So it's that time of year again when I get a bit depressed and bore everyone to death moaning about how I don't want to be old. But as my charming brother told me in his card, it's only 9 years until I'm 30! The 'celebrations' started early as a few of us went to the Australian the night before. At midnight I was sung 'Happy Birthday' in about three different languages and bought a 'hilarious' cocktail. In the morning, under the pretence that 'it's my birt...

Our first proper day in Bordeaux and we decided to head out to the coast and the Dune du Pilat. Having au paired for two months, visited the region with my family, and just generally having had enough of FU's shoddy road skills I appointed myself navigator and told FU to follow our car. Probably about 5 minutes after we'd left the other car lost us and as we headed west, they were following signs to Paris. Luckily I could give them towns to look out for and we ma...

The holiday got off to a good start with warm sunny weather and two peugeots, which we easily navigated onto the autoroute. For what was to be the first and only time on our trip, we made it to the hotel in Toulouse incident free in about 2h30. This was where one of the main sources of hilarity for the trip began, as ME failed to grasp FU's name; instead calling him Fluvio, Flavio or Fabio for the duration. After checking in we went to have a walk round the to...

So it's Valentine's Day, I'm in the (supposedly) most romantic country in the world and I'm invited over to chez mon chéri for the evening. Candlelit dinner? A dozen roses? Diamond ring? Erm... my 'present' was that he'd had a shave, and we ended up watching 'Fatal', a rap comedy starring Fatal Bazooka and a Paris Hilton lookalike. Better than a punch in the face I suppose. Then came the beginning of what was a gastronomic three day feast. As GL's friend ...

Another fairly standard week at uni i.e. trying not to skip too many lectures was made better by the fact that we've just completed plans to go on a road trip for the second week of the holidays. We're hiring 2 cars for the 8 of us that are going: me, MA, ME, GL, LA, EM, FU and IP. Luckily I'm too young to be able to drive a hire car, so we're leaving it to the Europeans to navigate through the city streets. The first night we're spending in Toulouse, then 4 nigh...