The Flying Adventures of DOUG

I have plans. I have tickets. I have a deplorable lack of information. That's right... I'm going to Greece!

I talked to Bertrand (manager of pickers at the orchard) yesterday about finishing on Friday and now it's all set. I'm getting all my money for the five weeks I will have worked on October 1, posting stuff home on the 2nd, catching the train to Paris on the 3rd, flying out on the morning of the 4th for Athens, and this has all come together over the last couple of days. I'm looking forward to being a tourist again, although I'm a little scared at travelling with myself because I can sometimes suffer from near-fatal bouts of disorganisation.

For example, having left this plan-making until the last minute (well, one week before is more than one minute...) I now have a train trip that arrives in Paris at 2345, while my flight isn't until 0940 the next morning. What am I going to do? The current plan is to catch the metro - assuming it's still running so late - from Mont-Parnasse station to Charles-de-Gaulle airport and crash in the flight lounge - assuming the airport doesn't close up. They may even have vagrant-spotters whose job it is to catch and expel loiterers like me. Here's hoping; I want to get a photo of a man in a camouflage jumpsuit wearing a badge that says "Vagrant Spotter". Or perhaps they'd sophisticise his title and call him an Expectorator of Undesirables. Hmmm, that would be cool!

Pascale and Ara, my kiwi friends, are going to Athens almost exactly a week before me and heading out to the Greek Islands after a couple of days. I'll spend at least a day in Athens (here's to bloody, blistered feet and snapshot-RSI in my index finger), then set out by ferry to hunt down Azza and Pazza. After that I expect we'll go to Turkey, and then I'll try and find my way as cheaply as possible back to France. I'm trying not to think about the logistics of this; the combined weight of my inability to speak Turkish, the general expensiveness of flights and the importance of booking in advance is all too much of a burden for my mind to assume at this point in time. I'm thinking of trying to work my way stepwise back to France, just choose a city on the map each day that looks closer to where I want to go, and go there.

Back in France, my plan is to go to Nimes so I can visit the Pont du Gard and the Maison Carée, then to go to Paris and have a good explore around. Ah, there are SO many things I want to visit there, especially le Sacré Coeur and le Musée de Picasso! And le tour eifel, I guess; I'm going to take the stairs! And I only really want to visit one wing of le Louvre, where they keep the Venus di Milo, Nike of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, and works by a whole lot of Rennaissance painters including Carravaggio (sp?) and Rubens who are amazing. I've seen a couple of theirs now, in different galleries, and they really are all they're cracked up to be, in my opinion.

As for life on the orchard, the last two weeks have been spent picking by the bin (as opposed to by the hour), destroying all positive preconceptions my French campadres may have held about NZ'ers and thouroughly establishing my status as the worst picker in the world. I am so slow that they had to pay me by the hour anyway, because otherwise I would have been earning less than the minimum wage... I don't feel like I'm slow: I work solidly all day, don't take breaks except for lunch and toilet, and somehow (no matter what I do) I always pick 3 bins per day. Even if I go super fast, it still ends up being three bins. And if I go super slow? Three bins. Weird huh? I think part of the problem is that my conscience won't allow me to put in any apple that has a fault - they all go on the ground as they're supposed to. Dad, on the other hand, strips whole branches at a time and dumps everything in, pausing to pluck out excess leaves and sticks and to hide faulty apples in the corners buried under pristine apples. The quality control men only take apples from the top when they do their sampling.

I anticipate that this week is going to be difficult. I'll probably spend all my time bobbing up and down, jiggling, and saying, "Are we there yet?" Having a goal is not always a good thing.

Money is going to be very tight from now on. I'm going to eat at supermarkets and sleep under parked cars. If I can find a dog, I could become one of the many dog-people (as Dad and I call them) who sit on street-sides in all European cities hoping people will give them money. I think the dogs are a kind of help-me-I-have-twenty-children-and-five-disabled-wives-to-support ploy, except it's help-me-feed-my-dog, which is perhaps a little less tear-jerking/wallet-greasing. Tears make a good lubricant for stiff wallets. I want to have enough money left at the end to have a wee bit of fun in England when I get back there... Man, I hope I'm not being a naive wishful-thinker and massively overestimating my ability to pinch pennies.

Anyway, take care all. Sorry for missing a week last week!