Bordeaux

When I returned to France after 7 weeks in Australia I was expecting to return to work pretty much straight away but as it turns out I couldn't start for another few weeks. I had to have a "welcome to France" interview and a medical exam first, which was scheduled for mid July. So in the mean time I went down to Bordeaux to stay with a friend of mine (Sandrine) whose parents live down there.

Apart from being one of the main wine growing regions in France it is also a really nice city. Apparently until a few years ago it was a dump but it has been done up (all the beautiful old buildings have been cleaned) and it is a really nice small city, with lots of little pedestrian streets lined with shops and cafes and quite a few gorgeous old buildings in a similar style to Paris.

The first few days I spent just walking around Bordeaux and hanging out with Sandrine. In the evenings I ate at home with her family and then went out with Sandrine and her friends in the evenings. Her family was really friendly and very nice tome - cooking lots of vege food (which I am sure they are not used to doing) as well as delicious pies and desserts! Later in the week Sandrine and I went to St Emilion which is a gorgeous medieval village known for it's wine. We tried some wines and walked around the town that was situated on a hill over looking the vineyards.

Another day we did a wine tour of Medoc, which involved visiting some chateaux as well as getting a bit of history of wine making and a tour of the cellars before tasting the wines. I wasn't that keen to do a tour but the wineries don't do the cellar door thing over here, so you have to be on a tour to do wine tasting, and in the end it was actually quite a good tour.

On the last day we went to the beach. It was my first French beach experience and I really enjoyed it. First we went to Dune de Pilar - Europe's largest sand dune, which was huge!! The beach on the other side was fairly quiet (for a European beach) and we spent a few hours swimming and hanging out at the beach. Afterwards we stopped off at Arcachon, which is a famous beach holiday town. It was a cute town but the beach was packed and very European, with boats and people, balls and toys everywhere, children’s rides along the beach, and stands selling ice cream and junky souvenirs. It was quite kitsch but I am glad I went.

The last night was Sandrine's birthday so we all went out to dinner to a lovely French restaurant and had a 6-course meal. They even made special vege food for me - I had fettuccini with truffles as a main. It was the first time I had tried truffles and I loved them!

Here are the photos. They are a bit mixed up between all the places I visited:

Bordeaux

So since then I have had my welcome to France thing and have started back at work. Not a lot has been happening (Paris in august is completely dead). I have just been hanging out with my friends and getting back into Paris life - ie hanging out in Cafes drinking wine. But tomorrow Daniel and Sue arrive (friends from Sydney) and on the weekend we are going to Croatia for a week. So stay tuned for more news and photos from that trip!

China

I am now going to go backwards in time and fill in some of the gaps of what I have been doing in the last few months. So i'll start with china.

As I wrote ealier there was a bit of drama getting my visa for china sorted out, but I did finally get my passport back and and made it to Hong Kong. Unfortunatley I didn't have any onward ticket booked due to the last minute date changes. I tried to buy a ticket at the airport in hongkong but this turned out to be just extremely expensive, so I ended up catching the train into Hong Kong and then getting an international train to Guangzhou - a large city a few hours from Hong Kong but inside mainland china. From there I bought a ticket to Biejing which turned out to be very cheap - so it was worth the effort.

I finally made it to Beijing where I stayed for a couple of days with Sitt. I had already been to beijing before and done all the touristy type stuff so I just spent my time there hanging out with Sitt, meeting his friends, going out to dinner and bars and that sort of thing. I did spend one day walking around a traditional chinese area, with a nice lake and some of the last traditional housing left in the centre of Beijing, which was pretty cool.

After a couple of days in Beijing Sitt and I headed down to Chengdu , in Sichuan province, South western china, which is famous for it's spicy food, it's tea houses and the world's largest panda reserve. Although it is a huge city (9 million people) it is actually quite chilled out. The people are calm and friendly, and there are some nice parks and cute little tea houses everywhere.

We meet up with a friend of Sitt's (another Rebecca) and her sister down there and the four of us stayed at a lovely, but noisy, hostel together (which had two very cute piglettes as pets). We hired bikes from the hostel and spent most of our time there biking around the city, checking out temples, parks, drinking tea and just hanging out. It was great to be there with Sitt and Rebecca, as they both speak mandarin. It made life a lot easier and we got to speak to a few locals, and try out some local food and do some stuff that would have been impossible if none of us could speak the language. One day Sitt and I went out to visit a "museum" of Maoist paraphenalia run by an old local man. He was hilarious and the musuem itelf was just the back section of the guy's house, which was stacked full of pictures, statues, old ads and propaganda posters and everything else with Mao on it.

One evening we all went to see a Sichuan opera which was excellent - having seen a Beijing Opera last time I was in China I knew what to expect - it is not much of a opera - more like a show of costumes and acrobatics with not much story. But it was extremely well done and the costumes were amazing.

One the last morning before I flew back to sydney we went to the panda reserve. It was huge and there were heaps of pandas around - several babies and a large number of adults. They were so cute. And they ate so much. They eat up to 40 kg of bamboo a day and just while we were watching a group of 4 pandas demolished a large area of bamboo!

China