Well, hello all.  I'm sitting here at this net-cafe in Carcassonne, France, thinking of how to spend the remaining eighteen minutes of our bought time.  Mail: check. Comix: not enough time.  Post?  There we go.

We've finally escaped from Barcelona. I don't mean to make that sound as if Barcelona was terrible, and we didn't even get to see Sagrada Familia, but you can only try to leave so many times before it feels like you're escaping; our train schedules were far too unwieldy, I'm afraid, in our inexperienced hands. I did have time to retrieve my lost-on-the-plane backpack, so now I am wearing clothes that I wasn't wearing on Friday.  Nice, huh?

So we're about to go see this castle in Carcassonne.  It's going to be super-nice, so everyone tells me.  I'm just glad that we've been able to relax and everything.  This morning's train ride from Figueres, Spain, was perfectly archetypal: nice scenery, infrequent stops, quiet people, lots of sleeping and reading, and the one crazy/drunk guy smoking illegally and talking way too loud to nobody in particular.  Great, huh?  We didn't bother him and noone else did either.

When we arrived here, we got some coffee, pastries, and I got a hot chocolate--that is, you know, molten chocolate. Quite nice quite nice.  There was a market so I got some fresh apples and some goat cheese.  Happy Markets!  We almost got some olives but maybe later in the week--we've got one full week left and we're just settling in to the whole "I can't understand anything anybody is saying" vibe.

And man, I was not aware at how much harder it is for me to get the French words for numbers compared to the Spanish words.  SO MUCH EASIER!  Thanks, Mexico, for being so close.

That's it for now.