18th July
Yesterday I spent the whole afternoon trying to get rid of coins. We'd sorted them out into 10s, 20s, 50s etc, and so thought it would be a simple matter of going to a bank and changing them....failing that, into a bar and changing them...as bars love change... failing that, going into a shop and changing them, as shops love change. Nope. Nobody likes change. All the banks have signs with coinbags on the door and an X through them. The bars were all immediately completely disinterested (and quite rude). The shopkeepers weren't rude but still no interest. Closest I came was a casino, which agreed to change them after hesitation, but only if I had my passport with me. I'm not sure if this was a bluff, knowing that I'd hardly be carrying my passport - or if they really do need a passport ID just to let you in to change some coins? Strange. Anyway, still have the coins. Need to find a supermarket with the self service checkouts and buy groceries with 10c coins. Haven't found one in France yet though. They're quite behind on some things..
Afterwards we all went in for a busk. First time all of us at it since Rennes, so that was nice. Went really well too - I got 60 and Finbar got 50. Dara/Alex's show didn't go as well as the previous night but still easily enough to cover his third of groceries etc. I'd like to be hitting 50 average between the 3 of us a day - only been doing this 3 weeks so enough for groceries/living expenses/fuel is fine for me. So over 120 is great. Dara went home to sleep and I went into an Irish bar to watch some jazz violin/play a few Irish songs while Finbar went home to leave his art stuff in the van then come back in (which took 2.5 hours from when I left him. He says he didn't leave straight away, which I believe, but even if he left an hour and a half later that's a bit crazy!). Met a cool guy in the bar named Rommy who we met again later on the street and offered us a trip on his boat. He was hammered though - hope he remembers that! We went down to the beach again, this time to meet some couchsurfers. It was fun - all fairly fluent English speakers, which was very refreshing! There were a couple training two alsations on the beach so I spent most of my time watching that - very cool. They had them chasing eachother around and stuff and it looked kinda violent/bad between the dogs but then the owners would say something and the dogs would stop, run back and sit down. I'm guessing they're to be police dogs or something.
I was wrecked though so we went back a little after 4, after agreeing to go to one of the girl's birthday parties on Monday.
Today I'm hoping to get some stuff done in town - a wifi dongle so that I can have internet anywhere, some hand sanitiser as while we have showers nearby, keeping your hands clean is basically impossible when you deal with so much money and shake so many wino's hands on the street. Maybe an icecream. Keep meaning to go to the aquarium as it's meant to be great here. But it's Saturday and even the carpark here is packed full of campers. Methinks Monday. Toodles.
24th July
A while since I wrote in this. Tsk tsk David. You should keep your blog up to date. Let me think...Sunday..ah yeah, I decided it'd be my day off so I went into town and found a park. It was lovely - spent a few hours on my own writing a new song and reading my kindle. Parks are so invaluable when it's so hot - never really appreciated them for that purpose before. I felt like I should do something before dinner though, so thought feck it - I'll do a quick hour. Got 25 and considering it was my day off I decided to spend it on a pizza and beer out. Finbar joined me; we went to a restaurant near where we're parked. I got a calzone.. I guess I haven't technically eaten a pizza since coming to France actually, always calzones...but they're just so good. We got a giant icecream and went for a walk afterwards, and coming back through the beach we saw that there were a few groups with guitars drinking and playing. Figuring it might be a chance to meet new people, we got my guitar and Finbar's camera and went for beers beside the sea. After a while one group of girls came over and invited us to join them. They turned out to be really cool, easily the best English speakers we've met, it's great, don't need to worry at all when talking, but still get the foreign-ness of them speaking French lots of the time, with the advantage of they don't speak Irish. So we've been hanging out with them every night since. The second night got pretty messy. I'd had a bad night busking - made plenty of money but I was down two strings and a peg by the end of it, with the music shop closed that day. But with a box of wine on my bike it all became pretty good pretty fast. It was the aforementioned couchsurfer's birthday on the town-beach in La Rochelle so we went along, though with the group of 7 girls and us we were a bigger group than the actual birthday party. Oh - I forgot to mention they're all singers. They do really nice covers together with harmonies and everything, so half the night is spent singing. Which is fine by me. One of them has a really really lovely voice too - I've asked her if she'd like to write a duet but dunno if it'll happen with us leaving in the morning and all our time with them spent drinking. But anyway, that night we ended up coming back to our beach to get our cognac from the van, at like 5am...a guy came along who was a bit of a French knacker and had a knife in his hand, and a bottle of whiskey in the other. It was a bit surreal as we were quite drunk so he really didn't scare us...he just wasn't believable enough. Just holding a knife out in his hand. Why? So after a few minutes we all just got up and left. He didn't follow. We decided we'd try and sneak a free breakfast at the girls' hostel. Wasn't a good breakfast and we're actually making well enough money to buy nicer breakfasts but hey - gypsy lifestyle. We met a mentally disabled (is that what we say now?) woman who is apparently a convicted pedophile. Bit scary. She was weird. Luckily we don't speak French, so weren't half as weirded out as a girls. A few went off to bed while us hardcores went to one of the room where the girls decided to dress me up in their clothes. I really must stop agreeing to such things.
