Brittany, France

Camille sitting on a cushion!

I have always been interested in the French region of Brittany. I love the legend of Arthur, in which Lancelot ruled the area. Brittany's culture and history was always quite distinct from France's, and until 1532 Brittany was a seperate Duchy that was sometimes aligned with England and other times with France. Camille, another AFS 2009-2010 student, comes from this area and has always insisted that she comes from Brittany, not from France, so it was great to see what she had always been talking about.

Me, Camille, Emilie and Florian

I got there on Friday afternoon and just took a nap while Camille went back to uni for her afternoon classes. She is living in student accomodation, a little studio apartment, in the city of Nantes, which historically was the main city of Brittany but is now the capital of a different region. After she finished we headed into town to run a couple of errands, and then her friends came around for drinks that evening. Most of them don't speak much english at all, despite it normally being compulsory throughout school - like Spain, France doesn't do too well at language education compared to the rest of Europe (although I keep reminding myself that NZ is even worse and we rely too heavily on being an english-speaking country). I don't know if I've mentioned this before but I've now concluded that a lot of this is to do with both Spain and France being former world powers, especially France as French used to be the main international language, as the nationalism (or arrogance if I'm being less PC) that is entrenched in their culture prevents them from accepting english as the dominant language and putting a lot of effort into learning it as most other european countries do. I don't know if I've articulated that very well, but no French people I have spoken to so far have opposed this theory. Personally I have no issues with people who don't see a need to learn english, that would be cultural arrogance on my own part, and its so much fun trying to do simple things like buy beer in another language, but the reasons behind France's lack of english really interest me.

crazy drinking vessel

But anyway. One of Camille's friends, Florian, apparently keeps getting told he looks like Justin Beiber, and he learnt from my expression at this comment that I am not a big fan of his, which led to a lot of the night being filled with his attempts at singing all of Beiber's songs just to annoy me. What is it with french speakers and such bad kareoke! Eventually a couple of us headed into town and went to the Delirium bar, one of the franchise that has the bar in Brussels that holds the record for the most beers available in the world, where I went with Arthur. We drunk a few beers and ate saucisson, a kind of french salami that you cut thick slices of and eat alone. Eventually we decided to move on and chucked the uneaten half of the saucisson into Camille's handbag. I do have to admit to also stealing a Delirum beer glass as a momento, as I'd been unable to at the Brussels bar (they use plain glasses there as obviously otherwise they'd lose far too many to unscrupulous people like me!). We spent the rest of the night in a spanish bar where you pour into your mouth who knows what alcohol out of a strange kind of jug from way above your head, very messy, and later in a normal club. We finished the night off by walking the hour and ten minutes home. One thing I miss in Europe is the way we have transport available to us to get home from bars in Wellington, either in the after-midnight bus or in free vans run by the bars. Here you're on your own, which I think leads to much more stupidity, like driving drunk, sleeping in strange places, walking home alone or staying in bars way past the point where you should have called it a night because you're waiting for public transport to start up again in the morning. I was not impressed with Florian because he kept telling me we weren't yet halfway there and played Justin Beiber on his mobile most of the way, but all in good fun!

Coast in Brittany, notice the old cross on the cliff

Saturday afternoon we got up and headed to Surzur, a village of about 4000 in Brittany where Camille's mother and brother live. Camille had just gotten her license a couple of weeks earlier, so she proudly collected her car from her mother's place and drove me around for the afternoon. The French license system seems a bit relaxed compared to ours, here you have to firstly pass a theory test, but its not like ours in that you have to pay a lot of money to attend classes about it first, and then you sit a driving test after doing a minimum of 22 hours of practise (NZ is changing their system to make it 120 hours of practise before passing your restricted license, let alone your full license). The whole process costs a ridiculous amount of money, and most people fail at least once, I'm told because the driving schools are run by the testing places. Camille is a cute driver because she is so short she has to sit on a special cushion to reach the wheel, and watching her try to park is very entertaining, even the dog sat and watched her park at one point!

