Border Crossings

Alright... ummm so the last few weeks have been a bit crazy.  So I'll start at the beginning.  Leaving the chateau. After almost three months living and working at the castle I decided it was time to move on, you know, got that itch to move (not that kind of itch you sick bastards).  I found a HelpX host down in the southwest of France near the French and Spanish border.

After my first hitchhiking experience I figured I would do it again, just on a much larger scale.  If I was driving myself, with no stops, my route would take 8 hours driving.  So, I decided to play it safe and give myself a few days to get down there.  Holy crap did I underestimate the speed of hitchhiking.  I made it in 12 hours.  Well... actually I could have made it, I stopped for the night in some hills to camp, but I was only about 20 minutes from my destination, Perpignan.  Only thing was, I was two days early.  I have no phone or anything call, I just have to wait till Friday.  So Thursday I walked around in Perpignan, and took a bus to where I was going to be picked up, Arles sur Tech.  Found a campsite, played some french bingo, didn't win, but am now really strong on my french numbers (I didn't always pay too much attention to this in school) and got picked up by my hosts the next morning.

It was a beautiful house in the middle of nowhere in the mountains.

This is their house, the one on top

This is the waterfall on their property.  Great sound to fall asleep too every night.

Unfortunately I seem to not have any pictures of their house.  Shame on me. But it's okay, I wasn't there too long.  My first weekend I decided to head to Barcelona.  I had never been there and always heard it was amazing, but I never really had had the urge to go but since I was two hours away, I said, why not and headed down on a bus.  Sounds easy enough yeah? Nope.

As we are crossing the border, the french police come on board and check everyone's passports and what not.  Well... my passport has a slight problem, I have no entry stamp for the European Union.  It's not my fault, in Paris, when I arrived, customs just glanced at my passport, handed it back and I was in France.  Took all of two seconds.  Well this no stamp thing really mad the police not happy.  They pulled the whole bus over into the a police station, and hauled me off.  The whole trip, for everyone on the bus, was delayed for me.  In the police station they keep telling me I don't have a stamp, I keep saying, yes I know, you didn't give me one.  Then one lady came over and started yelling at me "You have no stamp, You are guilty!"(in english) over and over, she scared me.  They threatened to deport me, and all I did was drop my french level down to very basic and kept saying was I am a tourist, I know nothing, I am sorry, I am leaving Europe soon blah blah blah, basic dumb American tourist (of course if they would have looked closer at my passport and seen all my previous visas, this may not have worked so well, but they didn't and it did). In the end, the supervisor came over and said to all of them sometimes when people come in through Paris, customs doesn't stamp.  It's a fairly common thing, look it up.  Anyway, after a few more minutes playing dumb tourist, they let me go saying it was a 'gift' and 'next time' they would get me.  After about a 15 minute delay, I was back on the bus, gave everyone the thumbs up and we were off to Barcelona with more than a little grumbling about the French Police.

Got to Barcelona, checked into the hostel, walked around.... and the rest is to be continued, for I have a meeting now.

There's sand everywhere!

Ah yes, it's been about six weeks, so I guess it's about time to make another blog post.  Things at the chateau have been going well.  Work has been getting done on the roof, therefore I've been playing around three stories up with no floor, walking on small three inch beams.  It's been fun.  Alas I am parting ways with this place on Wednesday  more about that later though.

This past weekend was a great time.  I finished with work early on Friday due to the fact I had accumulated some extra time the week before, packed up my sleeping bag, tent and backpack and walked out the front door with Jon.  We had one goal in mind; get to the ocean via hitchhiking.  We had never done this before (minus a brief asking for a ride in Colorado one time, but I never stuck my thumb out for that one).

We walked about 4k to the main road and stuck our thumbs out for the first time.  About 20 minutes later a girl stops and picks us up, takes us to the supermarket in the nearby town of Bressuire.  We load up on some food (Bread, Cheese, Pain au Chocalot, Apples, OJ and Chips).  After packing it all up we head out to one of the main roundabouts.  Right when we arrived at the roundabout, without even trying someone pulled over and asked where we were going, it just so happened they were going our direction.  The mom and son took us about 6 kilometers into the next small town and dropped us off.

