• Déjà vu

    To be perfectly honest I had a very specific plan for Paris which didn’t involve anything out of the ordinary, was totally vanilla and included only one night of moderate drinking with friends in a very safe setting and absolutely no surprises whatsoever. And I almost succeeded. Almost.  If you followed my adventures the last…

  • Just another night in Nantes

    I was arriving in Nantes quite late by Blablacar and was supposed to meet Carolina at the train station. For whatever reason, I was dumb enough to ask to be dropped off on the opposite side of the station, where I’d end up running nearly a mile in the wrong direction before turning back around,…

  • A long siesta

    I was stuck in the airport at Dublin for most of the morning, since my flight left six hours after Grandma’s, but eventually I made it to Strasbourg (after a quick layover in the WORST airport in history: London Stansted).  My host in Strasbourg is a political activist and leader of the Strasbourg-based “LA STACION,”…

  • Dreams come true

    Okay. So anyone that knows me in real life knows that I’m obsessed with going to Spain. I’ve wanted to go to Spain for like, nine years. And I’m finally here.  Viktor sent me off by driving me to town on Thursday morning. I planned on hitching to Foix where I would be able to…

  • The life of a mountain man

    It was only a few minutes before my host, Viktor, was there to pick me up. Here’s the scoop on Viktor:  He grew up in England, but had a distaste for city life and ended up WWOOFing (World wide opportunities on organic farms) with his boyfriend for six years, living out of a van and…

  • Don’t be a republican in France

    Instead of hitching from Paris to Toulouse, I just chose to book a ride online through BlaBlaCar/covoiturage. It only set me back €40, and a train ride would have been at least three times as much, and as far as hitchhiking was concerned, I wanted zero more surprises, at least for a six and a…

  • How to make friends

    The last few days have been full of sleep, fun, and walking. So. Much. Walking.  On Wednesday morning my backpack finally came, but Camille was planning for us to go out Thursday night with her friend for a ‘cheap’ €3,50 bière with some friends. So I resolved to see as much a possible between Wednesday…

  • How to travel on the cheap

    It’s no question whether I’m poor/cheap/stupid. When all three of those traits take over, though, it leads to adventure (and saving money, and illegal things). This morning didn’t start off too great. I had to make my first student loan payment, which I couldn’t do through credit card, so I had to dig through some…

  • Cultures collide

    On Saturday morning, Camillle and some of her coworkers/friends/brother planned on doing brunch together (a very un-French thing to do, apparently) and she was nice enough to invite me along. And oh, what a brunch it was. Let me tell you, the French know how to eat (…have I already written that somewhere else?).  First…

  • Yay clothes, boo thieves, Twix is the only thing that matters.

    I could hardly keep from laughing. I turned around to the people behind me and said somewhere between a bark and a yell, “Ils ont trouvé mon passeport!” A couple people cheered at me but most of them ignored it. I gave the man all my passport application papers to shred and he wrote out…