Yesterday I spent the whole afternoon trying to get rid of coins. We'd sorted them out into 10s, 20s, 50s etc, and so thought it would be a simple matter of going to a bank and changing them....failing that, into a bar and changing them...as bars love change... failing that, going into a shop and changing them, as shops love change. Nope. Nobody likes change. All the banks have signs with coinbags on the door and an X through them. The bars were all immediately completely disinterested (and quite rude). The shopkeepers weren't rude but still no interest. Closest I came was a casino, which agreed to change them after hesitation, but only if I had my passport with me. I'm not sure if this was a bluff, knowing that I'd hardly be carrying my passport - or if they really do need a passport ID just to let you in to change some coins? Strange. Anyway, still have the coins. Need to find a supermarket with the self service checkouts and buy groceries with 10c coins. Haven't found one in France yet though. They're quite behind on some things..
Afterwards we all went in for a busk. First time all of us at it since Rennes, so that was nice. Went really well too - I got 60 and Finbar got 50. Dara/Alex's show didn't go as well as the previous night but still easily enough to cover his third of groceries etc. I'd like to be hitting 50 average between the 3 of us a day - only been doing this 3 weeks so enough for groceries/living expenses/fuel is fine for me. So over 120 is great. Dara went home to sleep and I went into an Irish bar to watch some jazz violin/play a few Irish songs while Finbar went home to leave his art stuff in the van then come back in (which took 2.5 hours from when I left him. He says he didn't leave straight away, which I believe, but even if he left an hour and a half later that's a bit crazy!). Met a cool guy in the bar named Rommy who we met again later on the street and offered us a trip on his boat. He was hammered though - hope he remembers that! We went down to the beach again, this time to meet some couchsurfers. It was fun - all fairly fluent English speakers, which was very refreshing! There were a couple training two alsations on the beach so I spent most of my time watching that - very cool. They had them chasing eachother around and stuff and it looked kinda violent/bad between the dogs but then the owners would say something and the dogs would stop, run back and sit down. I'm guessing they're to be police dogs or something.
I was wrecked though so we went back a little after 4, after agreeing to go to one of the girl's birthday parties on Monday.
Today I'm hoping to get some stuff done in town - a wifi dongle so that I can have internet anywhere, some hand sanitiser as while we have showers nearby, keeping your hands clean is basically impossible when you deal with so much money and shake so many wino's hands on the street. Maybe an icecream. Keep meaning to go to the aquarium as it's meant to be great here. But it's Saturday and even the carpark here is packed full of campers. Methinks Monday. Toodles.
