Exploring What Isn't Meant to be Explored

     I have no idea where I should begin on this post. I feel like so much has happened in the last week or so, and it is already hard to remember all the details. I guess I could start off with what happened the most recently. On Saturday, most of the Davidson group participated in an excursion with the Institut de Touraine that went to two chateaux. After meeting at the bus at 8:30 am in the morning, the group of maybe 40 students and Dufresne (professor extraordinaire), the bus drove for about an hour to reach Cheverny. This castle was very much cool, but the adventurous nature of us college students craved for more. What we found was this: hunting dogs galore! They were at once adorable, and at the same time depressing. For the most part, these dogs were not very young (puppies), and they had sad, droopy eyes. They also smelt terrible. It was kind of like a mixture of dog bath and poop. Weird. In a bad way. But the amount of interest the dogs had in all of the people was so cute. Plus, they were dogs, which are awesome, and helped me get some dog back into my life.
     This was the most exciting part of the visit to Cheverny for me, so heading back to the bus was not to bad. Back in my seat with about -3inches of space between my knees and the seats in front of me, we headed to Blois for lunch. I packed a pique-nique so I wouldn't need to buy a sandwich, but when we got there, our group headed to find a boulanger for either a sandwich for lunch, or a pain au chocolat for dessert. After picking up our supplies, we just kind of wandered through some streets and found a big staircase. Of course, we needed to know what you could see from the top, so we made our way up and found ourselves at a great lunch eating spot. It overlooked the Saturday morning market, and provided a good table for my lunch consisting of a ham and butter sandwich (yes, that is a popular thing, and when I told my family that I made a sandwich without butter last time they sort of freaked a little), a clementine, compote (applesauce in a pouch, but a little different, and better), coca, and little cookie things. Since we had over an hour before we needed to be back at the bus, our group made our way down to the river. It was pretty big, so we said, "Why not cross this huge bridge?" Once across, we could a lot of Blois, including the church next to which we parked the bus. With about 15 minutes until departure, we thought it might be a good life choice to head back across the bridge, up the hill through the town, and back to the bus. Having a tall steeple to guide us back, it didn't take too long, so with a couple minutes left, we sat down in the cathedral for a few minutes. Yes, we sat down in the cathedral instead of just going to find the bus. In retrospect, maybe not the best way of doing that. With our feet a little rested, we walked back behind the church to where the bus was parked. But it was gone! And there was nothing where a building used to be. What happened? Turns out we went to the wrong church. So two minutes past the time we were supposed to be back, we start our journey across a new part of town to hopefully find the bus before Dufresne gets upset. Blake, being the good guy he is, asked a man where the church (which Quincy remembered the name I believe) and he helped guide us in the general direction. It turns out we weren't terribly far from the church, and Dufresne even said that he never gets mad because of lost people. Good to know for future excursions. So finally, we got back to the bus.
     After a pretty short ride, we arrive on the property of Chambord. To get in, you must drive through a gap in a wall surrounding the land that is 33km long. They made the wall to keep critters in when they do "la chasse" aka go hunting. Chambord is amazing. It is huge, looks really cool, and has less security measures, maybe because it is something like 20,000 m² in 427ish rooms. Technically, the public can see a number of rooms that is significantly smaller. As I mentioned earlier, we are a pretty adventurous group. The start of our adventures was in a small yellow room adjoining the room that I called dibs on for my future bedroom. In this room were a few little trinkets, but also a brown door. *Cue dramatic music* Upon further investigation, it was discovered that this door was closed, but because of the way they made the lock, it was possible to undo with my just fingers. So, with me being nervous about my first time, I got Blake to go in to see what was there. I stood guard by the almost closed door, and when he came back, all I heard was "There's stairs." This definitely peaked my curiosity. As I slipped behind the door during a brief period of time when nobody else was in the room, I glanced at a staircase leading upwards, to who knows what. Well, I do. As do Blake, Erin, Mary, and Jane. This staircase led up to what seemed to be some sort of office. It was a series of three rooms. The first was empty, with a good amount of light coming from the window. The second, however, had no light, and was filled with very random objects. Across the room, one could see two posters of human skeletons, providing an ample amount of fear for us adventurers. The third room was similar to the first, just with those posters. As we went back down the stairs to find the rest of the group, Blake and I got stuck. There was nobody to tell us when to go out of the room, and we could only see through a very tiny crack between the door and wall. After a minute or two of waiting for 3 guys to leave, we decided to just hope they didn't care, and as Blake opened the door, they headed out of the room, never seeing us come in. It was absolutely perfect timing. After showing the room to the others, we continued our tour of the chateau. Much to our dismay, pretty much every door was locked. In one room, we may or may not have used a paperclip and swiss army knife to try and pick a lock we thought was simple, but we were unsuccessful in our endeavor. After a long period of bad luck, we went up some stairs to a level of the castle with a little gate barring our passage to the unknown. I had tried to push it when I first saw it, but when I saw some of the others (not in the LOST sense) walking around the balcony, I knew that I just needed to push harder. I managed to open the gate, and what lied behind was both amazing and absurd. First, we encounter a staircase that leads both up and down. Which direction to choose? Up of course, it is always a contest to see how high up in the castle you can get. Turns out, this only led to a locked door much more complicated than the last, so Paisley, Blake, and I took a picture in front of the door to remember our accomplishment. There left only one possibility: go down, down as far as you can. Only Blake and I were brave enough to complete the journey, so as our two wandering souls ventured downwards, we had some good bro-bonding time. At every level, there was a door that opened up to the side, with a series of rooms. All of these rooms seemed to be getting remodeled with new flooring, and the walls looked like dry wall getting painted. One opening led to another hallway with a wooden staircase, but apart from a light at the top, which made me really nervous because I thought someone would be there, that was it. So for those halls, nothing exciting. My biggest regret from our adventure was not going down a hallway that was finished, and appeared to be lined with offices or some type of small room, most of which had lights shining under the doors. At the end of the hall, there was some sort of staircase or new room which I wished we had looked at, but we did not want to get caught by someone. So we continued trekking down the stairs. Then all of a sudden, we made it. We reached the ground floor of this tower. Actually, we had to walk through a small passage first, then we were on the ground floor, behind a set of giant doors that might shelter vehicles at other times. There was another staircase here, but we didn't make it very far because we realized that we did not have much time left before we needed to get out of the castle. So we left. As we finished our tour of the castle, we found a room with a fire burning, helping us warm our bodies in such a frigid place. (Chateaux are cold because they are huge, don't have insulation, and are only heated with fires, so rooms without fires are just stone freezers)
     All in all, I would say that Chambord is a pretty sick chateau, and now on the top of my list of favorite chateaux. My life in Tours is not quite as exciting as that day was, but always know that I am doing something new and fun, because, why not?


