“Let’s meet at the cafe.”  The question is, which one? Easy, right?  Just give the name–if you can remember it.  Is it Cafe de la Paix or Cafe de la Poste?  Or give directions, but that can be confusing.

Thank goodness for cafes that make it easy.  Like one near us called Le Trou du Fut, or The Hole in the Barrel.  There’s no mistaking it–the entrance is a door in the end of an enormous barrel.

Sometimes, though, the name doesn’t really help.  Consider A la Miaou, or At the Meow, which is on the beach.  “I don’t know why it’s called this,” said the current owner.  She bought the place in 1971 and its name was already established.  “Maybe there were lots of cats here when it opened years and years ago.”  Now the cafe’s neighbor is a nudist beach.  Instead of cats–well, let’s leave what could be said to your imagination. 

Owners of one cafe, however, have left nothing to the imagination or to chance.  Here’s the name of the place.  Okay, take a deep breath.  Ready?  Here we go.   Le Cafe du Coin d’en Bas de la Rue du Bout de la Ville d’en Face du Port.

What?  The Neighborhood Cafe at the End of the Street at the Bottom of the Town just across from the Port. 

Confused?  Don’t worry.  Once you find it, just do what the locals do and call it The Java.

While putting in a terrace in front of our house, we discovered an odd arch beginning just below the ground level.  When we dug down, it turned out to be a large vaulted space for…well, we weren’t sure what.  An old wine cellar?  The passage for a moat? A vault for hidden treasure?  A plain old basement?

What we were sure about was that we didn’t have the money to excavate the whole thing, so we filled it back in, leaving the top of the arch exposed as a bit of a tease and put a small, sloping planting area around it.

Knocking around the house was a plaster cast of a capital of a small column we’d bought it years before at junk shop.  We had never figured out what to do with it.  “Aha! A faux archeological dig,” we said, and thought ourselves very clever.

We dug out part of the garden, buried three-quarters of the capital and invested in a few trailing plants, artistically arranging them so the column just peeked out.   Then we added a few weighty stones.  An instant ruin!  We loved it.

A few weeks later we had a business trip.  We asked our neighbor Madame Mercier to “cat sit” for us and keep an eye on the house. 

On our return, we discovered our little “ruin” was literally in ruins.  All the plants had been dug up and put into a big pot.

Sittiing proudly in the center of our picnic table was our column capital.

Madame Mercier called the second we walked in the door.  “Did you see what I found?” she asked breathlessly.  “There was part of an antique column in the part of the terrace you dug up.”

She had been so excited by her discovery that she dug up the entire garden–rocks and all–to see if there more “artefacts,” but she hadn’t found any.  She thought we would want to do some more excavating, however.  “I was very careful with the plants and potted them for you,” she added.

The plants are now back in the ground, along with the rocks.  We gave the column capital to a friend who said he had an idea for a phony ruin.  “Talk to your neighbors first,” we warned.