What a weekend!

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Hey Everyone!
How are you all? Sorry for being so slack recently, even when you don't have a ton to do it takes for ever to accomplish anything. Seriously, systems are not a strong point over here. It is quite frustrating. Yesterday I had replied to some emails and had in fact written the journal entry I'm about to rewrite :p when I was told my time was up on the computer and i had to give it to someone else. Which is normally fine cos you do normally only get an hour here, since there are so few computers and everyone wants to use them. But I aciddentally closed my journal window before it had properly sent and so lost the whole thing. grrr. so anyway, here we go again....

well, life in lyon is still pretty great. I know I say it every time but it really is such a beautiful city. You notice new stuff every time, and I'm constantly in amazement at all the old buildings. The only new one, the ugly crayon, we discovered actually has a bar at the top with pretty amazing panoramic views of the city.

So to the weekend finally: On friday Cat, Torse, Chris (cat's brother) and I all caught the TGV to Nimes, where we ate lunch at a pizza place in town before catching a bus out to the Pont du Gard - a very famous Roman aquaduct bridge across this beautiful gorge surrounded by trees and scrub. Having been somewhere I have wanted to visit for so long I was worried it might be a disappointment but it turned out to be even cooler than i imagined! It is absoultely enormous, mind-blowingly so, and quite awe inspiring. It was quite magical. We wandered around in the sunshine taking in the scenery, and walked up to the top of this hill away from the other tourists to take some photos. Afterwards we followed these people who had the cutest miniature dog (hehe, lauren I told the others bout your obsession so we're all into taking surrepticious photos of tiny dogs for you now! we got one of this one and its really cute!), before spending an hour or so just chilling on the flat rocks beside the river marvelling at the whole structure and in my case getting freaked by the flying/jumping fish who were swimming really fast and kept looking like they were gunna jump out of the water onto my rock! See no worries, there will always be plenty of people to laugh at my stupidity!

that night we spent a lovely evening in a square in Nimes having dinner where my irrational fears were agin to the fore, this time with some lizards who were basking in the lamp lights on the walls surrounding the sqaure - they really looked like they'd just fall off onto our heads!

After a great breakfast at the youth hostel, where this little lady cooked us eggs and kept tryign to feed me more and more toast with honey cos the local honey is supposed to cure everything and I had a cold, we found that Nimes also has these rather eclectic water gardens. So we wandered round these on saturday morning. There are fountains, a cool grotto place with a waterfall, and a temple to the goddess Diana!!

We lunched with a pitcher of rosé at a mexican restaurant (getting any drift yet? food, some photos of old stuff, more food, food again.....) before discovering that everything else of interest in Nimes was closed for no explicable reason just for that day, so we did a bit of retail tourism, much to Chris's chagrin (basically we left him with all the bags standing outside each shop while we satisafied our shopping needs.

We then caught a train to Carcassonne, another place I've been waiting to visit since 4th form french and Mrs Dineen's excited ramblings (noone tell her i said that k?!). Upon arriving we discovered our youth hostel was in the middle of the famous bit, the medievil cité! It was pretty cool, and the walk up to it was stunning. At one point we rounded a corner to come onto this really old bridge and all lit up on the little hill above was the cité with all its towers, ramparts, moat and other castley like features.

We had dinner in the sqaure; great atmosphere, with a funny waiter, a warm evening and a jazz singer doing old french stuff. It was cool. Sunday morning we walked round the ramparts, going right round the medievil cité. We bought some expensive local handmade chocolates too, which were amazing, but sadly are all gone now!

So we had a wonderful weekend. it was exciting, fulfilling, and at the same time very relaxign to get out of Lyon and the big city. Now Im back at school racing to fisnih this beofre my time is up so it hardly feels real!! Just had 3 hours of this french guy trying to explain these complex theories of language in english, using french examples and reverting to french for lost of the lecture. he accidentally said 'meaning for us perverts, language....' today which totally cracked us up when he actually meant that 'language perverts meaning'! Ah such immature humour, but its always great to laugh.

better go, will try and write more often and less lengthily (my english is getting pretty bad listeneing to these lecturers!!)!

lots of love to you all, hope you are all great, healthy and happy.

big hugs, Samara xxoo

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