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.
Good times :D
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