24th July
A while since I wrote in this. Tsk tsk David. You should keep your blog up to date. Let me think...Sunday..ah yeah, I decided it'd be my day off so I went into town and found a park. It was lovely - spent a few hours on my own writing a new song and reading my kindle. Parks are so invaluable when it's so hot - never really appreciated them for that purpose before. I felt like I should do something before dinner though, so thought feck it - I'll do a quick hour. Got 25 and considering it was my day off I decided to spend it on a pizza and beer out. Finbar joined me; we went to a restaurant near where we're parked. I got a calzone.. I guess I haven't technically eaten a pizza since coming to France actually, always calzones...but they're just so good. We got a giant icecream and went for a walk afterwards, and coming back through the beach we saw that there were a few groups with guitars drinking and playing. Figuring it might be a chance to meet new people, we got my guitar and Finbar's camera and went for beers beside the sea. After a while one group of girls came over and invited us to join them. They turned out to be really cool, easily the best English speakers we've met, it's great, don't need to worry at all when talking, but still get the foreign-ness of them speaking French lots of the time, with the advantage of they don't speak Irish. So we've been hanging out with them every night since. The second night got pretty messy. I'd had a bad night busking - made plenty of money but I was down two strings and a peg by the end of it, with the music shop closed that day. But with a box of wine on my bike it all became pretty good pretty fast. It was the aforementioned couchsurfer's birthday on the town-beach in La Rochelle so we went along, though with the group of 7 girls and us we were a bigger group than the actual birthday party. Oh - I forgot to mention they're all singers. They do really nice covers together with harmonies and everything, so half the night is spent singing. Which is fine by me. One of them has a really really lovely voice too - I've asked her if she'd like to write a duet but dunno if it'll happen with us leaving in the morning and all our time with them spent drinking. But anyway, that night we ended up coming back to our beach to get our cognac from the van, at like 5am...a guy came along who was a bit of a French knacker and had a knife in his hand, and a bottle of whiskey in the other. It was a bit surreal as we were quite drunk so he really didn't scare us...he just wasn't believable enough. Just holding a knife out in his hand. Why? So after a few minutes we all just got up and left. He didn't follow. We decided we'd try and sneak a free breakfast at the girls' hostel. Wasn't a good breakfast and we're actually making well enough money to buy nicer breakfasts but hey - gypsy lifestyle. We met a mentally disabled (is that what we say now?) woman who is apparently a convicted pedophile. Bit scary. She was weird. Luckily we don't speak French, so weren't half as weirded out as a girls. A few went off to bed while us hardcores went to one of the room where the girls decided to dress me up in their clothes. I really must stop agreeing to such things.
By 10am everyone was absolutely wrecked so Finbar and I stumbled home for a few hours sleep. I also forgot to mention, it stormed that night. Luckily we just missed getting wet, but Finbar had left his skylight window open for air - his bed was soaked when we got back. So while I passed out Finbar made up the spare double bed (gotta love a 6 berth) and slept for the day.
No rest for the wicked David though - I had a guitar to fix. So after a few hours sleep I made my way in and through my broken French and the shop guy's broken english I managed to get my parts. Took me a few hours to unstring, clean, re-pin, change the bridge, and restring the guitar, but now it's so very tasty again. I brought it to the beach last night but was super-careful not to get sand on it this time. Hope it's alright. Anyway - we spent an hour or so discussing a tax system for the van. See we're all coming from different standpoints at the moment - Dara wants to create artsy things for the sake of art, isn't concerned with money as he has his savings, Finbar wants to paint on walls for no-money, but wants to make lots of money also for other less artistic reasons.. I want to play music as much as possible, with the aim of being a pro-musician, the money being an indicator of how I'm doing. This gets tricky in the van - until now we've been putting all of the money into the communal jar, but say if I make 20 euro in an hour (Easily enough to more than cover my third of everything communal) - should I just stop working? I don't get any of the money afterwards anyway..and what if I made 60 euro, can I not work for the next two days? So we've agreed on a sort of a tax - 10 per day and an extra tenner per 50 euro above 40 euro. Eg I made 55 last night, so had to pay an extra 10 on my original 10, giving me 35 euro personal profit. Or beer money. I don't like the system too much - it's not very nice mathematically and doesn't really encourage profit. But maybe that's for the best right now.
Last night was fun, back to our beach again for another evening of songs and drinking games. And running around in the sand games, and laughing games. Lots of games. We all went back to the van for pasta. The van doesn't really fit 10 people..
Fun times though. Finbar facepainted half the girls, which was a bit pointless considering it was like 6am so we were all going to sleep a few minutes after. One doesn't think of such things at times like these though. I think there were complaints about the noise - the police arrived in the morning and asked us to move some stuff into the van and were generally grumpy. They asked how many were in the van, but of course Finbar replied 2 truthfully, which threw them off. I guess they presumed it was some kinda party campervan. So they didn't ask us to move or anything, just better not do it again tonight.
Off to Toulouse tomorrow I think - EJC 2013 time. Looking forward to finally doing some juggling. And not-busking should leave extra time for music too :)
Over and out!
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