fontainbleau

i think i am going to start associating the name 'andreas' with excruciating physical pain.
a few years ago the guy decided to teach me how to ride a bike, so that i could go on the "little bike tour" he had planned...i learned to ride a bike, the tour lasted for 64 kilometres, i couldnt move the next day, and i havent been on a bike since....so i had an idea of what was awaiting me when andreas, visiting paris for 2 weeks, decided he wanted to go for a day to fontainbleau. until he told me, i had no idea that fontainbleau was the home of world bouldering...and that the international bouldering rating system was developped right here, 1 hour from my home...this great gaffe in my bouldering knowledge is no doubt due to the fact that i didnt know that there was such a sport as bouldering....until andreas informed me, of course....
so off we went to fountainbleau acompanyed by a friend of andreas's from his language school...we drove to some spot near fontainbleau-the-very-small-town, parked the car, and headed for the rocks, with alcohol, sandwiches, smelly french cheese, wierd climbing shoes, and a crash pad. the wierd climbing shoes didnt really fit me, and in the end i climbed with my bare-but-chalked feet.
bouldering is fucking hard. andreas scales 15 metre rocks like it was a perfectly easy affair. but in reality it was quite complex...at least for me...being short was also not an advantage for the most part...
after a few hours, we took a rest, parked ourselves in the sand and ate. we also consumed a bottle of wine which provided the inspiration for the second round of climbing....hanging upside down from a small ledge seems more possible with wine in the stomach i guess.
i wasnt brilliant, but i didnt humilate myself as much as i had feared that i would...my greatest accomplishment was a 3b, the 3b+ was too much for me, i kept falling off...i propose as my excuse that i was very tired by that point, and thus incapable of executing the leap-while-attached-to-a-ledge that would have been necessary to overcome my natural vertically challenged state....that is of course, an excuse, but i am trying to salvage my pride.....(both of the guys managed it....but they are taller!)
there is something exhilarating about getting to the top of one of those boulders, i admit...we clibed until it got dark, drank some more wine and headed for paris
i dont imagine i will go bouldering again in my immediate future...unless of course, i am once again hauled off by andreas...
but now i smell like a stable....no one sat next to me on the RER....very bad sign
pictures of all of us wincing to follow