surfing on the côte basque

After 9 hours of driving on thursday, we arrived in Bayonne.  It was pouring rain for some parts of the drive, but along the way we saw a couple castles and some beautiful stretches of forest.  We also passed through the town from where the 17th stage of the Tour de France started. The apartment that we're staying in is right on the Adour River, with a beautiful view of the Pont St Esprit and the two churches in old town Bayonne.  Sylvain told me it's situated in a great spot for the festival de bayonne, just on the other side of the river from most of the bars and festival activities.

yesterday I had my first taste of the atlantic ocean surf.  it was very windy, too windy, for any consistent surf to hold up, but it was great to get into the water and exercise my arms again.  The Michels had two surfboards stored in the garage, one longboard around 8.5 feet and another around 6 ft, but I was just glad to not have to rent one here.  The Biarritz/Anglet area is renowned in France as a surf town, so there are a lot of people out in the water who have rented boards at high prices.  Today the surf was much better, with the shape and form both holding up nicely.  I talked a little bit with some younger guys who asked me if it was hard to leave the California waves for these waves.  The waves are very comparable to huntington or newport, but there are definitely more people in the water, which was annoying sometimes.  I was able to see Spain from where I was surfing.

Last night Aunt Melissa, Uncle Alain and I went out with some old friends of Alain's from grade school.  They live in a nice apartment in Biarritz, so we went walking around the downtown area of Biarritz and walked to a bar situated on the hill above the main surfing beach in the area.  We walked along the coastline on the cliffs, where you can see a lot of huge rocks that have all fallen from the same land mass.  You can see the lines of the sedimentary rock that match up perfectly with each other in the way they slowly eroded from the wind and sea.  The city was built up during the period of Napoleon III and during the early 1900's when a lot of American's came to visit.  As a result, there's a really cool mix of stone walls and Art Deco buildings along the coast line.

As for the language learning, its getting much easier to understand people and understand whether they've asked me a question or not, which sounds silly, but it's really hard sometimes to tell whether people are directing something at you or not.  Last night, the wife of Alain's friend, Mailiss, was explaining a lot of the history of the region to me which was interesting, but she was talking so slowly with me that I couldn't follow her.  I finally had to ask her to speak a little faster with me because I found it difficult to understand what she was saying.  It was also getting kind of annoying to have someone talking to me like I was a child, but I left that out.  We had some good sangria and tapas at the top of the bar and then a great dessert at their house afterwards.  It was called La belle athene, which was vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, roasted almonds and pears.  it was a delicious way to end the walk around biarritz.

Sylvain arrived today from london, so I'll have someone around my age to hang out with now.  It wasn't too bad to be with the older folks though, because I got to drink and eat for free, and we didn't eat "Macdo" as the french call mcdonalds.  But it's definitely nice to have someone to hang out with again.