Tours, Versailles, and Paris in a Weekend

It's Sunday evening here and I just got back from Paris. I figured I should write about my weekend while everything's fresh in my mind!

I left bright and early Friday morning to catch my train to Tours to visit Darcy, and the voyage was pretty uneventful other than the fact that the train was delayed an hour due to signalling trouble (not quite sure what that means). I didn't find it a big deal, but I guess the TGV wants to preserve its reputation so they were giving out discount passes for future trips with them. Somehow I missed getting mine though; I think I was in a rush to switch trains to get my connection to Tours and didn't see the people handing them out.

Anyhow, I arrived in Tours in the early afternoon to find it beautifully warm. Darcy showed me the main areas of town (Hotel de Ville, main square, etc.) and then we wandered to try and find the Musée des Beaux Arts, discovering some neat little streets along the way. The museum was great because it was just the right size. Each of the rooms were fairly small so you weren't overwhelmed with fifty statues or paintings or something, and we managed to see the whole thing in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. not the two weeks it would take to see everything in the Louvre). The museum also had a lovely garden that reminded me of the red queen's garden in Alice in Wonderland, maybe only because I just watched that movie. On our wanderings after the museum we found a fancy clothing store where Darcy wound up buying a fancy fancy dress, and then we headed out for a Mexican food dinner and to a different place for dessert.








So it was a short visit to Tours, but I really liked it! One of the things I loved most was all of the old buildings with the wooden beams. I also loved how the river had natural banks, not cement walls like they put along most city rivers.

Saturday morning we took the train to Paris, where we dropped our stuff at the hostel and took some more transit (metro and the crazy RER I mentioned in my previous post about Paris) out to Versailles. Since we had both already seen inside the main palace we decided to cover the gardens, the Grand Trianon, the Petite Trianon, and Marie-Antoinette's Hamlet (all smaller buildings on the other end of the grounds). It was a half hour walk from the palace just to get to the Grand Trianon! It's another --smaller-- palace where Louis XIV (or maybe XVI, I can never remember because they look almost the same when I'm reading captions) went to escape the main château if he ever felt it was too much. Of course this place was still way bigger than your average home and just as fancy as the main palace.


The Petite Trianon was Marie-Antionette's quarters which she apparantly had built for her because it was more quaint, like what she was used to in Vienna. So here we have two monarchs who sometimes found Versailles too big so they built more palaces...


The Hamlet was actually really neat. Again, Marie-Antoinette had it built so she could enjoy something "simple." It's an entire village of houses made to look like peasant dwellings with food gardens and farm animals, but I don't think too many other peasant dwellings had an architect! It felt quite a bit like Disneyland, a bunch of buildings carefully designed to give a certain image so everyone can play pretend.
After Versailles we lugged our tired selves back to Paris to meet up for a night time bike tour. While we waited for the whole group to show up we met a guy from Montreal who came to Paris to dance the robot under the Eiffel Tower. Apparently he also goes to New York frequently to do the same. So for all of you with any performing skills, there are some interesting career possiblities out there for you! And he's considering coming to Vancouver, so be on the lookout for a robot-mime in the near future.

As for the bike tour itself, so much fun! We went with a group called Fat Tire Bike Tours and our guide was great. It was a really great way to cover a lot of the city at night, and of course everything's beautiful and all lit up. I thought it would be way scarier to ride a bike in Paris, but we were a big enough group that cars had to notice us. The tour ended with a boat trip along the Seine, complete with free wine. However, it started monsoon-raining and we had to take shelter on the bottom deck, making it harder to see everything the boat guide was talking about.

Sunday was a much more relaxing day, as we leisurely strolled around the Latin Quarter and had coffee and crepes outside on the Place de la Sorbonne. We also had time to check out the Jardins de Luxembourg and the Pantheon, and even go inside the Pantheon. I thought it was really neat because there are so many famous people buried there including Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Louis Braille, the guy who invented --you guessed it-- Braille. The main part of the Pantheon was interesting because it started as a church and now is filled with all kinds of statues commemorating the revolution and great thinkers.

