Blind-sided by a social calender

I've ditched the friends map; after volunteering at the local triathlon on the weekend and meeting what feels like a hundred people, it got out of control. Plus, this week I've had people stopping by to do things like help me hang curtains and I didn't want to weird anybody out.

Suffice it to say that making friends in my new French town is a big success so far, and the triathlon club is a sudden and a big contributor. Not one English speaker, which is forcing me to learn a whole new vocabulary very fast (wetsuit = une combinaison, un enchaînement = a brick workout, these waves are very big = cettes vagues sont très grandes, I have a flat tire = j'ai un pneu plat and so on); I've temporarily sidelined my French current affairs studies in the mornings to make way for tri-vocabulary. I also attended a rugby match last week and learnt all sorts of interesting words which I won't repeat here, but which I foresee being useful in heavy traffic so it's worth spending some time committing them to memory (in a similar vein, I learnt at dinner the other night that many food words can also be used to describe members of the opposite sex, so again, it's like double-points vocabulary if you learn them).

My new social life has taken me a bit by surprise; I wasn't expecting to meet so many people so fast, and for them all to be so incredibly friendly and helpful. They are, after all, French (they tell me that I'm confused and that it's only Parisians who are that special combination of stuck up and rude, and they've ruined it for the rest of the French). Unexpected social demands not withstanding, I've been continuing to work at getting into a rhythm for training, and it's slowly coming. Speaking of which, it's time to get out for a run before the sun gets too hot, so I'm going to default to posting some pictures from the triathlon on the weekend to give this post some substance.

Narbonne's beach at dawn:


The sprint distance swim start:


Half-ironman athletes warming up:

And skipping ahead six hours, the beginnings of the afterparty in the vineyards:


And on an unrelated note, but since I'm in a grove with uploading photos: the poppies are in bloom and I can't help including a picture I took from my bike yesterday:


Must press on; places to go, people to see and some running to do...