Premier Jour

7:15am: Hold on, let me just repeat that: 7:15am.

CRASH! BANG, BANG, BANG, WHIRRR... CRASH!

Wake up in foreign bed in foreign country with foreign war being waged all around. Decide I have probably been in a coma and am suffering from amnesia somewhere in an apocalyptic future.

CRASH! CRASH! ... CRASH!

Decide to attempt movement in case still asleep. Lean over and open window. It feels pretty real. All philosophical thoughts on the nature of reality rapidly vanish as a huge plank of wood comes flying down to join a pile right outside my window.

There is a crane outside my room.

There is a man hammering the wall the other side of my bed.

It is is 7:15am.

That's 6:15am English time.

This is distinctly merde.

Reality

Speak to Francois (accommodation bloke), who reassures me that they are simply touching up the paintwork on the side of the house. Too tired to debate definition of 'paintwork', so go to explore town with Dad and Beth.

We 'do' Chambery's main tourist attractions:

- An elephant fountain: a giant fountain with four very life-like elephants coming out of it.

- The chateau - sadly not open, but spot a row of ground fountains to play with in the summer.

- The cathedral - all the walls are covered in trompe l'oeil paintings, giving the impression of intricately engraved arches and stone carvings. Really trippy - touch a couple to prove to myself that they're not real.

- Memorial gardens

- Skate park - Chambery is keen to get past its image of a bourgeois retirement home.

- Can't find Rousseau's house, so think about him instead and feel literature-ly fulfilled.

Reasons why Chambery is very French

> Every bench has either a collection of old men on it, or a couple engaged in tongue tennis.

> There is a Galeries Lafayette area with mutton-dressed-as-lamb old women caked in bright blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick, complete with little rat-dogs yapping at their stilettos.

> Every 5 metres there is a dog turd. These are conveniently positioned so that you really can't avoid treading on them, unless you do a dance-machine style, hopskotch routine. There's actually quite an interesting range of colours, shapes and textures. You soon learn which are the worst sorts (usually the crusty ones with stiletto holes in from previous victims).

> All the shops shut for at least 2 hours at lunch time. Goodness knows where everyone goes - it's not like they can go shopping in their lunch break.

That said, it's a lovely town. The sun shines, there are enfants climbing trees, I can spot mountains in the distance, and we have dinner in a lovely traditional restaurant. Pudding is a killer: ice cream sandwiched between two giant meringues and draped in chocolate. After a couple of glasses of wine, Dad's French picks up, and he is able to order 'le bill silver plate thank you'.

Day Two

After a final morning of essential patisserie evaluation and How Not to Die in Your First Week driving lessons from the patriarch, my source of money, amusement and food departs back to England.

I merrily head off to the supermarket, which is 5 minutes down the street.

20 minutes later: it still hasn't appeared. I decided to keep walking forward, assuming that it will eventually materialise.

10 minutes later: still no supermarket. I appear to be in the foreign quarter of Chambery, with illegible shop names, dodgy looking characters leaning against walls, and a variety of leaves and smoking devices on sale in every other shop that isn't a takeaway. I speed up to a half-walk, half-jog.

10 minutes later: where the hell am I? Follow a sign to the town centre. It's definitely not Chambery town centre. A hoard of school kids rush past, gold teeth and tattoos glinting alongside their knife blades as they cackle in a foreign tongue. I enter a supermarket to ask for directions, but the shop assistant looks like she'll set her dogs on me if she finds out I'm English, so I buy some hot chocolate and escape.

10 minutes later: having followed a promising-looking bike track down a river, I end up fighting my way through prickly bushes. Maybe it's just an overgrown bike track...I find myself in a small clearing next to a barbed wire fence by the railway. The floor is nicely decorated with broken bottle. My mind full of tetanus and used syringes, I rapidly retreat and call the hubby for directions home from Google Maps. The shame.

Finally get back home to find series of panicky texts from the patriarch asking for translations of various transport-related words. Luckily he made it home more successfully than me!