This is where our luck ran dry for a bit.  We ended up walking for about an hour and a half down a long stretch of road.  I was quite fond of the blackberries that grow on the side of the streets here.  So I was off collecting some blackberries in my hand to eat while Jon had his thumb out.  A french couple stops and asks us where we are going, we said the sea.  As luck would have it, they were going to the sea too, and even cooler, the exact destination we had picked out on a map earlier that day.  What chance!  We ended up at the coastal city, St. Gilles-something-something and were dropped off at the beach.

We proceeded to walk down the beach, away from civilization, turned left into the dunes and headed towards the edge of the forest and set up camp.  Collected some wood and had a nice little campfire.  It was a fantastic night.  Listening to the fire crackling, the waves coming in, hanging out, chatting, couldn't ask for anything better.

The next day though was horrid weather wise.  It rained all day.  We donned our waterproof gear and walked around the city.  We went to the north of the city where there were rocks and searched for a cave to sleep in for the night.  The only caves we could find though were too close to the water, and you could see that the tide rolled into them.  That would probably have not been beneficial, you know, health wise.  With out attempts to find a cave to camp in faltering, we ended up staying in a hotel, because screw putting up a tent in the rain.

The next day we packed up and hitched home.  The rides we got were from:

1. Dude who didn't say one word
2. Dude who was heading south to jump out of a plane 10 times in 5 days
3. Mother and her two kids
4. Guy who shared a bunch of french music with us
5. Female cabinet maker who lived out of her van and was missing a finger
6. Portuguese guy
7. French road worker who drives some incredible number of miles each year
8. Some guy who's french was impossible to understand

Eight rides, made it back to the chateau.  It was a grand adventure.  It was wierd, being rejected over and over again, hundreds of  times even, but in the end, you always got somewhere.  Sometimes after all this rejection you catch a break and go a loooong way.

All  of this was in preparation for my next travels.  Which is happening on Wednesday when I leave the chateau.  I am hitching south to a city an hour outside of Perpignan (right next to the French and Spanish border on the Mediterranean Sea), to my next HelpX host. If one was driving straight through it would take eight hours to get there so I'm leaving early Wednesday morning and hoping to get there sometime on Friday.

Anywhoo, I think I say this every post, but I will try and update more.  Look for an update sometime this weekend documenting my trek south.

Fights in the streets...

I figured I might post again, since it has been quite a while.  Time is flying by here at the Chateau Noirlieu, it is hard to believe I have been here a month already.  It is quite stunning how fast the weeks are going by.  It feels like I turn around and another week has passed.  Just working, playing pool, poker, watching movies and just generally hanging out.  Unfortunately though, the weather the past few weeks has been unseasonably unpleasant, which has made laying out or using the pool rather unfeasible.  We are hoping that it will get back to the usual sunny and warm weather experienced in this area of France during the summer. Hopefully soon.  We have had a camping trip planned but postponed for three weekends now due to inclimate weather. 

Last night we did something a bit different, we went to a music festival of sorts in the near town of Bressuire.  It was pretty cool, stages were set up all over the city and they had all sorts of bands and shows going on.  There was rock, jazz, polka, traditional, tribal, spanish, rap, dub-step, punk rock etc., basically everything.  The highlight of the night though took place at the dub-step stage.

Six of us from the Chateau were hanging out there.  We had the owners of the Chateau, Chris and Rachel (UK), Me, Jon (UK), Eric (USA) and his fiancee, Jess(UK).  Jon and I were off to one side, Eric and Jess were close by and Chris and Rachel were dancing.  This French couple took exception to their dancing and started getting in Rachel's face.  The confrontation got a little heated but the French couple walked away from Rachel and Chris.  Well, Chris found out what was going on (he doesn't speak french, Rachel does) and found out the names they were called, so he flipped the bird.  The French guy in the couple came up and grabbed Chris. 

Unfortunately for this French guy, he didn't know there were four of us with Chris, so Eric goes charging in takes the Frenchie down and Jon and I follow shortly behind.  BRAWL!!!!  His friends and girlfriend get into it, Jess gets into it, three of us, Eric, Jon and I, on this one French guy and friends, and the girls were also in there, yelling and screaming.   The Frenchie's friends take on Chris.  The details are a bit fuzzy and a lot of random people seemed to get involved (I swear I saw people fighting each other who weren't affiliated with any of us) but by the time it ended I had the original French guy immobilized in a full nelson hold and his girlfriend was pulling Eric's hair. Over a dozen people were involved.  It was pretty crazy.

