the holiday post

And we're back. Or am I? Tell you the truth, the line between holiday and not-holiday has been a bit blurred this time, which is all a bit weird and unexpected. Anyway, I'm sure you all want to hear about my holiday, don't you? If not, I recommend you skip this entry and buy a Pond Vac or something instead.

Following on from the last post then, we arrived in Nice in the early evening with the Kiwi's cold getting worse by the minute. She rallied after we'd checked in at the hotel and we went for a wander and got a quick pizza in a manically busy place in the town, complete with our first beer in over a month - so, so good. Back to the room, knackered, sleep.

Come the morning she was in a terrible state, awful sore throat and much distress, game attempts to go down to the beach thwarted by huge coughing fits and so on. On the second attempt I managed to convince a pharmacist that we really needed something full-strength, which took the pain away enough for her to get some sleep whilst I went for a wander and some lunch. That afternoon we did get to the beach briefly (you can only lie on big pebbles for so long), cooling off in the amazingly opaque blue water, sort of milky blue like a glacial stream.

We spent a few hours in the afternoon in a bar in the old flower market too, a gorgeous part of town, all fading pastel buildings and languid sleepiness, before deciding to come back in a few hours for dinner, which we did. Oysters, steak, mussels, tremendous. Early night and an early start to get the 0730 ferry to Corsica. Now, arriving in Calvi was a bit of an odd experience, as firstly we hadn't been given the actual address of the apartment we were staying in, so I had to translate the directions we'd been given to the taxi driver, despite the fact that the directions were from the airport, not the port, hence no use at all. Secondly, the route we took to the apartment somehow took us through the least picturesque bit of Calvi (which really is quite lovely on the whole) before dumping us outside a block on what seemed to be a main road.

Still, we got there, and by the time we'd got into the flat, we could see from the balcony that the beach was literally just across the road and the town a few minutes walk to the left, and although the road probably was a main road of sorts, in Corsica that just tends to mean
it's tarmac'ed.

We got into the swing of things pretty quickly, the rhythm of 'breakfast/beach/lunch/beach/dinner' forming the backbone of the coming week. Food-wise, Corsica's reasonably well-served, with decent cured meats (although they do like a light cure and very thick slices, so their charcuterie tends to be a bit more... challenging than the Italians') and some pretty awesome cheese. I'd heard of the infamous Corsican 'A Filetta' before, and was keen to get involved so we picked up a jar (a jar!) at the supermarket on the first day. It's a sort of cheese paste, god only knows how it's made but it's mental: an intensely rich ammonia smell which burns the eyes, and on the palate it seems to fizz and writhe before drying the mouth out completely and filling your head with an acrid ammonia sensation. The finish is marked by a few minutes of dizziness and choking.

It stayed in the fridge for the rest of the holiday. I have brought it home with me to try out on unsuspecting house guests and to ward off evil spirits. I have never in my life been beaten by a cheese, but this one has me hands down, I'm afraid.

On the wine front, Corsica does produce a fair amount of its own wine and beer, but doesn't tend to export, and we were pleasantly surprised. There's a ton of rose produced there, all of which is of the crisply aromatic variety (all indigenous unpronounceable grapes); the whites are similarly floral and the reds that sort of good, gutsy style you'd expect in that sort of place. The only not-lovely bottle we had was one we got from the local domaine, but it was only slightly sub-standard and cost about €4, so I'm not complaining. Their local beer was a full-flavoured lager with a healthy 6% ABV which, two bottles in after a day in the sun was not unlike being hit around the head with a cricket bat.

One more thing which really astounded us both about Corsica was the landscape - lying on a beach of the softest white sand I think I've felt, you would look up across the bay and see incredibly rugged mountains stretching up into the sky, apparently up to 2700m in places. There's something about that that gives you a whole lot more perspective than you're used to, somehow. In fact, I refused to believe they were more than 750m at most, and unfortunately the Kiwi found out what the truth was and I had to deal with being wrong, which as you'll all know I'm not very good at (doesn't happen that often, you see).

And so, bar a train trip to the nearby beach town of Ile Rousse and watching the start of the rugby world cup in some of the bars in the town, that was Calvi.

On the following Sunday morning we got the 0800 ferry back to Nice, negotiated our way through Nice to get the train to Cannes, just down the coast, and had a long lunch in a restaurant on the beach followed by wonderfully aimless wandering round town. That evening we sat chatting in a painfully cool bar just off the Croisette for so long we'd drunk too much and were too tired to go out, so we got a pizza on the way back to the hotel and gently wound down to the end of the holiday.

Back to Nice in the morning with my version of the Kiwi's cold (which she'd more or less got over with the help of super-strength French throat spray) developing nicely. On the way back, we stopped in the pub at the end of our road for a proper-sized beer and a bag of properly flavoured crisps before finally going home.

All in all, it was precisely what we needed. I'd definitely go back, too, although the jury's still out on whether it beat Sardinia or not. Photographic evidence will be linked to as soon as the Kiwi uploads the photos from her camera. Reasons why I'm typing this at work will be in my next post...

Are we there yet?

For those of you not in the UK, today is a bank holiday, and what I'm doing instead of feeding my beer baby in the pub is sortofworking. I've had to invent a new word for it, because it's not really working, but I am actually doing constructive professional things in between doing this damn thing that Kathryn posted on her blog and has been intermittently occupying my time all morning. I've also been listening to more Pet Shop Boys than is probably healthy, but I'm in a sunny sort of disco mood and have had Se A Vida E going through my head since I woke up, so there you go.

However, apart from doing my expenses form (yay!) and fiddling around on Facebook (damn you facebook), I have actually been working this morning, and the main reason for this is that the Dublin project appears to have slipped another week, sort of. I have found this in the past though - instead of everything being delivered with a triumphant flourish on the due date, it all sort of trickles in over a period of several weeks. This is feeling like the last week of it all though - we've got a fair idea what we're building and how long it'll take, so work could conceivably begin next week.

I'll be involved then, although the build is taking place in the UK, so the visits to Dublin and their accompanying 0430 wake up calls will be less frequent, fortunately. I'm also going to miss the first week of the project because I'll be in Corsica working on my ability to do nothing for hours at a time (which I got quite good at in Sardinia last year). That's ok, as as far as I can see, week one will be all about working out who's sitting where and all the techies making sure their development environment is all working and so on. Nothing I really need to be involved in, I don't think.

One thing I will have to do before hols is give a wine tasting to my colleagues. 30 of them have responded to an invite to one on Thursday evening - normally 10 is a challenge to keep under control, so this could be something of a challenge, but I'm looking forwards to it. Will be a nice way to end the week - although it could make packing on Friday morning something of a challenge.

So, holiday then! Off on Friday, two nights in Nice (must... make... joke...), a week in Corsica and then one night in Cannes on the way back. Well, it's not really on the way back, but it's in the area and the Kiwi's never been. Personally I thought it was pretty dull, but it's a bit iconic I suppose and the train ride down the coast past Antibes is really lovely. Good cocktails at the hotel bars on the Croisette, too...

I can't bloody wait, to be honest. Apart from anything else, I've forsaken beer for the past month or so in an effort to be able to see my toes again, and I'm so looking forwards to that first cold one by the sea. That said, I've noticed a real improvement - I've cut out beer and almost entirely cut out bread lately. I've not really been exercising all that much more, but I'm visibly trimmer, so that's my top dieting tip - drink less beer.

I'm sure there'll be photos and all when we get back, but for now you'll have to make do with one of a pile of unnaturally shiny apples on reception at last week's hotel. They were definitely real: I think they'd been polished.