Dear Diary

I must have written this to myself several times in various notebooks (paper ones) on overseas trips... but here goes in public:

With solo international travel, the highs are higher and the lows are lower.

But today it was the other way around. About 3pm I was slumped over a lecture theatre desk with that aboslute bone-marrow deep fatigue with my head over my folded arms, wondering whether I'd be able to even stand up & walk to my workshop where I was giving a paper presentation an hour later.

Of course that only lasted about 1/2 an hour, and the presentation went just fine. And a couple of hours after that I was drinking Champagne (well, appelation Loire method traditionelle, which tastes like a $15 Aussie sparkling - i.e. pretty reasonable - but it's not Champagne) at the Grennevillier city hall, and enjoying the conversation. After which I had someone approach me and profess to be a fan of a CORBA Trader paper I wrote in 1995. And 1 hour later, I had negotiated the Metro back into centre de ville and was eating a Croque Monsiour in a window table, drinking a red wine (when I'd ordered a white - but didn't have the words to say "that's not what I asked for"). Then I got  a smile from a cute random passer by. How high.

And then when I ordered "un autre glas vin" (the next most important thing to learn in any language after "beer" or "wine" is the translation of "another") and I got a white, I did have the words "c'est different", and got a replacement red. I sometimes wonder about my need for acceptance from random wait staff in other countries... but probably more so in France than elsewhere.

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