We headed out for a walk along the cliffs, it was great to see the sea again and the coast is beautiful, it looks a bit like the west coast of the South Island of NZ, and I'm told by people not from Brittany that it rains as much in Brittany as it does there too (flatly denied by any one from the region of course). We then drove to see a couple of ports and had a drink with some of Camille's old friends from school before heading back to have dinner at her mum's. While crepes are considered a French national dish (and I got addicted to buying nutella-filled crepes for a couple of euros as a snack in Paris), they actually come from Brittany, and her mum made them for dinner for us. We were meant to go out after dinner to a party at her friend's, but we were both so tired from the night before that we just collapsed into bed instead.

Vannes

Sunday was her mother's birthday, so we went out early to the village to buy flowers and a cake, and bread (french bread has to be eaten fresh, it only lasts a day or so, so you're forever making trips to the bakery!). The village centre is really cute. One of Camille's sisters joined us for lunch, and afterwards we headed to Vannes, the closest city. Its over 2000 years old, so we had a great walk around the old buildings and wall, although we had to stop at one point when the rain got too heavy. It was funny, everyone in the city just stopped what they were doing and waited under awnings until the downpour subsided back to drizzle before carrying on. We took their dog as well, and just like Tim's dog he is quite lazy and had to be prodded along! I don't get what it is with European dogs! We then dropped Camille's brother off where he works during the week and drove back to Nantes, an interesting journey without a map or GPS that took us twice as long as it should have! I told Camille not to worry, we were just taking the 'scenic route' like dad does at home!

Me on the rampants of the Castle of the Dukes of Brittany

Monday morning we ate crepes for lunch. The traditional way of eating them is just with butter and sugar, but I discovered that Belgian speculoos is amazing on crepes, and vegemite isn't too bad either. Then we went for a walk around town, passing by Camille's uni where someone had graffitied "welcome to hell" on the law faculty building! We went to the Castle of the Dukes of Brittany, it was cool, we could walk all around the ramparts. It made me remember playing games of knights and invaders at primary school, it would have been so cool to be let lose inside a building like this back then! We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around town shopping, and then had a really dinner with Camille's dad and stepmum, where I also helped Camille with her english homework - making a poster to describe herself. I guess if that is the homework for her first-year uni class, despite the students having studied english for years at primary school, I can see why none of her friends can have a conversation with me!

Giant mechanical elephant

Tuesday we headed to the 'Machines of the Isle de Nantes', a crazy project where for reasons I don't quite understand a guy from a theatre company decided to create giant machines. A bunch of engineers and artists work in a workshop that is open to the public, where they've already created a giant 12m tall mechanical elephant that takes about 50 people at a time for rides, and they are now working on a huge merry-go-round of sea creatures, im not sure how big this is supposed to end up but each of the already completed sea creatures is a couple of metres tall and its going to be three or four levels of these sea creatures to ride in. Their final plan is a 25m tall, 48m diametre tree, made of metal that supports plants and hanging gardens that you can wall all over, with two giant herons circling above that you can ride on. Wierd as, but very cool. I wish dad could see it.

Florian trying vegemite

Finally, we finished Tuesday night off with friends coming around again, although this time we drunk tea and ate biscuits. Florian made as all laugh by creating origami animals, telling me a story, and then looking up and me and saying "sex, or no?" - apparently he often uses sexy as an adjective in French and was actually asking for my opinion of the story, not propositioning me, but it was hilarious! I also initiated everyone there into the joys of vegemite (normally I'm a marmite girl but vegemite has been all I've found here). The first guy ate some only to run to the kitchen and wash his mouth out, so I'm not really sure why everyone else complained so much when they went on to try it too! Our 2am bedtime was probably not that smart considering we had to be up really early for me to catch the 7am train to Lyon, but oh well!

