A night in Metz, France

Last Friday Josh and I loaded up his little mini and headed down to Metz, which with a population of 230 000 is the closest big French city to Luxembourg, less than 45 minutes drive south. It is the capital of the Lorraine region, and being near the borders with Luxembourg and Germany, has been shaped by both Roman and German culture and has a pretty interesting 3000 year history. Its known as a city of art and history, and hosts the Pomidou-Metz museum, the only branch of the famous Pompidou modern art museum to be located outside Paris.

Josh and I modeling masks for Elise

We stayed with Elise, a 22 year old french art student from Couchsurfers. We arrived on Friday evening and met her and her friend at the train station, parked the car and walked to her apartment. They were great fun and really hospitable, we sat around drinking and talking about France and their studies, and they got us to pose with some masks on for one of Elise's projects, quite funny!

Audrey, Elise, me and Josh

With another friend, Max, we walked to their friends' apartment in the centre. We were definitely hanging out with a bunch of french art students - we walked into an apartment decorated with completed art projects and works in progress, filled with marijuana smoke and half a dozen bohemian-style kids performing a medieval dance! They were really friendly and were probably the best bunch of young french guys that I've spent time with when it comes to speaking english, they were all really open to trying to speak to us, and Josh did his best with a bit of french as well! As in Luxembourg I normally go out to bars rather than to house parties, it was cool to hang around for a bit of a change. We'd planned on going out to a few bars later on, but all three of us were pretty tired, so we left around 1.30 and headed home in the freezing cold!

A residential street in Metz

We were up in the middle of the morning and bid farewell to Elise before heading off to see the city. We wandered aimlessly around the city centre for awhile, heading into quite a few pharmacies to stockpile medicines that are perscription-only around the rest of Europe, it made me laugh seeing as I used to work in a pharmacy and we worked so hard to prevent people doing the same thing there! Metz has one of the biggest pedestrian-only areas in France, and most of the buildings are built out of pretty yellow limestone so it would have been really lovely had it not been freezing cold with a terrible wind blowing.

Stained glass in the Cathedral

Eventually we stumbled upon the cathedral, an amazing building. I've been to a fair few churches in Europe now, but this one has the largest amount of stained glass windows in the world, mostly from the 14th and 16th century, and the third highest nave in France (10th in the world). It was consecrated in the 1500s, but has had a lot of extensive renovations done since then.

Wall near the Cathedral

We left the cathedral and stumbled through a indoor market that turned out to be rather uninteresting, and went in search of lunch. As is typical for France at a weekend lunchtime, everywhere was packed, and we ended up with a tiny table at a a place called Bar Saint Jacques, a typical french bar-bistro with a terrace on a square. We really hit gold, it was full of locals catching up and knocking back wine, and I was amazed to order a meal of toasted sandwidge and salad that only cost me 3.80euros, or $6NZ - the price of a cup of coffee in Luxembourg!

Frozen river

There, we searched for the location of the tourist office, and found it to be right beside the cathedral we'd been in earlier! So we headed back and sourced a map, and then went for a big walk around the city. Metz has more than 100 buildings on the historical monument list, and huge open green spaces along the riverbank. The river itself was quite pretty, as it was frozen over, and had a whole lot of ducks and seagulls just sitting around on the top. But, we were really suffering from the cold and had to keep popping into cafes to buy coffees to warm up. A fair was just starting up in one of the big squares, so we stopped in their for some below-par crepes, and then we called it a day and went back to the car.

Ikea!

On the way out of town we stopped at Ikea. As we don't have Ikea in New Zealand, before coming to Europe I'd thought it was a pretty expensive place full of amazing modern furniture. However, here its a massive chain store that sells cheap furniture that students fill their flats up with! I still get amazed by some of the modern designs though. I'd wanted to go to Ikea since I'd arrived here, but had never been, so I was really excited to finally get there.

Ikea swedish meatballs and lingonberry juice

The stores are all really huge, and the layout is quite clever, its like a maze and they make you walk past everything to get whatever you want. Naturally, we went in just to get clotheshangers, and ended up spending 80euros, or $120NZ, between the two of us! They even have a map with a list to fill in and free little pencils at the beginning, so naturally there are now half a dozen Ikea pencils lying around my room! Ikea has a cafeteria inside, and I'd also heard a lot about swedish meatballs, so it was cool to split a meal of meatballs, rice and swedish lingonberry juice.

So, I quite enjoyed Metz, it was good to go somewhere new rather than return to an old haunt, and to stay with locals again, and I think it's a pretty cool city. More photos are here.

January in Luxembourg Part II

The Sphere Room at the Trans Ardentes Festival, Liege, Belgium

The second half of January hasn't been particularly interesting, I caught a really terrible cold and spent the better part of two weeks either in bed or moping around the house. I did make it out a couple of times, mostly just to Liquid for live jazz during the week, and once on a Friday I went out with the intention of having a big night out dancing, but I didn't make it further than the free jager party at Scots.

