A night in Metz, France

Last Friday Josh and I loaded up his little mini and headed down to Metz, which with a population of 230 000 is the closest big French city to Luxembourg, less than 45 minutes drive south. It is the capital of the Lorraine region, and being near the borders with Luxembourg and Germany, has been shaped by both Roman and German culture and has a pretty interesting 3000 year history. Its known as a city of art and history, and hosts the Pomidou-Metz museum, the only branch of the famous Pompidou modern art museum to be located outside Paris.

Josh and I modeling masks for Elise

We stayed with Elise, a 22 year old french art student from Couchsurfers. We arrived on Friday evening and met her and her friend at the train station, parked the car and walked to her apartment. They were great fun and really hospitable, we sat around drinking and talking about France and their studies, and they got us to pose with some masks on for one of Elise's projects, quite funny!

Audrey, Elise, me and Josh

With another friend, Max, we walked to their friends' apartment in the centre. We were definitely hanging out with a bunch of french art students - we walked into an apartment decorated with completed art projects and works in progress, filled with marijuana smoke and half a dozen bohemian-style kids performing a medieval dance! They were really friendly and were probably the best bunch of young french guys that I've spent time with when it comes to speaking english, they were all really open to trying to speak to us, and Josh did his best with a bit of french as well! As in Luxembourg I normally go out to bars rather than to house parties, it was cool to hang around for a bit of a change. We'd planned on going out to a few bars later on, but all three of us were pretty tired, so we left around 1.30 and headed home in the freezing cold!

A residential street in Metz

We were up in the middle of the morning and bid farewell to Elise before heading off to see the city. We wandered aimlessly around the city centre for awhile, heading into quite a few pharmacies to stockpile medicines that are perscription-only around the rest of Europe, it made me laugh seeing as I used to work in a pharmacy and we worked so hard to prevent people doing the same thing there! Metz has one of the biggest pedestrian-only areas in France, and most of the buildings are built out of pretty yellow limestone so it would have been really lovely had it not been freezing cold with a terrible wind blowing.

Stained glass in the Cathedral

Eventually we stumbled upon the cathedral, an amazing building. I've been to a fair few churches in Europe now, but this one has the largest amount of stained glass windows in the world, mostly from the 14th and 16th century, and the third highest nave in France (10th in the world). It was consecrated in the 1500s, but has had a lot of extensive renovations done since then.

Wall near the Cathedral

We left the cathedral and stumbled through a indoor market that turned out to be rather uninteresting, and went in search of lunch. As is typical for France at a weekend lunchtime, everywhere was packed, and we ended up with a tiny table at a a place called Bar Saint Jacques, a typical french bar-bistro with a terrace on a square. We really hit gold, it was full of locals catching up and knocking back wine, and I was amazed to order a meal of toasted sandwidge and salad that only cost me 3.80euros, or $6NZ - the price of a cup of coffee in Luxembourg!

Frozen river

There, we searched for the location of the tourist office, and found it to be right beside the cathedral we'd been in earlier! So we headed back and sourced a map, and then went for a big walk around the city. Metz has more than 100 buildings on the historical monument list, and huge open green spaces along the riverbank. The river itself was quite pretty, as it was frozen over, and had a whole lot of ducks and seagulls just sitting around on the top. But, we were really suffering from the cold and had to keep popping into cafes to buy coffees to warm up. A fair was just starting up in one of the big squares, so we stopped in their for some below-par crepes, and then we called it a day and went back to the car.

Ikea!

On the way out of town we stopped at Ikea. As we don't have Ikea in New Zealand, before coming to Europe I'd thought it was a pretty expensive place full of amazing modern furniture. However, here its a massive chain store that sells cheap furniture that students fill their flats up with! I still get amazed by some of the modern designs though. I'd wanted to go to Ikea since I'd arrived here, but had never been, so I was really excited to finally get there.

Ikea swedish meatballs and lingonberry juice

The stores are all really huge, and the layout is quite clever, its like a maze and they make you walk past everything to get whatever you want. Naturally, we went in just to get clotheshangers, and ended up spending 80euros, or $120NZ, between the two of us! They even have a map with a list to fill in and free little pencils at the beginning, so naturally there are now half a dozen Ikea pencils lying around my room! Ikea has a cafeteria inside, and I'd also heard a lot about swedish meatballs, so it was cool to split a meal of meatballs, rice and swedish lingonberry juice.

So, I quite enjoyed Metz, it was good to go somewhere new rather than return to an old haunt, and to stay with locals again, and I think it's a pretty cool city. More photos are here.