Bonjour

You know what, I'm convinced that France isn't actually just an hour away. I'm pretty sure that when you step aboard the plane, you actually go through some kind of space / time continuum and actually fly to the other side of the world. Despite learning the language from the age of about 6 until I was 15 - combined with after school tuition and frequent holidays to the country itself, communication in this foreign tongue still completely evades me. Helpfully, the only sentence that remains prominent in my mind is J'ai douze ans (I am twelve).

Once you're actually in France, there's a few things that become immediately apparent. The men consider anything in a skirt fair game. The women consider anything in a skirt competition. Young, greasy haired men in tight trousers yelling incoherent jeers in your direction is enough to make you cringe and tug your skirt down a few centimeters. But when you've got a 70 year old man mumbling lewd French thoughts with an added 'Haw he haw' as you walk down the street, letting their eyes wonder up and down your body, then nudging their mate to do the same - it's enough to make you bloody agoraphobic. Perhaps this is why the streets were mostly empty throughout the day. On Tuesday we dragged ourselves away from the pool and headed into the nearest town at about 11:30am, only to find it completely deserted; the shops closed apart from a few cafes.

When we did find one open, there's nothing like linguistic incompetence to brighten your shopping experience. It's a continual embarrassment to me that I am so inept at basic French conversation when every other person on the continent seems an expert at English. When it came to explaining what it was I needed, I could do nothing but look confused and go "Errr, c'est...err...la..." before using my best drama skills to act it out. And then there's paying. Oh, god - paying. I'd often sort of just thrust a 20 Euro note in the shop keeper's direction and hope for the best, rather than try and figure out exactly what the amount they require is. "Could you say it slowly?" or "Can you write it down?" only ever resulted in them saying the amount again, but faster.

Anyway, so all that's just my way of saying that instead of practicing my French, mingling with the locals and spending lots of money in their shops, we mostly stayed at the house, ate copious amounts of cheese, tasted the local produce from the surrounding vineyards and err, flopped by the pool. All day. Sometimes all you need in life is a good book (or a stack of four, in my case), some sun cream and a box set of The Wire.

Et voila, mon vacation fin.