Josh, me and Naz at Jager night at Scots bar, Luxembourg

The highlight of those last couple of weeks was going to Liege, Belgium for the Trans Ardentes electronic music festival. Josh and I drove up on Saturday afternoon, its only a little over an hour away, and after picking up Lena we headed just over the border to Maastricht in the Netherlands for a brief stop to go shopping and get KFC for lunch. I'd been to Maastricht once before, for a day, and it was freezing cold so we didn't stop to look around much.

The ceiling in the Elektropedia room, Les Trans Ardentes festival

Then we just headed home, fluffed around getting ready, and caught the bus to the festival. Having been sick, and being very tired from a couple of sleepless nights with crying children, I wasn't really amped until we got on a packed bus full of young people who were definitely much more in the party mood than we were! The festival is held indoors, at a big kind of hall, with concrete floors and steel sides and roof. It has separate sections, so there were four stages with different DJs performing at different times. Josh and I were both pretty into the Cube Room, which had kind of electro lounge music, more than the others, but the three of us, and Lena's friend Marion (who is awesome, I know her from past visit to Liege and the La Semo festival) and her friends, spent the night moving around quite a bit.

Lena, me and Josh at Les Trans Ardentes festival, Liege, Belgium

Like all the festivals I've been to in Belgium, you have to swap cash for tickets that you then swap for drinks. I guess it seems like a good idea, not having to mess around with money at the bar, but it really just means you have to join another really long line, and you can only get the tickets in preset amounts that aren't divisible by the cost of drinks, grrr. But, being sick (and broke!) I had resolved only to have a few drinks anyway. The other annoyance was having to pay an extra 2euros to be able to use the bathroom - not every time you went, you just had to pay for an armband that allowed you into the toilets all night. How stupid is that? Just raise the ticket price by 2euros! And sexist too, because there were free urinals outside for the guys. And even though it was smokefree, once the crowds built up everyone started smoking inside, so I was constantly afraid of getting burnt in the middle of the dancing crowds.

Boys Noize at les Trans Ardentes festival in Liege, Belgium

But, rant over, the festival was awesome, I'm now totally addicted to electronic music festivals. I don't think New Zealand has anything comparable, not with 12 000 people coming through the doors and with such high standards of DJs, like Birdy Nam Nam, Cassius and Boys Noize. The German DJ Boys Noize was the big drawcard for me, he's been my favourite DJ for about three years, and I was gutted to miss him playing at Rhythm and Vines back in New Zealand just after I'd flown to Germany last year! He played at 1.30am, and by that stage I'd been dancing for over five hours and I was dead tired and aching everywhere, but I stayed on my feet for the whole set, he was really amazing and actually better live than recorded. I couldn't say the same about Birdy Nam Nam, I thought they were terrible live and I didn't stick around! It must have been around 3.30am when we called it a night, Josh was really the worse for wear and Lena and I were both shattered. But, it was an awesome night, and one of my favourite experiences here in Europe.

Lena and Josh at "the cool bar" in Liege, Belgium

We slept quite late the next day, only dragging ourselves out of bed sometime around 1pm to find Lena's mum had laid that table with pastries and fruit for us for breakfast, so cute! We wanted to show Josh around Liege, but we were all so tired and it was absolutely freezing, colder than I've felt all winter so far, so we kind of dashed quickly through the centre into what me and Lena call "the cool bar" where we always go for a drink, and then we ended up playing a couple of games of pool before heading to Quick for dinner and then jumping into the car to head home. It was so cold I couldn't even bear to take my hands out of my pockets to take photos all day. An hour later with the car heating going full bore, I still couldn't feel my hands or feet, and just as we crossed the border into Luxembourg it started to snow.

Ollie playing dress-ups. Girly or what!

The cold weather continued the next couple of days, with highs of about -1 and lows of about -4, so even though more snow didn't fall, what we already had stuck around. I spent Monday recovering from the weekend, and running a ton of errands around the city. I babysat that night, putting the kids to bed myself which is uncommon. Unfortunately, Pepi's 'Baby Mozart' stuffed monkey was forgotten in Rogier's car and went off to him. Trying not to show my panic, I went through the whole bath/bed routine as normal, and it wasn't until he was lying with me in bed that he realised Baby was missing. I told him Baby had wanted to go to work with Papa, and he only cried for a couple of minutes before settling down, a pretty good outcome considering how attached to that thing he has been!

city hall buildings, Thionville, France

Tuesday I was up early and took to the bus to Thionville, 30km away in France. Remembering that international postage from France was quite cheap and knowing that nothing (ciggarettes, alcohol and petrol excluded) can be described as cheap in Luxembourg, I looked into the price difference last year and found that I could post up to 7kg in a pre-paid box from France for 40euros, compared to paying 160euros to post 7kg from Luxembourg. So, before Christmas I lugged 14kg of presents and crap I wanted to ship home over the border on the bus, discovered the handrawn map I copied of Google was useless and wandered aimlessly around town until I found the Tourist Office, and then spent a whole hour in the shop sorting everything out with a english-speaking man who told me that his daughter had gone to New Zealand on exchange, and reported it to be 'boring, with nothing to do'.

