Stranded in Brest

The weather made us stay in Brest for some days.
We got our well deserved rest days and managed to walk around a bit and be off the boat.
While i am used to travelling, this way of slowly travelling through southern Europe with stops in multiple random places per country shows you even nuanced differences i didnt expect between countries and cultures. For example the availability of vegetarian supplements: in Portugal mostly not a problem, in spanish supermarkets mistly not existing, in France: they have but only like whole meal ones like burger patties. Just vegetarian sliced "meat" for sandwhiches - impossible. Nothing.
Or that while in Germany you cant find food after 10pm, in Spain restaurants open at 9pm, i k ew that. But that in France vetween 2pm and 7pm its impossible to find food, i didnt know.
- Stereotypes are not great, but usually true. 4 days in Brest and i remember more of my 4 years of french classes from high school, than i ever anticipated. Cause 99% of the people i spoke with did not just refuse to speak english, they also fuöly refused to understand even the simplest words. We had a guy asking us if we speak english in french 3-4 times - at some point Kiarash understood him and while i thought it seemed a bit ride at first his reply was perfect : Why do you ask me in french if i speak english??
In the end it didnt help us, cause the guy didnt speak english..
Other than that what we collectively learned that google reviews might sometimes be helpful to identify good food places, but not always. In Brest we had bad luck, every single time. I was hopefuö for french cuisine but somehow every café and restaurant we went to served really bad food and drinks. Only some good IPA we found, in a bar we went to to steal wifi.

Some hours of my time in Brest also went into plannning. Since next week i have another trip, to London, with my family planned, i have to be back on the 30th. Since our boat had so many issues and also the weather was giving us a hard time, i had to come to terms with the fact that i will not be able to complete the trip all the way back to Kiel as planned (the current ETA is the evening of the 31st). I played with the thought of being dropped of in Calais and take a ferry over the English Channel, but then my mum (luckily!) reminded me, that i need my actual passport to enter the UK. I am always a bit disappointed when, with my level of travel routine and experience these things happen to me, but also i want to blame the stupid UK politics for this a bit also.
But doesnt matter, it just means i spent some hours researching how to get from northern France to the North of Germany in the most cost and time efficient way, in the next couple days. I saw "cheap" (350€) plane connections taking 39 hours flying from Paris to Gran Canaria and then Hamburg, or insanely expensive train connections. In the end i opted for flixbus, 24 hours with one stop..
Another journey in itself i get to lool forward to tomorrow.

Some things i noticed:
- on the boat time just passes faster. There is always something to do. Yesterday after sleeping in twe had breakfast, planned the rest of our route and went for the next big grocery shop (by now, we are a routined team and working our way through a shopping list time efficiently is no problem) - and then it was already dinner time.
- so being on a boat is a good way to travel and see places, but in the end uou mostly see the areas around the harbours.On off days you are usually to exhausted to walk around, habe to fix the boat or prepare for leaving to be on the water again. I didnt come on this trip expecting to really get to see the cities we stop in, but i also on this trip really learned to understand the saying "its good to have an end to journeu towards, but its the journey that matters in the end". Sailing has very little to do with arriving and everything to do with being on the way. Also cause with the rotating shifts, different sleep and eating routines, but also the depemdability on wind and water (making it impossible to plan accurately), you fully lose track of time and that slows down life a lot.Læs mere