Travels in France

Tower! And the biggest lumps of nougat I have ever seen. Scarier than those is the information that actually those are the small lumps. He demonstrated the size of large ones. Not something I would like to encounter rolling down a hill in the dark.

I'm back in England for, oh, a couple more days. Friday I fly out to Athens. Yay for Greece :-) remarkably normal sounding job there, not sure how I will cope yet. Two weeks to find out.

I will attempt a post on France either tonight or some time tomorrow,  although that's not a promise!

London, briefly

Well, I had awesome adventures in Paris, which I am yet to have an opportunity to post about, or even look at my own pictures for, never mind sort out decent ones.

I am currently back in London. I have been since Monday actually, but I am also sick, and have been internet-deprived to boot, and over-tired. Oh and working full time, plus interviews. I leave for France again tomorrow, but this time on holiday :-D Yay canoeing and camping and stuff! It is entirely possible that I will not have an opportunity to post anything until after I get back from France, so Paris may have to wait until then. Several massive posts on France will be due by then!

In other news, I have a job trial in Athens. They're very enthusiastic about me. I am somewhat more reserved, but will wait and see. Don't judge till you've tried it and all that.

I am slightly concerned by how pleased I am to be back in England. I am enjoying things like beer, and menus that I can read rather a lot. Oh and jacket potatoes. Jacket potatoes may possibly the best thing the English ever invented so far as cooking goes. Nom nom nom.

Right, well, I better go and try to get some sleep. Dorm rooms aren't generally the best place to sleep, and I have to get up early due to their stupid check-out at ten in the morning policy. Bloody stupid policy if you ask me, my train isn't until 1pm. What am I supposed to do for three hours? It's only across the road! I hope it has good facilities like Paddington. I suppose it must. It's got to be like an international airport really. I'm sure I saw duty free shopping and stuff in the Paris station.

Time for 'sleep'

I've had the most awesome day ever

and by awesome I really mean words cannot describe how fail *everything* was. Really, it's beyond words. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. It was just so fail. We dissolved into hysterics at dinner as the meal descended into a food-fight (fruit, plates, cans of coke, bowl with a sharp knife...) and then one of them said "wee-wee" and looked at his lap. No other response was possible.

I wish I had a picture to share with you all.

Le Marmite Creole

I am currently sitting in Le Marmite Creole, a lovely little cafe/restaurant with rather delicious food. Not nearly as rich or creamy as the French usually try to feed me, which my stomach is happy about. Seriously, France could turn me vegan, I'm so sick of cream!

Anyway, as you may observe from the pictures, I have made it back to Dinard, the lovely little resort town in Brittany. The weather is not so stunning as last time, but somehow it feels like it suits it here, a bit moody and temperamental. I took a walk yesterday, rather unintentional, it was just that all the shops were still closed from the siesta, and I wanted to know what was up the hill from the town square. Upon further investigation I discovered that the hill offered a lovely view towards St Malo (the port where ferries go to Jersey, Guernsey and England). I was thus compelled to pull out my camera and take too many photographs (oh the joy of digital cameras!).

A lovely maiden overlooking the port, I think she is supposed to be sheltering from a storm. It has an inscription, but it's in French, and I forgot my dictionary.

Al lonely little boat in the water. It was amazing how all the boats were just sitting on the mud flats at low tide, I can't figure out how you're supposed to get on/off your boat. Obviously you can only get the boat there when it is high tide, but then how do you get from the boat to dry land? Just wait for the tide to go out and walk on the mud flats? It was pretty impressive to see how many boats there were, hundreds of them all lined up, sitting in the mud.

A nice spot to sit and take it all in.

Great weather for flying the coolest kite I have ever seen! What a sweet family really, they were all flying it together, it took them a while to get it in the air again, but it was worth the wait! It makes me thing of Peter Pan...

The tides are rather extreme here, because of being in the English Channel apparently. This isn't even the lowest ebb, the day before there was a full sand bar to see, which you could wade onto.