Thionville, France

I looked around me at Thionville, a town of 40 000 with nothing special and no exciting nightlife or activities of its own, and had to wonder where in New Zealand she had been living. Thionville was so unexciting, I didn't even mention going there in this blog. This time however, the town was covered in snow, and even the most boring and basic of places look pretty under snow, so I walked around for a hour or so taking photos, until the cold really got to me and I jumped on the bus again. Back in Luxembourg, I walked from the train station into the city centre to photograph the Petrusse Valley in between.

Petrusse Valley, Luxembourg Ville, Luxembourg

Arriving back home, I noticed that some of our neighbours had shoveled the snow of their driveway and the pavement. With it being sunny during the day, but still so cold, it was really icy and Rogier had hit the rubbish bin sliding while backing out the night before, and because I've never shoveled snow before I thought it would be fun to give it a go. I thought wrong! Shoveling snow is hard work, that stuff is damn heavy and it took me forever to work out how to break up the ice, rather than just trying to scrape it off the concrete. I won't even tell you how long it took me, but I was pretty proud of my effort.

So, not a very interesting blog post I know, I'l do my best to get out and about a bit more in February!

Photos from January are here. I've also just gotten into Twitter in a big way, you can follow me here.

January in Luxembourg Part I

Ollie's cake

So, after a pretty uneventful New Years, January is turning out to be a little crazy as I try to jam in as many things on my 'To-do-before-leaving-lux' list as possible.

I spent the first week of January working on a birthday cake for Ollie's second birthday. I made him a train cake, and it took me a bit of planning, three trips to two different supermarkets, several hours spent making three separate cakes, and then a whole afternoon to decorate them. The finished cake was pretty cool though, so now I'm trying to work out what I can make to top it for Pepi's fourth birthday next month.

Vianden

That Friday I headed out for a day trip with Josh, my American friend. He hasn't seen much of Luxembourg beyond the city, so we drove through the Bambesch forest behind my place, through Diekirch and Ettelbruck, up to Vianden on the German border. Our detour through the McDonalds' drivethru for coffee was entertaining, I don't think Josh's american english is easy for people here to understand, so I ended up leaning over ordering in German, and we received two very black, very sugarless coffees at the end.

Ceiling inside Vianden Castle

I had been to Vianden in September, but we didn't really stick around for long. It has the most beautiful and biggest castle in Luxembourg, home of the Counts of Vianden, whose descendents eventually ended up as part of the Dutch Royal Family. It dates back to the 11th century, got trashed over time, was inhabited by Victor Hugo in the 1870s, and was the last place in Luxembourg to be liberated from the Germans after WWII. The castle has been undergoing restoration ever since the 1970s. This time, Josh and I actually went inside the castle and had a look around. The guy selling tickets was funny, he complained that the total was smaller than they usually allow for a credit card sale, allowed it anyway, and then spent ages complaining about it. This seems to be on par for Luxembourgish customer service, they will normally help you, but they will make sure you know they're not happy about it! The castle is pretty cool, but it seemed like we were missing out on some vital information like a map, so we spent a lot of time wandering around trying to work out what things were. Information panels that were only in French and German provided me with a good chance to show off by translating them making shit up for Josh. You can go right down to the foundations of the castle which is kind of cool. We finished off the afternoon having a few beers in a pub out there.

Josh and I went out clubbing on Saturday night, so having a house full of guests and excited kids on Ollie's birthday the next day was interesting. The cake went down well, and Ollie was a real cutie all day - he's just grown tall enough to reach the door handles and has worked out to open them, but mine is a little bit too high, so that afternoon he pushed his little chair underneath it, climbed up and opened the door, and then came and sat on my bed just chilling out with me for quite awhile. We've just begun toilet training him, which has been very cute as well - he's so proud of himself!

Devnull at Rocas

This last weekend has been kind of crazy, Jacquie was away so I spent Saturday helping Rogier with the kids and made a last-minute decision to go skiing the following day, so I ran around like crazy for a couple of hours trying to organize everything for that, tidy the house up a bit and cook dinner for them before I headed off to Josh's to cook dinner for us there. Alex and Steve's band, Devnull, had their first gig that night at Rocas, so we went there. I'd sworn I would be home by midnight but the drinks were free and the night seemed young (and someone thought it would be funny to lock me in the backstage room) and I didn't end up home until 2.30am.

Driving down to La Bresse skifield in France

7am the next morning I was up early to go skiing with Josh. I was not feeling fantastic and Pepi coming downstairs to hang out with me while I was getting ready didn't help, he has just suddenly gotten into the 'but why?' phase and kept asking for an anatomy lesson while I was running around like a hungover headless chicken trying to sort myself out. Eventually I tumbled out of the door into Josh's car, and we were off to Le Brasse, the biggest skifield in North-East France (so still pretty small, bout the same size as Rauris was). It's about two and a half hours drive from Luxembourg, further South than Strasbourg, and Le Brasse is actually only 20km from Le Markstein where I went skiing one day last year.

Me rocking the aviators on the lift with Josh

Rogier had been kind enough to lend me all of his gear, his boots fit my freaky size 45 feet perfectly, although his skis are a little long and heavy for me, and I definitely looked resplendent in his too-big beige colored jacket, oversized mittens and some random aviator sunnies I found in the cupboard! Visibility was a major issue for me all day, so I might invest in some goggles this year, they seem to be the only thing I can never manage to borrow or hire. It took me a hour or so to get really comfortable again, but by the end of the day I think I'd improved marginally on where I was at last year, and the only fall I had was tripping over and whacking my head in the carpark! I really need another day or so this season if I really want to improve my skills, rather than just maintain them.

