"Sarkozy spends £250,000 of French EU budget on shower he did not use"
Well this is fun. That headline, from the Guardian, comes from a story reporting that during the French EU presidency, the French president "sanctioned an elaborate upgrade of the Grand Palace in Paris
for an EU-Mediterranean summit – one of his pet initiatives to mark his
turn at the EU helm.
"Nearly £300,000 was spent building a conference podium, nearly £200,000 upgrading the gardens and grounds, and a total bill for the Sarkozy shower of almost £250,000.
"The audit report said the cost soared because of the complications of installing a state-of-the-art shower to the president's specifications in a listed building.
"The president never used it – instead going back to the Élysée palace during the three-day summit to freshen up. The shower has since been dismantled."
*****
But, um, the elaborate facility in the photo is NOT the French president's. It was ours, in the owner's suite, on a trip across Lake Malawi on the MV Ilala.
Not to give the wrong impression - the Ilala cruise was a great deal of fun, sailing across placid, inland Lake Malawi from Monkey Bay, Malawi for a couple of days alongside the Mozambican shoreline to Likoma Island, which is part of Malawi.
The Ilala was an authentic, agreeable experience and the trip was served up in inimitable African style. Here's the Ilala at anchor in Monkey Bay (left, on the left), and below, a man paddles his canoe toward Cobue village in Mozambique, a photo taken from the Ilala that was the EarthPhotos.com most popular photo for a while on our return from Malawi.
Read a story about our drive through Malawi, called Everlasting: Malawi here. And see more photos in the France Gallery and lots more of the MV Ilala, the Mozambican shoreline, Monkey Bay, Likoma Island and the Malawian capital Lilongwe in the Malawi Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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