2005-12-05

Finally, eh?

The rumours are true.
I am alive.
PROMISE!

So, I'm currently writing this entry while sitting in the tableseat of Stefan's van as we drive towards Perpignan, France for the evening. Yes, at 8 pm this evening we have decided to go to France from Cadaques, Spain-- the home of such artists as Dali, Picasso, and Man Ray, where we have spent the last two nights. Would be beautiful in the summer, I am sure, but let me tell you, it's d-e-a-d here in the winterish months. Speaking of winterish, can you guys believe it's already December?? It just doesn't feel like December here, the decorations are everywhere and theres just no snow... or anything... wintery. It's just like an incredibly old woman forgot for the last year to take down her christmas lights from last season. And for some reason, there's a large abundance of snowflake street light decorations. Hello. You're in Spain. What the heck does snow have to do with here at Christmas? It's as elusive as Santa. For crying out loud! Also, we just squeezed ourselves through the tightest street ever.

I'm bloody impressed.

Also... the sea is splashing out over the barriers onto the road. Cadaques is pretty cool in the fact it's like a large cove with the city wrapping around the coastline of the whole place. There, thats about all thats positive I can say about this place, because seriously, it's otherwise dead. The first night we were here, we saw a total of 5 people, not including ourselves. It was like a ghost town, I tell you, ghost town!

So I guess I should backtrack a little bit and let you guys know all about Scotland, where I spent last week with the Pdiddy. We did some great things, including alot of relaxing (on my part, while Pat was at work) and some varying events of excitement. I did some doctoring, got some chest x-rays and bloodtests, got to know the Scottish medical system... which is awesome. On the Saturday I was there, Patrick and I went to the Celtic game, which was great and rainy and cold (and they lost) but we also did something else INCREDIBLY exciting that morning...

wait for it...

we bought two more love fish!!!

I would like you guys to meet Umberto and Rosie, the two new love fish of our hearts.

Umberto is the really fat bulbus looking one, he's really lazy and funny and has little fins and is OBVIOUSLY built exactly like an old Italian man.

And, keeping up with my italian heritage, we have Rosie, the redhead, our second child, her name coming from her beautiful red cap and thus a take on the word red. Beautiful. She is really pretty, let me tell you.

So we got lovefish and went to a celtic game, all in one day. Beautiful. We also had some great food that night if I remember correctly. I would love to go through my trip day by day, but it would involve alot of repeated things like 'i slept alot, and watched an episode of Ellen on TV'.

Oh! one thing I DID watch on TV was a show about Octopuses, my new ABSOLUTE favourite animal. I won't get into the details, mostly for the sake of Patrick and Stefan--- Patrick having also seen the show, and Stefan, who has listened to me talk about octopuses for like, three days now, constantly raving about their awesome abilties. Just trust that I am now an expert and if you have any questions, please, let me know and I will be sure to answer them.

Anyways, what other great things did we do? We ate some great food, especially at this one restaurant on my last night there. Mmmm, delicious, and miso soup. Mmmm in my tum.

We also went to this really cool thing in Glasgow, called Radiance Glasgow, which was essentially a festival of contemporary artwork done with lights, all over Merchant City, an area of central Glasgow. It was pretty unreal, we saw a performance work and then saw a guy play like... organ pipes using huge torches of fire to heat the pipes and cause sound making vibrations... accompanied by fireworks, it was pretty cool, let me tell you. I very much fell in love even more with Glasgow that night. Those of you who have been to Glasgow must think I am crazy making that statement. But seriously. I likes it.

Ummm.. I met Patrick for lunch... i went shopping..... shit, thats right, i caved in when I had an afternoon to myself in glasgow to wander around and look at sale promoting shops.. dammit. So good. I bought a pair of leather boots, which i have been lusting for the entire time I've been here.

Side note: The roads that lead to and exit Cadaques.. let me tell you. Scary. I just so brilliantly refered to them as 'Murder Country' because at night, thats really what they look like. I hope Stefan reads my journal so he can relive my moment of hilarity and cleverness. Anyways, it's like something out of a horror movie... and then all of a sudden a little town on the coast appears and life is awesome. Then, two seconds later, you're back in axe murderer houseville.