Paris



Camille and I, Eiffel tower

 I arrived in Paris on Friday afternoon and went to find the hostel that I had booked in Montmartre, a district previously famous as the centre of bohemian art where artists like van Gogh and Picasso worked, and home to the Moulin Rouge and the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur, now a designated historic area. I hadn't really bothered to look at the metro map before I came, I'm an expert now and figuring my way around on the go, so after I had some fun and games with the ticket machine I jumped on a metro. At the hostel I met one of my roommates, an Australian girl called Fiona (seriously, what is it with aussies and being everywhere I go!) who was keen to come along with me to see a former AFS student, Baptiste Le Denn, DJing that night. I worked out what Metros we needed to take to get to Bastille, an area famous for its bars and wrote it all down, and we headed off. Alas, I was overconfident in my ability to navigate the metro without any problems and soon found my scribbled instructions taken off my by Fiona, who got us safely there. At the bar we sat around listening and nursing ridulously expensive drinks (5€/$10) until we met a couple of parisian guys who talked to us for ages and then convinced us to change location with them. We headed off to one of the bigger clubs and ended the night there at around six in the morning.

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise

Saturday I headed off to met Camille, another french exchange student of the 2009-2010 group who just happened to be in Paris that weekend. It felt really wierd to be meeting her under the 'east pillar' of the tower, as if it was a really routine occurance! We went to the famous Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, as Camille and her friends wanted to find the grave of a french singer, Edith Piaf (as a side note, her name actually starts with the letter é. French keyboards have random french letters like é and ç where the numbers normally are, and you have to use caps lock or shift to make numbers, which is infuriating, but means Ive spent about ten minutes trying to work out how to make a capital é to no avail. Apparently french keyboard makers also thought that ; was more important than a fullstop, and what the hell even is this § ? Go figure!) I have visited cemeteries in Germany and Austria and walked past one in Belgium, it is really interesting to see the differences between the countries. In this cemetery a lot of the graves are marked by a little concrete building, I'm going crazy trying to remember what to call them, that the family has a key for and can enter to leave flowers and pray. Anyone who has looked at my photos will realise I love taking pictures of graveyards, this one Ive shown isnt particularly artistic photography but I wanted to show the little rooms (please someone remind me what they're called!), so I happily explored until they gave up the search for Edith, and we headed off to look at an apartment one of Camille's friends was considering.


Notre Dame




After a stop at MacDonalds (have I complained before that fast food in Europe is the same price as fast food in NZ, but in euros instead of dollars, so like 8€ or $16NZD for a combo, ridiculous!) we headed to the Notre Dame. This church is really amazing, and we arrived right at the end of some ceremony in time to see a beautiful procession walk around inside the church (pardon my lack of knowledge of Catholic customs). I've learnt in Europe that blue and purple are extremely hard colours to make, hence their presence in stained glass showing the importance and wealth of a church. The Notre Dame has some amazing stained glass windows with huge amounts of these colours in them.

arches in the club under the bridge

Our two new Parisian friends had invited Fiona and I for a homecooked french dinner that night, so I headed back to the hotel to met them. After jumping in their car I did have to ask myself what mum would say, but then laughed remembering that I met my best friend when he was a foreigner in a bar and promptly invited him for a homecooked kiwi dinner the next night as well (conviently ignoring the part of the story where we had mutual acquaintances anyway!). We survived their amazing dinner without ending up as a storyline for the next Hostel movie and Fiona headed home, while I went off to meet Camille for another night of clubbing with the two parisians in tow. We headed to a huge club under a bridge over the Seine that she somehow got us on the guestlist for, its really cool because you can see the bricks and arches of the bridge and the lit up Eiffel Tower and other buildings through the open side. The place was packed, I think there was something really special on as they had english-speaking DJs yelling thanks to the crowd and holding fireworks, and heaps of stiltwalkers and dancers. The music is heaps better than the remixed pop we listen to in most clubs in NZ as well, but the downsides of clubbing here are the costs (normally anywhere from 20-40 NZD for entrance and 10-20 NZD per drink) and huge lines, both to get in and to go to the bathroom, full of angry, rude and drunk french people who are really pushy. Another 6.30am bedtime, Paris is a tiring city! Two nights and 5hours sleep across both of them!

