Unholy days

Right (left) here (alone) we are (i am) (am i?) at last at the end of the holidays, nearly 3 whole months from where (when) we started.


Off School 7th june and kicked the summer off in style by going to watch "House Of Wax" with Sarah and Tamara. very good creepy movie, highly recommended.

Then came veging for a bit and I did nothing. so little that i can't say any more about it.


Alain & Brian 11-12 june:

This was our little inauguration of the summer, And on saturday afternoon it was a beautiful day, so we decidedd to make the most of it and stay in all afternoon playing Quake 3 (excellent multiplayer fps). Lots of fun. Also good to get all three of us together again for the first time in over a year.
On the sunday we went to a Kung Fu beginner-thingy, which was fun but exhausting. It's really impressive stuff, but not really my kind of thing (what with having to be in some sort of physical condition nearing fit).

On the whole a great weekend, fantastic way to start the summer. I didn't even regret having to miss the Anti-Flag and Die Toten Hosen concerts.



Work at Rothgerber's apple farm, 13-17 june:

(I got a summer job! yeah, proper work! manual labor! getting up at 7 every morning! more than a typical office 9-5 i can tell you. )

Technically, none of this was exactly legal, because in France you have to be 16 years old to get a job, which is a stupid law but that's just the way it is. (It's not like us People are supposed to have any influence on the way country's run or anything vaguely democratic like that.) But we found a way round that alright. First my dad offered to just write my birthday down as the 2nd insted of the 22nd and pretend I was dissleksick (dyxlesia lures, K.O.?), but they said that they would simply declare me all official-like and stuff with my real birthday. When my dad gave them a look and was about to ask them why run the risk, they said, "I know we're in France, but this is Alsace." Plus we know them personally, my dad used to fix their computer, and I had done my "stage en entreprise" work experience thing with them. I'm probably the only person to have gone on to work for the company they did their work experience with. The one hting I learnt from the experience is that I do NOT want to be a farmer when I grow up, and therefore I MUST get qualifications and get a better job. Stay in school or we'll make your thumbs bleed. Your choice.

I was totally shattered at the end of my 34.5 hours of picking the weedy fruit to give the bigger fruit proper room to grow (hardened the ends of my thumbs no end), including several in the boiling heat (had to give up on 2 afternoons because of heat-stroke) and torrential rain. I was paid minimum adult wage, which was nice of them. 212,77€ after I gave quite a bit of it to a government I don't get to take part in. I only atually got my paycheck (my first ever paycheck w007!) a week later, because they were closed and/or I was busy (read on for more...), and even then I had to keep it safe while I was away for another week, but the money got to my bank account in the end.

At the end of the week, as I said I was shattered, and would have really loved a nice lie-in. But nooooo, not for me, I had to go and do the silly thing of throwing a party straight away. A big one, too. (I make this sound like I regret it and/or that it was a bad thing. I suck. Simple as that. I intend to remedy this idiocy right now... or at least, very (relatively) shortly). And besides, it's not like any of it came as a surprise, it was all planned months ahead. Yes, I chose to do all this next stuff at the same time just after the work.


Birthday Week 17- 24 june:

So after my last morning of work, Natalie and Alain came over early for helping with getting the party ready and stuff. My parents went out for dinner so we had the stereo on really loud, Blink-182 while cooking too much food (we had seriously overestimated how much pasta 5 (me, nat, al, my sis', her friend) people can eat), it was great.

Saturday was the (first) day of my party. As usual, it consisted of my dad on the bbq, and then a massive waterfight, which this year was proper massive, because there were 14 of us, instead of the usual 6. I had originally intended it to be 12, but then Nat's visit came up and Lena was with Tess at the time, and Tess was coming so Lena had to, too. Which was good. Anyway it was the best ever by far. The transport worked out really well, Alexei even came on his bike (lunatic!).
I got some great presents, some of them genuinely meaningful. In the evening those who hadn't left went down the road (literally) to the restaurant for dinner which was really good, as usual. We came home and had a few beers, threw apples at each other, played PS2, cards, talked, then some of us started watching Pulp Fiction while others just talked in another room, thenwe all migrated to the living room and set up camp and talked some more. Surprisingly little was actually said, despite all the talking. In all I think I got somewhere between 2 and 3 hours' sleep.

