hi again,
sorry for another late update, have visited a few more cities and still having a great time with about a week left of my holiday.
After toulouse we headed to montpellier for a few days, a beautiful and very live-able city but not a lot of big sights for tourists, it was easy though to spend the days wandering through the windy cobbled streets looking in shops and smelling all the delicious aromas coming from cafe's, would have been nice to sit and sip coffee and eat cakes all day, but more fun to explore. we went out to the local aussie bar 'ayres rock' it was huge and disgustingly popular with the locals, which was absolutley hilarious. we ended up chatting to some big (and i mean big) crazy french guy with a huge monobrow... who shouted us drinks all night, all 5 of us, 3 of which were boys!! he LOVED AUSTRALIA and we loved the aussie beers and cocktails he kept buying us.
Next stop was marseille in an attempt to see the aussies WIN the quarter final against england...well we suceeded in getting tickets, but as you all know by now we werent so lucky to win the game. shame because the seats we got were surrounded by middle age english men who we bantered with all afternoon, until the final siren. they went easy on us, i think they saw us shed a few tears. but the night wasnt a complete failure, we ran into some guys from sydney who had just bought 70 euro's worth of booze and needed some help drinking it. and our luck kept getting better as we watched the 2nd half of the french NZ game with a (soon to be very happy) french hotel owner who (after the game) decided to let us sleep on his reception couches for free since we barracked for the froggies and all his rooms were booked. AH LELE BLU!
We spent 2 or 3 more days in marseille, in a hostel by the beach, it was a beautiful 30 min drive from the beach all away along the coast to the port, the weather was gorgeous so we got to swim in the mediterranean (although Niamh got stung by a jellyfish!!) as well as explore the old town adn some markets. Marseille ahs an unfortunate reputation of being dirty and horrible for tourists, there is a bad ^ghetto^sort of area un the town where a few hostels are, but i think we were always in the right place at the right time and saw all the beautiful parts of the city instead.
Nice is nice, nice is Nice as the crazy man on the bus proclaimed. Our first impression was strange, driving along the coast into the city looked like california in an old 90s movie, palm trees, aquarmarine sea and a big fat footpath with cyclers and rollerskaters, it didnt seem real. then from the coach stop to the bus stop was roadworks, dusty streets and sandwhich bars...only 2 streets back from the beach. Again our hostel was a bit out of the city, but this time in an old monastery, one of europes top 10 rated hostels, pretty much all the staff and guests were aussies but that was fun, we met Sheree, a girl from NZ and took a day trip to a private little beach surrounded by millionaires mansions then headed to Monaco to look around the ports, casinos, hotels and castle... the yachts were amazing, and ive never seen boats that look like floating hotels before, what a life.
Had to keep moving and unfortunatly Niamh and I had to go our seperate ways, I was off to Lyon for the night to get a morning flight to Madrid. Stayed in a hostel in old town on the hill overlooking the whole city, it was beautiful, and bigger than i realised when we visited for the rugby,sat with some spanish and french guys for a while and listened to them play guitar to the city, then just had an early night and caught up on sleep! In the morning I realised I didn`t have any coins for the funicular down to the train station and there were no cash machines anywhere in old town, but luckily an old man let me sneak through with him and i made it to my flight in time.
Since then I have been to Madrid, Sevilla, Granada and I^m in Almenecar at a friend from Brisbane`s Mums place before I leave in the morning on a 9 hour bus to visit an old flatmate in Valencia. It`s getting late so i`ll have to fill you in on my spanish adventures another time.
I haven`t had a chance to upload photos onto this site because it^s pretty slow but i have them on facebook and hopefully these links will work to the 2 albums i have set up. Enjoy! xox
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=60877&l=8c8b0&id=866955116
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=60866&l=19cd0&id=866955116
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