"Tonight's pizza night". The happiest I've been, so far on this trip, was when I heard those three words. I had a hangover today, and I had actually been daydreaming of pizza.
The cause of my hangover was a bunch of beers, a shot of rakiya (nasty Bulgarian spirit) red wine, and a few rum cocktails. I threw it all up behind my caravan.

It was a lovely day though. Jan, the older brother in the family I'm staying with, and the only one I'd met prior, had just arrived for the weekend, and him, his brother Rodolph and I went bar hopping (which in the south of france consists of going to weird empty corner stores).

and once we were all feeling a bit beer headed, we decided to go for a nice tractor ride to the river. Safe? Probably not. They own a big orance tractor, Jan drove, and Rodolph and I took a side each and hung on. It was strange, for some reason, driving down the dirt path through a neighbouring field (for some reason there aren't any fences here) past the kiwi vines, I thought to myself "this is the real thing, this is what life is like here". God knows why I thought that, it's not like I've seen countless images and films with french youth driving on tractors in their togs.
Rodolph decided to show us an even better swimming spot than where they usually go, and he was pretty sure he could remember how to get there... we parked the tractor, and within seconds we were fighting our way into thistly prickly stinging nettly hell, that somewhat resembled the overgrown hedges in the sleeping beauty cartoon that the prince has to get through to get to give Aurora true loves first kiss. Rodolph didn't have shoes on. It took us a lot longer than it should have to decide to go back to the tractor and find another spot.
The water was freezing, it being snow melt from the pyranees and all.

So anyway, today I struggled over John Updikes The Witches of Eastwick all morning until I decided I hated it. That probably didn't help my hangover.

Something I really hate about european keyboards is that the full stop shares a button with the semi-colon... But you have to push shift to get the full stop! That's just ridiculous. I've never even used a semi-colon! (because I haven't quite figured them out yet)

I kind of like stinging nettle. It's like spicy food for your feet. The first time you experience it it's too much, but it settles down to leave you with a comforting reminder that you have feet, and when the pain goes away, you want it back.