I fondly remember warm evenings on a terrace in the south of France overlooking the Mediterranean, watching the sun sink, glass of local red wine in hand, and full of fabulous food. Ah the good life!!
The reality was a minimum of two bottles of wine, the food on top would wake me with palpitations in the middle of the night so I would toss and tuen and wake up exhausted and hung over. I would need a toilet in the middle of a strange French town the next day to relieve my battered innards and be terrified I wouldn't find one in time. And I would be so freaked and wired that my more or less useable French would come out in stammers and stutters because my brain was fried and my anxiety levels off the scale!
Oh how we fool ourselves!