Sunday morning crept up on us, and with it camethe morning after the night before, and the stragglers left, all saying how amazing the party had been (hey I'm only telling the truth). In the afternoon Nat and I went to the cricket my dad was playing in after having watched several recovery dvds. That was really nice.

On monday (20th) Nat and I went into town to meet up with Chris and Tess at Cara's house to practise for the Fête de la Musique for the very first time. There was no drumkit, so I had to just imagine it all in my head. We had enough instruments and cables and amps and stuff, through some bizarre twist of people actually being fairly reliable for once. All that was left was to decide what were actually going to play. Ah. Right. We knew we had about 15 minutes to fill, or so we had been told. In the end we did a mixed-up cover of Wishbone Ash 's (some old band, I'd never heard of them either) "Error Of My Way", one of Nat's songs, and one of Chris's songs he did solo (the only way really). It was pretty... hm.. how to put this.. sporradic? is that a word? it should be. But we pulled it off with both hours of practise going really well, and on Tuesday we went up and it went down pretty much ok. It was fun, in any case, and definitely worth doing again.


<== Tess (rhythm guitar) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
getting plugged in
(hehe not needed for me!)

Chris (a.k.a. Jimi Junior) (lead guitar) ==>

On Wednesday it was my birthday, so Nat and I went to Europa-Park to celebrate. We were meant to take the bus (there are 2: 7:50 and 8:20). We turned up 10 minutes early, but there was no bus. We waited around till 8:30, thinking it might be late or something. But someting was deifnitely wrong, because there was no-one else standing around obviously waiting for this bus. Turns out that they only run on weekends outisde the summer, which for some demented reason they define as july and august. Anyway with a bit of quick thinking and mobile phoning my mum ended up taking us. We eventually got there a couple of hours after we had intended to, but we still managed to get all the good rides done, because none of the queues were too bad (which was weird... the weather was fantastic).

On Thursday Nat left on the train :( in the morning, and in the evening I went to Nancy with Corell and some of his friends to see Slipknot (see that post).

Thursday night I slept at Corell's, and thankfully he had mentioned to his dad that I had a bus to catch in the morning to go home on, because otherwise I would have missed it because I, being an idiot, had taken my watch (and with it my alarm) off for sleeping. Anyway that's fascinating. The rest of Friday was spent packing for snowboarding, and then actually leaving. That night I stayed in Switzerland. I must have covered some record distance in those 24 hours.



Tignes:

Ah, Club Med, you just can't beat it, really. Unlimited food, great people whose job it is to be friendly and entertain you as much as possible, unlimited coke-fanta-sprite (this was one of the more expensive ones with fountains in the restaurant, but because it was just me and my dad we could afford it), great people who aren't paid, but are really friendly anyway, and did I mention the unlimited quality of the food and drinks? Altogether pretty damn nice.

The real plus side of all that food, was that I genuinely needed it, because of all the sport I was doing. It wasn't so much the three hours of snowboarding every morning (after 11 am the snow started melting and it became more like white-waterboarding (but not like surfing because it was downhill) than anything else) that was tiring, though, but rather the walk back up to the hotel from the bottom of the funiculaire. In winter, of course, they don't have this problem as there's enough snow to have a slope all the way down to the front door... Anyway apparently they're renovating the whole thing over the next couple of years to fix this "problem". Personally I didn't really mind because it helped my appetite (my mum said I needed to eat more... I'm not complaining!)

One of the reasons we got to go for the low price we got was because we went out of season (I know July should hardly count as "season" for snowsports, but I don't make the rules.). The problem with that was, nobody else went. The place was deserted. Seriously, there was no-one my age, because they were all still in school, the silly sods! But socialising wasn't my main reason for being there, I was there for the snow, and no-one being there meant the pistees were pretty empty most of the time anyway, so all the better for me!

So after a week of that, I went home, leaving on Saturday (2nd July), staying in a hotel in France on the way, getting home shattered on Sunday (3rd July).



