure you are covered for losses, cancellations, missed connections and health. There are details on our pages at...

Last year we ran a series of warnings about "sharp practices" by some rental companies in France. We have had far fewer complaints this year and I know that some of the better agencies are getting tough on the rental companies, Auto Europe came out top last year and I have received a lot of good comments about their services. Auto Europe are making some very special offers for travelers this year, you can go to them direct from out site at...

For new readers, this is the continuing saga of one of the highlights of small rural village life in the south of France. For the past year our neighbour has generated local friction by leaving, indeed gluing, a 250 liter wooden wine barrel in the middle of our street so that he, on the rare occasions he comes on holiday to Nizas, can park his car in his garage. He needs this extra space to manoeuvre his car as he is from the unfortunate northern European country where driving comes a poor second to brewing beer and the driving test is a very recent innovation.

We all though we had heard the last of this infernal obstruction when due to the power of Mme J.... it was "vanished" to the alleyway behind her house. A further optimistic development was the departure of F... the builders son, who is suspected of gluing the infernal tub to the road with white mastic.

However - J...., the father of F.... has recently been renovating the facade of the building on the corner of the old medieval tower, to do this he has placed a large blue barrel full of water in exactly the same spot. It remains to be seen if it will be left there when the scaffolding is taken down.

The new mayor has appointed a "specialist" in tourism to his team. This is a far sighted move for our village which for over 2000 (yes two thousand) years had been a farming and wine making village. There is no doubt that tourism is coming to our part of the south of France. Even the regional government has changed the name to Languedoc Mediterranee so that people will know where we are.

Try to come to see us here soon while you can still see the "real" south of France and before we all vanish under a thick covering of writers and television crews.

In the first lines of this newsletter I explain why I am spending a lot of time in Paris. I have often visited Paris and have stayed a few days here, but usually on business or rushing around with the family. Now I am working here and I have to travel around to meet people.

The first thing I discovered is how small Paris is. I rarely have to use the Metro to meet people, a short walk from my place, over the Seine at Pont Neuf (actually 400 years old) past Notre Dame or past the Louvre or a few minutes on the metro to Etoile or Bastille gets me to a meeting with a writer or contributor to our new "Chez Frog" venture.

The next thing I discovered is that a car is a big liability in Paris. I drove here to bring computer equipment and other stuff I needed. Getting rid of the car became a priority. Parking is a nightmare and expensive, driving is the slowest way of travelling in Paris. If you want to buy a secondhand car then Paris must be the cheapest place in Europe, I have heard of people paying 500 francs to someone to take a perfectly good and legal registered car away.

What is essential is a portable phone. Meetings are often in restaurants or pavement bistros and all apartments have security doors with a door code. So to find out where you are meeting or how to get in, you have to call by phone, there are no doorbells and it is difficult to tell which of 50 identical and crowded pavement cafes you are expecting to meet your friends.

These security doors are simple and efficient - until the electricity fails. Yesterday I was locked out on the street when the door code buttons were not operating. Even the post girl, who has a key to bypass these buttons, could not get in to deliver the mail. Without a portable phone I would have been stranded.

Some friends have asked if the French will be annoyed that our company is called "Chez Frog". In fact the frog is one of the old royal symbols of France. There are many "stories" about why the French are called "frogs" and to the French people it is certainly not an insult. One of the hundreds of good restaurants near me in rue Dauphine is called "Roger the Frog", now that really conjures up a strange image!!!

Our aim is to provide you accurate and relevant information about France. If there is anything you think we should write about or if there is anything you would like help with, please write to me at