summer days

Due to popular request (yeah, Conway this is your mention right here) I'm blogging again briefly, not that I ever stopped intentionally, I just got lazy I guess. Once again, it's been so long since I wrote that I'm afraid you'll have to make do with snippets of news from the last few months.
About a month ago I had the joy of popping back to Edinburgh for a week to see my friends and family (even my kiwi cousins, huzzah!), celebrate some birthdays and attend the Aiken-Croley wedding. I was so happy to see everyone and can't wait to ba back again to hang out with the Edinburgh lot again at the end of the summer. (you rock dudes)

At the beginning of July I found a job serving ice-creams in the Glacier Catalan in Palavas, one of the seaside towns on the coast, about 10km from Montpellier and about half an hour away for me on the bus (or on the bike when I'm feeling energetic and it's not too swealteringly hot). My job isn't complicated, I scoop ice-creams from around 7 in the evenings til 1.30am (yep, folks are still buying ice-cream at 1.30am) which gave me some pretty impressive ice-cream scooping blisters at first. I'm very proud to say I now know automatically where to find all 48 flavours of ice-cream, how to make crêpes on the special wee crêpe device and how to calculate change in french, oh yeah.

ohh, I hate the machines for the italian ice-creams, grr
but I do like to serve huge towers of carefully balanced swirly ice-cream for wide-eyed children :)

Palavas is a bit of a hilarious wee place, a former fishing village the last 200 years have gradually brought an increase in bikini clad-tourists and ugly buildings. Opposite our stand a shabbily clad and amply bearded monsieur makes his pennies drawing caracatures, he drew mine one evening when he had no paying customers, we call him Pirate. On a friday evening a man sings badly from a boat on the quay and elderly ladies dance to elderly classics. One of my supervisors and our wonderful KP are true Palavasiennes born and bred and proof of the fact that, despite the tourist trash, Palavas still definitely has soul.

The Quay Paul Cunq (Our glacier is right at the end near the beach, opposite the casino, somewhere in all those lights)

In other news, I try to make the most of my days, that is, when I'm not busy sleeping in :/
The last couple of months I got the chance to play a fair amount of basketball, with some couchsurfing friends and any other people who turned up to play at the same time. I find it such a shame that we don't have a similar culture of street sport back in Edinburgh, or at least not that I know of, maybe it's more the case for football.
Sadly I don't get much time to play since I started work, it's too hot to play during the day and I only have one evening off in the week.

When I get the chance I galavant off for adventures with friends

↕ these photos are from a couple of weeks ago when I went to Les Gorges de Colomiers with Andrei and Laura. We hitchhiked there and then spent the afternoon scrambling up the gorge and jumping into plung pools when it got too hot to continue (which was fairly often, its been a minimum of 28˚ for the last two weeks). Most activities have to involve some sort of proximity to water.

Otherwise I tend to spend a lot of time buying, preparing and consuming edible substances and then doing the inevitable washing up which follows. Cooking and eating are just so much FUN!
Yesterday was the day of THE roast beef (y'know how we call the french 'frogs' yeah? well to them we are 'roast beef'). It was my first solo roast dinner and I'm extremely chuffed to say that even the frenchies among us found it palatable (one may even have been remarked to have licked his plate!!!).

↑ Here's a wee photo of my angel of a new flatmate Aina (left) with Anne, one of our Couchsurfers, just about to dig into a full british breakfast (one needs a change from pain au chocolat every once and while).

That's all for now, I need to make some fruit tarte before work, pastry awaits.
Over.