Pakostane 7-20 july (9th-18th):


Now, when my parents annouced to me and my sister that we were going here, we both pointed out that they had said that what with Kenya in febs we were supposed to be cutting down on the expensive holiday front, and that surely a small country next to India counts as pretty bloody expensive. Then of course they said that it's not a country in southern Asia but a village in western Croatia, and that the spelling is quite different.

Again, in typical Club Med fashion, it was all great weather, great food (although this time only unlimitied orange juice and beer... stil not too bad considering my parents gave us plenty of money for the bar, plus my sis' and I are particularly good at leeching of others... score!), great people, but I didn't get to know anyone properly because everyone was there for a different set of days so there were departures all the time. We even set up a sort of geeky levels system whereby one's level is determined by the number of big arrival days one has seen (arrivals being mainly on weds and sats.), hence someone jus arriving would be a level 0, et cetera up to about 3, with the occasional person being a 4 (cor how pathetic were we?). But none of that joke stuff got in the way of friendships or anything, everyone got on with everyone else fine, it's just that no real groups were sealed too well, because they all got disrupted all the time by the bloody wednesday arrivals from bloody Paris (there's only one weekly flight).

Driving there we took 3 days, staying overnight in Bavaria, a country in Germany, and a very swank hotel (nice to see how one of the other thirds lives) in Opatija, which is next to Rijeka, in Croatia. It was my first time in a formerly communist country (techincally, we drove through Slovenia earlier that day, although that hardly counts), and the touristy bits look just like the touristy bits in Italy, same see, different side, but altogether very much the same.

The drive back we did in 2 days, because we (by which I mean my parents) wanted to have a whole day at home to get the house ready for my aunt (dad's sis') and cousin. We stayed in italy, in a hotel called the Regina, a name that for some reason I recognised. Turns out our family once stayed in a hotel with the same name somewhere completely unrelated, something like 8 years ago... weird.

So in total I sateyed in hotels in 5 different countries (Switzerland, France, Germany, Croatia, Italy) in 3 weeks.

There was an island just off the coast where we were staying, which had a very particularly unpronouncable name. Brace yourself, as it is somewhat deprived of vowels... it was called Krk. I've triple-checked, there is no typo. That's right, the placename was spelt Krk. Apparently there are some really pretty things to see there, but who cares about that crap, I mean, LOOK AT THAT NAME! And it's not like this is an exception. If you go to the site on the end of that link, scroll down and look at the map, you'll see that the other placenames aren't exactly over-furnished in the vowel department. I have a theory about the whereabouts of these missing vowels (I say missing, because I have found them. One could never say that they just disappeared, because no civilisation would be mad enough to make their own lives so complicated by purposefully removing the key elements of their own language (although some African lagnuages have gone a bit far to counteract this threat, and have thus caused the inverse problem: underconsonance, but that's another story altogether); howver one might say that they were never there in the first place.). I postualte that during the Occupation, the Romans raided the land, pilaging sentences and reducing words to ruin, leaving behind them an excess of Ks and Vs (neither of which is to be found in present-day Italian), and integrating the spoils of their crimes in an attempt to enrich their own words. The remnants of these crimes against communication are to be found at the end of every single Italiano word.

About five minutes after leaving, I saw a sign saying "WARNING: minefield." We went through a few abandoned villages, all falling to pieces. There was a war ("conflict", for those who are too modern for the real wor(l)d) here less than 10 years ago.



Cameron visit 22-27 july:
- veging. what else can I say?


Al's 27-31 july:

Saw "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", which is just your standard fairly good yet really crap action movie. It being in French didn't affect it at all, if you get what I mean. Next day saw "Batman Forever", which was definitely better than all the other Batman movies combined, if ony because of the Batmobile, as made by Aston Martin (oh yeah, the Yanks rejected the project without even trying, have it!).


And, in case you hadn't noticed, we also made a blog about red bull.


Beckenham 2 - 17 august:

This trip was a house exchange, which, for those of you who didn't get it from the name, is when two families decide to swap houses for a certain amount of time. A lot cheaper than hotels. I won't go into the details, because that's even less interesting than what I'm going to say instead.

