My birthday :)

I love my birthday, and this was a very special one.

The photo is a ridiculously-sized panorama but I just wanted to put the whole thing up as it will remind me of the place we spent the day, above the beach, under the trees and away from the crowds. On the right hand side, if you look really hard, you can see a pink spot - that was our picnic spot for the day :)

Because I'd been rather distracted with recent events and lost track of days of the week, let alone dates of the month, I only realised a few days in advance of my birthday that it was coming up so soon. Cue a generic Facebook invitation to everyone I know in Bordeaux (not many) to do "something, somewhere, this weekend". Of course everyone already had plans, most of which involved being nowhere near Bordeaux. In my fragile state I suddenly felt very alone (even though the rational part of me knew that if I'd organised it more than three days in advance I probably could have had a big ol' party).

But my two best friends here had reserved the weekend for me. In the end, what started off as a pleading "Are either of you still free...? Wanna come over...?" from me, became a "Let's spend the weekend camping on the beach, I know a beautiful spot, we can swim in the day and stargaze at night!" from them. In the end I planned almost nothing, paid for almost nothing, they organised the entire weekend, did all the planning, thinking, shopping and packing, and (as two's company and any more's a party) with a boyfriend, another friend and three dogs it became a really lovely party.

The most amazing thing was this: while the two days were beautifully sunny with not a cloud in the sky, when we wanted to do our bit of stargazing last night, we went down to the beach in the middle of the night and realised it had become overcast and we couldn't see any stars. Then we noticed that the sea was sparkling ever so slightly. We went closer, started paddling, and realised that it was absolutely full of fluorescent algae, which glow an electric blue when they're agitated. We discovered that when you walk through them, it literally looks like you're making trails of stars with your feet. It was absolutely magical. All of us were beside ourselves with excitement - we'd all heard about the algae and had all wanted to see them but none of us had realised they were in this region, right on our doorstep. We spent hours paddling and splashing around in the glowing water.

It was like the sea had given me stars for my birthday :) I'll never forget it.