Cow, Wind Turbine, Chateau... Repeat.

I had a fabulous weekend in Nantes with Emily (a friend from UPS who is also a Theta)! I was able to get all of my homework for Monday done Thursday night, so I just brought a little reading for Tuesday with me incase I was bored on the train. Friday I took the metro to Gare Montparnasse and caught the 11am train to Nantes. The ride was only 2 hours and I spent 40 minutes or so dozing and the rest staring out the window, fascinated by French countryside after being in Paris for a month and a half. I felt like I had more culture shock seeing wide-open spaces with trees and cows than adjusting to living in France. I loved looking out the window and seeing not only farm houses, fields and cute small French towns, but also wind power turbines and numerous chateaux (French castles)!! I definitely decided that one of those needs to be on my “To Buy” list…

So I got to Nantes at 1pm and Emily met me at the train station. We hit the ground running and headed over to her IES building because they were taking a field trip to the “Mechanical Island” and I was tagging along. I left my luggage in one of the offices and we took a 10 minute walk over to the island where they have among other things, a giant mechanical elephant!! It was quite cool to see, but a ride on it lasts 40 minutes and we decided it wasn’t that cool. We looked around the rest of the workshop where they had other mechanical animals such as a squid and crab that also moved and squirted water. After we had exhausted the possibilities there we went back to IES to pick up my suitcase and then to Emily’s house to drop it off. She introduced me her host mom who told us she and her husband were heading to their other house for the weekend so we would have the house to ourselves. It was now 3:30 or so and I still had not had lunch so we went to Monoprix and decided to buy a snack and we would have a later dinner. We ate our food at Place Royal… very pretty, I’m sad now I didn’t think to take a picture. On our way back to Emily’s house we stopped to admire wedding dresses in a couple of the store windows. Back at Emily’s we ran into her host mom and dad finishing packing up the car to leave. We went upstairs wasted some time on the computer and then decided at 7 we were tired and needed to nap before going out since we were meeting up with some French friends of Emily’s at 9:30pm for a “verre” (glass of wine). We napped for a little while and finally headed out to dinner at 8:30pm. We found a Thai/ Vietnamese restaurant with reasonable prices and what turned out to be yummy, but smaller portioned food. After dinner we met up with her friend and some of his friends at a small place that was half tea parlor, half bar. I enjoyed it a lot! I introduced Emily to Kir (she got a raspberry flavored one while I stuck to the traditional cassis) and we stayed there until about midnight chatting.

Saturday we met up with another one of Emily’s French friends, Beatrice, and went to the marché (market). We meandered around the stalls and bought lots of fruit (Italian grapes – my favorite! – orange, the most delicious strawberries I have ever tasted – and perhaps the most expensive – pink pomelo – not sure how it was different from grapefruit – and a coing which resembled a pear-apple cross, but tasted like star-fruit to me). We then got sandwiches for lunch and sat at a café and ordered hot chocolate since it was chilly but sunny. By this time Emily and I were exhausted from all the walking and headed home to relax, we spent the afternoon watching old Gossip Girl episodes since Emily just started watching the show. We decided to get Chinese takeout for dinner, a process that took us an hour from leaving the house to get back, but had quite the feast of curry chicken, basil beef and chow mein. The evening was spent watching more gossip girl.

Today we slept in and then had brunch before heading out to see the local chateau and cathedral. We meandered down a couple cute French streets and admired the gothic architecture. A little French park then caught my eye before heading back to her house to pick up my suitcase and head over to the train station. I took the train back into Paris and got a little bit of reading done before falling asleep for most of the rest of the trip.

Now I’ve unpacked and eaten dinner, I might try to do a little more homework before heading to bed. Classes tomorrow again…

Click the title for photos!