Delirious Jellyfish

Friday, July 20, 2007

My niece reminded me of the fact that I hadn't updated in quite a long time, so here I am, haha.

I got back from France last week, where I went to visit a friend who stayed there for ten months as part of an internship. It was in the south of France, but we stopped in Paris for a day to see all the fancy things there like the Eiffel Tower and the Notre Dame and the Seine by night.

We arrived in Paris at 5 in the morning and had to wait 7 hours before we could check in at our hotel. On one hand this was really awful, because we were all exhausted from the drive and we hadn't slept in 20 hours, but on the other hand I loved it because we could slowly see the city awaken and we got to see everything without all the tourists. It was a nice, pure experience. We had breakfast in a random cafetaria (there was of course French loaf, croissants and orange juice) and had our first experience with really gross toilets. Yuck.

I insisted on having breakfast under the Eiffel Tower and we did, although for my fellow travelers it wasn't really breakfast anymore, but they ate cookies while I ate sandwiches with real Dutch peanutbutter and everybody was happy.

The Notre Dame on the inside was only pretty from one side, the front was not that interesting. The inside I did like, especially the brick-like ceilings and the sheer hugeness of it all (I'm a sucker for large bows).

We went to have dinner in a random restaurant and I ate duck, because the last time I ate duck in France it was heavenly. Of course this time wasn't as good, but I had salmon for a starter and that's always delicious.

As for the people, I really expected the worst. Everybody always says that Parisians are snobbish and unkind and only the week before the mayor of Paris (or something) had been on tv to proclaim that Paris had to become a friendlier city. Maybe it was because we at least tried to speak French instead of just immediately babbling away in our mother language, or maybe everybody we talked to were just in a good mood, but they were all really nice to us and we had no nasty encounters there whatsoever.

We arrived in Argentat, the place in the south where my friend lived, in the middle of the night. It's a cute, not so big place in the Dordogne with the river running right through it. It turned out there was a festival in town there, probably because of the 14th of July, a national holiday on which the French celebrate the end of the monarchy. On this day there are lots of festivities and fireworks and drunk French people. It's a very national holiday and the national anthem gets played a lot.

The next few days were spent trying to speak our best French, eating French loaf, listening to the various bands, eating crèpes and pizza and lying around playing "Wie ben ik" with pads on our foreheads. The most exciting thing we did was canoeing. Marilyn knew of a good canoeing place but it turned out that they required you to take a guide with you, so we searched for another one, run by a funny, grey man who was very eager to help us and was actually very good at English. It was quite a large route and a girl fell out of the canoe and completely freaked out, but overall it was quite relaxing and fun and we got a nice tan from it.

We also went swimming in a lake, but I didn't like it very much because there were bugs and other weird things in the water, haha. I really don't like bugs. Or weird things, for that matter.

We also went to visit a waterfall, which was so gorgeous. We hardly have real nature like that in the Netherlands of course, and that really is a shame. The waterfall itself wasn't even the prettiest thing: the smell of the water and the trees, the sight of all the greenness and the little stream with all the rocks on it... everything was just perfect.

Labels: photos, vacation

posted by Mykerinos at 6:05 PM