Foreign Perspectives

This place is something of a crossroads and is quite a convenient jumping off point for Toulouse, Montpellier and Barcelona.

Anyway, having exhausted the shops in Perpignan on Monday (it’s a pretty small place), we thought we’d try a little further afield. So, Tuesday it was off to Barcelona or rather we were aiming for Badalona which is a bit to the north of the city but didn’t make it (our navigation in Barcelona is rubbish). Still, we ended up in one of the many large shopping centres dotted around the city and picked up a nice little stereo for the hotel, a brilliant little electronic Spanish-English dictionary for my course next year (the DBE118: the equivalent of carrying round the Collins dictionary but weighing in at a couple of ounces instead of several pounds!) and a heap of shopping (we bought our first “proper” bread for months and months and proper baked beans at sensible prices too).

This is Wednesday, so it was Montpellier’s turn. Total writeoff I’m afraid as we’re just not familiar enough with the city to find what we were looking for. Still, we did the trip in a lot less time than expected and will likely be there again in late January for the hotel fair.

We don’t think we can face travelling to Toulouse tomorrow so it’s off to Auchan in Perpignan instead (it’s a massive supermarket that seems to have everything you could possibly want).

This’ll probably be the last newsletter before Christmas, so Merry Christmas one and all.

And seeing as it’ll likely be the last newsletter before the New Year (due to the imminent arrival of the French family on the 31st), Happy New Year too!!