How to (not) dine in troglodyte lands in N very simple steps

February 18, 2018 by Lucian Mogosanu

Let's do a little role-playing -- not the CRPG kind; a different kind, the real kind.

Say you're getting together with a few buddies (ten or, say, twenty) to blow some cash. Say it's winter season, so you'll go to the nearest mountains for skiing, snowboarding and other activities, some involving more or less alcohol, as the liver tolerates.

Say you've just arrived in a beautiful little village1 lying on the edge of a mountain covered by a thick carpet of fir and pine trees. Sort of like... in fact, let me drop a few thousand words:

It's Friday evening at 9PM and you want to eat something. You wander around the village and find that it's barren2, save for a place where they just closed the kitchen and a restaurant that goes by the pompous Swiss-ey name Le Chalet... or at least that's what a (broken) WoT implementation tells you.

You arrive at the chalet-oui-oui and park the car. Someone comes out; you ask if their restaurant's open; they say that no, it's closed, nothing to see here3. Your friends also arrive, so you resignedly tell them to do a 180 and propose to go look somewhere else -- maybe, maybe someone on a 5km radius will get off their asses and serve you food for money.

But it doesn't end here. Upon discussing with your buddies on how to properly fit twenty people in places that aren't able to feed merely one, the stranger from Le Merdelet appears, joined by what seems to be a partner of his. He asks you to leave; you say that sure, you're gonna do just that; he says that this is private property and that they're not afraid of twenty people, so you'd better leave, or else; you, dumbfounded as you are, tell them that yes, leaving is just what you intend to do, what else? So you finally leave.

The following day you wake up and write about this peculiar occurence; however uncivilized you might be, you mean to illustrate how one would attempt to eat in the lands of troglodytes and fail. Oh, and in the spirit of the WoT, you pull out the broken star-based implementation thereof and leave the following rating:

1 star: Owners are paranoid and incapable of sticking to the advertised schedule.


  1. We can't properly call it a resort. We'll see in a moment why. 

  2. See? Told you, not a resort. 

  3. See?! By now you should be convinced that, sadly, we're dealing with a backwater village, not the super-mountain-resort its inhabitants pretend it to be. Yeah, at least it's got nice views and all, or as the saying goes: frumoasă țară, păcat că-i populată. 

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2 Responses to “How to (not) dine in troglodyte lands in N very simple steps”

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