La Bresse, France

La Bresse is ok, much bigger than Markstein and I think about the same size as Rauris, but the snow isn't great this year and several of the runs were closed due to a lack of snow (not that that stopped us going down them!). I think learning at Rauris really shaped my skiing preferences, I prefer really long runs so that I don't have to get on and off the damn lifts all the time, and I prefer pistes that have sharp curves and drops in them like Rauris did, rather than straight and flat slopes that are only really good for speed like La Bresse has. I should be more sensible with my time and money, but I'm dying to go again this season, so I might see if I can head down that way again, although I'd be keen to check out a different skifield. The region is quite pretty though, its more hilly rather than alpine, and apart from a strong wind at the top the weather was perfect so the snow covered trees were really beautiful glistening in the sun.

Pepi "take a photo of the plane on my shirt!"

I've now only got about seven more weeks left in Luxembourg, and it's starting to scare me a little, as there is still quite a bit I would like to see and do before I leave. On the other hand though, I'm ready to get to Amsterdam, as I'm eager to discover somewhere new and have a change of scenery and lifestyle. Like I've said before, Luxembourg is a hard country to settle down in. Because there is such a large expat community of people who are always coming and going here, Luxembourgers tend to stick to themselves and the expats tend to keep their friendships pretty superficial. I was at an Internations event (for the expat business community) one night and when I told people I was moving to Amsterdam, everyone said it was a good move. Luxembourgers don't have the best reputation among many of the expats I've met here, one said to me that night 'Luxembourgers are like Dementors, they're all gloomy and depressing and if you get to close, they suck the life out of you'. I posted the quote on Facebook and got a pretty angry reply from a Luxembourger, which didn't really do much to prove that they have a sense of humor. On the other hand though, many expats here are so negative about the people and the country that they're hard to be around too! But anyway, seven more weeks...


More photos from this month are here.

Strasbourg at Christmas time

Strasbourg - Capital of Christmas

This weekend past I headed to Strasbourg, France, to catch up with Hauke who is there for a year on a study exchange (between European universities it's called Erasmus). Strasbourg is only about 250km away, so two hours on a direct train. I'd been there for a day trip back in March when I'd been visiting a friend further south, in Mulhouse.

Hauke and I before the ball

I arrived at 3pm, and after dropping my stuff at his place we headed to the mall. Shopping usually isn't on the cards when we get together, but we were going to a ball at the university that night and we needed formal stuff. We were dashing from store to store, and kept bumping into another Erasmus student on a mission to find tights, but finally got everything done and after a few laughs at the awkwardness of Hauke trying to ask the lingerie shop assistant for a backless bra for me in french, we headed home to get dressed and have a few drinks before we went out.

A bunch of the Erasmus students

Rita from Ireland and Majorie from the USA came over, and after we were all dressed up and well-watered and had taken the obligatory prom photos we headed in. A lot of people had paid to go earlier and eat, so we were arriving as everyone was already into the swing of things and lost no time on catching up by drinking the cheap beer. A lot of faces of other Erasmus students became a bit of a blur, and while we had a good time, nothing exceptionally remarkable happened, and then sometime around 4am we toddled home with us girls feeling rather sorry for ourselves after a night in extremely high heels.

One of the many squares in Strasbourg

Saturday got off to a slow start, we didn't make it out the door until after 3pm, but we headed into town to see the Christmas Market. Strasbourg has a really famous and large one, which unlike in most cities, is spread all around the place, with many sections having specific themes. Each year they invite a different country to have their own section as a guest of honour, so this year there was a 'Little Switzerland' section with a lot of cheese and watches, including a fondue stand where instead of dipping things into a pot full of melted cheese they had cut massive wheels of cheese in half and had managed to melt the cheese on the inside, so that the half wheel was working as a kind of bowl that they could dip things into.


Hauke drunk some Gluhwine (mulled wine) but I was doubtful that my stomach was prepared to hold that down after what I'd put it through the previous night, and so I stuck to spiced hot orange juice, a nice alternative that I haven't seen before.

Christmas decorations in a pedestrian alleyway in the centre

The Christmas decorations in Strasbourg are really hard to convey through photos, just the shear volume of stuff decorating each tiny alleyway and each shop made it hard as photos where too noisy for you to be able to recognize individual decorations, and photos can't show the atmosphere or how packed the place was. It really was incredible, I thought the Christmas markets and decorations that I've seen in Germany and here in Luxembourg were amazing, but they have nothing on Strasbourg. One street even had a row of actual chandeliers encased in glass or fabric boxes suspended down the middle. The council's electrical bill must be massive, as would be the amount of money poured into buying and installing the decorations, but I guess they get it back from all of the tourists. I also didn't take so many photos because it was just too damn cold to seriously consider taking my hands out of my pockets!