ANYWAYS. Glasgow. Patricktime. It sounds like I'm glossing over everything, but really, I'm not, it was just full of relaxing and awesome and falling in love and hanging about. You guys don't want to hear about that kind of stuff, shit.

Pretty much leaving Glasgow was so horribly sad that I couldn't handle it. I was so down when I left, it was really hard to leave not knowing when I would see patrick again. I mean, dammit, that man, he's just so great and my best friend and awesomethings and treated me so good and took care of me when I was sick and all that jazz. Very sad to go. I had some little tearsies, very emotional.

Funny thing that happened when I said goodbye to him. Patrick doesn't even know this yet.

I'll tell you what. I'm going to skip this story, because it's really not that great, and just keep it here as a reminder for myself for later so I can tell you all atleast one story that you haven't heard already. AWESOME. K. Anyways.

So anyways. Right now... well.. I'm not driving in a van anymore, let me tell ya. I'm right now in Canet, France, still in the van although not on the move. Well... somewhere near Canet. We don't actually know anything about where we are. Let's get back to the beginning of flying into Barcelona.

So I flew into Barcelona.
AND THEN.

I picked up my luggage.
Excited yet?

I got into BCN at like, 3, and Stefan picked me up from the airport. Because we had and still don't have any real plan for our van trip, we thought we would just get into Barcelona, get a coffee and then decide from there where we wanted to go. Well, coffee ended up being the two of us, on the late night search for food, as has become a regular occurance when we combine forces. For some reason the two of us just can't decide what we want to eat. We decided that it was too late in the day to find our way out of Barcelona, so we kicked around a couple of bars, generally walked around and camped out in the van outside the train station. Class, we're talking here folks... Class.

The next day we slept way too long and after an freaking adventure around doing pretty much nothing. I honestly

can't really tell you what time we left Barcelona and decided to get our show on the road, because really... I don't think anything we did was really even... nothing mattered at all. We wasted the day. After moving on our way to the outskirts of Barcelona with Andorra as our general goal, we decided to actually, oh, I don't know, learn
something about Andorra first and see if there was any cool cities we could get to. We really had no plans whatsoever-- it was just a get in the car and drive thing. So after some great deliberation, at about 10pm we left to Cadaques. Stefan had met a bunch of people on his journey that had suggested the place, and so we headed on our way to the random seaside fisherman village we knew nothing about.

Two and a half hours later we got into Cadaques, and as previously mentioned... shit it was so dead in there. And we were, how do you say, completely famished.

I'm going to leave that right there because seriously, this is the third time I have come back to write this journal entry. There is just too much to talk about! You do realize it would be so much easier if you guys were all just there, right? So technically, this is all your fault. You're inconviencing me by not flying over to experience all this stuff. Thanks alot!

So right now, I'm in bloody Amsterdam. Yes, thats right!

BACK TO THE ADVENTURE.

Cadaques. We stayed two nights. Took some great photos... well, I took about three that I like, and Stefan I think deleted all his. Cloudy, blah, whatever. When we left, we couldn't really wait to get out. Now, I seriously think that I really like it. Funny how that changed. I might even go back there one day!

The next night we decided after a huge deliberation that we should make our way to Perpignan, after learning that Andorra was pretty much shite. We got an actually early start (8pm) and found our way to Perpignan, with the help of electronic girlfriend Gina (the GPS).

Perpignan... was shit.

It was seedy and dodgy and big and NO WHERE near the coast. What? Why would you visit there? Seriously??

And the road! The road was just so bad! And windy! And twisty!

I just realized that I missed two VERY important things just now:

1. We pulled over in Perpignan to get our bearings and figure out where we could go in the bloody stupid city. Stefan was kinda stressed out, and I? I was laughing my head off.

Why, Why were you laughing your head off Nicole?

Because to our right hand side was a hair salon.

Called 'Fanny Coiffeur'. Straight up, just like that.

FANNY. COIFFEUR.

There will be a picture to come. Promise. If you don't get the awesomeness of that, you're either really really old, or you've been living under a rock, or you have no sense of humour at all and in that case, why the heck do I even know you??

