Vamos a la playa! Day trip to Spain.

If there is one other thing that France does very well, it’s holidays. The stereotype that the French love a good bit of time off from working seems to be holding up well – 2 weeks off from university in the middle of February isn’t half bad in my book. Les vacances scolaires are an Erasmus student’s favourite words, as they can only mean one thing: time to travel.

Living in the south of France has many advantages, not least because of its (mostly) glorious sun and blue skies. It’s also handily close to Spain…

So we headed off to the border, unable to get our heads around the fact that we were going on a day trip to a different country – to me, going to another country means at least several days, a suitcase, a passport and 9 times out of 10, a certain level of stress. Not this time round. Breakfast in France, lunch in Spain, all very simple and stress-free!

First stop, Figueras, and some delicious tapas to kick off our Spanish trip. We saw the Museum of Dali, weird and wonderful as you’d expect, and later we walked past a man casually taking a siesta in his car, in the middle of town. Nice to know we got both ends of the cultural spectrum covered right there. 

After lunch, we made our way to the coast and the journey along the way was stunning – windy country roads and views of the sea. We had to make several stops to keep taking photos…

Destination: Cadaqués. I hadn’t heard of it before either. It’s a small town on the sea, gorgeous, very Spanish-feeling and best of all, free from tourists. It was so peaceful and quiet, so we were able to wander round and enjoy the view. Our collective lack of Spanish knowledge made things a lot harder, I have to admit. When needing to say something in a language other than English, we found that out instinct was to say it in French, which in all honestly was just as, if not more, pointless. I can tell you now, just don’t do it. Thankfully, we managed to get ourselves understood through the international language of pointing and a reliance on the broken English of the locals. 

The whole day felt very surreal and we kept repeating “we’re in Spain, we’re in Spain” to try to make it sink in. Waking up in France, spending the day in Spain, going to bed in France; to me, it still seems crazy. Oh, the Erasmus life! 

So just to write a bit about general progress and goings on in France – I can’t fill my blog up completely with day trips to pretty places, I promise that’s not all I do!

After all my bragging about the sunshine awaiting for me in France, it turns out that Montpellier can actually get pretty chilly at times, especially in the evening! I wasn’t expecting to have to bring the hats and the gloves out; it’s the south of France, right? It does feel quite weird walking along all dressed up warmly to brace the cold whilst seeing palm trees everywhere – something just doesn’t add up there.  The daytime does often bring some pretty good sunshine; I even managed to get a little bit of colour the other day just by sitting under the sun for an hour or so. Not bad going! Saying that, at the moment the temperatures have gone right down to what feels like Antarctic levels – it even snowed on Tuesday,  not what I was expecting to see! Monty, I didn’t sign up for this.

In and amongst all the fun and games, there are inevitably times when things are stressful and can drive you round the bend. Ask anyone here and they’ll instantly tell you that one of the most annoying things about France is, yes, its crazy sense of bureaucracy and endless administration. Every time you think you’ve got all the admin sorted, another document pops up demanding to be filled in, sent, returned to be completed again, then signed by someone else, until finally it is done. I really wish I was joking. It never stops!

Something else that never ceases to amaze me is the increasing number of cases where services, shops, tourist attractions and all manner of things that involve people will be closed between the hours of 12 and 2, because clearly it is some sort of national crime to do anything other than eat and drink during these 2 hours. Truly brilliant when you have nothing you need to do, as it’s the perfect excuse to do absolutely nothing and, in most cases, enjoy the sunshine. On the other hand, it’s incredibly frustrating when there’s something you have to get done, someone you need to see or an attraction you want to visit. Lesson learnt: just go for lunch instead.

So just to write a bit about general progress and goings on in France – I can’t fill my blog up completely with day trips to pretty places, I promise that’s not all I do!

After all my bragging about the sunshine awaiting for me in France, it turns out that Montpellier can actually get pretty chilly at times, especially in the evening! I wasn’t expecting to have to bring the hats and the gloves out; it’s the south of France, right? It does feel quite weird walking along all dressed up warmly to brace the cold whilst seeing palm trees everywhere – something just doesn’t add up there.  The daytime does often bring some pretty good sunshine; I even managed to get a little bit of colour the other day just by sitting under the sun for an hour or so. Not bad going! Saying that, at the moment the temperatures have gone right down to what feels like Antarctic levels – it even snowed on Tuesday,  not what I was expecting to see! Monty, I didn’t sign up for this.

