booze

some more photos from tonight.
i go for a beer, some girls come and make friends with me:

i get drunk and take more photos:


that man has a gun.

i wanted to go to st tropez tomorrow, but the whole of it is fully booked because of some boat race, so im going to st. raphael instead. it's a 5 hour drive, but there's a massive beach at the end of it.

nothing to lose

today i'm in toulouse - i think it's my favourite place so far. there's loads of stuff going on here. its full of cobbled streets with cafes and bookshops and clothes shops and loads of people wondering around, there's loads of young people everywhere, it's a perfect place to sit around in cafes and stare at people. everywhere stinks of weed, especially a record shop i went into where the guy told me he has "nothing but love for brighton". then he sold me some dub, and told me about some stuff thats going on tonight - although im not sure if im in the mood for a whole night of ragga, i'll see.
my guidebook says that all the "students and arty types" like to hang out in arnaud-bernard, but when i went there i only saw arabs selling hash and a man with no teeth shouting and coughing like a donkey. but it's much nicer around st-georges and just generally in the middle of town, i spent most of the day wondering around there.
also found out where to go tonight, apparently around place st.pierre is where everyone goes so im gonna have a nap at my totally shit hotel (looked better on the net) and go and see what thats all about.
meanwhile here are some slightly crap photos from today.
a town called "condom".

some general tourist photos, these are a bit shit but at least im trying:





sitting at a cafe and staring at people

4 complete bastards live here:

a shopping trolley full of pups:

i open my mouth.

ok so today i got fed up with not talking, so i started talking to strangers. nothing weird, just asking for directions and asking about where to go drinking and stuff like that. simple as that may sound, this represents a small milestone for me.
it's actually very easy to talk to people here because there are parks, squares and cafes everywhere with loads of people sitting around, and so far, nobody has looked at me like i was a nutter, and everyone has been very nice and chatty, and curious about what i was up to. however, as a consequence of this, i have drunk about 14 gallons of coffee at a variety of cafe's, and i feel like jogging to toulouse which is about 200 miles from here.
so anyway i know haven't made any friends for life, but at least im making contact with other people, which helps a lot.

also, reality decided to come and check up on me today in the form of 2 phonecalls - the first reminding me of a deadline i have on friday (a piece of work i have completely forgotten to do) and the second reminding me that i have to buy the freehold of my flat - a task which is so incredibly tedious that despite of all the coffee i've drunk it still makes me want to fall asleep immediately. so now, i have set up a little work area in my hotel room and am about to get on with it. it doesn't bother me too much - the sun decided to hide away today and im going to toulouse tomorrow. im considering moving on from the french city thing very soon, and im starting to miss the sea, so im gonna head straight for the southern coast after that.
a few pics from today..

he only has one tooth, but it's a biggie

messy train, across the other side of the bridge amongst some weird warehouses

pain art is anal. make of that what you will.

not really too sure what this means, but i like the writing

bordeaux!

ok so ive got to bordeaux, and it's nice here. so here are some general photos.





and here are some other bits:
le jacket magnifique:

i decide to take a little bit of a nap in a car park:

my left foot, a can of cherry coke and my bag. i use all 3 of these items every day.

all white vans in bordeaux look like this:

darrell (or anyone), can you make up a caption for this:

nantes again

i made 1 friend today:

numbers on bins look good

girl on the ferry, from the other day

houses. dont know. i'll use them in something in the future

3.15pm. i find a river.


ok so it's been a slow kind of day.. but i felt like having a quiet day.
bordeaux tomorrow.

ugh

i just ate a disgusting kebab. im pretty sure it was made of bumholes. hope they weren't human. (but if they were i hope they at least wiped them before putting them in my kebab.)

day two..

..and i'm in nantes, about 3 hours drive away from where i was last night. i decided to come here in the end because it's not that far from the atlantic coast, which is where i'm going for the next 2 or 3 days. and nantes has turned out to be a really nice town, although it's sunday which means everyone in france is asleep or hiding. the solitude thing occassionally bugs me, but i'm expecting this part of this trip to be like this, and it's kind of why i'm doing this anyway, so i'm not gonna let it get to me.

whilst walking around today, i found a massive fair, and i took a photo of a woman with a huge ass. here it is:

this is a big angry guy called "spuk":

this is what nantes looks like: (a pair of breasts walked into the second photo)


and this is just a random street:


drawings are still to come, im gonna try to upload them later on tonight if i don't fall asleep in the next hour or so. i need some sleep, i've been up since 8 this morning, and i spent the last 6 hours walking around.

table for one?

ok, so this was day one of my trip into europe.

it dawned on me this evening that travelling alone is nice, except for the part where you have to go into a restaurant in the evening and sit down at a table by yourself. that part sucks.

tonight i'm staying in a town called trouville, somewhere on the coast of normandy, about 3 or 4 hours drive from calais. i think it would be all to easy to dismiss trouville as a crumbling shitty little resort that looks a bit like hastings, so i'm gonna do just that. mainly because it's raining and i'm really sleepy, but also because it really is a crap little town. having said that, if i had to choose between this and hastings, there would still be no contest. (but that's still not saying much, hastings is the worst place in the world - i drove through there this morning at around 8am, it was very ugly). strange then, that this place is packed full of tourists, despite of the pissing rain and howling wind. i had a walk around the whole town, and as far as i can tell, there are the following things here for entertainment:
1. a beach (kind of)
2. some restaurants, all of which serve mussels.
3. a huge empty casino.
4. one man in 'historic' costume with a donkey.
5. about fourteen thousand arcade machines.

luckily for me, i'm checking out of here and heading off further south tomorrow morning. i'm not sure where yet, but i think brittany and normandy are too close to england, so all of the seaside towns here will resemble hastings, and i would like to get away from that as soon as i can. i know i'm making it all sound a bit grim, and it is, but in a fun way. i like it.

anyway, here are some photos from today. i'm gonna post some drawings too, but probably not until tomorrow (i can't be bothered to get my scanner from the car and i still have to figure out where i'm going tomorrow).

1. double chin on the ferry!
2. calais looks like romania.
3. trouville arcades.
4. mustn't take photos whilst driving

it's time to go..

..more soon.