the rest of my time in france

Finally, you may be saying, if you care and if you are still out there there is a new post on this crap travellogue...well sorry, i've been in the mountains, ok, and not the kind where there is no access to civilisation let alone email and blogs etc, the kind where there is an internet cafe but it cost about 10 euro a minute to use it.

so i looked around marseille for a bike shop to buy a velo d'occasion (2nd hand) cos i was going to ride to spain or tuscany or something. but there was only one velo shop in town, seriously and i tried to find the markets my landlord at the hotel that smelled like poo told me about (in Bougainville, which is at the end of the line) but i didn't find it. the hippie at the bike community/collective who was trying to save the world from cars was no use cos he had a huge pile of old wheels but only a granny shopping bike and a bambino's trike (oops that's italian and we're not there yet) to sell me.

so i abandoned plan b and hung out in marseille with ben. we saw Boulevarde de la Morte, in Kurt Russells says, "Je m'appelle "Mike le Stuntman". Tu est Papillion, n'est pas? Je sais une poeme, que je voudrais dire pous toi! Pappillion, Paillion tu est tres jolie!! Danser pour moi!"

and we saw a gypsie band at a cool little bar and danced around with some drunk french people. ben had just spent a week and a jango rheinhardt (sp?) festival near paris and carts a gypsie guitar around the place so he was stoked, as was i, sipping pastis and shaking it.

our hotel smelled too much and marseille was too dirty (if you read the lonely planet guide to that city it actually rates the trash, which gets caught in the wind and twirls around in eddies as a tourist attraction - its supposed to be whimsical of something) so we jumped a train to avignon where there was a theatre festival in progress. its a cool old place with walls and palaces and an old bridge that everyone who learned french in primary school would have sung about. i sang about it while i was there but i only knew one line, which got a bit frustrating.

we camped and it was great cos all the performers - actors and circus peeps and musicians were all there too. the town was covered in billboards and there were people in costumes everywhere handing out flyers to get the punters into their shows. every second bar or shop had been turned into a playhouse. there were performances in the streets - juggles and people dressed in medieval stuff playing lutes and singing, acrobats and mimes and clowns.

i left ben there and jumped the train to st cyr sur mer, a small beach side place east of marseille to catch up with the doctors - gez and frawphy from pete and my namibian adventures. jo and hilary who i'd met in bris vegas and their whole crew (the charlottes, adilla (sp?), stu and neil) were staying in a villa for a week and i joined up with them and seriously did nothing for a week except drink, read books play cards and board games (articulate - with high stakes!) and swim in the pool. everyone brought a pile of paperbacks and peeps would just lie in the sun by the pool and devour them, reading two or three books a day. i've never seen anything like it! Jo would finish one and go, "Hmm, that was good, not as good as her first one, but good." and Hilary would say, "Yeah I thought it was good too. Try this one, its good too." and then Jo would go two hours later, "Yeah, that was good. What else is good."

We only left the house to go to reastaurants and cocktail lounges and maybe to the beach or the bottleshop. that was cool. kinda weird at first when you meet up with friends that you haven't seen for four years but had a great time and just pissed myself the whole time.

gez had been working for mediciens sans frontiers in somalia last year and this year is a researcher at oxford, working on a malaria vaccine. everyone else was a doctor of some distription except me and stu who is also a bum. he's just left the RAF and was telling us about the legendary schlack stack in the faulklands.

so then what happened? i got an a sleeper to verona with a kid from san diago who had just been to romania cos they're really into water polo there.

verona was pretty - i looked at some old buildings.

i went to the mountains.