Moi moi to the Vuolle family

During my three years and a bit years in France I have been sharing our small office mostly with Hannu, my trusty collegue. Now, the time has come for him to go back with his family to wintery Tampere. This sad event naturally calls for a leaving do (or as it turned out, two).

The plan was to get together all the “Riviera Finns” on Friday evening; but turned out Pete and his family were all down with the flu, and Mikko couldn’t make it either. Not to be deterred by this, we decided to meet up with the Vuolle family for dinner anyway. We opted upon the Domain de Loup clubhouse – a convenient choice for all of us (since the Vuolles leave at the Domain de Loup, and for us it’s a mere 10-minute walk away). The domain de Loup is one of the closed residences that are quite common on the Cote d’Azur – the residence houses a primary school, a pharmacy, a doctor, shops, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and of course the club house with its restaurant!

We had a very pleasant evening. The food was good, if a bit pricey (I was very content with my cote de boeuf - even if the quality of the meat didn’t quite reach the culinary heights of the Kobe beef I had a couple of weeks earlier in Japan). Sara and Daniel, Hannu’s and Rita’s energetic children provided ample entertainment for everybody at the restaurant (especially Sara's dance exhibition was a great success). The clubhouse was surprisingly lively, even if the middle age would’ve probably exceeded 60 without our presence. Actually the whole experience, with the views over the sea and the tacky live music, brought back memories from my youth, of booze cruises to Sweden?? (Except that the clientele was from a slightly different age group, and the proceedings were significantly more civilised). We finished the very pleasant evening with some coffee, grappa and limoncello.

Well, in the end, it turned out Hannu & Marianne could make it on Saturday, so we decided to have another farewell dinner. Any excuse will do, eh? This time we decided upon “Le Pelican Station” as a venue – a nice restaurant in the old town of Nice. Good choice for a venue, actually. The food was good, and quite reasonably priced for Vieux Nice (I especially loved the desert, or actually the three deserts). The staff was also most entertaining, and got along very well with Sara and Daniel (who were in a very energetic mood, again!).

Me and Mikko Hannu said our farewells to Hannu in a typical stoic Finnish male manner; which is to say no tears were shed, no hugging, and definitely no kissing on the cheeks. No touchy-feely type stuff, basically.

At the end of the day though, the Vuolle family will be missed, and I’m quite sure they will miss the Cote d’Azur as well (I don’t think they are all that keen to go back to Finland especially considering the time of the year). ‘nuff said!