Funny thing about this whole thing? It took place in the Police station parking lot.  Being France though, the Police station was closed.

No serious injuries, Eric's hand got a little messed up and Chris ended up with a bloody lip, but nothing to write home about.

Other than that, most days are pretty similar here.  There isn't too much to do, just hang out.  The village has which we are in has less than 150 people.  There is a church of course.  The post office, bakery and bar are the same place of business and it is open about 4 days a week.  No stores, shops or restaurants here at all.  Oh, I forgot, there is a telephone booth.


I have an idea for the next stage of my trip.  It involves walking from here (or a place 18km from here, where one of the trails is) all the way to the west side of Spain.  The Camino Compostela.  It's a loooooong walk, but it is cheap, and I feel like I want to do it.  It will take several weeks to do and I have nothing else going on so why the hell not?

Well that's all I gots for now, I'll try to be more regular with my updates :)

Snails. Everywhere!

So I have arrived at the chateau, settled in and put in a few days worth of work.  Let's be clear on this, this is not a vacation, I am working.  It's a nice little deal, the volunteers, of which there are six of us at the moment all work about 5 hours a day, Monday through Friday.  In exchange we get a place to stay and three meals a day. On the weekends there are French and business lessons taught here. 

On the grounds there is the chateau, a moat, a well, a pool, a garden, two pigs, three cats (and a bunch of less than week old kittens, fun :), greenhouse, barn, chicken coop, 3 chickens (soon to be many more, Chris and Rachel are picking them up as this is being written)



The typical weekday goes like this.


8:00am-9:00am
Wake up and grab a quick breakfast, and get ready for the day.

9:00am-Noon
Work.  The work consists of whatever needs to be done.  So far I have weedwacked a whole overgrown area, filled in an useless ditch, and cleared out a room filled with about four tons worth of stones, then got rid of a 4 inch layer of dirt on the floor.  Lots of heavy lifting, which is quite different than being a server or bartender where the heaviest lifting done might be a rack of glasses.  Needless to say after the past few days, I am sore as hell, but that only means I am getting stronger.

Noon-1pm
Lunch! All work stops and we eat a prepared meal.  I'm learning not to be a picky eater here, usually I don't eat ham or pork, but after all that work I don't care.  I still won't touch mayonnaise though, seriously that stuff is revolting.  How does everyone love it? I guess it's one of those mysteries of life that will never be solved, like the JFK assassination or Bigfoot.



1pm - 3pm
Continue work.  Work at this time is a little tougher, after the hour long siesta, but it always seems to go by quickly.  Two hours is nothing.

3pm-Rest of the day.
Relax.  Take a shower. Read. Nap. Write. Internet.  Explore.  Whatever tickles your fancy, this is the time we relax and hangout and enjoy the French countryside.  The rest of the day after work is for nothing.

We only work five hours a day, it goes by rather quickly (unless you are moving 12 different 500 pound stones.  That just draaaaags on).


I am scheduled to be out here a month, I don't know exactly how long, could be longer.  I'll know in a few weeks.  I mean I am working hard, but it is on a freaking castle in the middle of the middle of nowhere France.  Much better than a 9-5 in my opinion.

This is just a quick overview of the basics here.  It's lots of fun so far, even though the work is tough.  Everyone is really nice and laid back, after all, we are living and working in rural France, the pace of life here is a tad bit slower than in the rest of the world. :)

"I got blisters on me fingers"

Today is Sunday, the day of rest.  The past two days have destroyed my yet to be travel hardened feet.  Poor guys.  Blisters.  Painful.  So today I will be putting my feet up and writing.

My usual goal of getting lost in the city was not accomplished yesterday.  I woke up in a slightly self-destructive mood and decided to head to the most touristy area in the city. Some might say the world.  The Eiffel Tower.