Woman serving Gluhwine

The sun is currently setting before 5pm here in Europe, and it was really windy in Strasbourg, so while I think it was a lot warmer than Luxembourg, with the wind chill it was really freezing and we ended up sitting inside the massive Cathedral for quite a while just to try and keep warm! We had another quick gluhwine with a guy Hauke knew from highschool and some of his own Erasmus friends, the three of them had come for the weekend too, and then headed back home to warm up again!

Dinner at the Mexican place

We'd planned the night before to go out for dinner with some of the other Erasmus students, so we met them and went to a mexican place that Latin-American-born Majorie insisted was awesome. Unfortunately it was so awesome that it was really full, so we ended up going away for a beer and not getting to eat until 10pm! Luckily it was really worth the wait, everyone enjoyed their quesadillas and fajitas, and Hauke managed to eat his own 'plate full of different meats' (just meat. Big hunks of fried meat. Crazy!) meal and then finish off two of ours' as well!

Wandering around the city

We'd wanted to go out that night, but everyone was so tired from the previous night and so full from dinner that no one was really up for it, and we kept having issues with bouncers and places being full. After one last attempt to go to the University nightclub, a random place above what I think was a small shopping mall in amongst all the uni buildings, we called it a night and went home to bed instead.

We again didn't make it out of bed before lunchtime the next morning, and in the afternoon headed back into town. There probably is more to do in Strasbourg than either of us realise, but with me having been there before and it being so cold and christmas-dominated, we mostly just kept wandering around. We did manage to climb to the top of the Cathedral, which was cool but not as impressive as it once would have been, having climbed up church towers with similar views in most European cities that I've visited!

View of the rooftops from the Cathedral

Finally, we met up with Rita for a little bit, got our photo taken with a random drunk Russian, and headed back to the warmth to watch a movie before I headed to the train station for the evening train back to Luxembourg.


Photos are here, or even better ones from the last time that I was in Strasbourg are here.

Toulouse, France - end of the line

Toulouse is the fourth-largest city in France, in the south-west above the border to Spain and halfway between the two coasts. It's also where Emile studies architecture, a guy who lived in the Wairarapa on AFS from 2008-2009.

Just a note here, if I've convinced anyone that getting involved in AFS is a good idea, either by volunteering so you get to meet these awesome people from all over the world or hosting one yourself (I swear they don't party as much when they are younger and living in NZ!) then give AFS a call on 0800 600 300. Pretty cool organisation, not only did I get a life-changing experience as a teenager, and then several years of learning new skills as a volunteer, but I also just got three months free accomodation out of it!


Emile and I

 I arrived on Sunday afternoon and met Emile at the train station, and he graciously took the much-hated backpack from me. We met a couple of his friends, I made the social faux pas of trying to give three kisses on the cheek rather than two, and then we went for coffee. I'm used to the obligatory kiss on the cheek thing from Costa Rica, but that was only ever one. Since I got here its been hard to keep up, in Germany it was one (actually I don't know if it really is just one or that was just me being a weird foreigner) and then I got to Spain and had to switch to two, which requires some tough distance-judging while two people are both moving opposite directions if you don't want to miss and kiss the air, or get them on the nose, both of which I did many times. Belgium and the first half of France it was two, and then it got confusing with three in Switzerland, two in Marseille, then back to three in Avignon, so who can blame me for trying to plant three on this poor guy in Toulouse? Luckily, he is Emile's flatmate and speaks perfect english from growing up overseas, so I could apologise!

Seraphine

We went for coffee at a cool cafe that actually looked like it could have been a cafe back in Wellington, all modern rather than typical-french. I revelled in my speculoos addiction by buying a speculoos-flavoured hot chocolate (it didn't actually taste like speculoos) and a speculoos and banana muffin (it did taste like speculoos). The thought of going back to speculoos-less Spain is horrible! We then walked a little way, so I could see the River Garonne that the city is built on (have I ever mentioned that I like the way almost all European cities are built on a river?) and the view of the buildings lining the sides, Toulouse is called the Ville Rose, or pink city, for the colour of all the buildings, but honestly it looks more like a kind of browny-orange to me. Still pretty though, and very different from Avignon and Marseille. We headed back to Emile and Joe's apartment, in kind of the Newtown of Toulouse if you're from Wellington where I was introduced to Seraphine, the depressed turtle that had come for a vacation at Emile's house to see if it improved her mood. She has since developed her own facebook page, so I guess she has. Emile made a great chilli con carne for dinner, I loved that he made it out of the Jamie Oliver Ministry of Food cookbook, but the French version. Little things like seeing a familiar cookbook entirely in French amuse me.

Pont Neuf, or 'New Bridge'

Emile had class for the next day, so I slept in until he came home for lunch, and then went off to explore. I walked around the Basilica of Saint Sernin, the biggest romanesque church in Europe and the main city square, and then wandered up and down the narrow streets in the middle filled with all of the shops, trying to buy myself a new handbag and all of those last minute gifts and souvineers that I needed. They had some amazing places and I could have brought myself some really beautiful things, but I kept reminding myself of how much I hate carrying my possessions on my back and of how I no longer have my own house in NZ anymore anyway. Eventually all the shopping wore me out and I stopped at one of those little french bars with the tables on the sidewalks and had a beer while reading my latest book, I picked up one back in Avignon just because the title, A year in the Merde (shit, for those who don't speak french) appealed to me, its about a guy who moves to France for work and his awesome rants about all of the not-bad-just-different-but-secretly-we-know-its-bad things he encounters there. Struck a chord with me, and the first one was quite funny, although the following three got progressively more stupid. Finally, I went to get a better view of the Pont Neuf, or New Bridge, a funny name considering it was built in the 16th century. It's a nice bridge, but after the one in Avignon, I don't really get why its famous too.