P.S. Sorry this took so long to post, I wrote almost all of it Monday before going to bed, and I lost my interent Tuesday, and this is my first time back on a computer. Hopefully I get it back soon because I actually did all my homework the other night because I had nothing else to distact me. Weird.

What Up 2 Star Hotel

     Look over at the sidebar and observe the size of the scroll thingy. Yeah, get excited for a (kind of) long post. So, it has been a while since my last (and first) post. Logically, that would mean that a lot of things have happened in my life in France, and for some reason, logic works the same way in France. I have had so much time for activities, it's ridiculous.

Hotel de Ville, Tours

 Yeah, that's a picture. I bought a new camera. 

     So, class started, and it is fine: a lot of time, but not stressful. It consists of language courses focused on oral and written comprehension and production. Also, there is an art history course with an awesome teacher. In addition, I am taking an international relations type course and literature course with the Davidson group. We haven't really gotten into any real material in any of these yet, so I guess I will update those later. 

     As for last weekend, the highlight was going to visit our first two chateaux. I don't want to find accents. Sorry I'm not sorry. The names, in order, were Langeais and Azay-le-Rideau. I didn't yet own a camera, so Wikipedia should do the trick. Also, on the Langeais page, you might notice an image of figures at the wedding of Anne of Brittany to Charles VIII. These are in the coolest part of the castle. While the room itself was not anything special, just kind of big, it was the show that was put on that made it fun. They had a slide show of images of the figures following the story of the wedding, lighting up different people at different times. This was not a very busy day to be visiting the castle either. Since nobody was in the room, and I like to see how soft different things are, I thought it might be interesting to hop over the rope that may or may not have been there, in order to mingle with some historical figures. While the lights went down at the start of the show, I scurried over to one of the people, and pretended to be part of the show, trying to follow the lights and observing the figures up close. It was very fun, and because of the low security, I voted that as my favorite castle of the day. Next, we went to Azay-le-Rideau. It was a very cool building with great architecture, however, it's security was over the top. There were ropes to guide you through the castle, and everything in every room was somehow monitored. Virtually every chair in the entire castle had wires making it so you couldn't rest your legs for a little bit. Really? The most bizarre thing about the security was a dining room where there were no ropes or wires, but somehow, it knew if you touched something. If you did, something made a loud noise that could be heard for a few rooms. It was unnecessarily protected. 

This is how natives take the train. I know, it's creepy.

A pensieve! Are we in Dumbledore's office?

     During the past week, I was either in class or walking around Tours, doing nothing really exciting. Fast forward to yesterday, aka Saturday. We planned a trip to Bordeaux! This was the first time leaving Tours, and doing something new. We had a train at 8 a.m., which explains why those girls are so sleepy. It took just under 3 hours to get there, so we had a little time to kill before we were able to check into our 2 star hotel. Sounds fancy right? No, but that is for later. Upon arriving, we started walking. Nobody knew where exactly, but it kept us maybe just a little bit warmer. We stopped in a few cathedrals to see some cool gothic architecture, all of which had pensieves, as shown on the right! What was more unique was the 231 steps we climbed to get to a panoramic view of Bordeaux. Keep in mind that the steps were about 2 feet wide, so allowing people to pass and passing people going the other direction took patience and care.  

