Akascribe A personal blog covering all manner of subjects

February 27, 2010

Club Med – The Last Best Hope for Civilization?

Filed under: Domestic Tranquility,General — akascribe @ 2:01 pm

Along with my lovely wife and son, I recently returned from a week at Club Med in Cancun – a long-planned vacation coinciding with my son’s Presidents’ Week school break, colloquially known as “Ski Week” in these parts.  A little counter-programming on our part.  Despite the less-than-stellar weather – since when is it chilly enough in the Caribbean to require pants and shirt sleeves most evenings? – and terrible flight delays, we had a terrific time.  So I got to wondering why.

Now on paper, I may not seem like the Club Med sort of guy.  I avoid group travel like the plague and generally prefer the independence of a vacation rental with its own kitchen.  But despite all that, there’s something about the Club Med formula that works for me.

One thing that is totally simpatico is the sports, which are various and all-inclusive.  Not just for me, but for my 8 year-old son, who never met a ball game that he didn’t want to play.  Ping pong?  He’s there – literally for hours in the Mexican-tiled courtyard just off the main dining area, taking on all challengers.  Basketball?  I booked a room in the building right next to the hoops court on purpose.  And don’t get him started on the tennis, as each afternoon I dragged my exhausted, middle-aged carcass off the courts against his protests.

Actually, we all played a LOT of tennis that week, starting every morning for me at 8.30 am in the advanced lesson that soon became a regular event among a handful of guys my age, meeting up for a quick breakfast (those French pastries are so tempting) then stretching out and working on a different aspect of our game.  What really make it all so enjoyable, though – and this is where I’m going with the Club Med experience – is the interaction with the staff as peers.  In our case, it was with Youssef, the head pro from Morocco, and José-Luis, the younger pro from Mexico.

In case you don’t know how it works, at Club Med the guests are called GMs (gentils membres in French) and the significant staff are called GOs (gentils organisateurs).  I say significant staff because the local staff who handle the more menial chores (cleaning the rooms, sweeping the grounds, serving the beverages) are not accorded the same status as the GOs.  GOs are typically recent college graduates, uniformly attractive, personable and multi-talented (as well as multi-lingual).  They are deemed the social peers of the GMs in a village and are encouraged to share meals and otherwise hang out when they aren’t performing their regular job or in the evening skit/musical review, kind of an amateur talent show that is an acquired taste.  It might seem like a dream job, getting paid, for example, to spend six days a week giving sailing lessons in the tropics while enjoying free room and board, but these kids work incredibly hard.  And they don’t have the luxury of much solitude, so it inevitably attracts a very socially-oriented group of people.

What this does, however, is help break down the barrier that typically exists on a vacation between the customer and the staff.  In our tennis group, for example, by the second day several of us die-hards had spent sufficient time in the lessons and tournaments with Youssef and J-L for them to realize we weren’t complete jerks, and they invited us to a “tennis” dinner where we commandeered a large table in the dining area and got to know each other better.  Instant friendships are sometimes to be mistrusted on foreign vacations when people are thrust together, perhaps especially within the GO-GM dynamic, but I’d like to think that not only did we fellow-GMs forge some real bonds with each other (as the subsequent e-mail exchanges have borne out), but some of the GOs and GMs established some genuine ties as well.  I really enjoyed getting to know Youssef in particular, an intelligent, curious and light-hearted man with some unique insights into American culture as an educated, cosmopolitan North African.  The fact that Youssef also bent the rules and allowed my son to participate in the adult tennis lessons and genuinely seemed to enjoy bantering with my precocious offspring certainly endeared him to me.

Another aspect that I like about Club Med is that the GMs are typically well-educated and active.  Even though Club Med is now all-inclusive, with “free” booze readily available, there was no drunkenness and really not all that much drinking.  Admittedly, we weren’t staying up that late to check out the bar scene, but this was a family-oriented Club Med village, as opposed to some “couples only” locales, so we were probably a self-selecting group of non-carousers.  You might think that this might limit the types of people you meet, and perhaps it does somewhat, but I was very pleased to get to know Bob, for instance, a fascinating older New Yorker traveling with his extended family and his “girlfriend” – a widow of the name partner of a very prestigious international law firm.  Now this woman can afford to vacation in any hotel in the world, yet here she was staying in the less-than-luxurious (but adequately comfortable) rooms of a Club Med, sharing cafeteria-style meals with total strangers and hitting tennis balls with folks who would not be eligible for membership in her Southhampton country club.  “This is America!” I thought, in all its meritocratic glory, except it was Mexico by way of France.  Well, come to think of it, why not?  The French know a thing or two about revolution.  And certainly about cuisine.

