I'm in France

As I typing this, I am sipping my very well deserved Fraise et Banana smoothie in Aix En Provence, France, while waiting for my dear Laure to come pick me up. We’ll be heading together for Toulon tomorrow for the first Interrail session of the PEJ (Parlement Européen des Jeunes) where I’ll be chairing once again.

To give my story a bit of a background, I’ll have to tell you how it all started. Last Friday I saw that my friend, Ruru (whom I’ve known for longer than I can remember and met through the EYP), was selected as the president of the above mentioned session. Congratulations were in order and a couple of minutes later I got a message from Laure asking why I’m not applying. “I don’t speak French!!” was my prompt answer which came in response to an earlier EYP France session where my utter inability to speak French proved to be quite an obstacle. “Dude, there’s no French involved!” she almost yelled back and my application was in just an hour later.

The next day, I got my confirmation e-mail and the quest to find suitably affordable tickets began. I’ll take this chance to publicly apologise to the boyfriend and to my friend, Ana, whom I managed to annoy over the legal limit because I couldn’t find tickets that were “cheap enough”. I ended up buying an Interrail pass and bus tickets Lincoln-London, though it ended up being much more expensive than by plane. Or than any other combination. Life.

So, with little hours slept the night before due to last minute packing and planning, I embarked on a 5 hour coach at 7:20 coach on Friday morning and went to meet Ana in front of the Buckingham Palace. Delightful as it might seem, my trolley wasn’t the best accessory to accompany me on this adventure.

But we made it in the end, had cereal for lunch and went back in town, to do some touristic activities: we strolled through Hyde Park, saw Kate and William’s “little” house and dived into the fashion section at the Victoria and Albert Museum. For dinner (or “tea” to sound more Brit) we stayed in and Ana’s boyfriend, a lovely German business mastermind, cooked spaghetti with mozzarella, oysters and home-made tomato sauce. Delish!

But enough for that nice stuff, let me tell you the “this could only happen to me” stuff.

As I said earlier, in an attempt to minimise my costs, I booked a coach ticket from London to Paris, as the Interrail doesn’t cover the Eurostar, that left Victoria Coach Station at 22:00 and made a 9 hour trip to Paris.

The bus? The seats were probably rehabilitated medieval torture chairs. The water bottle in my bag decided to open its cap (I’m guessing it grew hands overnight) and flood all of the things in my bag: laptop, camera, cables, planners, books, cookies.

Such a delight, right?

Still, I’m finally enjoying my French routine: sitting at a fancy table in a fashionable (I did sit outside for a while, but it’s still chilly) bistro called Food Simply and enjoying my Parisian inspired meal. This time, it’s also organic(ish)!