My mom and I are in Spain now, in the coastal town of Cadaques, and the keyboards here are almost normal! Yay! All the letters are in the right places, and just some of the punctuation and accents are moved around, so it´s much easier to type fast! Hooray!

Of course, even more than the keyboards, I´m loving the shapes and colors and light on the buildings... The view from our apartment at night is fantastic (only marred slightly by the huge crane that is being used for major construction work across the street from us. Ahem.) and almost surreal. Which seems appropriate somehow, as this was Dali´s home for many several years. It seems easy to imagine how someone with a surrealist bent would find comfort here. At night the houses and buildings across the way (we´re up on one little hill, looking out at another little hill, and we can see the sea from our balcon-ee) look like fantastic boats and strange geometric shapes, all different shades of pale orange and ivory and the palest rose... it´s just gorgeous. And the sea is clear and green, and I swam in it today!!! It´s also very salty, saltier than the Pacific, and warm! Well, cool, but warmer by far than the Pacific in Santa Cruz!

The Degas show turned out to be something different as I had misunderstood the French advertisement, but they did have one Degas pastel (and no Renoirs, despite there being a Renoir in the catalogue and in the advert), and in another part of the museum they had some lovely paintings by a local painter from around the turn of the last century. So that was good despite the exhibit itself not being what we´d expected.

Yesterday we had a long and arduous, but still somewhat upbeat, train and bus journey from Toulouse to Cadaques. Our train was supposed to leave Toulouse at 1 and we would change trains at Port Bou, Spain, and then get off in Figures (home to the Dali Museum) and take a bus to Cadaques, which cannot be accessed by train. However, I didn´t realize that "supprime" meant cancelled until I finally asked about 15 minutes to 1, and discovered that our train to Spain just wasn´t. After an hour of going back and forth between the information/help office and the international ticketing desk (most of it spent waiting while a very nice harassed-looking French help-desk guy tried to sort us all out [there were about ten of us trying to get to Figueres or Barcelona]) we did get new reservations. There was also this young French guy (probably in his very early twenties) who was also trying to get to Cadaques, and he helped us immensely along the way. One of our concerns was that the last bus left for Cadaques at 8:00 pm, and at various times we thought we would make it about twenty minutes before that, and at other various times we thought we would make it about twenty minutes after that, so it was kind of stressful. But we did get on a train to Narbonne, then changed to a train going to Cerbere, just on the French side of the France-Spain border, where we were supposed to take a four minute train across the border. However, this train was not listed on the departure screens at the Cerbere train station, and the agents said there was no such train and recommended that if we needed to get to Port Bou fast, we take a taxi, because the next train wasn´t for an hour. It turns out that there was only one taxi in this town, and there were about 6 people ahead of us, maybe 8. Then our young French friend (whose name I never got!) went back in the station to check on something or other, and then ran out to tell us that our original train that we were supposed to be on (that supposedly didn´t exist) was pulling in now and we should get on it. So we ran and got on it, and it took us over the border to Port Bou, where we were supposed to have an hour until our train to Figueres, but there was one leaving three minutes after we arrived, and we caught that one and got to Figueres in time to get the 7:00 bus to Cadaques. What an adventure!

And then my mom´s friend Eduardo´s friend Kixe came to take us to the apartment we were renting (she manages vacation rentals in Cadaques) and she came on a motorscooter! It was hilarious. I had predicted this to my mom, who assured me that Kixe knew there would be two of us and that we would have luggage, but it´s Spain, so everyone goes everywhere on motorscooters! She ended up taking our two little suitcases wedged between her legs and driving them the four blocks to the apartment, and then walking down the hill to meet us and show us the way.

Our apartment is lovely and we have a view of the sea, and of the church with it´s bell, and of the hill across the way, and also of the huge crane and the construction work. The work was pretty noisy during the day, but they stopped for lunch and we got a break then. We spent most of today sleeping actually.

Toulouse was kind of stressful -- we didn´t get to go to any of the museums, because they were closed on Monday (at least the ones we wanted to see), and we spent most of our time holding on to our purses and money belts and looking for places to eat! We did go to the movies and saw "Slevin" in English with French subtitles. If you´re not a fan of movies in which a whole bunch of people day, usually violently, don´t go see this movie. It was okay, and the fact that it was in English and the movie theatre was posh and air conditioned made it fabulous. Toulouse has lots of narrow streets that smell like piss, but our neighborhood was okay (a little noisy) and we had some nice encounters, including one with a man who ran a little tiny postage-stamp sized grocery who joked with me about the heat and the cost of his air conditioning.

We also had a slightly difficult but also funny Tour des Toilettes on Sunday afternoon when my mom had an upset stomach and we had to keep stopping at little cafes to use their bathrooms, which meant I had to order something. So I had a decaf espresso in one, and then a Perrier and lemon in another... if my mom hadn´t been in discomfort it would have been even funnier, but we both did get some laughs out of it, and it didn´t last too long, so it was okay.

Tomorrow, Barcelona! I´m really excited about that. We´re going to take the bus back to Figueres and stop at the Dali Museum, and then we´ll take the train to Barcelona, and int he next week we´ll go to the Picasso Museum, and see the gaudy Gaudis, and take the tram up to Mont Juic, and ride around on the top of a double decker tourist bus and go to the beach and I can´t even imagine what else!