Emile, Joe, and thirteen drinks

We quickly ate that evening and then went out for the evening, to a venue called The Chapel that they boys had been recommended but hadn't gone to before. Took us ages to find it, we kept asking for directions and getting told to go the opposite way, but eventually we got there and found out it was an actual church or chapel or something, I don't really know the difference. Its now a venue for an alternative crowd that serve dirt cheap meals and drinks until 10pm while bands play, this night a couple of guys with a guitar and drum set. They were quite good, and it was just one of those chilled out gigs where everyone sits around tables chatting. We then went to another bar which was not so chilled out, on Monday nights (yes, Mondays) they sell 13 drinks for 13 euros ($2NZ per drink), both beer and spirits provide you take them all at once and give them their tray back right away (ie drink ridiculously fast). Again, I had to question NZ's reputation for bad drinking culture, I can't imagine anywhere in NZ running the same promotion and getting away with it.





Toulouse - see what I mean, not really pink!

 The place was packed, we watched a couple of fights erupt, one over an allegedly spilled drink (who can blame the guy, trying to hold 13 drinks in two arms is tough!), and eventually ended up sharing a table with the same guy who started that fight. He turned out to be quite friendly, as did the guy beside me who had learnt some english in Australia, but I took advantage of his english skills and drunkeness to make fun of him without him realising for our amusement, at least until I ended up in a similar state myself. The boys also amused themselves adding to the grafitti decorating the table and seeing how many penis doodles they could reach with just one had. Boys.Finally, we finished all of our drinks and headed out to pee in the alleyway and find another bar, but we didn't stay too long and returned home via my favourite method of post-drinking-crap-the-metro-is-closed transportation, the public bicycle hire system!




Emile with his egg-on-mince in the little plaza resturant

 I was not really on top of the world the following morning and again, slept in until Emile finished half of his classes and came back to wag the rest of them, and we used our reciepts from the night before to use the bicycles again, this time back into town for lunch. Turns out I am much better on a bike when I am sober, I was beginning to worry that the old adage 'It's like riding a bike' didn't apply to me and I could in fact forget such things. I had wanted go to a proper french resturant, one where you sit at tables in the little plaza, since I've been here and so as it was my last day in France, we went. Emile did a good job of translating the menu and we both had I guess a french version of steak and egg, but here they put a fried egg on top of what I would call a hamburger pattie, like a round of minced beef. I asked him about that, because I think it would be quite strange to have that without bread, but apparently its quite typical here. Was good anyway, and I even proved how far I have come in Europe buy drinking a whole glass of red wine with my meal, I surprized Hauke back in Austria when I arrived by not being able to handle more than a sip or two of it. See, I did put off postgraduate study to learn important things over here! I also got a lemon cheesecake with speculoos cookie base for dessert, yum.



random street in Toulouse

 We then wandered around the shops for awhile and I helped Emile pick new glasses before we went home to make it in time to the post office. In France they have different sized boxes that you pay one price for and can fill up to a certain amount, so I had my $80 box to post back to NZ (meaning my bag might actually be light enough to get on the plane to Madrid) and some other bits and pieces. I got really annoyed though that they didn't have a box the right size to post something within Europe, apparently not just that this store was out, but full stop. Seems like another inefficient system, you can have a medium-sixed box if you want to post internationally, but not if you want to post within Europe, and no, you cannot just pay more for the medium-sixed international box and post it within Europe, and no they don't have any other packaging options at all, and no I wasn't happy to buy a extra-large-sized Europe box and have my tiny thing inside it get bounced around, so screw you French post system, I will just post it from Spain. We did get revenge however by still being in the shop as they were closing and then trying to buy stamps by inserting our 1eurocent coins in the vending machine, not realising that it would take a maximum of 20 individual coins before it spat them all out again, meaning one poor guy had to stand around and wait for us for another 5 minutes while we tried to get enough stamps.

Pot-Au-Feu

Finally, we finished off the evening with communal attempts (ie Joe and I were meant to do it while Emile studied, but we couldn't agree on stuff and had to keep interrupting Emile to ask) at cooking Pot-Au-Feu, a traditional french soup. Was quite good. Poor Emile had a huge assignment due Wednesday, so he was up most of the night working, and then he insisted he'd come to the train station with me so we were up early the next morning. When I planned this trip I thought that Toulouse would be the ideal last stop before I hoped over the border back into Spain. Wrong. Turns out the Spanish train system is even more ridiculous than the French one, they use different tracks to all the other countries, so while the rest of Europe is really well intergrated, Spain isn't. You can train to the border, and then try and get another train from the border, but the timing was a joke, I was going to have to spend a night in the middle of no where on the border, and trains within Spain are three times more expensive than in other countries, so in the end I trained back to Paris and flew into Madrid on Easyjet, at $100NZD it was the most expensive flight I've taken within Europe, but it was much cheaper than trains would have been! After flying with Ryanair so much, Easyjet felt really luxurious, and landing at Madrid airport felt like coming home, although after taking four metros, three trains and a plane to get to the apartment, I was shattered!