Yes, I may as well segue to food now, since this is really a make or break component to a vacation for me.  And I could only marvel how the food staff dished up such delicious meals with fresh ingredients in large numbers.  I’m convinced that without the French influence Club Med would fail.  Not in the types of food, although it certainly doesn’t hurt that every meal includes terrific fresh baked breads and pastries that could only come from Mother France.  But in the emphasis on good food and making meals an event, which of course is sadly still missing in mainstream American culture.

Anyone who has taken a cruise might find aspects of a Club Med vacation familiar, with the method of dining being one similarity, which is why I find it so interesting that I enjoyed the Club Med experience and detested the Norwegian Cruise Line trip to Alaska my extended family went on several years ago.  How to put this delicately?  The typical passenger on the cruise ship was extremely overweight, uninteresting (judging by the Danielle Steel novels) and the paucity of port time made me feel like I was in a floating prison with only treadmills and a postage stamp of a swimming pool for exercise.  In the Club Med village, however, you could truly escape to a secluded corner of the beach, play volleyball or a dozen other sports if you feel like it, and hang out with some vibrant, attractive people.

Speaking of attractive, the GOs really are a good-looking bunch, and our tennis pros smiled broadly when, after we were well into a bottle of Spanish rosé one night, I broached the issue of “fringe benefits” with working in such close quarters with so many pretty young women.  Sure, the GOs worked hard, but this might help explain why there was so much discussion about the lack of sleep.  During lunch one day, we struck gossip pay dirt when a stunningly gorgeous reception desk hostess from France revealed that she was secretly dating the tall, hunky American windsurfing instructor.  It may seem silly, but among all the married-with-kids GMs, there was a kind of vicarious thrill in seeing all these attractive, multi-national 20-somethings and wondering who was shacking up with whom.  I guess the “old” Club Med was about swinging GMs (with no doubt the participation of GOs as well) and maybe it’s still somewhat like that at the non-family villages, but fraternization seemed to be limited to the GO ranks at this place.

One thing that did take some getting used to was the Cruise Director-like enthusiasm of Olivier, the chef de village, and his entertainment staff colleagues.  Maybe you’ve heard of the “Crazy Signs”?  It’s a kind of group semiphore meant to whip everyone up into a frenzy, and seems to me to be uniquely French in its silliness.  If you recall that France uniquely claims Jerry Lewis as a comic genius then you’ll understand what I’m talking about; there’s something oddly infantile about the French, perhaps karmically necessary to go with their sophistication.  But really, it wasn’t too unpleasant.  In fact, I found it fascinating each evening to observe Olivier, a deeply tan and diminutive career GO, wield his microphone and deliver his patter in a seemingly impossible stream of foreign languages as his fellow GOs on stage began their skits.  Even my son rolled his eyes at me – he is old enough and jaded enough now to realize that there was something intrinsically corny about this display, but it was intended in such good fun that we all surrendered to it, even if we would never seek out anything remotely like it in the way of entertainment at home.  And once we got to know individual GOs, it was amusing to spot them performing costumed song and dance numbers.  “Hey, isn’t that Francesca from the Kids Club in the chicken outfit?”

Speaking of the Kids Cub, the one problem we encountered – which ultimately didn’t turn out to be a disaster – was that our son adamantly refused to participate.  The Kids Club is intended to be one of the principal benefits of a family club – built-in day care and camp activities (a sort of club within a club) segregated by age, in order to give the parents some much-needed alone time.  At first we insisted, since our son is renowned for his initial “No!” followed by enthusiastic “Yes!” once he realized the fun he’s been missing.  But in this case we could find no chink in the armor – there was no way in hell he was going to hang with his peers, a stance that was cemented when he spent a couple of hours doing kids tennis (I figured this was going to be a home run!) only to have him report that the other kids “sucked” and he was much happier getting his own pickup games.  Which is pretty much what he did.  And once we realized that he is now old enough to navigate the club on his own (security is excellent and it’s totally secluded from the rest of the hotels in Cancun), we resigned ourselves to a no-Kids Club vacation that involved perhaps a bit more parental supervision than we would have preferred but still afforded us some Husband & Wife time.

My feelings about Club Med crystallized after we departed.  My son had said goodbye for perhaps the seventh time to Spencer, a teenage boy who’d become his favorite table tennis opponent, and we’d each exchanged e-mail addresses with several new GO and GM friends before heading to the airport.  Then our flight was delayed because Felipe Calderon, the President of Mexico, was landing – he was in Cancun to host a Latin American summit, which made the headlines the next day when the heads of Venezuela and Colombia got in a shouting match (apparently it doesn’t take much to provoke Hugo Chavez).  What if, I thought, Calderon had hosted the summit for a week at Club Med along with everyone’s families?  Instead of posturing before reporters to see who has the most anti-Gringo bona fides, the leaders would have to take their aggressions out on the tennis courts and could get to know each other better over communal meals with attractive GOs instead of agenda-pushing policy wonks.  Think that might be more successful?

