bring it on

Oh, the summer, the summer! Finally, at the tail-end of May, some Contiki weather: 18° to 30° and frisky as hell. All my little nerve endings are waking up again, carrying my self back out to the skin, where I can connect with the world properly. I took a rent-a-Peugeot out to the medieval fortified town at Carcasonne today. All around, mediterranean hills like--ok, not like white elephants--but like something alive and sleeping, wrinkled and muscled and mangey. And beyond that, the iceberg Pyrenees, half-unreal. The medieval town was so sun-struck and lazy that I could almost have wished that I lived in the moyen age--until I visited the museum of torture. An unforgettable experience. Believe me, I've been trying all afternoon. But, wow, today felt like a total holiday. I thought about all the kids in school who would rather have been strolling around a castle seeing where they used to shoot the arrows from and where they poured the oil. When I was eight I thought that adulthood would mean being able to go where I pleased on sunny days, hire cars and eat ice-cream. I felt my eight-year-old self looking out of my eyes and going, whaddaya know, it's true! (I'd of course like to shelter my little self from details like the way a career doesn't automatically materialise at the age of 22, and boring things like telephone bills and rent--but if she did find out, she'd probably say, so what? At least you're not sitting around in a damn quadrangle every day eating vegemite sandwiches and wondering what a stimulating conversation feels like).

What else? Well I walked around Narbonne a little more, enjoying all the details in the buildings here, where France starts phasing into Iberia. Lacework balconies jutting from walls painted pink and yellow and white, and everywhere those charming hacienda half-pipe tiles. Right, I just used the word charming: I have officially lost the plot, and need to go and have a cup of tea and a lie down and wait for these fits of bourgeois travel-lit rapture to die down. Barcelona tomorrow. Wish me luck.