In France, a local town hall is a mairie, where the mayor (maire) presides, and is more often than not called the hôtel de ville, three words that have confounded more than one foreign traveler in search of a place to sleep for the night.
Years ago, with friends driving from London to the south of France on our way to one of those three-day château
weddings (in this case a great-great-granddaughter of Victor Hugo who
was marrying her piano teacher), we decided we'd better stop for the night.
Arriving in a small town in Burgundy, the driver, a Brazilian banker who fancied himself Ayrton Senna, upon spotting the elegant hôtel de ville, stopped the car, jumped out and proclaimed, "Now this
is what I call a hotel!" and began to unload the bags from the trunk.
His usually cool-and-calm English wife, fed up with being cramped in the
car for hours and bickering with him at almost every kilometer (he preferred taking time-wasting wrong turns rather than asking anyone for help), leaned
back, closed her eyes, and calmly said, "For Godsakes that's the town
hall! Pleeease put everything back in the car and stop being so tiresome!" - BPJ
Above: l'Hôtel de Ville - Paris's main town hall
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