La de da… not much going on…

At least, not right now.  Next week will be a different matter, but for now, things are very quiet.  I spent all day yesterday (and I’m not exaggerating that much - it took me about five or six hours) downloading the 300 digital photos I’ve taken in the past three weeks onto my laptop and erasing them from my camera.  That’s good - now they are all labelled and sorted on my computer’s hard drive, and the wonderful card that I have for my camera is clean.  By the way, here’s a little product placement: I have a Canon Powershot G3, and I love it.  I splurged and bought a 500 MB card (oooh, ahhh) before I left for France, and it is wonderful.  As I’ve told anyone who will listen, this card will hold 440 of the largest-size jpegs (which is pretty large, considering the camera has a 4.0 MP resolution), and even 200 RAW-format images!  It’s mahvelous, dahling, simply mahvelous.  The camera is well laid-out, and I’m sure that I would be able to use it even more easily if I had bothered to read the manual.  As it is, I’ve fiddled around with it some, but I mostly just learned to use the aperture- and shutter-speed-priority settings as well as my personal favorite, the manual setting.  The one problem with the camera is that it has difficulties with color-rendition in the purple range.  Purples shift to blue, which is annoying.  But other than that, I have had no problems with it - the pictures are clear, most of the colors are true, and the white-balance options are wonderful.  No more indoor pictures where the people end up looking jaundiced!

In other news, I’m headed to Madrid next week!  School holidays here in France start this Wednesday, and I have a friend who is studying in Madrid this semester.  I have never been to Spain, so I decided to go visit her.  The decision was easy; getting the tickets turned out to be one of the worst experiences that I’ve had in recent memory.  I went to the train station, knowing that it would be difficult to find a seat, since I had waited so long to buy my tickets.  However, I ended up being “helped” by a man who typified all the negative stereotypes held of French people (or, actually, people in general).  He treated me as if I was an imbecile who had decided to make his life hell.  He kept pinching the bridge of his nose, rolling his eyes, rubbing his forehead… He misunderstood what I had said and then acted like I had deliberately said the incorrect thing, just to make trouble.  When I said, several times, that my French isn’t very good and asked him, very politely, to repeat himself, he would say, in the most exasperated tone, “I........said...... blahblahblahblahblahblahblah.” (Yes, sir, I realize that you said something - what I had problems with is what you said.) Finally, after about forty-five minutes, about thirty of which were spent with me in tears, I told him to help the other in line, went outside, collected myself, wrote down my request, and went and stood in line for the other agent.  That wonderful gentleman had everything sorted out in ten minutes and was kind, solicitous and understanding.

The bottom line is that I now have my tickets, and will be gone from Monday to Saturday of next week.  I’m very excited about the trip, even if I don’t speak a lick of Spanish.  I’ve heard wonderful things about Madrid and the people there, and I will let you know how it all turns out!