And, of course, I also missed this:

2. Le Pirate Creperie.

You read right, bitches. A PIRATE CREPE RESTAURANT!

Now, first, you must realize three things. One, my love for pirates. I'm sure we all already know about this. But two, we were hungry. Hung. Ry. And Three, Stefan earlier that day had this huge craving for a dessert crepe. He had been talking about eating one the whole day, just casually throwing in his desire for something with 'butter, nutella, maybe a little bit of syrup'.... (we're really bad about talking food--- one conversation about christmas dinners almost had me scheduling my flight for later that day back home).... and suddenly, there it was. Right on the border into France. And it was so beautiful! AND DELICIOUS! AND AWESOME!

Pictures to come. These ones are good ones. I may even show you the picture of Stefan eating a crepe while looking like a pirate. Classic.

Okay, so back on track. Perpignan.
Hated it. Didn't feel comfortable. Bah.

We couldn't get an internet connection ANYWHERE, so we put our general location in the GPS and just kind of winged it to whatever came up. Neither of us really knew where we even were, to be honest. Especailly me. I was just along for the ride, content with anything. So, we headed in the direction the little red arrow and green line took us, which ended up being this [on first impression] small seaside town called Canet Somethingsomethingsomethingfrenchishsomething.

Well, long story incredibly short, we slept on the shores of a yacht club, two nights in a row. That was pretty sweet, especially when we opened up the windows and pretended we were sleeping in a boat. Stefan was kind enough to perfectly line up the van with the yachts. Appreciated. We collected AWESOME seashells, actually saw some daylight and enjoyed it, took photos at the beach (mine are bad news), we ate some pizza, we drank some wine, we took ALOT of photos of yachts at both daytime and night, did pretty much everything silly and not alot productive. Which, in itself, was absolutely awesome. I enjoyed it, I won't lie. We had good music, and some good sleepies, and some goodness all around.

Last night we left Canet and headed to Girona, where we stopped for dinner and some wandering. I think I would definitely like to head back there and check it out in the daytime. It looks like a really pretty city. And it also looks like it could be really fun if you know where to go. After dinner and wanderings, we got a little lost thanks to electronic girlfriend and we drove our little bums back to Barcelona in time for me to repack my bag and hang about for a little minute. I got into the airport at 5, flew out at 6, and got into Amsterdam today at 8:30 am.

So that's where I'm at right now.

Sheesh.

I really did have such a great couple weeks. Scotland was amazing, so sad to leave, it really really was. It was a very emotional little day for me. And so was this morning! The van week was just fantastic, Stefan and I get on really well, so being stuck in a van for a week didn't have any ill effects. Infact, it was really great and fun. It was just so random to think that we were driving up the coast of Spain and France. And it's even more crazy to think that tomorrow I'm going home. That's just mindboggling.

I have to say, I'm really sad to go. I'm sad that this is the end of my adventure, that I can't fly to Scotland on a whim anymore, that I have to leave an excellent new BESTFRIEND4EVA Stefan (ha, it's a joke, kids), that I won't be taking any more trains, buying any more green runners, theres no chance of buying a fifth umbrella, I have no camper type van to drive around in with a Welsh man, I won't be meeting so many Aussies I can't handle it, I won't get lost, I won't live off bread and cheese, I'll have to start worrying about if my clothes are wrinkled or not, that I will be showering regularily, that I'll have a real bed to sleep in, and that I'll be sleeping in my room alone. Do you realize I haven't slept alone since Ferrara, with the exception of Bordeaux, but those days were just too sick to count. What will it be like sleeping in a room without atleast one other person, nevermind 6! Shit, I'm even going to miss the awful experience of shaving your legs in a European shower... not saying I've done that lately, though.

I dunno.

It's just like suddenly, my goals have just changed into getting back here. Anywhere. Scotland, Spain, Italy, France, SOMEWHERE.

I'm not done exploring yet.

I should go and get some sleepies. Lovies to all of you, and I mean it. I'm so over emotional right now it's ridiculous! I had a little cry session in the airport this morning. It's just so... over.

Hope you're happy, and healthy, and safe. Sorry for not updating in so long. This isn't the last you've seen of me kids on the journal! Don't you worry!

Love.

love, nicole 12:43 p.m.

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