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.