So I just got back from my 9-days-holiday. This year I went to France on a 'surfing'-vacation with a bunch of friends. Let me tell you, I can not recommend to go surfing.

Most important reason being that it is a very tough sport. Carrying the surfboards to the surfspot alone is already a big trouble and annoyance. The surfboards are just too large for their weight. They catch a lot of wind and water so that if you don´t point them in the direction of the currents, they start rotating and it´s hard to get them back to their original position.

Then once you´re at your surfspot, getting in sea is another big trouble. That is, if the waves are good. With low waves, it´s not so hard, but you can´t do much surfing either. With good waves however, it can be really hard. On one day for example, the waves were about 2.5 meters high, which looks very nice for surfing. But it was almost impossible to get into the sea with waves like that. Every time you thought you were finally at a decent distance from the beach, you´re board got taken by a wave and that took you all the way back to the beach ("square one"). In a whole hour, I think I caught about three waves. Which was pretty good considering some people couldn´t even catch one. Luckily, the other days weren´t that bad, but it´s always still very heavy.

Anyway, once you´re finally in a good position and you start pedalling to catch a wave, the most diffecult part came: Standing up. You gotta do this pretty fast and it´s so hard to keep your balance while you´re being pushed forward by a wave. After a whole week of lessons and practicing, I´ve only seen 2 people of our group of 10 managing to stand on a board for longer than 1 second and go for a few meters before falling off (myself included). I know someone else had lessons for three weeks a couple of years ago and even she couldn´t manage to stand up. So you really can´t learn to surf in less than a couple of weeks, but I was hoping that I would be a decent amateur surfer at the end of the holiday.

To summarize my opinion on surfing in one sentence: It´s a whole lot of trouble for very little fun. Still, the deal we had wasn´t bad since we paid less than 100 euro´s for a full week of lessons and material hiring. And I´m still glad to have done it once in my life.

The rest of the vacation was nice, beside the fact that our friendsgroup was split up and put in caravans on either sides of the camping. That was just ridiculous, but the arrogant French dick who owned the camping thought that foreign youngsters always caused trouble so he wanted to have them separated. Ironically enough, it were a bunch of French guys behind us who made the most noise in the middle of the night. Anyway, the rest was nice like I said. We had good weather, the food was good and cheap and our trip to the Spanish harbour city San Sebastian was awesome. If you´re ever on the north coast of Spain, I can recommend you pay San Sebastian a visit. Even a non-city-trip-fan like myself enjoyed it there and the food there is really good and relatively cheap.

Anyway, now I´m back home after a long bustrip with a whole month of absolutely nothing to do. First thing I´m gonna do today is go to the local DVD store and buy a shitload of DVD's. There are so many movies I still wanna watch, but I never had the time to do so. So I thought now would be a good time.

My wanted list currently consists of:
-Goodfellas
-Slumdog Millionaire
-Snatch.

Movies I have/bought:
-Requiem For A Dream
-Fargo
-Kung Fu Panda
-The Big Lebowski
-The Shawshank Redemption
-No Country For Old Men
-Scarface
-LA Confidential
-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
-The Dark Knight
-Full Metal Jacket
-The Prestige
-Office Space
-The Wall
-Reservoir Dogs
-Wall.E
-Saving Private Ryan
-Space Cowboys
-Vanilla Sky
-Unforgiven
-The Aviator
-Magnolia
-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
-V for Vendetta

If anyone else has any recommendations for great movies, I´ll be glad to hear them :)