Market day in Dinard! They do have three each week, but still, it was nice, the atmosphere is lovely. I had to stop for coffee after a while though, which was an experience. The French have this interesting approach to milky coffees, they make an espresso, and give you a jug of steamed milk with it. Now, in principle I have no objection to this. However, the issue arises with the size of the cup- you can see it is about as tall as the width of my hand. Inside it contains a double espresso, which takes up about 3/4 of the space, leaving very little room for milk. My current technique involves taking a few sips, and quickly topping it up with more milk. After the third or fourth repetition the coffee starts to be diluted enough to drink, and it turned out that this was particularly delicious coffee! However at this point it was still in phase one, hence the rather strained smile.

I have a couple more days in Dinard, but I will be working. Then back to the castle for a couple of days, then Paris, and finally back to London. Then I can embark on the adventures planned for my holiday in September. Yay holiday!

Adventures in the making

Having been vaguely reminded that I haven't really updated for a while, I feel compelled to explain that this is largely due to a lack of adventures. I have some in the works, but the last few weeks have been consumed by work dramas and people dramas which aren't actually mine to blog about. However, next week I will be going back to Dinard early next week, then the following week to Paris, and then I'm due to be gainfully unemployed again, so off to the South (Avignon I believe) for a holiday with some friends before returning to the wonderful world of looking for new job. The way I say that implies that I haven't already started looking, which isn't strictly true, I have, but it's hard to look in earnest when you work 12 hours a day, and all you want to do on your days off is get out of the house.

In other news, I moved rooms in the castle. I no longer have to deal with a toilet that you can't flush toilet paper down, but I also no longer have a shower. Well, that's a lie. I do have a shower here, it's just that it is one of those hose-pipe, hold in your hand affairs, over the bath, and there is no form of barrier to keep the water contained. Thus I must bath every night and then just torture myself with some sort of cold-water holding the shower-head over my hair thing in the morning. It isn't ideal. Also, my bed in this room sucks. It looks awesome, but is awful to actually sleep on. And it squeaks. Why did I swap my essentially comfortable room for this thing a floor lower and just across from the childrens playroom, preventing me sleeping in on my mornings off? Well, it has an internet connection. It's prettier too, but mostly it has internet. If only it was going to be more than a few days. Ah well. I might post pictures of this room, it's really quite nice.

Back to work...

Nightswimming...

Turns out that drinking wine and then going for a swim while the stars come out is awesome :-) Even if they are strange, Northern Hemisphere stars.

Apparently I'm going to Paris next week, should be cool. Not that I will really have time to see the sights, but still, I will see some of it.

Oh and off to the South somewhere for a holiday in September, middle-end-ish of September, then Eurostar back to London. If I read the ticket correctly then I will be on a train for for 14 hours at one point.

Dinard ("Dinarrr-eh!")

Dinard is a resort town on the North coast of France in Bretagne (Brittany), and it far exceeded expectations. I was told Brittany was wet and cold, and that it wasn't anywhere near as good as the South of France, and that it was similar to holiday towns in Cornwall in England. Having never been to Cornwall (I know, major failing really, given my heritage) this wasn't very helpful. But it turned out to be really lovely, as the pictures should show. Unfortunately my limited comprehension of French was quite a hinderance here, I could see enough tourist trash to realise it seemed to have some Piratical history, but of course I couldn't understand anything written about it. It did have a piratical feel though, with cliffs and rocks with little coves and possible caves and tunnels up to the houses at the top of the cliffs- I was put in Famous Five mode!!! It was pretty cool. And not only did it have awesome rocky bits, but also a sandy beach, where I first dipped my toes into the Atlantic! It was really strange sand though, it sparkled like gold flakes when the sun was at the right angle!!! And it stuck like glue, really impossible to get off without showering, not like normal sand that you can rub off with a towel.

A very charming town, picturesque, and with ice-cream stalls in all the right places :-D

The only bad part of my trip was that I screwed my back part way through, and spent several days rather incapacitated before being tortured by a French doctor, and half killing myself with anti-inflammatories before being able to even do up my shoelaces. But at least the painful experience with the French doctor seems to have been worthwhile, I appear to be fixed.

In other news, contrary to an earlier post, I will be staying in France for a while yet, hopefully the rest of the summer, all going to plan. But as we all know, my plans are subject to change at short notice and on the whims of others, so really, I have no idea. In theory I'm here for another 5-6 weeks roughly. Earn some money, avoid snakes, and maybe go back to Dinard.