Calvi

September 27th


Rafaël and I went off to Calvi for the day, which is about 45 minutes away on the train, west along the coast. It is disorienting, knowing literally nothing about a place’s history – I am very dependent on wikipedia, and there is no internet here! Anyway, Calvi is beautiful – a long beach with huge mountains behind, and an old citadel rising out of the bay. I always feel like I’m hallucinating when mountains are involved – I’m just so unused to seeing them in Cambridge that they seem bizarre. We had pizza in the port and walked around the citadel in the baking heat, just being lazy and speaking dodgy French to each other. He spent a year studying in Toulouse so knows a lot of slang, and understands what people are saying, but his accent is really impenetrable. I am getting very good at conducting whole conversations without understanding 80% of what someone is saying.