Yumiko and I at St Michel fountain

I dragged myself out of bed the next morning and headed to met two women, Yumiko and Marie at the Fountain of Saint Michel, a popular meeting place. I spent two months with Yumiko participating in the Ship for World Youth in Japan and on board a Japanese cruise ship in 2009, so it was really cool to catch up with her in France! When a friend of mine went to Japan for a month, I put her in touch with Yumiko and they got on really well, so she put Yumiko in touch with Marie, a friend of hers in Paris when Yumi moved here - complicated links, I know. Marie speaks great english, she took us to Mariage Frères, a famous tea shop and cafe. It was quite an experience, to be served by waiters dressed all in white fluent in english who gave us star treatment and recommended tea of a list of hundreds of types! I've never been a tea-drinker, but I drank my way through two pots quite happily while we discussed the differences between our countries, and then we headed off to explore a section of Paris full of winding narrow streets and little boutiques.

That evening I moved all of my stuff to the apartment of the Chatel family. Their son Sylvain lived with my parents for a two month AFS exchange in 2009, although we didn't have the chance to meet then, and I was going to stay with him, his parents Laurent and Claire, and younger brother Remy for the rest of the week. We jumped into the car and went for a tour of Paris by night, it was really beautiful to see all of the buildings lit up, and then returned for dinner. We had Foie Gras as an entree, a dish I had heard a lot of from french exchange students, its made of duck or goose liver from birds that have been specially fattened by force-feeding them corn (highly controversial in Europe now but a french tradition protected by law). 

Escargot

For every dinner here we ate an entree, main, then cheese and finally desert, along with wine and champagne, its been a week of absolutely amazing food and I wish I knew the names of everything I ate so I could list it here! I am not overly fond of french cheese, it is much stronger than NZ cheese (strong enough to be stored outside on the windowsill rather than inside the fridge!) and the stuff filled with bits of mouldy bread really didn't go down too well at all! On Monday night we had escargot. The snails themselves don't really taste like much, its the garlic butter that gives the dish its flavour, so eating snails wasn't as bad as I had imagined as a kid, but they are very difficult to eat! There are special tongs for holding the snails and little pitchfork things to pull the snail out, but I as I al a little lacking in the coordination department this was not an easy task!

Sacré Cœur

Back off the subject of food, I woke up on Monday morning and messed around the place until lunch, another  meal of two dishes, plus cheeses and dessert and fruit (I can already tell France is not going to be good for my waistline!) and then headed back to Montmartre to check out the Sacré Cœur, a big basilica perched on the Montmartre hill, the highest points in Paris. There are more than a few steps to reach it, and as Europe is much flatter than Wellington I am very out of practise at walking up hills, but the view was nice, although very cloudy. It was interesting to see six men from the french army patrolling around as casually as if they were normally tourists. The Basilica itself isn't that noteworthy, its quite simple compared to other churches here and while normally you can climb to the Dom this afternoon it was closed without any explanation, so I headed back through the district, checking out the former market square, now crowded with artists selling portraits and pictures of Paris to tourists, and a few old windmills that were built back when this area produced flour and wine. During the siege of Paris in 1814 an owner of one of the windmills was killed and nailed to it, rather grisley. I returned home by taking the metro from the Abesses metro station, its nearly 100years old and at 36m down, one of the deepest in Paris. There is a sign at the bottom warning people that there are 115 steps and pointing to the elevator, I laughed thinking that many people in Wellington walk that number of steps just to reach their house from the road! The staircase has been decorated with murals done by local artists, its quite cool.