In and amongst all the fun and games, there are inevitably times when things are stressful and can drive you round the bend. Ask anyone here and they’ll instantly tell you that one of the most annoying things about France is, yes, its crazy sense of bureaucracy and endless administration. Every time you think you’ve got all the admin sorted, another document pops up demanding to be filled in, sent, returned to be completed again, then signed by someone else, until finally it is done. I really wish I was joking. It never stops!

Something else that never ceases to amaze me is the increasing number of cases where services, shops, tourist attractions and all manner of things that involve people will be closed between the hours of 12 and 2, because clearly it is some sort of national crime to do anything other than eat and drink during these 2 hours. Truly brilliant when you have nothing you need to do, as it’s the perfect excuse to do absolutely nothing and, in most cases, enjoy the sunshine. On the other hand, it’s incredibly frustrating when there’s something you have to get done, someone you need to see or an attraction you want to visit. Lesson learnt: just go for lunch instead.

VIP dans le Village

An ordinary day out to watch the tennis somehow become more eventful than I was expecting…

We managed to get tickets to the Open Sud de France, not quite the French Open, granted, but it was still pretty fun – plus when it’s only 12 euros for a day tickets to watch professionals play, you can’t really say no to that. Naturally, we decided to go in armed with enough food to last us the entire day: with sandwiches, crisps, several boxes of cookies, some random bits of fruit, we were good to go. Imagine our horror when we get to the door only to be informed that food was interdit in the arena, therefore we’d have to chuck it all. You weren’t even allowed to take in the lid for your water bottle, “just in case you threw it at the players”. Great start to the day.

Undeterred, we set out on a plan of action. First step: eat as much as you can. So we sat ourselves down in the car park, at 11.30am, and attempted to work our way through what can only be described as our FEAST. After cramming in as many sandwiches and crisps as we could, we were still faced with 4 boxes of cookies, packets of sweets and a lone banana. 

Second step: find all means possible to sneak the rest in. And boy, we did ourselves proud. Coat pockets, hidden zips in bags and even space up jumpers were filled with cookies. A plan which was potentially brilliant if it worked, and extremely embarrassing if we were to be caught: “oh sorry, I didn’t realise those cookies were in my bra” wouldn’t really wash. Third step: walk back to the door, waddling, carrying a huge bin bag of empty cookie boxes and repeatedly say “on a trop mangé, on a trop mangé” to make them think we’d eaten the whole lot. Worked like a charm. I even sneaked in a bottle lid, just for good measure.

As for the tennis, despite the fact that during the course of the day we only saw one player that any of us had ever heard of, it was fun to watch, especially when you suddenly decide to start rooting for a particular player (in this case, it was simply because he was Canadian) and genuinely start wanting them to win. We managed to see 4 matches, 3 singles and 1 doubles. Not bad going!

Highlight of the day was undoubtedly managing to get entry to the VIP area – at first, we hadn’t realised what it was, and had casually wandered over with our arena tickets, thinking that we could go straight on through. Yeah, it turns out you have to be slightly more important than that. We saw a competition stand, where if you filled in a crossword, you had the chance to win free VIP tickets and get to go into “The Village”, this wonderland of the rich and famous (or so we thought).  Through a mixture of luck and turning on the pure English/Irish/foreigner charm, the women running the competition decided that they liked us enough to both give us the answers and then declare us the winners. Brandishing our blue VIP wristbands, we ran (very civilised) over to the Village and sat around drinking free champagne and some very nice wine, trying to pretend that we were rich and important, but all the while looking, very obviously, that we didn’t belong there.

I decided this would be the perfect “mingling” opportunity, but when it became apparent that no one really wanted to talk to us, we just carried on drinking the wine and watched all the pretty people walk around. “Famous” people check: the Montpellier football team (apparently a big deal), Miss Languedoc Roussillon and some other model-like people (pretty, but they don’t do anything other than look good) and one of the tennis players that we then saw on court later that evening. It’s probably the only time I’ll ever get to go into a VIP area – such a great time!