Rififi chez Renfe

Sorry, wet leaves yesterday, wet flowers today! Still raining. Apart from my wonderful yoga class (still so pleased to have found it), it's been a very frustrating day. The plan for this weekend was to go back to France for choir practice, setting off tomorrow to allow extra time for the inevitable problems that arise whenever I travel by train. 

When I got back from yoga, an email from Renfe popped into my inbox: "Your train is cancelled because of strikes in France." When I looked at the SNCF site, it claimed the train was running (it's a joint Spanish-French service). I rang Renfe and spoke to a human being. "It's cancelled." Who to believe? To cut a long story short, I spent most of the afternoon bouncing between unintuitive websites and both French and Spanish customer "support", becoming increasingly enraged and frustrated. 

In the end I cancelled the whole journey, but despite Renfe telling me there would be no charge because it was due to a strike, I was charged nearly 80 euros for it. Grr! S served me wine and aperos to lessen the pain. Too exhausted to go to intercambio in the rain ... we watched a film instead. Jules Dassin's Rififi: brilliant! Why had I never heard of it till someone mentioned it as a black and white classic on Twitter the other day?