A grand beginning

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Trip Start Jun 27, 2008 Trip End Aug 31, 2008 Next
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  Paris, Île-de-France, France
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

(apologies for any typos in the following entry.. ive not quite got the hang of the disconcerting nature of the french keyboard with letters in all the wrong places...)

A spontaneous day-trip to Wimbledon started off my journey as fiona (who I was staying with in Swindon) and i set off bright and early the morning after id arrived to meet ric (a friend from edinburgh), make our way across London and join the end of the highly regulated queue in Wimbledon Park. It was a very enjoyable and wonderfully British queueing experience (due, im sure to the helpful 'guide to queueing' booklets dispersed along the line) which spanned about 5 hours before we made it into those famous grounds at about 2.30pm. This gave us enough time to catch a few decent matches, laugh at the hapless ballgirls and disinterested score-keeper boys, cheer for Andy's victory (agaist the German guy) on the 'mount' and indulge in the necessary doses of strawberries and Pimms. A spiffing wat to start my time away, I must say.

The following five days were taken up by camping outside Oxford for the People and Planet Summer gathering. An inspiring time meeting other P&P-ers, packed full of workshops from fundraising to samba drumming. We were sustained with delicious vegan food, enjoyed a ceilidh bemusing all the english unis (ie 80% of those there...) and had plenty of games and bonfires. Twas a fantastic few days (despite Fiona and I sharing the world's worst cold) - leaving me 'ethically revived', healthily motivated for next term.

I spent another couple of days in Swindon with fiona (in which we ate nothing but onion and garlic soup followed by ginger cake in an effort to blow the bugs away..) before heading to my cousins' in Teddington for a night (involving much tree-climbing and hide-and-seek playing in order to prove my worth against doug who'd visited the week before and clearly set a high precident!). I took the bus over to Paris the next day - a good 12 hours travelling by the time id made it to Pontoise on the outskirts of Paris where my friend Heidi lives.

Ive been here for the last few days in her rustic-looking house in the countryside complete with horses and new foals. I made friends with a wee boy at the stables while Heidi sorted the horses out. We played 'who can throw the mud the furthest' causing my word of the day to be 'la boue' (mud), its much easier conversing with kids in another language... theyre so much more accepting of mistakes! A bit of a storm brewed up during what had turned into a mud-fight so we cycled back drenched and dirty. Heidi has been working so I had a day to entertain myself in Paris which I did by going to the Musee D'Orsay and Jardin des Tuiliers then i went to see the dubbed version of 'Narnia2, Le prince caspian' which was a good bit of practice. Frustratingly though, I guess since its my first time abroad since thailand, the thai words for things are often cropping up in my head quicker than the french ones...

Heidi's dad is currently cooking some squid from the market for dinner which is smelling good so id better go, im catching the bus down to tarragona in spain tomorrow eve so hopefully that'll all go smoothly.

Hope youre all happy, whats the news?

xxx

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