Sweden in December.

I've been rather quiet on here recently. Christmas happened, which meant I was preoccupied with present-opening, cake-eating and other assorted festivities. Oh, and I type this from a shiny new laptop. Finally!

I spent the first week of the holidays in Sweden, which was good. It was weird going from one foreign country to another, but it was nice to escape France for a bit. Getting across Paris in the snow was an experience, but it was quite nice to see the Eiffel Tower in the snow.

I arrived in Stockholm on the 18th and stayed until the 24th. Not a long time, but still enough to see Frida's family, friends and relatives. We made a gingerbread igloo, leaped around in the snow and ate vast quantities of dill-flavoured crisps.


The gingerbread igloo, painstakingly glued together by Frida and I. There definitely isn't a bowl hidden inside to keep it standing:



A photo of Frida's back garden. Ridiculously picturesque; ridiculously cold (looks much better once clicked on):



Frida in the Christmas market in Stockholm. Better than the Nantes market by far, as it actually felt christmassy. The two feet of snow may've helped:



An inquisitive Swedish deer:

Fleeing France.

Interestingly enough, the last five posts on this blog have been from five different computers:

My laptop
Collège Gutenberg computer
Collège Anne de Bretagne computer
Internet café computer
Charles de Gaulle airport computer

At one of these places, some virus-y thing managed to get into my emails and recommend a variety of interesting-looking health remedies to all of my contacts. if you got one, apologies! Alternatively, you could actually invest in the remedy 'I' recommended - it might work!

My flight leaves in just over an hour, I hope. This terminal is not the prettiest place in the world, so it'll be nice to leave:



If all goes well, the next time I write on here will be from Sweden (and another different computer), when i'll hopefully have something more than computer woes to recount.

Stupid strikes.

I am in an internet café today, so it's going to be a short post. But, an informative one.

Strikes are fun when you're participating, but not when you're on the other side.

In two days I leave Nantes, to go to Stockholm. Slight problems though. My TGV arrives at Paris Montparnasse, but my flight to Sweden leaves from Paris Charles de Gaulle. Normally, i'd have to take the RER train across Paris. But, there's curently a strike, so i'd usually just have to take the Metro instead. However, there's another strike on the Metro, so i'll have to get a taxi. Or, if they too have by then decided to have a spontaneous strike, i'll have to walk. All the way across Paris. With a huge heavy suitcase. Grr.

To throw another spanner into the works, I see on the BBC website that there's a cabin-crew strike planned by British Airways staff, rendering 90% of flights cancelled or delayed for 12 days over Christmas. Twelve days into which my return-to-England-in-time-for-Christmas flight falls. So, apparently I might be spending Christmas in Sweden too. We'll see.

On the plus side, there is snow forecast for Nantes, Stockholm and Horsham. I'm fairly sure that due to my country-hopping, i'll miss all three, but again, we'll see.

Computer Update.

So, an update on the computer situation. It's still dead, and there doesn't seem to be any imminent revival on the horizon. This is problematic for a number of reasons:

My bank card is only going to be activated and sent to me once i've uploaded a photo of myself onto the bank's website, which I now can't do. I'm reluctant to use a public computer, as some sneaky French man will probably steal my password, PIN, then money. Not good. Basically, I won't get my French bank card until about February. I leave in April. Hmm.

Also, the generic lesson for the next couple of weeks was the classic 'Christmas wordsearch', which was to be found on the internet, and I also can't talk to anyone on Skype, rendering me completely cut off from the world.

I'm typing this in the CDI at my Thursday-and-Friday school. The CDI's basically a library, but with less books, less computers, and more chairs. Facebook is blocked here. Upsetting stuff! It doesn't help that the keyboard is all messed up and French too, so I keep typing Qs instead of As.

Basically, I miss my computer. I'm probably a bit too reliant on it, to be honest. What did people do before the internet?! I might have to read one of those 'book' things, or even talk to someone in real life. Frightening!

Death of a computer.

The laptop has died - i'm writing this from the staff room in one of my schools. There won't be many updates until Christmas now. Useless technology.

