Bonjour à tout!

Hello everyone, I just got back from 27 hours in France, it was amazing! For a total of 30 pounds ($60ish) we were able to fly all the way from London to the town of Carcassonne in Southern France and back (gotta love that Ryanair!). We stayed in a house that was owned by a really nice older couple, Richard and Meei. He was British and she was from somewhere in Asia. When we got in they just wanted to talk for an hour! You really meet the nicest people when you travel.

Kyle, clearly unimpressed with the lodging!

Carcassonne is a small French town that is dominated by a massive medieval fortress. We sadly did not get the time to find anything out about it but it was beautiful. We spent the first day wandering lazily around the twisted network of cobblestone streets and feasting on wine, cheese and fresh baked french bread in our picnic at the foot of the castle! Afterwords we ate dinner in a fully lit tree-covered plaza.

Star-crossed lovers at our picnic

Sometimes it's just better not to ask...

La Citte at Night

Today we had breakfast at the house and got to meet the other people that were staying there (who strangely enough also happened to be a nice older British man with a wife from somewhere in Asia!). We had lunch on a sidewalk cafe that was so small we had to move everytime a car needed to come through! We got to have amazing crepes and we all even ordered entirely in French (Je voudre le crepe au formage si vous plet! sp?). My French was horrible as I have never learned it and I even said "Merci Senor" to somebody, but it was still a ton of fun.

We took LOTS of modeling pictures

The now infamous cafe

At one point we went to go buy chocolates. They charged you a certain amount for every 100kg, but gave you no way to weigh them. When I went to the register and the lady told me almost $40 my jaw dropped in shock but she would not let me put any back.... I guess you have to make a few mistakes when you travel, right? Luckily it is easily some of the best chocolate I have ever had, I dunno if it is 40 dollars good though! We all had a similar problem, 2 people ended up buying almost $30 worth of cookies! After saying goodbye to the city (and sneaking into a vineyard to get some amazing pictures) we made it back to the airport.

Chocolatier con-artists

Vineyard "Tour"

My friend Kyle went to go pick up his ticket and they said they did not have his reservation. After they looked into it more they said he actually booked the flight going home for the day before (25 minutes after we had landed). Because of this he had to buy a new ticket to get home. With Ryanair being one of the cheapest discount airline in Europe we figured he would have to pay $140 at the very most but his new ticket just to get back to London ended up being almost $400 (almost double what the other five of us payed combined for roundtrip tickets)!

Exhausted after his "fun-tax"

Despite the few monetary faux pas the trip ended up being the best weekend so far and just what I needed after a long week at the office. I will put up pictures of the weekend sometime this week on webshots and facebook but I can't now because I was blocked from the internet here for using Itunes to LEGALLY download music (so dumb). Hope everything is well and look forward to hearing from you!