So, Where Was I?

I didn't mean for that title to be a pun, but I guess it kind of is. Anyway, I really need to catch up on blog entries so I figured I'd do a rundown of a bunch of cities.

No pictures (yet); my ipad is still being a princess about charging properly. It appears that it will only charge at a snail's pace, and even then it will only do so if it is completely turned off and left to its own devices.  I'm telling you--princess. Hopefully once I get it charged to an acceptable level (and really, I'm not being picky at this point; 40% will feel downright extravagant) I can come back and pop some photos in here for those of you who hate words and prefer (pretty?) pictures.

So, here is a very brief breakdown of what I was up to one or two weeks ago.

Montpellier (May 12-15)
A vacation from my vacation--awesome! I stayed with my cousin Nick and hung out with him, my Aunt Linda, Uncle Ed, cousin Chris, and his girlfriend Stephanie. I did not have to plan anything, find anything, or do any sort of errands. It. Was. Awesome.

We had some great dinners, explored Montpellier, and did a really interesting wine tour in the Pic St Loup region. I learned a lot about wine, and I re-learned that my alcohol tolerance is laughably low. (I am the very lightest of the lightweights, and after a quarter of a glass of wine I look like I've got a bad sunburn all over my face.) But the tour was accompanied by a fantastic dinner, the guide was really friendly and knowledgeable, and there were like ten different varieties of wine to try. (I'm even starting to like red wine, everyone!)

Finished out my sojourn in the south by doing some shopping, and by some stroke of luck I FINALLY found a pair of black Oxford heels that didn't look like they were created with the cast of Pretty Woman in mind. Carrying them home would prove difficult, however, so I shipped them, along with some other souvenirs I picked up. Packing everything took some doing, as I refused to buy a shipping box (I had a perfectly good shoe box right there!), but I eventually managed it. Granted, Chris did have to hold the lid on for me while I taped, and all parties involved (except for me) were extremely skeptical that the box would ever make it out of the post office. (Bets were placed at 90-10 odds.)

The happy ending/epilogue to this story is that the package arrived in the US this week, apparently unscathed. Ha-HA! (That was my triumphant laugh of victory.)

Tours and Chateau Chenonceau (May 15-17)
Left Montpellier just as the rain was blowing in, and managed through the magic of the TGV (France's high-speed train) to mostly outrun it. Arrived in Tours feeling tired and sort of blah, but had a pretty awesome hotel (not hostel!) room.

Went to Chenonceau (a castle on the River Cher) the next day, and had all sorts of plans to write a very historically informative and hilarious blog post about it, but now that it's been two weeks I've sort of forgotten my angle and am too lazy to be bothered. Sorry, everyone. But eventually there will be pretty pictures to make up for it!

Rennes (May 17-18)
I had zero attachment to Rennes--it was mostly a convenient stop-off for seeing Mont St. Michel the next day. So, as often happens with these things, Rennes ended up being a fantastic stop. It started with the cleanest, most efficient subway system I've ever seen and continued with an open-air book fair. The hostel room had only one other bed, so I had a pretty fair amount of privacy, which was nice.

Ate a late lunch at Creperie Sainte Anne, in the medieval heart of Rennes, among timber-framed houses and other outdoor cafés. It was delicious and I had a mug of cider (which is a thing in Brittany--hurray for my favorite variety of booze!) and just sat and people-watched and did some writing. Not having any particular points of interest to check out was quite relaxing. Less relaxing were my attempts to download the season finale of Elementary from itunes, which were thwarted at every turn. They remained thwarted for the next 4-5 days, so that was sort of a bummer.

Mont St. Michel (May 18)
This is going to get its own entry. Eventually. I mean, a couple of these points might get fleshed out in future posts, but I'm not going to bother getting into Mont St. Michel right now.

Paris (May 18-20)
Ditto for Paris, which was a series of unfortunate events from start to almost-finish. There's a happy ending (sort of)!

Inverness/Loch Ness (May 21-23)
Inverness is located in the Scottish highlands on Loch Ness. In the course of the day and a half that I was there, the weather went back and forth between rain and sun at least five times a day, and occasionally there were high winds, hail, and rainbows (three! Complete rainbows, too--all the colors and a full semi-circle) thrown in for good measure. (Also, the morning I left, it snowed in the Highlands.) I did a Loch Ness boat tour in the afternoon but was otherwise pretty lazy, since I didn't feel well at the beginning of my stay. And then I accidentally ate meat (I think...either that or it was the most convincing fake sausage I've ever tasted). And then there were, um, blog issues.

Inverness was a perfectly nice city in general but a pretty weird experience for me personally, let's just leave it there.

Edinburgh (May 23-25)
Edinburgh is such a crazy, morbid, messed-up, awesome city that it deserves an entry all to itself. Prepare yourself for all manner of miscellany, from Harry Potter to body-snatching to more accidental ingestion of meat (possibly? It's unclear. Either way, I ended up leaving a lot of meals uneaten north of the border.).

The Peak District (May 25-28)
A.k.a the site of my technological downfall. This is going to get its own entry as well...I hope.

And that about brings us up to the present! I realize that I did very little in the way of actually updating things and much more in the way of "Hey guys, remember how I haven't written the stuff I was supposed to write? Here's me not-writing it some more!" But you'll just have to accept it as it's all I can manage at this point. Sorry.

Between that and the "no pictures" thing, you're probably feeling pretty cheated with the "new" post. So here is a picture of a cat hugging a kitten. Happy Thursday, y'all.