In this picture religion meets secular. The paintings on the ceiling and the walls are part of the original decor of the church and the statue was added latter with a caption that reads: "Vivre libre ou mourir," Live free or die.

So this time around I saw a new side of Paris, one that was more leisurely and beautiful. Perhaps I like it better during a monsoon than during a hurricane.

Anvers-Antwerp-Antwerpen

What to call this city? It usually depends which language you're using, but I've found here that hardly anyone calls it Antwerp even when they're speaking English. So for the title of this blog I've settled on the combination of all three used by Express (the group that organizes exchange activities for us) to advertise the trip, and from now on I will refer to it as Antwerp because I think that's what it's best known as in Canada.


So the city itself. I thought it was a great place, and I could probably live there. It was super clean, near water, and had some neat looking buildings (starting with the train station that strikes you right upon arrival). The shopping was also fantastic. Indeed that's all I'd heard about Antwerp before I went, that it was great for fashion and shopping. I thought that would mean expensive, high end stores, but I found instead that there were tons of vintage stores to be found! I also found a store selling all kinds of natural and organic stuff, from shoes to dresses, and I wanted to buy almost all of it. Everything looked so cool! It was difficult to do, but I did manage to leave Antwerp with only two purchases: a jacket and a scarf. Both of which I'm extremely happy with now that I'm back in Brussels.


Antwerp wasn't entirely a shopping trip, however. We started the day in the Ruben's house museum where some of his paintings were on display. The museum was really about the house though, Ruben's was no starving artist!


We also did a walking tour, which started in the Antwerp's Grand Place (every good Belgian city has one), showed us the Notre Dame Cathedral (which I thought was cool with its one onion dome, see the photo), and took us to the Steen (a castle-like building that was the first building in Antwerp). The tour continued, but at this point a few of us decided we could stop for fries and catch up with the group. Of course the fries took longer than expected and we didn't wind up rejoining the tour. However, by calling friends who were still with the group, we managed to find the next stop of the tour after they had left and were on their way to the next. It was a little contemporary art gallery that was called something to do with a panther and offered free enterance. What's not to love about free art in a quaint little building with a courtyard?

After all the touring was done, we caught up with the group again at a restaurant/pub for hot chocolate and then started browsing vintage (and some non-vintage) shops. The evening flew by as there just continued to be places we wanted to go!

So Antwerp was a really nice place to visit, not over touristy and it just had a nice vibe.

A Good Old-Fashioned Puppet Show

Thursday night I did one of the most interesting things I've done in Brussels yet; I went to a marionette puppet-show!

The theatre was right near Grand Place, and has been there for ages. We had to walk down a narrow alley to get there and then climb a large amout of stairs to get to the theatre in what was pretty much the attic (downstairs was a pub, and the middle floor was a tiny museum which also had a bar). The theatre itself was small, and there were marionettes hanging all around the walls and from the ceiling. I was glad we went in a group because it was a little bit frightening! It really felt like we were in someone's attic to watch a little puppet show, it really wasn't big and over the top like we're used to shows being nowadays.

The show was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so also a little bit of a frightening story, but it was really entertaining! Even though the mouths of the marionettes didn't move, because of all the hand gestures they did it actually seemed like they were talking. I recommend you go (it's called the Toone theatre) if you're ever in Brussels. Oh yes, but the shows are in French. I think they do the occasional English one though.

Hurricane in Paris (Part 2)

The windiest part of the trip was the day we went to EuroDisney.

Leaving the hostel in the morning I almost got blown off the sidewalk a few times, and by the time we reached Disneyland Paris it was full on wind and rain. Most of the rides were closed due to extreme weather conditions, so we had 7 hours to pass in a half-closed theme park. It turned out there was still quite a bit to do, of course we probably spent more money on food and hot drinks than we would have had it been sunny. It was nice in a way to not have to rush from ride to ride just to wait in lineups, and we got to leisurely walk about and check out every single gift shop looking for a specific character from Up for Gabrielle. We never did find it, the only store that sold him was sold out.

