Hiatus and holidays

First of all, I must apologise for having left this blog unattended for about a week. I've been really busy preparing for holidays...actually, I'm on holiday in France now. The only reasons I'm updating are because 1) this place has wi-fi and 2) I don't like to leave things unattended without an explanation. This is mainly a pointless, rambling post about my holiday, so feel quite free to ignore it utterly.

France has been quite good so far - I've been staying in the Dordogne, an area in the south of the country - very pleasant, very rural kind of place. As the cliché goes, it's had its ups and downs and, in the best holiday tradition, it'll continue to have them until Sunday (I'm staying till then). I won't type everything up, so here are the distilled life lessons which I've learnt...now in bullet-point form.

• Two's company, three's a crowd.
• There's a reason you don't try and put three people of wildly differing ages together in the same room. No, not even for one night.
• French people are nicer to you if you make an effort to speak the language.
• Speaking French gets less nerve-wracking after the first couple of times.
• A lot of French people don't have that great a command of English.
• The language barrier is quite easily surpassed with a little bit of ingenuity.
• If your road map is 14 years old, it might be time to get a new map.
• Sometimes the GPS does know best (even if it's trying to drive you into the river).
• Sarlat is the foie gras capital of the world. Literally, there's at least one foie gras shop on every street (and some sell truffles...mmm truffles...). They even have a statue of three ducks!

So that's been my trip so far...hopefully today and tomorrow will be OK as well. One final note from me: when I get back to England I have one day in which to do all of my homework and sort myself out for school on the 26th. After that, I have revision, exams, yet more revision and you guessed it...yet more exams. Joy(!). (I also have a lot of other stuff going on.) Therefore, updates will likely be infrequent and erratic. Just a warning.