Tuesday morning I was woken early to a very apologetic Claire knocking on the door and suggesting I call home urgently - news of the Christchurch earthquake had reached France: Fortunately I could get hold of my parents on their cellphone and learnt that my immediate family were ok, however I spent a couple of hours glued to the computer screen following the news and everyone's facebook comments. It put a damper on the rest of my time in Paris, its too hard to enjoy yourself when you can't stop thinking about something on the other side of the world. Its been quite hard to be here actually, I remember after the September earthquake last year my nearest co-worker was also from Christchurch and we were constantly talking to each other about it and looking at photos together. Ive really missed that this time around, just having someone to talk to, its made me feel really alone for the first time in this trip. I don't think I was very fun for the Chatels to host for the rest of the week, I really just wanted to sit in front of the computer the whole time instead of going out or making small talk.

Gardens at Versailles

Later in the morning that Tuesday Claire took me to the Palace of Versailles, about a hour outside of Paris on the train. Words cannot describe how enormous this place is, and how elaborate all of the decorations are, nor can my camera capture the size of the buildings and garden, it really just has to be seen. We walked through the main palace, seeing a set of rooms decorated after each of the planets, the Queen and Kings bedchambers and the Hall of Mirrors. The hall is truly amazing. After seeing both the Palacio Real and Versailles, I do wish that someone would give a tour of the less glamourous side of the palace, like the kitchen and servants quarters,  I think that would be quite interesting. After lunch in a fancy wee cafe we jumped into a little train and headed off to see the Grande Trianon and Petit Trianon, little palaces build on the other side of the gardens where the royals would head away to for some privacy (think Marie-Antoinette and her parties). The gardens are huge, you could spend days in there just wandering around. They are very beautiful, but with their perfect lines and symmetry they are very different from the wildness of the Wellington Botanic Garden that I used to walk through every day. One of my favourite parts of Versailles was the Pavillon de la Lanterne, an old hunting lodge on the edge of the grounds. It looked very old and run down, but apparently its still used by Sarkozy when he wants some time hidden away.

Lourve

Wednesday I woke up late, and then visited the local market with Claire. Markets here are actually quite different to farmers markets back in NZ, as the fruit and vegetables are actually quite a bit more expensive than those in the supermarkets, you don't pick fruit etc yourselves but ask the guy and he selects them for you, and they use plastic wrappings very liberally (personally, I don't get why you need to wrap up things like broccoli when its just going into a bad of other vegetables). I messed around looking at the news online and then got held up by lunch (the disadvantage of having epic multiple-course meals is the amount of time it takes to eat one!) so I left the house quite late, and then went off hunting a Kiwi restuarant and bar I had seen on the weekend to buy some NZ wine and beer before I headed to the Louvre. As I've said before, it's reached the stage where I have seen far to many painting of old royals and Jesus, and even here I found myself just wandering around thinking up funny captions for the artworks! Its actually too big and crowded, and its really hard to find your way around in - I laughed when I saw a group of boys obviously there on a school trip who had sat down in the middle of a hall to play cards. I did try to see most of the stuff I'd studied before, but again you could spend weeks there and not see everything. Monia Lisa was cool, some of the sculptures were quite cool, and the buildings were amazing, the word enormous springs to mind again! The building used to be the Palace before Louis XIV moved out to Versailles, and its so big that one of the streets actually drives through/under the buildings. They are also very stunning on the inside, ever since Berlin Ive found that I take more photos of the museum buildings than the artworks themselves! Really not convinced by the glass pyramid though, it just doesn't fit with the surroundings and I find it ugly even by itself.

Pantheon

Wednesday night was the last night with Claire at home, as she works as a flight attendant on long haul flights and was off the following morning, so I had made a pavlova with Sylvain's assistance. The decoration was entirely his, he made me laugh claiming that was just how mum had done it back in Rangiora!

