Summer #1

Did you know that Dijon is the French city the furthest from any sea in France? When people found out we came from Sydney, we were often asked how we would cope living in Dijon given the above information. We were told that to get to any large body of water, you have to travel 500km to the south to Marseille, 630km to Nantes in the west, 500km to Le Havre in the northwest and don’t even bother about looking to the east. And that’s all travelling by the motorways. If you are in any way poorer than rich, you can add a whole lot of extra time by going by the slower Routes Nationales! For a couple of Aussies who had grown up in the fresh sea air of Sydney, the prospect of not being near the ocean, and most importantly, a beach, kind of scared us (well me anyway). So imagine how we felt when we arrived in Dijon to be told the news that there was no water near us.

Then the summer hit. It seemed that there were varying opinions on how hot it actually got near us but some thermometers actually said 38°C. (It did get up to 45°C but we’d escaped to London by that stage.) It was an indescribable heat, oppressive and lethargic. A heat that made you sweat more even if you were just rolling over in bed to get out of your wet sweat patch. A heat that came inside and smothered you as soon as you opened the windows with the intention of cooling the place down. The only time the heat subsided was at 5am in the morning just as the sun, the source of the heat itself, was about to rise for another day of torture. The only place with air conditioning to escape the heat and humidity was in the Galleries Lafayette department store and that was packed! There wasn’t even a body of water we could go and cool off in. Except of course if you counted the Lac Kir and the Cap Vert water centre. But the first from a distance looked filthy and not safe to swim in (even though we did see some people around its banks later in the summer), and the second you had to fork out €8.50 to get in and then there’s some French regulation that nobody’s allowed to wear board shorts, not even boys. Mmm. A real bargain. Paying to swim and not even having the choice of what to swim in? Doesn’t compute in an Australian’s brain. Needless to say we didn’t bother with either. In the end we had to settle for the River Thames in London! But we didn’t swim in it of course…errrgh!