I don't understand the point of taking photos of these things sometimes.  A photo of you in front of the tower (or any really famous touristy site), okay, understandable, I was there and I want to prove it so I can show my friends and family and they will all be jealous.  I get that, I guess. It is what you are 'supposed' to do when you visit a place like Paris, the guide book said so.  But trying to take scenic photos of something like the Eiffel tower is incomprehensible to me.  What photo are you going to get that hasn't been taken 1,000,000 times before ( in the past year alone) and many probably with better equipment, angles, photographic technique and  is already available in thousands of books, magazines and on the internet around the world?  Maybe you are a budding photographer and are practicing technique?  I have never been a big fan of of taking photos though.  Not really my thing.  If someone could explain this to me I would be forever grateful.

Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should travel and see the sites such as the Eiffel Tower at least once in their life, and when visiting places we are all tourists, but for me, going where everyone else goes just doesn't get my juices flowing.

I guess for me traveling isn't about going around and seeing the sites and taking redundant photos.  So sometimes for fun, I turn my camera away from the site itself and onto the people visiting the site themselves.  But, again, that's just me.

Anyway it wasn't long till my tourist allergy kicked in and I had to get out of there before and I headed on the metro to the other side of the city.  To a cemetery, so I could pay my respects to an American poet. 

The Lizard King

Ah, Jim, good to see you again.  I paid my respects, made the required sacrifices (goat, frog and a human liver) and moved on.  While this site does bring a lot of visitors to it, there were only 20 people visiting the grave site when I was there. Much more sanity than the 20 billion (give or take a few) at the Eiffel Tower, so my allergy wasn't too bad.

That night Marco ended up taking me and four french Canadians out to a bar.  The bar was okay, it was in a... let's say open minded district of Paris.  We didn't stay there too long and at about 230 we hopped in the car and Marco gave us a night tour of Paris.  The highlight of which must have been the catfight we saw happening on the Pont de Neuf.  Hair pulling and everything good about girl fights.  Of course all the guys were standing around looking confused because unlike fights between guys, you do NOT get in between two girls fighting.  You are likely to get killed doing that.  Now unfortunately we didn't see the outcome, we drove away when they were wrestling around on the ground in the middle of the street. 

This was the third fight I've seen since I arrived three days ago.  I saw one where one guy jumped another from behind and they fell down a large flight of stairs in front of the Sacre-cour.  The guy who did the jumping then started throwing the skull of the other guy on the cement over and over until he was pulled off.  They went their separate ways, and the guy who had his head thrown against the concrete multiple times climbed the stairs and started smoking a cigarette while looking quite dejected.  I imagine he needed some Tylenol later. 

Later that night, just a hundred yards away from the first fight, I saw a girl get into it with a one-legged guitar player.  They were yelling and there was some pushing going on.  I don't know how the one-legged man stayed on his foot, but he did.  There was a group of friends and acquantinces who were being mostly vigilent about keeping them apart, but they got at each other briefly once or twice.   Very interesting to watch that one even if it didn't get too far.

We then drove down the Champs Elysee's and ended up in Charles De Gaulle Etoile.  CDG Etoile for those who don't know, is the large round-about around the Arc De Triumph.  It has 8 roads leading into it and used to be 8 lanes.  I say used to be 8 lanes because a few years ago they got rid of all the lanes, so now it is, as far as I can tell, a free for all.  There is a reason that auto insurance in Europe does not cover anything that happens in this round-about.  It is absolutely bonkers.  Sitting on a bench and watching the madness unfold here during rush hour is a great thing to do if you are bored.

So the next time you hear from me I shall be in the countryside.  I will start writing soon on how to travel in Europe cheaply, from finding cheap (or even free) accommodations and how to get from place to place cheaply, stuff like that.  For now though, I am just going to hang out and prepare for my trip to the west side of the country tomorrow.

A poorly written first post

So due to requests I will try to blog my travels.  I've never really done this blogging thing (minus a 3 day affair in the livejournal days, until I realized no one cared about what I ate that day.  You can only describe pizza in so many ways) so bear with me.  I really don't know exactly how I will use this blog, but I'm thinking for telling the stories of these travels and maybe sharing some travel tips. If you notice any grammar errors, I don't care (read: go f*** yourself, I mean that in the most polite way possible too ).  Spelling errors on the other hand, well that means I wasn't paying attention to that little red squiggly line, therefore, if you notice any, you can bite my head off.  Go for it, seriously.

