We got up fairly early and headed into town to buy a few bits and bobs, most importantly we both bought a watch each and I bought a torch, seeing as we’re staying in hostels a torch shouldn’t be necessary but you never know! After a final round of packing and list-checking we were picked up by Barrie’s mother and taken to Stansted Airport for about 11:30am – significantly early but I always tend to err on the side of caution when travelling to airports, it’s pessimistic approach but it works.
We wandered around the airport for a while, eating pizza and drinking coffee then we headed for the check-in desk to ditch our bags. Whilst we were in the check-in queue we saw an amusing guy who was obviously on a trip to the UK but had little grasp of English. He spent about five minutes trying to check his bags in at the Ryanair desk using a ticket from another airline, the poor guy behind the desk was doing his best to tell the guy he needed to go to the ‘Go’ desks but eventually gave up and called over a colleague to escort the guy to the correct desks. There were some Australians in the queue behind us and they found this pretty amusing as well.
After a reasonably quick flight we landed in Biarritz at 18:30, grabbed our bags and went outside. We tried to get a bus to town but neither of us could make head nor tail of the timetable so we jumped in a taxi instead and had the pleasure of pan-pipes for the 15 minute journey to the hostel. On arrival the first thing which struck us was how nice the hostel looked, neither of us had ever stayed in a hostel before and we didn’t know what to expect – a pleasant surprise anyway.
We checked-in to the hostel (and saw the Aussies again) and were allocated a 4-bed room sharing with a Malaysian guy from California called Song. After dumping our bags we decided to head into town and jumped on a bus where once again we bumped into the Aussies. We spent a couple of hours wandering round the town, had more pizza and a few beers in a nice bar playing house music. We walked home as the busses seem to stop running at about 8pm, it took about a half hour, I called my father to wish him happy birthday – an odd experience wandering around in France talking to my dad, cool all the same.
Back at the hostel we met a big odd guy who told me that my name ‘Ash’ has the same pronunciation as the letter ‘H’ in French, his only solution is that I should get another name. He seemed a bit odd but harmless all the same. We both slept fitfully through the night, doing our best to get used to new surroundings.