The South of France

It is so typical of my parents to, when told that I have bought a one-way ticket to London, make it all about them and decide to rent a villa in Tuscany for the whole family to stay in. They are always doing things like this. So on the 27th of September, 2009, I flew out of YVR to London (and received extra leg room at no extra cost), slept in Gatwick for an hour and flew to Pisa, arriving fresh-faced and ready for a week-long B-Family Tuscan Extravaganza. The French Riviera (a region in my geographical imagination spanning from Pisa to Barcelona) was spent in typical family fashion: we ate a lot of cured pork products, argued about which wines to buy and how to properly cook polenta, saw Roman ruins, and my dad sat and read the same issue of the Guardian over the course of one week. Afterwards, we went to France.

So, Provence: wine, fresh produce, blah blah blah, Lavender Museum, blah blah blah, corkscrew museum, blah, Joan of Arc(?), pain au chocolate, and Carrefour. Trust me, it’s beautiful and the people are awesome, but there is nothing I can tell you about this place that you can’t get from Google Image, or from asking any American college student who did an exchange in Lyon, or Rome, or Barcelona. Just assume my experience was exactly the same. Perhaps a list of my Facebook status updates will fill in the gaps:

September 27, 2009: Rory has the day off tomorrow. For a year
October 2, 2009: Rory is trapped in the mountains of Tuscany with no Internet and only his parents' credit card.
October 6, 2009: Rory à Provence, jaloux? And has a whole slough of generic, filled-out and stamped post cards requiring addresses.
October 9, 2009: Rory est gros à cause de foie gras. Jaloux?
October 12, 2009: Rory. Stay tuned for a "Rattails of France" facebook album.
October 19, 2009: Rory is in Spain, and had no idea Spanish was actually spoken outside of Mexico/California.

So, you guessed it, after Provence I took the TGV as far as Montpellier, and then hitchhiked my way to Spain, improving my French considerably in the course of one day. This was the more French I had ever been exposed to at any time in my life. Despite constant bombardment by bilingual packaging laws and the “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” segment of Sesame Street growing up, I knew zero French until I decided, on a whim in May 2009 and much to the annoyance of my coworkers, to finally conquer the Everest that is the French tongue. So, on October 16, I hitchhiked with a combination of eight different people, ranging from 1980s hatchbacks to brand-new, climate-controlled Renaults, the last of which dropped me off in downtown Barcelona at the start of Las Ramblas. For those wondering if I spent the entire time in BCN partying and “gettin’ crunk” in the cluub, you better believe it: every night I had one or two glasses from a tetrapack of wine, and then watched an episode of 30 Rock (and…Desperate Housewives, but really only one or two episodes), and then went to sleep.

With all due respect to Western Europe, nothing exciting happened until I arrived in Bratislava on Halloween. After sitting on a sweaty bus from Central Barcelona to the airport at Girona (a bus ride which cost more than my ticket to B-Slav, I’ll have you know), I arrived in Bratislava in freezing cold weather. My first thought was, “What sort of faulty synapse led me to think this was a good idea?” but when I saw the overabundance of fur-clad locals piling into a sturdy, utilitarian socialist Hungarian-built bus from the 1970s, I knew that yes, this is exactly where I wanted to be at 23. This is so my life. If you’re so interested, read on.