Alles Normales

In short: a funny story on how I was successfully shopping at French sites for a French textbook not knowing a word in French and got the textbook for almost nothing.

Bonus: My Favorite Trick To Counterstrike At International Internet Shops is revealed first time ever.

The story:
My daughter takes foreign language classes at secondary school. English being the major, she’s choosen French as second language last year (and Spanish would be the third in a couple of years). A minor problem with French classes was lack of certain textbooks (namely, JUNIOR 1 Methode de Francais by M. Butzbach et al.) though.

My daughter’s teacher told us that those textbooks were brought in Russia via Embassy of France and unfortunately not all of her pupils got the textbook this year - for instance, we shall try to find it somehow and she couldnt help us - to the best of her knowledge, these textbooks are not sold in Russia. She suggested we could try to buy it secondhand off her former pupils but we didnt succeed in that.

Being an Internet Find-and-Buy-It guru :), I didnt hesitate to embark on a quest to locate the best textbook for my beloved daughter.

1) First off, I, as usual, tried to google it out - naturally, at main Google site — google.COM. The search brought out very few meaningful links - all were in different countries:

Yugoslavia: http://www.cgudzbenici.cg.yu/147e.htm

M. Butzbach
JUNIOR 1 - Methode de Francais
(Udzbenik) 11,50 (Price)

—————————————
Slovenia: http://www.kopija-nova.si/index.php?stran=izdelki/97_78.php

JUNIOR 1, Methode de francais, ucbenik za francoscino
avtorji: M. Butzbach et al.:
cena: 2.800,00 SIT (Price)
————————
Estonia: http://www.allecto.ee/cle8.htm

Junior 1. Livre de l’eleve
M.Butzbach, C. Martin, D. Pastor, I. Saracibar
ISBN: 2090333545 Publisher: CLE
EEK: 118.13 (10 USD) (Price)

Naturally, I tried to contact somebody at all three of these locations, emailing Yugoslavian, Slovenian and Estonian folks in English - but to no avail, nobody cared to respond back.

2) OK, I thought to myself - google.COM brings limited results, but maybe I could try French-language resources?
So I tried to run the search in Canada (at amazon.CA) - actually, it gave me what I wanted:

http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/2090333545/qid=1098548226/sr=1-11/ref=sr_1_0_11/702-5252812-7109666
Our Price: CDN$ 18.95

- but both pricing AND shipping was a little bit too steep (it’s always the case with Amazon) so I decided to try resources on the other side of the pond — in France.

How do I know what popular French search engines are? Easily - just substitute well-known search engines .COM domains with .FR and see for yourself - google.FR, yahoo.FR and lycos.FR worked fine for me (and I believe that there are links to all local versions of Google listed at Google main site now…but that’s just me, I figured out this method 10 years ago and stick to it).

It doesnt take a rocket scientist to understand what that button by the search field just need to be pressed to run a search, regardless of whether you can figure our what “Rechercher” means “Search” or not….

That’s how I located French marketplace site http://www.priceminister.com and found the textbook (slightly used but in excellent condition) I was after, at very reasonable price AND shipping cost:

http://www.priceminister.com/offer/buy/267955/AD060
Butzbach
Junior 1 Methode De Francais (Livre)
Prix : 4,05 Eur - Economisez 56%

Junior 1 Cahier D’exercices
Auteur : Butzbach
Prix d’origine : 7,00 Eur

EAN (code barre) : 9782090333558
ISBN : 2090333553
ISBN 2.09.033355.3

OK, so I found it - but how to order it? I pressed a button which I assumed meant “Buy” and was forwarded to checkout form done entirely in French. I do not speak French - and the site does not offer an English counterpart.

Not a problem actually - online translation services worked just fine for me. As I mentioned previously, I use either Altavista’s Babelfish or Babelfish’s developer (Systran) site directly - I just copy French phrases I need to understand and paste it to Babelfish, and it provides English translation (I noticed that it is more accurate as compared with Russian translation it produces).

Funny thing is, that Priceminister site did not listed Russia in allowed postal destinations list - but I managed to get around it. How did I? Look, a friend of mine taught me this trick a long time ago - you look up in the list of allowed postal destinations a country closest to yours ( I always pick up Finland) and put it into COUNTRY field of address form, and the rest of the form you fill in as if you would always do, with your actual information, with one little exception - in the CITY field you put your city AND your COUNTRY in ONE line, just like that:

Name: Fedor Zondermaher
Address 1: 5 - 89
Address 2: Karl Marx str.
City: Izhevsk RUSSIAN FEDERATION
ZIP: 426000
Country: Finland

It WORKS and package gets delivered to RUSSIAN FEDERATION which is NOT listed among allowed postal destinations. It’s proven numerous times - by myself and my friend. I dont know exactly how it works, but I guess that combination of proper ZIP code, city AND country makes postal people think that Internet shop software hiccuped and put WRONG country into the COUNTRY field and PROPER country ASIDE the city into the CITY field.

Funny, isn’t it?

But I got even funniest thing to tell ya about my hunt for Junior 1 Methode De Francais.

Along with placing the order via French marketplace site http://www.priceminister.com, I decided to keep looking for another source of the textbook - because I was not 100% sure that ordering went smoothly, I just wanted a back-up plan.

I decided on contacting Cle International which put out the textbook. I located their website, found contact info and sent them an email asking where can I get hold of the desired textbook.

In a short while, I received very kind message back. It turned out that they got a representative in Russia - Relod company.

Cle International wrote: “Please contact Relod (ask for anyone but note that the one in charge of the French department is Ludmila Maximova) which telephone number in Moscow is 924 67 17 or or 924 46 83.”

I telephoned Ludmila Maximova and she kindly advised that Relod got a representative in Izhevsk (!) (my city) and gave me their address and phone numbers. I telephoned Relod’s Izhevsk office and voila! - they invited me to come over there and get the textbook I searched half the world thru :)! The office happened to situate within 2 blocks from my daughter’s school…

I ended up buying new textbook via Relod and selling that slightly used (but cheap!) one I got via French marketplace site for a double price (there were other peple who wanted to find the textbook for their kids) - so a copy of “Junior 1 Methode De Francais” for my daughter cost me almost nothing.

Filed under: Success stories - Offline meets Online