We left Aix-en-Provence feeling very smug for having found €4 bus tickets to Marseille as opposed to the €40 train tickets.

Of course, the service left a little something to be desired: in Marseille the driver shut his doors and proceeded to drive off whilst we were still tugging our packs out of the luggage compartment. We managed to rescue the backpacks but he left with our most precious cargo of all - the food bag. (You’d think our passports would be our most precious cargo, but that’s what embassies are for, right?)

Anyway, in this cataclysmic moment all of Kylie’s past 400 metres training finally came to fruition - she was off like a rocket after the bus, dodging cars and taxis with blaring horns, weaving in and out of dumpsters and leaping over stray dogs like they were carefully placed hurdles.

There was a tense moment as myself and a small crowd of onlookers watched with bated breath as she finally leapt on board, only to have the bus driver close the doors and simply keep on going.But at the next traffic lights she was off again, food bag waved triumphantly aloft, and our small gathering of spectators burst into spontaneous applause. One of her finest moments.

Far better than the time she booked us tickets to Bratislava thinking it was in Austria, anyway.

I’m familiar with the till chat. As an Aussie, when I first moved to Europe I was thrown by the terseness of German checkout chicks and chucks, who all looked suspiciously militant and liked throwing your groceries on the ground if you weren’t quick enough to bag them…needless to say, when my German boyfriend first came to Sydney it drove him up the wall, having to blather on at the Woollies register about the weather and how bloody crap those Poms are at cricket. But he learned…!

Continuing our southbound journey, we made for Aix-en-Provence. Given that we’d heard it was supposedly one of the most beautiful landscapes in southern France, we were kind of expecting…well, beautiful landscapes.

Whether it had something to do with the toy kangaroo having fallen off my backpack earlier that day being a bad omen I’ll never know, but the train pulled up somewhere in deepest Arizona. It was like a barren, desert wasteland.After some minor train station dramas, it transpired that the idea was to catch a bus into town, which was still another good drive away (because, you see, Aix-en-Provence train station is not actually anywhere near Aix-en-Provence).

Eventually we arrived it what was quite a nice old town - not as beautifully restored as Lyon but with the same sort of character, although the periphery was rubbish (literally).

The old walled quarter was great though, all the typical little cobbled alleyways, people’s washing strung up across the streets and shrunken old men with accordions in every corner.

We followed our riveting little map from the tourist office devotedly: ‘To your left you’ll see a medieval building with a particularly interesting wooden door. On your right is a house with a lovely wooden staircase inside…’ Having arrived on a Sunday didn’t do much for the place either - only a few cafes and bars were open, barely any buses were running and we had to wait hours to get into the youth hostel. Verdict: worth a look, but only with highly entertaining traveling companions (lots of them), and don’t go on a Sunday.

I’ve gone down this road, so I might as well blog the full trip for posterity’s sake. Needless to say, we didn’t hang about long in Dijon. Next stop, Lyon.

Strolling through the cobbled streets of the quaint old city, we thought we’d died and gone to dessert crepe heaven. We’d arrived mid-afternoon weary and slightly lacklustre, and had taken ourselves off in a somewhat dejected state in search of - what else - food. Cake, preferably.

Our hostel, as it turned out, was located right of the edge of the old city wall, and as we picked our way through the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre, we suddenly popped out into an orchard where the birds were singing, waterfalls flowing and the flowers, erm…flowering.The views of the whole city were just spectacular. We followed the little windy path down into the alleyways of the old city, dodging buskers, fruit sellers and artists with their easels set up on street corners.

Everywhere we turned the locals of Lyon forced us to dispel the myth of the French being snooty little snoots - everyone was tossing around jovial ‘bonjours’ and pressing their chocolate crepes into our hands. There were ice cream flavours I’ve never even heard of (possibly because they were in French).

Finally we settled in a jolly little courtyard wash our salmon salads down with Baileys as Kylie, my trusty traveling companion, chose that precise moment to have a small nervous breakdown over the tragedy of her latest heartbreak.She’d met him in Italy, a visiting Aussie rugby player (’I swear, he did have a neck though! And an engineering degree, and biceps like dinner plates…’), and by all accounts he was the perfect guy with the perfect everything. Including the perfect wife.’But did I mention he had biceps like dinner plates…?’

Moaning in my last post about the pitfalls of daily life abroad harked me back to the unpleasant business of expectation. Expecting that everything abroad is plum, that is, when in fact it’s sometimes plain old bran, or even, at times, off mustard. Which leads me to Dijon.

I’ve spent more than a few nights in Towns of Death, Europe, and Dijon, France was one of them.

Possibly better known as the Home of Dijon Mustard, the town itself was quite pretty in parts and I was pottering about one Friday night some time back with my mate Kylie. Our choice of entertainment was restricted to a theatre called ‘des Abbattoir’ and what looked like a rollerblading convention for over-70s in the town square.

Our hostel was supposedly in a state of mid-restoration, but ‘throes of demolition’ might have been a more apt term. The wallpaper was on the floor and the carpet on the ceiling, and our room (and the toilets and showers, for that matter) had no lights, and was the smallest broom closet in the darkest corner of the furthest corridor of the longest building. Not a single employee spoke English and all looked like they’d just stepped off the set of the Addams Family.

