Weather's a Bitch

I said yesterday that I’d just deal with being wet. Boy did I. I left my room at about 2 and dealt with minor drizzle on the mile-long walk downtown. I arrived pretty dry: I chose to head out only after the sun finally began to break through the clouds. The trip downtown was actually a necessity for me. Yesterday I forgot to buy tonight’s dinner, and as I may have said before, France tends to shut down on Sunday. So I needed to find food at a café downtown. Almost all of downtown was a complete ghost town today, with the exception of the area around the castle. Even that awesome giant outdoor mall I showed you guys a few days back was completely closed.

The cool thing about Pau? The winding, multi-level streets which allow pictures like this.

 I headed down to the castle, but didn’t get to go inside today. In case you didn’t know, this weekend is Heritage Days in France, which means that pretty much every national heritage site in the country is free of charge to enter. This one weekend during the entire year, every Frenchman seems to flock to their nearest heritage site. So I got to the castle by roughly 2:30, and the courtyard was packed with people waiting to get in. I walked around and looked at the souvenir shops nearby, which today were hidden behind many stalls where people were selling their own goods. It was kind of like Denio’s back home, but it was French. So instead of selling stolen car stereos and knock off clothing, they were selling stolen antique jewelry and silverware. One guy was selling old-school cameras which were pretty cool. I’m talking the cameras were as big as my head and made of wood old school.

They use this side of the castle as a giant projection screen during certain celebrations.

 I bought myself my second (or third, depending on how you count) souvenir. It’s a small box shaped into the coat of arms of Henry II, who was a king of England, but before that was a powerful French nobleman. He’s also one of the most interesting people of the Middle Ages as far as I’m concerned. Since I’m in Europe and they don’t have bills smaller than 5€, I tend to always have about 6lbs of coins in my pockets. And when I come home, they used to just go in a pile on my dining table, but now they’ve got a little box to go in, which is nice.

Le Tour de Monnaie. Yes, it's where they made the money.

 I walked down into the gardens below the castle and took some pictures there while the sun was out. After walking around down there, it started to actually warm up and dry out, so I put away my sweatshirt in my backpack. I walked into a store, and three minutes later I walked back out and the sky opened up on me. It poured and I had to quickly pull my sweatshirt back out. As soon as it was back on, the rain stopped. Score one for Mother Nature.

I wandered around downtown, looking at all the closed shops. See, I’m hoping that somewhere in the city I’ll find an actual record store. I know they’re rare, but I’d like to find a place that carries some actual French metal CDs, which seem exceedingly hard to find. German, British, Swedish, no problem. But French is non-existent, it seems.

I finally ate a late lunch at about 4-ish at a fast food burger place. No, it wasn’t McDonald’s, it was called Quick. Ironically, the service wasn’t exactly what I would describe as quick. It wasn’t slow, but it was about where In n Out is on the slow-fast spectrum.  The burger reminded me of Jack in the Box back home, and I got some fresh-made, completely unsalted French fries with it. Seriously, is salt at a premium in this country?

By 4:30, I had had enough of walking around the ghost-town which was downtown Pau. But it was another mile to get back to my dorm, and guess what? It poured on my the ENTIRE WAY. I hope I don’t need a sweatshirt this week, because it’s going to take four or five days for that thing to dry out. I finally got home and changed into some dry clothes, looked out the window, and the clouds had broken again. It’s been bone dry outside for the past 6 hours. Score another one for Mother Nature. But hey, at least I had a story to tell today…