Even without many rides we got to enjoy the Disney experience, with Sleeping Beauty's castle and tunnels under Adventure Isle. Disney just adds the perfect touch to everything, they pay attention to all the little details. So basically, though I wasn't convinced at first that I would enjoy Disneyland as an adult, I found it a really impressive and happy place even during an intense storm!

We did get to go on Pirates of the Caribbean and the Star Wars virtual reality ride (both indoors), and they were both really cool! It was weird to hear pirates and robots speaking French.

And the day just kept getting better, first the wind stopped, then the rain, so Space Mountain reopened and I got to go on it for the first time in my life! I remember being too little when Lisa and Dad went on it at Disneyworld. Needless to say it was the best ride of the day. Actually I think it was the last, too, because I didn't get on Big Thunder Mountain during the brief time it was open (the weather relapsed).

But it was great to see Disney come alive during the sunny break, and all the floats came out for the Princess Parade. We also got to watch some of the first Mickey Mouse cartoons in the indoor cinema, which was really cool.

So, overall, it was a fast-paced weekend full of dramatic weather changes and interesting things to see. We got to see both Paris and Disneyland in every type of weather except snow, and only when we got home to Brussels did we find out that hurricane-speed winds had been recorded in France!

Hurricane in Paris (Part 1)

So I had a whirlwind weekend in Paris and EuroDisney, complete with hurricane-speed winds!

Of course it was beautiful and sunny when we arrived Saturday morning, and I decided to leave my jacket at the hostel and go around for the day in only a sweatshirt. We tried to hit most of the highlights for Gab and Angie who had never been to Paris before, and along the way we discovered just how insane Paris' transit system is! Metro lines crossed each other everywhere but the stations never seemed to overlap. So trying to get to the Eiffel Tower we decided to walk from a station that didn't look too far on the map... So we had a nice stroll through an expensive looking district of Paris (or maybe it's all expensive), all the while trying to see the tower over the tops of buildings. For such a monstrous tower it hides itself pretty well! When we got to the tower I was extremely confused because I couldn't find the place I'd stood to take a picture only a few years ago! I would think a large, flat space of dirt would be easy to find...

We decided to try and find a metro stop closer to the tower so we could head back towards the Louvre, and we ended up at something called the RER. Not quite a metro or train, because Paris has separate lines for those, the RER was some other kind of underground rail transport that somehow needed to be called something different. And it drives on the left hand side, as we discovered while waiting on a platform expecting it to go the other way.

Just before going in to the Louvre, we stopped at Angelina's, a place my mom recommended we go for hot chocolate. It was a popular place! We waited in line on the sidewalk for ten minutes before going in, but it was worth it. Our waitress wasn't particularly friendly, but the chocolate was amazing! (And so were our desserts!)


At the Louvre we split up to go see the exhibits we were most interested in. I went through the section of works from Iran and Syria (Mesopotamian, Akkadian, Babylonian sculptures and things) which was cool for me after having touched on cuneiform and akkadian writing in a linguistics class at UVic. I also really liked this lion, because it's made from separate brick-shaped sections and it's formed so the lion is 3D coming out of the background. Hard to explain, but I thought it was really cool.

I'll stop there on my explanaition of what I saw at the Louvre because I don't want to bore you all if you're not interested in art. All in all I loved it and am looking forward to going back sometime later to see the other sections.


Just before returning to the hostel to get our room keys (and my jacket, as it was starting to get cold!) we hopped over to Notre Dame. It was a bit of an easier trip than getting to the Eiffel Tower. There was a service going on, so it felt really awkward being a tourist in there. I was surprised they let people in to look around during a service. And there was a souvenir shop inside! It was kind of disappointing.


By the evening it had started to rain, and we set out to Montmartre to see the Moulin Rouge and Sacre Coeur by night. We found a little cafe to go for dinner and realized it was 10:30! So we had a super later dinner, but it was delicious. Then it began to rain even harder as we puzzled our way through the metro to get back to our hostel, where we all slept like logs despite the creaky, shaky bunkbeds.


Since this is a pretty long post I'll split it in two and continue on to the real hurricane part of the trip.