St. Nazaire. Avoid.

The weather forecast for yesterday was 20% chance of rain. For Nantes, that's as close as it gets to a dry day so we decided to venture to the beach. The nearest coastal town to Nantes is St. Nazaire, so we met at the Gare SNCF and hopped on a train towards the sea.

The rolling-screen on the train informed us that we'd be arriving in St. Nazaire at 12h57. We looked out the window and saw: a sewage works, an oil refinery, gasworks, a motorway and a nuclear power station. Looking at my phone, I saw the time was 12:57. Welcome to St. Nazaire:



Firstly, the 20% chance of rain forecast was a lie. It drizzled for almost the whole day. Walking towards the beach was cold, damp and miserable. The scenic route to the coast went through an industrial estate, past a derelict supermarket and a demolition site. When we finally arrived at the sweeping sandy beach this was the sight/site that greeted us:



Not a single person on the beach, howling wind, driving rain, and not even any cosy seafront cafés to hide in. Just a vast, miserable expanse of grey.

After the disappointment of the beach, we headed towards the town centre. Which, again, was dreary and dreadful. There was a whole row of funeral directors and stonemasons (every sign you can see in the photo is a funeral directors, except for the Axa one - life insurance):



We did eventually find a relatively-new shopping centre, but it was just the chains which seem to be in every town in France, and they've all got branches in Nantes anyway. The highlight of the whole trip was seeing the Airbus boat, which they use to transport the fuselage sections of the A380 from Germany to France. The factory in St. Nazaire makes further parts of the fuselage, before it gets shipped down to Toulouse where it al gets pieced together. Think Airfix, but on a much grander scale.




To summarise, never go to St. Nazaire. I will be actively avoiding it for the rest of my life, and urge other people to do the same.

Christmas Market.

Yesterday evening, I met up with some other assistants (three Welsh, one English, one American), and went to the Nantes Christmas Market. It looked really festive, with lights, tinsel, christmas trees and fake snow in every direction. It's basically row upon row of wooden sheds, with people selling their stuff from the window. The music coming out of all the speakers sounded like they might have borrowed my MP3 player though - Muse, then Kasabian followed by Scarlett Johansson. Not festive, but nice nonetheless...!

There are actually two markets in the town centre - one in Place du Commerce, near Fnac (the CD shop/HMV place) and one in Place Royale, where there's usually just a fountain and a pavement artist.

We each got a cup of steaming mulled wine and wandered around, looking at all the overpriced things for sale. Monopoly for 50€, a little wooden giraffe for 25€. I assume it's aimed at tourists, even though they don't seem to be very common in Nantes. Here's a bunch of pictures of the markets. It's quite hard to take decent pictures outside in the dark, but I managed to get a few half-decent ones:

(again, clicking on the photos makes them look a bit better)

Noël á Nantes.

Regent Street tries its best, but has no hope of matching the festivities that can be found in a certain little shed on Rue des Friches, Nantes.

Firstly, there's the tree. The label in the shop reliably informed me that it was a five-foot tree for 5.50€. Upon getting it home, however, and eagerly opening the box, it turned out to be about two feet tall. I assembled it and put it on the floor, where it's flimsy branches barely reached my knee. Pathetic. Luckily, with a bit of straggly tinsel, some lights and some deceptive photography, it doesn't look too bad: (the pictures all look better if you click on them)



I found these little fellows in Ikea. They're amazing. I think they're made from wool and stuffed with something or other. I bought a pack of ten of them, and hung them all over the tree, where they all look very content and snuggly among the branches:



On the wall opposite the tree, there's the shelving unit which has been adorned with more tinsel and lights. Battery powered lights from Wilkinson's in Horsham, at that. They only cost £1.99 - bargain! The trouble is, all the lights are LED things, so when you turn off the proper ceiling light, you can't see a thing. Christmas is all a bit impractical, really.



The Christmas lights and markets are all up-and-running in the centre of Nantes now. I'm going into the centre tomorrow night to see them, and will be sipping mulled wine in the (fake) snow to the sound of an accordion... Couldn't do that in Regent Street.