So therein endith the big tour, or at least the intial tour I had planned. As I said in my last post, glad to stop moving around so much and doing the repetitive tourist-site thing, but sad at the same time that it has all come to an end. The plan is now to get my visa sorted, finally, and then find a job and place of my own here in Madrid, but its kind of freaky to have nothing at all definite on the horizon, not even plans for the weekend, after three months of knowing where I would be every day of the week. But I guess one of the things I have learnt over here is how easy travel is, so I guess Europe's my oyster!

Photos from Toulouse are here.

Avignon - a bridge, a palace, and an english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man

View back towards Avignon from the bridge

Avignon is about a hundred km out of Marseille to the north-west, and home to Boris, surprize surprize an AFS Wellington 2009-2010 student. The shortest train trip, but also in some regards the most difficult!

In France, you can buy cheaper tickets online in advance, which I did, but only if you use the French website, the minute I put it into english it took me to another page and things were in pounds and twice the price. Typical French arrogance, lets make anyone dumb enough not to speak French pay more! So I thought I just be clever and buy my tickets from the french site, and proceeded to do so without any problems, so I thought. I get here and France has the weirdest system in place that I've come across. You can't simply print out the ticket that you booked online, like you can in other countries, you need to go to machines in the station and insert the credit card that you used to book it, and it prints out a proper ticket for you.

 Boris and I. Bad photo, I know!

Luckily the first time I tried to do this I wasn't in a hurry, because turns out these machines can't handle foreign credit cards, so everytime I go to take a train in France I first need to line up, carrying my painfully ridiculous amount of luggage and either try to mime what I want to a non-english-speaking-and-unfriendly service person, or in the cases where they actually have a specific english-speaking-but-stillunfriendly service person, wait behind an even longer line of often similarly luggage-laden foreigners in the same position as me. I would prefer the shorter line and take my chances with a non-english speaker, but there is also a mean security man there directing traffic. And these aren't lines like the polite, short lines we have in New Zealand, these are European lines, which always, always, no matter where you are, the supermarket, the post office, the skifield, are at least three times longer and full of people who don't understand the concepts of single-file and waiting-patiently-for-your-turn.

Random small plaza in Avignon

Ok, enough ranting about the lines at the railway station. You get the idea, it adds an unpleasant half hour onto all of my journeys. Normally, I need to give my reference number and then they ask for my credit card to verify my identity about half the time, before printing me out my ticket, which you then need to take and validify yourself in a different machine before you get on the train. Again, something you don't need to do anywhere else. Apparently its so that the controller who comes around to stamp your ticket knows you didn't already use it. Which makes me wonder why he still stamps the ticket.....Oh France. But three months earlier when I had brought my ticket from Marseille to Avignon, I was waiting for my new credit card to arrive and had used mum's instead. Something I would not have done could I read the fine print in French on the website. Not to worry, I thought, half the time they never ask for the card anyway and if they do I will say I lost it, as must surely happen quite frequently, and offer my passport instead, who can refute a passport as proof of identity? Well, as it turns out, the French can!!!

main plaza in Avignon

Yes, this particular english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man refused to let me use the ticket I had brought online three months earlier because I had "lost" my credit card and couldn't use it to prove who I was. For security reasons. Why the hell doesn't my passport prove who I am? Isn't that the safest proof of ID around? Isn't that what every other country in Europe uses as proof of ID for train tickets? Grrrr France. So I then had to buy a new ticket, fill in a similar number of forms to what you would need to buy a house in NZ, and wait for them to process the forms, send them to the accounts department, and then refund me...7 euros. Little lesson on efficiency France, wasting the time of the english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man, all the office people out the back, the staff at my bank, and me, all over 7 euros = inefficient. Accepting a passport as proof of ID to get the angry NZer out of your face and on her train = efficient.

OK so it is kinda my fault, I brought a ticket with a credit card I didn't have on my person, but seriously. And I don't appreciate english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man telling me the computor system makes it impossible to print the ticket without the card because I have seen it happen so many other times.

View from the Palais over the old centre of Avignon

So I get to Avignon, knowing that Boris was going to be about 20min late to meet me, and just sit on my bag in front of the train station reading and amusing myself watching the drug peddlers, members of the 'moroccan deaf mute association' (similar to the turkish deaf mute association found further north and in Germany, in that in between waving a plea for money in your face they will have group huddles to verbally plan their tactics) and african black-market vendors do their thing in between disappearing when the police patrol came past every twenty minutes. True to form, Boris showed up an hour later and we caught the bus back to his place, outside of Avignon proper, and the first single-story house I've been in during the last three months! The south of France is quite different to the rest of Europe, its much more mediterranean, the houses are flater and golden, with those cool curved terracotta roof tiles. Roof tiles are actually quite important here, you notice throughout Europe that different countries and regions have different varities (flat, curved, big, small, different colours), and apparently some places, or everywhere I dont know,  have laws about what kinds of tiles you can use to maintain the traditional look of the region.