We offloaded our packs, creating a few new and satisfyingly gaping holes in the walls in the process, threw ourselves onto our bunks and nibbled dejectedly on the disappointingly deflated croissants we’d purchased earlier in the day, pondering what could possibly have possessed the interior designers to choose such a particularly confronting shade of psychedelic blue.

But we didn’t scale the pinnacle of true dejection until the dessert we’d splurged on thinking it was cheesecake turned out to be custard tart: woe is us.

It seems some countries have given up on conquering the language barrier and just gone for signs instead. Check this one out at More Than Sun and Paella (another good blog I came accross) … nothing but an exclamation mark.

My favourite sign is still the one I saw on a train toilet in China, saying “Beware of Nipping Hand”. I can only imagine it was referring to the door that shuts quite violently, but it’s not something you really want to be picturing as you lower your backside into a squat loo…..

Since the language barrier is likely to be something of a recurring theme here, there’s a classic tale that must be told (for those of you that haven’t seen it already). I consider the posting of this as revenge: I did, after all, once walk into a German bank and ask where the tellers were. A regular question, to you and me; to our friends the Germans, it comes off as a slightly out-of-place enquiry as to the whereabouts of one’s crockery (teller being the German word for plate)…

Hairdressers are not the only hazardous undertakings abroad. Supermarkets in foreign countries, in fact, are always, always there to make foreigners feel vaguely retarded and utterly in the way. They should certainly come with handbooks and possibly also tour guides.

France, I’m not picking on you. I’ve always felt awed by your many cheeses but I am pacified by the fact that grog can be bought in your supermarkets. This is also the case in German and Dutch supermarkets – it does, not, however, redeem the wearers of the lederhosen and their near cousins of the many other harsh realities that foreigners must contend with amid their aisles.

In German supermarkets, for example, and Dutch ones too, you must pay for the privilege of using a trolley. Admittedly, you get the money back upon its safe return, but this does not make up for having to queue for small change, weigh your own fruit and veg, and bring your own carry bags.

Also – and this may come as a shock to some, so brace yourself – in Germany, product labels are cunningly written in German, a discovery which over the years has caused me hours of consternation and sordidly misshapen food. Try miming the use of self-raising flour to a wary shop assistant, or demonstrating a hefty nose blow in a packed pharmacy in the hope of procuring some tissues.

And don’t even get me started on the trouble with locating tampons.

Even the most well-practised reminisces, though, don’t keep me from everyday life in the Netherlands. Today I took the plunge and let a Dutchman cut my hair. More fool me.

With an overdrawn back account and a maxed-out credit card to my name, I opt for an 8 euro unisex student salon wedged between KFC and a fairly sanitary strip joint. Snippy speaks very little English, and me not a word of Dutch, so we get by in broken German. Things go swimmingly with the trim until Snippy turns to me and asks in German if I’ve ever dyed my hair dark. Or so I think. ‘Ja, ja,’ I reply, nodding politely.

Promptly he produces gloves and a thousand bottles of chemicals and rubber busts of female scalps wearing wigs in various shades of very dark brown hair. What the hey, I think to myself. It can’t do any harm.

The dye has only been in my hair for a minute when all at once I feel a terrible burning sensation. It feels like burning, it turns out, because it is burning. The chemicals have had a reaction to my scalp and left me with huge, pussy welts, which I have to endure the pain of while Snippy (who turns out to be an apprentice, at that) finishes colouring the rest of my hair so I don’t have to walk about with zebra stripes as well as looking like a Guy Fawke’s Night victim.

But at least I manage to put my foot down once it’s all over and refuse to pay. This could set a dangerous precedent - next time you don’t want to pay for a service just sustain a small flesh wound in the process. Think of it as collateral damage.

While I’m on the topic, Copenhagen really is all that. It’s very gingerbread: colourful and wooden, with no shortage of charm and baked good varieties.

For some night-time entertainment, the place to go is Tivoli, the world’s oldest amusement park. It’s pretty magical – rides, fireworks, parades – but the problem is that where there are rides, there is the spawn of Satan.

Kids, I mean. I’ve never been good with them. In fact they tend to cry whenever I enter a room, or at the very least, fling soft toys at my head. One night in Tivoli, travelling about with a friend, I got distracted by the pretty lights and sparkly things and wandered off a bit. Suddenly I found myself cornered by a band of miniature Danes in a dark section somewhere between a rollercoaster and the three-legged woman caravan.

They can’t have been more than five, with chocolate smears around their mouths and clutching big wads of fairy floss in their greasy little paws. I was terrified. I sidled to my left, looking for means of escape. They eyed me up and down and sidled cunningly to their right, blocking my path.

And then all of a sudden one of them was upon me, latched onto my leg with a vice-like grip, wailing in a high pitched squeal ‘Og mog tog reg sig ag glug!!!’ or some such. Then she looked tearfully up into my blank face as I said ‘erm?’ At this she drew a big shaky, chocolatey breath and wailed again, this time in English - ‘Are you my mummy?’

It was unfathomable – well bright enough to address me in a foreign language yet not so as to clock on that I hadn’t, in fact, bred her.

Meanwhile, the other three were trying to scale my legs like I was some sort of climbing frame. But I was prepared to defend my gelato with my life. I had five scoops of peppermint on that thing.