Old French Ways vs. Something Else from the West Coast

Gosh, what a grand opportunity, we have run up against some people
with out a vision, with lots of property and money, and they loudly
insist that we know nothing and can do nothing, right here in
paradise. We will have to learn some big things with this group.
Guess it's not a coincidence that the team consists Pierre, a retired
French colonial bureaucrat (tax collector with out a constituency any
more) who prides himself on having reached the 12th (highest) level of
pension and also to have perfected the technique of sleeping with his
eyes open while sitting in an office chair, and his son Bruno who is
at a much lower civil service level now in the same bureaucracy but
working his way up as fast as he can. Bruno has almost perfected
saying "et voila" after all of his hollow pronouncements and
proclamations, use it sometime and see how it works, or doesn't. The
poor wife and daughter-in-law is quite reasonable when in public, but
must play along with her husband and in-laws whenever they are chewing
over "the big issue".

The first big blow-out came when Pierre, who bought the little
bungalow for his son (he owns 16 apartments in Paris and he and his
wife get the 200% pension with no taxes because of their "hardship" of
living here in French Polynesia) came over and ranted, raved and
threatened to take us to justice over futzing with the portion of our
deck that he fenced into his son's deck zone, his argument was you
bought the place "as is" and that was that. These taunts have been
going on for a while, the big property line hub-bub where we all
agreed to go 50/50 on a survey and they backed down (having an
objective definition of this line might hurt them more than help),
then there was the Xeroxed page from the French Polynesian law book
that said condominium neighbors have to have an agreement on
construction. We were supposed to receive a copy of that to get us to
straighten out, the copy never appeared. The night before Bruno had
said that he did not care what we did on our side of the property
line, well, we agreed to that, isn't that an agreement? Then the next
night he came over with two hand written copies of his same letter
stating that he officially is not in agreement with what we are doing,
he demanded that Claude sign the paper and return one copy, he didn't,
that really got the steam rising. Then Bruno's dad, Pierre did his
sticking out the tongue thing and "I don't know you" line to one of
the old time neighbors who thinks our place is great.

Michelle and Marie France, in their 70's elegant retired people who
hang at the beach, are really glad to see us doing our design,
Michelle even made a drawing of how Bruno encroached upon our space by
building a kitchen with a stove, sink, and washer under Claude's roof,
imagine that! Well, most of the people around here, Chinatown, French
retirees, Tahitians, and investment rental people, all like the fact
that this place has no building codes, permits, inspections, or taxes,
AND WANT TO KEEP IT THAT WAY. So Bruno has gotten the word, in fact,
I don't believe anyone was joking when the possibility of serious
physical harm could result in further annoyances. This did not come
from us, but there are people here, French gangster types and Tahitian
tabu types that do not want any government people coming near this
little community, we like that. It feels like a general libertarian
attitude, not liberal or conservative, beyond both, maybe not the best
mode for corporations, but at this small scale it seems to work.

This long story has been shortened, but some of the extreme Frenchness
of it all is better than any movie or TV show. On the surface the
whole thing has to do with real estate, therefore money. But
underneath, the father/son dynamic seems to be in bad shape. The
mother, Franca, came over here a couple of times and in a very loud
and clear French told us all off in a variety of ways, standing right
in our faces while we worked, on Claude's property. Eventually she
huffed off to the beach, on her way back she smiled at everyone and
said how much better she felt and hoped we felt better too…is this
normal?