I GET SCHOOLED BY A FRENCH SELF CHECKOUT

                I woke up still sick in Montpellier.  We went to the French grocery store around the corner from our hotel for lunch/breakfast.  It was really crowded and all the lines were long.  I got some food including a couple of apples and got in line for the self checkout.

                Now, somehow I managed to butcher the use of this self checkout machine in every way possible.  The scanner didn’t work and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, but then someone pointed out a second bar code scanner on the side that thankfully worked.  Then, when I tried to buy the apples the damn machine switched over to French, which (even after all our time here) is still next to impossible for me to read.  I finally just pushed some buttons and I’m pretty sure I grossly overpaid for those apples.  Then I forgot to put them on the “paid for” part so the screen locked up.  After that I couldn’t figure out how to use the credit card machine, so I finally just paid in cash.  By this point, I was beet red and the line was out of control and full of angry French people with the exception of two pretty girls directly in line behind me who thought the whole thing was hysterical.  I looked like the biggest idiot ever. 

                The drive to Barberaz that day was really pretty and quickly made me forget my embarrassment.  We drove through the French Alps which was quite a sight.  When we finally arrived at the club it was in an industrial section of town at the foot of a mountain.  The beer selection was really extensive and they had a wide variety of Belgian ales of tap, none of which were under 8% alcohol.  We started drinking early and we had several hours to go before our set, so by the time dinner was served we were all pretty wrecked.  The show was ok, but relatively uneventful.  We kept forgetting that we were no longer in Spain and would often slip into speaking Spanish with people.  For the record French people do not like it when you speak anything other than French to them. 

After our set we drove up the mountain to stay with the promoter at their giant old home at the top of a mountain.  Now… we were following a woman who had been drinking since we got to the venue (a solid 8 hours ago), AND we were driving a giant van, AND Marco is a pretty bad driver, AND these mountain roads were very steep and narrow.  All this added up to a very irritated Marco yelling at this woman in Italian.  Thankfully she didn’t understand and took it very well, but it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.  I was able to catch some of it on video and posted it to my facebook page, but sadly I didn’t get all of it.

                When we got there we were shown to the guest house we would be staying in and then invited to the main house for drinks.  We all sat around the kitchen table drinking and smoking and communicating what little we could.  We were there with four people.  They were all a bit weird.  Nice, but weird nonetheless.  The one woman seemed straight out of the Addams Family or a Tim Burton movie.  She reminded me of a very unattractive Helena Bonham Carter. 

                The view was amazing when we woke up the next morning.  We were on the top of a mountain, surrounded by farmland, with more of the Alps in the distance.  It was a great way to start the day.  We piled into the Sprinter and made our way to Strasbourg for a night off before Holland.  Our evening was uneventful and the next day we walked around the downtown area taking pictures and exploring the Notre Dame Cathedral there, which was really beautiful but was probably the most commercialized and touristy of all the ones we’ve have been to so far.  Afterwards we got back in the van and headed back to Germany for a show in Miltenburg.