Thursday morning I managed to leave the house before lunch for once, and headed to the Pantheon. Claire had been quite confused by my desire to go there, I think its not something that really means a lot to the French, but as it had been the bane of my Year 13 Classical Studies class, I headed off to explore it. I think it is far more beautiful than most churches and similar buildings Ive seen, the grey and muted colour palate and the architecture is really beautiful. The crypt underneath is quite cool too.

Sylvain and I up the Tower

After lunch Sylvain took me to the Eiffel Tower. Even on a grey day in the off-season the lines were really long (I can't imagine it in the middle of summer) so I was really grateful that Claire's niece's boyfriend works for a tour company and we could join his friend's tour for free, skipping the queues. The view was really cool, and I guess the Eiffel Tower is kind of what you dream about when you are a little kid dreaming of travelling one day, so there is extra magic when you visit it that other tourist things don't have for me. One surprize was the ice skating rink on the first level, it just seemed bizarre, and again the army patrolling for terrorist attacks. Europe is full of people asking for money, either straightout begging, trying to sell you crap, or my most hated, trying to get you to 'donate to a charity'. Paris is one of the worst places for this, as there are a lot of illegal immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Selling crap on the street is illegal, so when the police do a round they gather up their stuff and run, but the rest of the time they drive you crazy as every two seconds a different hawker asks you if you want a mini tower for a euro. There was also a group of apparently deaf mute people collecting for some deaf mute society, but as Sylvain and I waited for the tour group to arrive they all took a break and chatted away! Before we left I gave in to a childish desire for the biggest candy floss I had ever seen, and then spent the rest of the way home feeling quite sick and complaining that my hands were sticky!

Moulin Rouge

My final night in Paris was really quite special. Ever since I based my painting portfolio around the Moulin Rouge back at highschool I have been fascinated by it, so the Chatels gave tickets to myself and their niece, Ingrid. We had dinner there before the show, a three course meal with champagne, served by lovely waiters. Ingrid has completed her Masters in Development Studies, so we had a lot in common to talk about, and a lovely young couple of Irish boys were sharing our table and halfway through dinner introduced themselves to ask if I'd been affected by the earthquake, so we spent the rest of the meal chatting away to them. The show was amazing, the half-naked girls and feathered costumes I'd expected, but the water tank filled with snakes and a girl swimming and wrestling with the snakes rising up from the stage, the choreographed miniture ponies, and the dancers descending from the ceiling on wires and swinging right over my head I had not! The stage and props really interested me, they had girls seated on giant spheres that moved across the stage unassisted, and different sections of the stage would rise and fall with dancers on them. They also had incredible little skits between the acts while the dancers changed, a juggler, a ventriloquist who pulled people out of the audience and used them in his act, and a guy who kind of juggled ping pong balls but using his mouth and hitting them on a drumkit to play music. Weird. It really isn't like the movie at all, and we really have nothing like this in NZ! One of the most amazing things I've done in Europe, and a reminder of how lucky I am to have friends willing to host me all over the continent and arrange for me to have such incredible experiences. Only negative was that after paying so much for a ticket they force you to check your coat and pay another 2€ for it, and they take your ticket off you completely, presumably so you pay €10 to have a momento (I solved this problem by stealing a cocktail menu, take that!).

The pavlova

So Friday morning I was off to Nantes to stay with Camille. I left the house too late and freaked out on the metro that I wouldn't make my train, but somehow I managed to run through the really long tunnel from the metro to the train station with my huge backpack, two handbags and another backpack in my hands, found the platform in the most confusing and badly signposted station I've been in so far, and even realised that there was two trains on the platform and the closest one was not going my direction, to jump on the train with no time to spare! As soon as I was on I lost all ability to work things out though, and I got really tripped up by the apparent lack of seat-numbers, so after walking around for ages trying to work it out I gave in and asked for help (something I have stubbornly refused to do so far!) and found out that the numbers are on the actual chairs, not above them like in a airplane, duh!

Facebook photo album of Paris is here.

Versailles, view through the fence