The advertising slogan of Club Med used to be:  The Antidote for Civilization.  Maybe it should be:  The Last Best Hope for Civilization.

15,524 Comments »

  1. 3morocco

    Trackback by 3continually — September 2, 2022 @ 5:17 am

  2. Title

    […]The details mentioned inside the article are some of the top accessible […]

    Trackback by marine documentation service — September 4, 2022 @ 3:45 pm

  3. Title

    […]we prefer to honor numerous other internet web pages around the internet, even though they aren’t linked to us, by linking to them. Under are some webpages worth checking out[…]

    Trackback by Süperbahis Giriş — September 10, 2022 @ 12:16 pm

  4. Title

    […]that could be the end of this post. Right here you will obtain some websites that we think you’ll value, just click the links over[…]

    Trackback by Mobil Bahis — September 19, 2022 @ 8:50 pm

  5. Title

    […]that will be the end of this write-up. Here you’ll locate some websites that we think you’ll appreciate, just click the hyperlinks over[…]

    Trackback by adjustable rings — September 24, 2022 @ 5:13 pm

  6. Title

    […]that will be the finish of this article. Here you will obtain some web pages that we feel you’ll appreciate, just click the links over[…]

    Trackback by خدمات شبکه — September 30, 2022 @ 8:25 am

  7. Title

    […]below you will come across the link to some web sites that we believe you must visit[…]

    Trackback by Windows Server 2019 5 Device CALs — September 30, 2022 @ 2:59 pm

  8. Title

    […]usually posts some quite exciting stuff like this. If you’re new to this site[…]

    Trackback by Türk Pokeri — October 2, 2022 @ 4:27 pm

  9. Title

    […]we prefer to honor lots of other web web pages around the net, even though they aren’t linked to us, by linking to them. Beneath are some webpages worth checking out[…]

    Trackback by 강남레깅스룸 — October 5, 2022 @ 4:15 am

  10. Title

    […]here are some links to websites that we link to because we assume they’re worth visiting[…]

    Trackback by babydoo.pl — October 7, 2022 @ 7:03 am

  11. Title

    […]always a big fan of linking to bloggers that I like but do not get lots of link really like from[…]

    Trackback by find out this here — October 10, 2022 @ 3:51 pm

  12. Title

    […]the time to read or pay a visit to the subject material or internet sites we’ve linked to below the[…]

    Trackback by rc autos — October 17, 2022 @ 1:52 am

  13. Title

    […]below you’ll obtain the link to some web pages that we consider you must visit[…]

    Trackback by persian — October 20, 2022 @ 6:33 am

  14. Title

    […]Here is a superb Blog You might Uncover Fascinating that we Encourage You[…]

    Trackback by 메이저놀이터 — October 21, 2022 @ 1:57 am

  15. Title

    […]Here is a good Blog You may Come across Fascinating that we Encourage You[…]

    Trackback by Nose dilator — October 22, 2022 @ 6:02 pm

  16. Title

    […]Sites of interest we’ve a link to[…]

    Trackback by how to sell credit card processing — October 23, 2022 @ 5:02 am

  17. Title

    […]one of our guests lately suggested the following website[…]

    Trackback by Bahis Siteleri — October 24, 2022 @ 3:38 am

  18. Title

    […]very handful of internet websites that come about to be in depth below, from our point of view are undoubtedly properly worth checking out[…]

    Trackback by krajowy.biz — October 25, 2022 @ 11:44 pm

  19. Title

    […]one of our guests a short while ago encouraged the following website[…]

    Trackback by krajowy.biz — October 26, 2022 @ 1:07 pm

  20. Title

    […]Here are some of the sites we recommend for our visitors[…]

    Trackback by 안전놀이터 — October 26, 2022 @ 7:18 pm

  21. Title

    […]the time to read or check out the content material or web-sites we have linked to below the[…]

    Trackback by tippmix — October 26, 2022 @ 11:26 pm

  22. Title

    […]just beneath, are quite a few entirely not connected web pages to ours, however, they are certainly worth going over[…]

    Trackback by 퍼펙트 가라오케 — October 27, 2022 @ 1:15 pm

  23. Title

    […]please visit the internet sites we comply with, including this one particular, because it represents our picks in the web[…]

    Trackback by Homes For Sale — October 29, 2022 @ 8:29 pm

  24. Title

    […]just beneath, are various totally not related web-sites to ours, on the other hand, they are surely really worth going over[…]

    Trackback by اشتراك يوتيوب — October 30, 2022 @ 2:28 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Powered by WordPress