I Am A Crepe

2.55pm Video game shop, Grand Rue, Dinan

I think you can only eat so much of something before you begin to resemble it. Which means that right now I'm beginning to look a bit flat, golden and brimming with internal goodness. My nose is also probably starting to resemble a glass of cider.

The reason I came to Brittany, home of crepes and their savoury counterparts - galettes, was to sample one of my favourite cuisines in their natural habitat. Well I have certainly sampled! At the weekly marchè yesterday morning I had a galette wrapped around a peppery sausage for breakfast, snarfed down while watching the locals buy bread, cauliflowers, cheese, meats, fruit and fish. I got in on the action a bit later by buying some mandarins and bananas, managing NOT to buy trois kilos of mandarins from the toothy old bloke.

As it's been awhile since my last post, my apologies, I had planned to blog before leaving Barcelona, but I was understandably distracted by the spectacular city, by friends and by the beginnings of the Traveller's Illness From Hell. So I'll try and be brief, but here's what happened in the Time Before Crepes.

Barcelona has so much on offer, it's not at all hard to fill your days. I spent one day looking at all the Gaudi and Modernist buildings, gorgeous and crazy. This was the same day I found my way to La Boqueria - Barcelona's daily fresh food market on La Rambla. I ADORED IT. I went back everyday to buy more fruit and more of their ready-to-go juices. The whole place had me in paroxysms of delight everytime and I wished I had a home and a kitchen to go back to, it made me want to cook so badly!

Apart from daily visits to La Boqueria, I also went up to the castle on top of Montjuic on a beautiful clear day to see the view and write mean, jealousy-inducing postcards. I visited the Museo Picasso, wonderful, and MACBA, a contemporary arts place with some seriously excellent exhibitions. Kills me that I will never again see this much interesting and exciting art in one short space of time again. Also checked out the cathedral, wandered the lanes of the Barri Gotic, had churros with chocolate (Rio was better Dad), and managed a very restrained purchase of earrings and a ring. Barcelona is a city in which I could spend some serious money - and most of you know that I'm not a shopper.

One of the other excellent things that happened in Barcelona was tracking down my friends, Kim and John, who immediately ferried me off for great tapas at their local, did my washing for me, took me on a walking tour of some of their favourite spots, plied me with candy and Strepsils, hid fun things in my bag and had me round for dinner in their very cool apartment - a home cooked meal! I was very sorry to say goodbye to Barcelona, but also very excited because I get to go there again on my first bus tour.

By the time I left Barcelona, for Toulouse - first stop in France, I was feeling very below par. By the time I arrived in Toulouse, I was done. I crawled into bed and stayed there for the whole next day, with only one very hard journey to the pharmacy and the train station. Have never had a fever like it. Felt like Marianna Dashwood in 'Sense and Sensibility' except no one could fetch my mother, no one was bleeding me or holding a cold flannel to my fevered brow and my fever eventually broke at 10pm, not 3am. NEVERTHELESS it was VERY SIMILAR to a Jane Austen book!

So I did nothing in Toulouse. Was feeling much better, although still weak, by the time I arrived in Orleans, to be met by my Mum's penfriend, Catherine, and her husband, Lionel. I stayed in their home in Les Choux for three days and really enjoyed having time to recover and some time in a real home. I also met their son, his wife and crazy beast of a dog and one of their daughters and her two small children. Catherine and Lionel also had a very sweet little dog with bucketloads of personality.

While in Les Choux I visited a very famous pottery place, Gien, a gorgeous chocolate shop in Montargis and the castle of Sully. The weather was back to being the middle of winter, but the countryside was just beautiful, all bare trees with MISTLETOE in them! Was pretty excited about that one!

And now I'm in Dinan, slowly turning into a crepe! Dinan is gorgeous, stone buildings and streets, walls protecting the city and overlooking the river. I kid you not, you can't spit without hitting a creperie and the whole town smells like them, it's fantastic.

On Sunday I head to Paris, quite excited about that, although I did see the Eiffel Tower for two seconds on a train, practically wet my pants with excitement. That was quickly cancelled out when I looked at the Metro map and had to work out where the hell I was and where I was meant to be. Am getting wonderfully adept at maneuvering my suitcase through ticket barriers though! Ahh, the life skills I'm developing!