Beaune

I'm currently in the small town of Beaune, 20 minutes south of Dijon by train, in the French region of Burgundy (French: Bourgogne). I'm here basically to taste wine - Beaune is the wine capital of Burgundy, which produces France's chardonnay and pinot noir wines - but it doesn't hurt that Beaune is a pretty little medieval town, complete with fortified city walls and stunning, perfectly preserved buildings from the 1400s.

I'm staying in a hotel and should be having a relaxing time, but I'm not. There's a few reasons for this. Firstly, almost nobody here speaks English. I was expecting it to be packed with English-speaking tourists, but in fact it's packed with FRENCH tourists. This tends to reduce the experience of tasting wine to similar to drinking wine by yourself, at home.

Secondly, on the way out of Beaune station, I caught the edge of my shoe on one of the stairs and fell heavily to the landing below, with my heavy pack strapped to my back. I was frankly lucky not to break any bones, but I'm undamaged. I can't say t he same for my laptop, though. The screen "broke", by which I mean that it (or possibly just the touchscreen stuff on top) cracked but still works completely fine. I'm not sure about the wireless, though. When I try to connect to the hotel network, or a couple other nearby networks, it simply ignores the connection attempt. I did easily connect to (but didn't have the key for, so no IP) another nearby network, suggesting that the wireless card still works. The rest of the computer is fine, so it would be weird for the wireless to break in such a limited way. I'm thinking it's probably a protocols problem. The only computer in here is a Mac, which would fit with that theory. If anyone knows what the problem might be, drop me a line. In the meantime I'm forced to use this French keyboard, which in typical iconoclastic French style, has several important letters moved around, including "a" and "m", slowing my usual fast paced typing to a crawl.

ANYWAY...

The third thing is that the wine has so far been pretty average and wildly overpriced. I'm hoping this is because I've hit the tourist traps. The all day tour I'm doing tomorrow - with an English couple as guides - will hopefully both deal with the no-English problem and reveal the hidden wine secrets of Burgundy. We'll see. In any case, the day after that I'm off to Interlaken, which will definitely cure any problems with boredom.