This post is to quickly recap the past couple days.

The European portion of this adventure began on Wednesday when I left the home town of Detroit to head to Paris, via Chicago.  While in Chicago I ate chips and salsa at a Chili's in the airp.... wait... I said I wasn't going to talk about what I had been eating... damn, two sentences in and I am already screwing this up.

Anyway, the flight to Paris was rather lacking in amenities.  I guess I had been spoiled by my previous flights to the old world where we each had personal TV's in front of us.  Not so on this flight, it was 'old school' style, with TV's every few rows.  What is this, the stone age?  Good god, I'm an American, I DEMAND to be entertained at all times!

Luckily, with the flight from Chicago being about eight hours I didn't get the fat man taking up his seat and half of mine, nor the screaming child (as experienced on my recent flight to Detroit from Denver, absolutely amazing), instead I had a (rather attractive) study abroad student from Wisconsin.  She was very nice and smart (triple majoring, holy crap),  but unfortunately she had a boyfriend which put slight damper on any Mile High club hopes.  Who the hell goes to study Europe while in a relationship? What a travesty. 

We flew overnight, landed in the morning, cloudy the whole way so no spectacular views of Paris, just clouds.  Oh well from the airport I exchange the little money I have, hit up the ATM and decide that it would probably be a good time to notify my bank that I am out of the country.   I'm sure they will get the point, I tried calling them but couldn't get past their automated system, so I sent I 'nice' email.

After landing I hopped on the train to a station a few stops away to be picked up by my couchsurfing host (I'll explain couch surfing in a later post, for those who want to know now:  www.couchsurfing.org).  It is interesting waiting for someone when you don't have a cell phone, you just say be at this place at this time, and you have to wait there without knowing for sure if they are coming.  It takes a certain trust I guess.  He finally showed up and brought me to his place, where I am writing this now, and will be here till Monday morning.

Marco (my host) and I hung out at his place for where we chatted and I took a nap.  He found me a play to attend for very cheap (a french groupon type thing I guess).  He had to go to dinner with his mother, so he drove me to Paris (I'm staying in a suburb) on the way we got stuck in traffic, unfortunately 300m in front of us there was a bad accident that made him late for his dinner :(.

The play was entirely in French so I only understood about half of it (optimistically).  It was in a small (40 people) theater and unfortunately I was still tired from the flight and ended up catching myself dozing off a few times, I feel bad because I think the actors could see me falling asleep.  Ooops.  It was some sort of comedy, taking place in an office of a fashion business.  I think.  I could be way off though, like I said, my french is a tad rusty.

Today I went to Paris and just walked around, started around Notre Dame and ended up next to the Moulin Rouge, walking wherever, getting lost and trying my hardest to avoid tourists, because tourists kinda piss me off even though technically I am one.  Loud and obnoxious they are, never looking where they are going.  Also, my god, it is way too easy to spot Americans.  Seriously, they are usually *ahem* bigger, and wearing bright yellow Pittsburgh Steelers Superbowl championship T-shirts and tennis shoes.  Grrrr, I see why the French might have a problem with us sometimes.


When I got back to the apartment where I am staying Marco was making dinner for us, and the appetizer happened to be escargot.  I've spent 5 months of my life in France and I have never had snails here (or anywhere for that matter).  This was an opportunity I could not pass up because I have severe doubts about my ability  willingness to order them in a restaurant.  They were surprisingly lacking in the disgusting department as would be expected.  In fact, dare I say, they were damn good.  Damn, again with the food, but I think this could be an exception, don't hate.

Now I have two days left in Paris before I head out to the country side to start working on that castle.  I really have no idea what to do, as I have seen everything I've wanted to see on previous trips, and doing stuff on a budget in Paris is really not an option (everything is damn expensive here) so maybe I'll just go get lost in different areas of the city.  Why not? I really have nothing else to do except write mundane blog posts about my mundane days.

Anywhoo, hopefully I will keep up this blog, even if no one reads it, at least it is documentation of my travels, because I am damn horrible at taking pictures.  I didn't even take one today.  Maybe I'll take some if I decide to go down in the catacombs.  Now it's time for some after dinner bread and cheese.  Nom nom nom nom.