Boris (right) and two of his friends on St Pats day

My laziness seemed to come with me from Marseille, for some reason I was absolutely shattered and after chatting to Boris for a bit, just went for a wee nap, that turned into a really big nap because he couldn't wake me to go out wth him! Eventually I woke, had dinner with his parents while he came back home, and then went for a walk with him just around the neighbourhood a bit to see the view. Thursday he had school, and I did more of the same lazing around the house, sleeping and catching up on emails and blog etc, and playing with Boris's cat, who is freakishly small and really seems like she's on a permanent acid trip, she is nuts, gets freaked out by everything and runs around the house jumping on stuff escaping invisible monsters. We went out that night as it was St Patrick's day, to a bar called Wall Street where all the students go for cheap drinks. Have to hand it to them, the drinks were cheap and they put a lot of effort into irish decorations, but they had a huge map of the world painted on the wall, minus New Zealand! Travesty! I found it quite funny, this party in the name of St Pats in a French bar, full of french people. At least in NZ we can claim a bit of Irish ancestry to justify the party! Boris's friends really speak no english, so I just amused myself with the cheap drinks until we went home quite late, I have no idea how he managed to get up the next morning for school! I definitely was not up that early in the morning, and again spent the day sleeping, emailing, blogging and swearing I would get out of the house the next day.



Little plaza in Avignon

 The weekend was supposed to be pretty quiet party-wise as everyone had exams the following week, but we went with some of Boris's friends to what he described as a tragic old man pub that they went to for cheap beer when they had nothing better to do. It pretty much lived up to the description, except it was quite packed and full of what seemed like a club of spanish bulfighting supporters, complete with videos projected onto the wall and red bandanas around everyones neck. It was quite strange, none of us really new what was going on, so we just sat outside drinking our cheap beers. The weather had changed dramatically by the time I got down to this part of France, it was warm and sunny during the days, but still quite cold at nights.

Wall around the town centre

The next day Boris went to the library to study (yes, for those of you who know Boris, he surprized me too!) and I went sightseeing! I had never heard anything about Avignon before, I doubt it is very famous outside of Europe, and someone in Marseille said "why the hell are you going to Avignon, there is nothing there except an old bridge, and its not even a whole old bridge, just half an old bridge!" It is actually quite a nice city, the old section is still ringed by the old walls and ramparts, so we parked outside the walls and walked through one of the old arched doors in the wall. In the city, the streets are narrow and windy, and around every couple of corners you find a little plaza filled with tables spilling out from the resturants and bars, and normally a fountain or statue or something. To me, the walls and everything make it seem so medieval, but I love the way to everyone who lives there its just so normal, having to park the car ages away because the walls are in the way.



Pont Saint-Benezet/Pont d'Avignon

 The famous bridge, called Pont Saint-Benezet, or Pont d'Avignon was built in the 1100s, allegedly after a local shepard boy claimed angels commanded him to build it. He got taken seriously after he lifted a massive block of stone and laid it at the riverbank, and then all the wealthy guys in the area stepped in and built the thing, 900m long, across the Rhone river. They built a chapel part way along the bridge, and the shepard became Saint-Benezet and was buried there later. It was put out of use in 1668 after a massive flood and now only four arches remain, so its kind of like a pier you can walk out on. Avignon is really windy, and being out on the bridge was crazy, the wind was so bad it was pulling everything out of my hands.

Palais des Papes

Avignon also has the Palais des Papes, or Palace of the Popes, something I never knew existed! In 1309 Rome was in turmoil so Pope Clement V moved everything to Avignon, and over the next decades the buildings were expanded and remodelled so that now the Palais des Papes is a huge medieval palace complete with all the halls and turrets and ramparts like the castles in computer games when I was a kid. Very cool. The Popes went back in 1377, but then the antipopes took over (something else I didn't know about, see I am learning a lot on this trip!), different guys who opposed the real pope and got enough support for their own claim for being pope, and the real pope only got the Palais back in 1433.

view inside Palais des Papes

In between visiting these I managed to order myself a meal at a chinese resturant, in french, and wander around the shops quite a bit, before I met Boris and we had coffee with a couple of his friends. We went out later that night, just the two of us for a couple of beers in a fancy bar and it was good just to sit around and chat. I really liked Avignon, for all I was really lazy and didn't get out too much. The whole travelling thing really just wore me down though, constantly moving around, packing and unpacking, catching trains, constantly trying new things, looking at museums and old churchs over and over and over. I've found myself longing for simple things, like a bedside table with my own things on it and knowing where in town to get my shoes fixed and just being able to go home when I get tired at a party, not when the friend who I am staying with gets tired. Not that travelling around hasn't been awesome, but I think I'm at the limit of what I can take before I need to settle down for a bit before taking off again. But the other part of me is sad that I have only one more stop to make before I head back to Madrid.

I should mention that when I arrived at Avignon train station to get my train ticket to Toulouse, the non-english-speaking-but-unfriendly train service man took my reference number and printed out my ticket without asking for my credit card. Those bastard train service men!

More photos of Avignon are here.