Caffeine 1, Renee 0

In case you did not know it, guys, I'm a lightweight. I had a pint of cider--with dinner!-- last night, and before I was even finished, I was in no state to do things like drive or operate heavy machinery. I wasn't drunk, but I was well on my way there. Off a PINT. Of CIDER. Like I said, lightweight.

 But I'm also a caffeine lightweight, too. Betcha didn't even know that was a thing, but it is. Ohhhh, it is. I'm super-sensitive to it. I had to stop drinking Mountain Dew when I was sixteen because it made me act like a really, really energetic drunk. The final nail in the coffin came when I drank a can of Mountain Dew and then kept incessantly challenging those nearby to race me to various area landmarks ("Let's race to the flag pole and back! Come on, it'll be fun! I'm winning! I'm winning! Hahahaha, run faster, loser! Just kidding, I'm STILL WINNING!").

 I also had to stop drinking chai tea lattes after 4 pm because I realized they were keeping me up literally an hour after I would attempt to go to bed. This was a much greater sacrifice than the Mountain Dew, because chai lattes are infinitely more tasty. (Your heartfelt pity is appreciated, thanks.)

 But today in Edinburgh I learned about a drink called Irn-Bru, which our tour guide jokingly referred to as "Scotland's OTHER official drink" (aside from whiskey, obviously) and touted as being a Scotsman's go-to hangover cure.

"It's full of sugar, full of caffeine, and full of quinine, which is a mildly addictive painkiller," he told us. "In the U.S. it's a controlled substance."

 "Sounds like something I should drink and then blog about!" I said to myself. "I wonder if I have a greater tolerance for caffeine than I used to. Experiment time!"

So I bought myself a can of Irn-Bru. It cost 39p, or about 65 cents. Quality stuff here.

I would like to quote to you the ingredient list--and accompanying WARNING LABEL--in its entirety:

INGREDIENTS: Carbonated water, Sugar, Citric Acid, Flavourings (Including Caffeine and Quinine), Preservative (E211), Colours (Sunset Yellow & Ponceau 4R), Ammonium Ferric Citrate (0.002%).
Sunset Yellow & Ponceau 4R: may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.

!!!

Like I said, quality stuff.

But I drank it anyway. I did it for you guys! This is an act of self-sacrifice so you never have to let something as suspiciously innocuous-sounding as "Sunset Yellow Colouring" ever enter your body.

It tasted like orange soda and bubblegum flavoring mixed together. If this sounds only barely appetizing to you, it's because this is only a barely appetizing beverage. After the first couple sips the flavor became sort of moot and I would mainly just call it bubbly, cold, and wet.

I wasn't even halfway through the can before I caught myself drumming my fingers against it at a pretty rapid clip. Fifteen minutes later I had drunk face going on. "Drunk face" is what I call the numbed sensation that creeps over my mouth, nose, and cheeks once I've had anything beyond a couple sips of alcohol. This was mildly surprising and slightly disconcerting.

I couldn't finish the can and threw it out while there was still a quarter cup of soda left. The aftertaste was still present ten minutes later but other than that I seemed to be suffering no other ill effects. I was a little disappointed at the anti-climactic nature of it all, as I had been hoping for some caffeine-induced hijinks to ensue. (Hijinks generally make for entertaining blog posts.)

An hour after I had drunk the Irn-Bru, I started having hot flashes in my stomach. Weird, but then they spread over my body. I had two or three really decent, fevery hot flashes. Odd, but then they subsided. I was still surprised at how I'd gotten off scot-free, so to speak (ha! Scot!).

The afternoon progressed normally until I realized around 5:30 pm that I'd been stifling an inexplicable urge to weep uncontrollably for the past half-hour or so. And that I was tearing up over army uniforms in the Scottish War Museum--not exactly normal behavior for me. By the time I'd reached the gift shop I realized that my hands felt so limp it was like they were two floppy vestigial appendages uselessly attached to my wrists. This might have been the result of being out in the chilly Edinburgh weather all day, but I've been sitting indoors typing this for a good forty minutes and I've still got some seriously shaky hands.

Perhaps chasing the Irn-Bru with a hastily-downed half-pint of Magners at lunch was ill-advised. Maybe combining a depressant with a stimulant has been the thing that has kept me from challenging strangers to foot races on the Royal Mile. Either way, I can safely say that Irn-Bru and I are not friends and will never be so, and that it has successfully beaten me even as it ostensibly protects me from malaria (thanks, quinine!).

But now I need to pop off and get dinner somewhere. I'm actually getting pretty tired of eating out but the closest grocery store appears to be a bit of a hike from here. What's more is that I seem to be hurtling headlong toward a caffeine crash despite never having actually experienced the caffeine buzz that's supposed to precede it. What's a girl to do?!

Eat chocolate I have hidden in my backpack somewhere? Ehhh, sounds like a plan!

EDIT: The night that followed this one was noteworthy not only for the fact that it took me AGES to fall asleep but that my stream-of-consciousness thought process was approaching James Joyce levels of insanity. "Scotland Scotland I wonder what movies are playing these days if I were in a movie I'd be pink dress big grin dog on a leash Scotland Edinburgh murderers be crazy I wonder what drives people to become serial killers vampires dogs on leashes shouldn't have drank that soda drank drunk oh geez my grammar is horrible laundry okay stop. Slow down. This is just the caffeine, take a deep breath. This is crazy. Crazy. Crazy like serial killers I wonder what makes people become serial killers I wonder who thought up vampires pink dress I want a pink dress I don't have a pink dress Confessions of a Shopaholic Legally Blonde VAMPIRES!!!"

It was a long night. I recall there being a lot more random insanity, but for the life of me I can't remember what it all was. I think it might be better that way.