So first day in London, I of course went to Camden Market, which frankly was something of a let-down. I had expected it to all be run by punks, and to go back 26 years as I walked down the street. Instead all the stalls where run by entrepreneurial Turks and Greeks and what-not generic foreigners. It's all been turned into a tourist trap. I saw a couple of real proper hardcore punks there though, and I feel like such a poseur even repeating it, but I have to because it was so clever, anyway he had written in bleach on his leather jacket:

"WE'RE SO VERY FUCKING SORRY,
THIS PRODUCT HAS SOLD OUT."
No shit.

None of this stopped me from buying loads of stuff with the stupidly large amounts of cash my various relations had given me.
Incidentally, this particular day was exactly 2 weeks after the second round of London bombs (the ones that failed), which had been themselves set exactly 2 weeks after the ones that killed people, and because we all know that terrorists work in a predictable and obvious pattern, there were literally hundreds of police officers all around the tube. Not a good day for muggers.

The following day we went to Thorpe Park, which has got loads of record-breaking rollercoasters, like the world's first backwards & in the dark coaster ( I forget the name, it was something like "X" or something stupid), which is like a combination of Europapark's EuroSat and EuroMir rides. There was also Colossus, the world's first 10-loop coaster, which is mind-corkscrewing. Amongst others.

We also went to Oxford Street one day, because I had somehow managed to accumulate more gift money, and I bought some stuff, including a trip to Metal Militia, a great little shop (also with a smaller version in Camden) with loads of t-shirts and badges and patches and stuff... just about cheaper than in France. later we went to Madame Tussaud's, the wax celebrity place, which was awesome yet creepy.

Meanwhile, the Ashes were on, and England were doing quite well for themselves after the standard defeat at Lord's, and the summer was shaping up quite well indeed. I still had another 2 weeks.

Also, as was the purpose of our visit to Blightey, we did manage to find time to see the family, which was good. Um... yeah is it not slightly strange that I don't have a little more to say about that?

On the last evening, wehad to call the police out to our (well, not ours) house because a bunch of local kids had broken into the back garden and stolen a sheet of the line (for to carry thyne swag most preciousome) and removed the door (and carefully placed leaning against the wall) off the shed, found there was nothing to take, and scarpered (not without my mum going out to have a look and then returning promptly back to the house at the first noise). Of course I hadn't been made aware of the situation, so you can imagine my reaction when these police officers stick their head round the door with radios going and everything! Anyway it all got sorted, apparently they were already dealing with the same thing going on down the road, so they got to us pretty quickly.
So once the nice mr. poiceman had written it all down and chatted a bit with us about quite why we were in someone else's house in the first place, and revealing to us that "Round 'ere these days, I tell you, I don't blame you for living all the way out in France." (someone hasn't recieved the Livingstone public morale speech yet...), we went straight down the pub. Even Joanna, who for two weeks had been on msn, came along.


Geneva 20-27 august:

So as I had just got back from England, it was of course time to leave again! (story of the summer really, unpack and repack on the same day, shows how I do in fact have enough clothes).
This time it was just me, off to see Nat. The first half of the week we just stayed and watched tv and listened to A LOT of music and played Boggle and Go Fish with 8 decks (3 hours).
Then when we finally got round to going out, we decided on swimming, but of course the pool was closed for some deranged reason. So instead we went for an ice cream in what can only be described as an ice cream restaurant/bar. It was absolute dessert heaven. Cost loads of course, because it was Switzerland where everything is nice (as in, there's no Lidl in Switzerland).
On the last day we went to see The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, which was most excellent. Not quite what I had expected, but these things never are. A pleasant surprise.


Al's (again) 28-31 august:

This time round there was some kind of purpose to my visit, namely: driving! Well, ok, just the theory for now, but still, feeling all responsible and apprehensive and stuff...


Back to school on friday afternoon. (2 sept). Which is... er... 2 weeks ago yesterday. Well, can you blame me? I mean I did only start this thing at Al's at the end of August, look at how bloody long it is!!!.