Stained glass

So after making it up the stairs of what may have once been Gryffindor Tower, we made it to a nice panoramic view of the city. This was cool, but would have been nicer had it not been a completely gray skied day. Blue skies are few and far between. The buildings looked a lot nicer from above as well. 

Bordeaux 

After dropping our bags off in the hotel room, we headed back out into the city to explore more. We never did really make plans of what to do. After a little walking, we stumbled upon a chocolate/sweets store. It wasn't your average store though, they featured live animals in the windows.

An antelope eating macarons off of a tree! What?!

There were lots of little shops along the streets of Bordeaux, enabling us to just wander and see where we ended up. One of the interesting things for me was the process of Christmas tree disposal. Basically, whenever you don't want your tree, you put it into a little area. Then, I guess, somebody comes and takes it. My only question is this: why not burn them?

Christmas tree disposal

This pile of tress, one of many, could easily provide a few minutes of warmth to the homeless. I can't even imagine how awesome throwing a match into here would have been, and trust me, it crossed my mind several times. At this time, we started to get a little rumbly in our tumblies. We now had a set mission: find a not too expensive restaurant with hopefully good food. We found one, but sadly it didn't open for another hour, so we went to a wine cafe type place. We each ordered a glass of wine, and I can now say that I have had a wine that I like. It was Loupiac for any connoisseurs out there. After this, we headed to the restaurant. My order was as follows (selected from lists to create a fixed price meal): a sort of french onion soup, then a foufillet (?) not exactly sure what the waitress said it was (and I didn't know it came with fries) with a bordelais sauce, and for desert, a rich, chocolate gateau or something. I am bad with small details if you didn't already figure that out. To accompany the main course, I had some sort of red wine, picked by  not me. All in all, I really liked the meal, and was satisfied with my first real restaurant experience.

My main course, and I did eat one leaf of lettuce

After dinner, we just went to a bar somewhere to warm up, and for me, watch soccer. Then we returned to the hotel room. Joy.

This is the entire room, with a terrible bed. 

We ended up having four people in this room, which had one blanket and two pillows total, so it was an experience, but it was really fun. I may need a couple of nights to fully catch up on my sleep, but it was worth it, and I am glad we stayed there. 

France is still amazing, everything is great here, and hope all is well back home. But until (insert number of days here), peace out.

Bienvenue a Tours!

I will start of by explaining the title of my blog: it was the first thing I bought in Tours, and I have had ham (jambon) in both of my dinners as well, so I thought, why not.

The journey here was quite exciting. First, my parents and I drove up to the Charlotte airport from home, and then I did the whole thing and ended up at the gate with about two and a half hours to spare before takeoff. I then proceeded to kill time on my phone. Eventually, I was in the plane, waiting to take off. It had no delays, and there was not a long line of planes waiting. During the flight, I watched the movie "Water for Elephants," which was alright, I thought it was kind of boring. I also watched "Wallstreet: Money Never Sleeps" during which I fell asleep for maybe an hour. That was the total amount of sleep I got that night. Upon landing, it took Quincy and I a while to figure out exactly where we were supposed to meet the rest of the group, but when we realized we needed to go through customs after we got our baggage--aka a hallway with guys holding semiautomatic rifles--everything was fine. We had some down time while we waited for the last member of our group (Ashley) to arrive on her delayed flight which is when we received our phones. After taking a short shuttle to the train station, we got a quick rundown of how the train system works in France, and then got our surprise first class tickets. The train ride was about two hours, and a lot more comfortable than the plane. After reaching Tours, my host dad was waiting at the station to walk me home.

My living situation is as follows: I live in a 3-story town house, with two parents, their 20 year old son, 18 year old nephew, and another guy who lives here and works with the nephew, but I think he works or something because he and the nephew have to leave the house around 7:50 every morning. They all seem to be very pleasant, and the parents are especially kind, and very easy to talk with. The son can even pronounce the "th" of my name (unlike most french people), and taught the mom to say it as well. I have eaten well, even eating the salad they have provided at both dinners--albeit I only ate about four leaves, or whatever you call individual lettuce. It was not very good, but the main courses have been good. I must say that the cereal they provided me with was too sweet, even for me. It was a chocolatey oat cereal with white, milk and dark chocolate chips mixed in. So basically, it is a chocolate cereal with half a bar of chocolate broken up in it.

Right now I am waiting to go to bed before the first day of class tomorrow. We will find out our course level based on our placement test that we finished today, and then we will get a schedule of classes that we can take. Based on what Dr. Kruger said, I think I will take mainly classes offered for Davidson students because those all sound very interesting, and in a couple weeks, the University starts back up and I may take a course there just to see what it is like. Who knows.

To sum up: I made it here safely, I love it, I haven't really started doing anything important, and hope the rest of the week goes well.

I also lost my camera in the Charlotte airport. Fail on my part.

Keith