The Space Train Multimedia Extravaganza!

THE SPACE TRAIN! Like a normal train but things go 'WOOSH' and 'WHIZ' when they move!

Take the seat: See the glowing light blue button. That was the light. Pointless but very gadgety!

Or the really crazy space-age lighting!

Only problem being the Space-Train had been given to the French to do the wiring. Now this isn't a rant, but I shall give you a car analogy to describe it.

If something electric goes wrong with your car and it's German, you have to go to a garage and get it fixed and spend many hundreds of euros for the privellage.

With a French car, when the wiring doesn't work (as happened recently with the aircon on my 107) you hit the dashboard until a light comes back on telling you that the problem is fixed.

I bashed the Space-Train after the plug in my seat didn't charge the iPod. No success, hence I'm in my house showing you these wooshy things!

fin

for mum and dad. x

OK, I'm not really an arty French film-maker, nor is this by any means the last blog post.

However, this is my last blog from Avignon, as in a matter of hours I shall be travelling the 1000km back to Brussels at a speed 50 years ago would have been said to be impossible on land: and I'm saying this now as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

Having been forced to speak French for the last fortnight has taught me three important lessons:
1. That I still can't use/understand the 'direct and indirect object' in any language; that now goes for English, German and French;
2. There are many people in the world who speak worse French than I do; but more importantly there are also many who speak better French than I do, and;
3. Why when a qwerty keyboard is perfectly fine, did the French decide the letters needed moving about, thus creating the azerty keyboard, a most incredibly annoying and the most useless thing in the world!

However, what the two weeks have taught me most is who I am and what different people of the world think of me. (OK, maybe the arty film director bit at the start was quite astute)

Two things stick out most; Steen, a lovely chap (world bank man; last blog) was astounded when I told him I was autistic. 'You? Asperges Syndrome? My god, you must have been working on your condition for years as no one here has guessed!' I just shrugged and said 'I got a B in GCSE Drama if that helps to explain it.' In hindsight that's a typical autistic response but it worked at the time!

Secondly and quite scary actually; someone asked me who was the youngest here:
'Dario is twenty-one and I'm younger than him: j'ai vignt ans'
pause. 'f**k' as someone realised what I'd said.
'I'm twenty,' I repeated
'F**k. F**K!' came the reply; 'I thought you were thirty! God, you must have had a hard life!'

And that was the real wakeup call for me. Albeit I haven't had a shave for two weeks, but me! Me, hard life?! I have one of the easiest lives of anyone I know. I am insanely privellaged with the best mum and dad in the world and secretly we all love each other to bits! Yes there's the ups and downs, but everything has those. Think of a rollercoaster with its ups and downs...thats what makes it exciting and at the end you get off smiling! So I wouldn't say that's a hard life. Not in the slightest. Not at all.

So there we go dad, if you're reading this. And mum too. And anyone else who is as well, all across the globe; 'Hello to you!'
When I first came here; mum and dad said I'd love it. I said I'd hate it.

After two weeks here I think we were all right. Now where's my razor.....

TOTALy weird!

First week is over; thank goodness! New groups of people arrive tonight with possibly more international stories and viewpoints.

There have been heated debates with many people over the past week on many different topics!

-Whether german football teams should be publically owned to stop the abramovichs of this world taking them over and whether the champions league should be just for champions;

-What is the easiest and safest way to extract gas, what is the fuel of the future and statistically driving to work at a refinery is more dangerous than working at one, but when it blows up there's pandamonium;

-What is the difference between 'transport' and 'communication'? With the advent of the Internet and the remote transport of knowledge, why doesn't everyone now work at home?

It helps when you're talking to a bloke from Germany, a man whose job it is to get oil out of a lake and a Dane who's worked for the world bank for 23years!
This, coupled with a Dutchman, two bitchy Italian women, a Japanese student and a woman who works for New Zealand make up some of the characters of this week.

I shall leave you with a story.

Dario, a third Italian who has been constantly slagging off everyone behind their backs in Italian all week with the aforementionned women, got angry at us on Friday night as we were speaking english a bit (pot calling kettle black was lost on him!).
We had to play the game where you have a famous person on your head and have to work out who it is. I was sitting next to Dario so chose his person.
I took the post-it note, and with no sense of guilt wrote: M-U-S-S-O-L-I-N-I. And, with a wry smile, lovingly stuck it to his glasses.
After the raptuous laughter had died down from everyone else (and the communal sense of 'ha, that's for slagging us off behind our backs all week!') he spent the next 20mins trying to work it out.

Eventually, a marginally humiliated, fully exhausted Italian boy, clicked and shouted at the top of his lungs:

'JE SUIS MUSSOLINI!!'

A moment that shall live me with me 'til the day I die!

Hope that wasn't too long and that it entertained you! Now I have to go and find the caretaker who thought it fine to break into my room eventhough there's clearly a STOP sign on the door. Things are never straightforward!

In France, no one can hear you scream! (unless it's in French!)

So I'm here, I've arrived. The weekend was sort of a non-event really; just mooched about Avignon. Hired one of those bikes like the 'Velib' ones in Paris but here they call them 'Velopop': imagine that! So it cost me €2 for an entire days cycling! And one euro of that was to register in the first place!!

So the French course....everyone is very nice, although I'm the youngest here by eons! I haven't spoken a word of English since saturday morning when I left Bruxelles and the novelty is starting to wear off somewhat....!

On a plus and confusing side, some of the teachers don't know what I'm doing here! The students too! One thought I must be French or spanish and another thought I was one of the teachers!

I got to leave a speaking class early today as the teacher saw no point in me being there as I was already 'fluent'. In answer to the question 'why are you here?' I always say 'mon pere' and it gets a knowing look from all concerned.

We shall see what tomorrow brings as it's more grammar and writing based; in a peverse way I'm sort of looking forward to it: je dois amiliore!

So to finish then before dinner; all is well here in France, it's 7pm and my iPod says it's still 31*C, and tomorrow we've got wine tasting! Can't be all bad!

But at the point French teachers, shop owners, taxi drivers and many other people in France are saying I can speak French very well or fluently, the people who doubt I can speak French need to start listenning!

Trainline

I had a very clever idea to have a running realtime blog on the journey, but because I'm a cheapskate and only have a free version of a blogging client for my iPod, once I've posted blogs, it won't let me update them! Not cool!

Having said that, I've just had a lovely breakfast of melon, croissant, orange juice and coffee. They didn't have jam so I used the 'speculoos pasta' spread to put in the croissant. They have metal cutlery! (pic will be uploaded when I get back). Although the spread was a bit sticky so I licked the knife; people glared at me!

That's all for now!

D

The third of many?

I think it will be many. I suppose this is where it really kicks off; I'm on a train as I write this, hurtling from Brussels to Avignon at a quite ridiculous speed. 1000km in 4hrs. That's quick!