Winter Vacation!

Just wanted to post a quick hello before we head out for vacation. We're going to Switzerland, the Alsace region of France, and the Bavarian region of Germany!

In case we don't have great internet access while we're on the road, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all of you! Here's to a great 2015!



Love,
Jess and Drew

Where There's Smoke...

...there is indeed fire. This morning I woke up around 5am to a terrible smell in my apartment. At first I thought maybe there was a problem with the gas and went to turn down the heat, but then I realized that the smell was in the living room too. When I went into the kitchen to check if I could smell the odor in there, I noticed that the windows had somehow blown open and were completely fogged up as if I had been cooking. 

I glanced out the open windows and froze. There was a fire in the courtyard that is enclosed by the back of my building and those on the same block. Trembling furiously, I dashed back into my room to call the fire department, put on some warm clothes, grabbed my purse, and left the apartment. Noone else in the building seemed to be awake, so I pounded on the other apartment doors as I hurriedly descended the staircase. When I got to the bottom, I put my hand against the heavy wooden door, and, finding it cool to the touch, slowly eased it open.

Once outside, I found that there were already several fire trucks and police vehicles on site, which explained the odd bluish lights I'd only vaguely noticed through the living room windows. Since I'm on the fifth floor, I hadn't been able to see down the building facade to the ground, or I would have realized what was going on much faster.

Outside the building, I waited with the other residents on the block who had been evacuated. Slowly we learned what was going on. Apparently a fire broke out (the cause is still unknown) in a store on the ground floor just two doors down from my building around 4 am this morning.

The first responders were awesome. They must have arrived FAST because they prevented the fire from spreading to any of the stores next door, and other than smoke, the surrounding apartments don't seem to have suffered damage. They had two buses waiting for evacuees to sit and wait, a nurse checking everyone's vitals and monitoring for symptoms of smoke inhalation (I think two people went to the hospital), and regular updates to those who were waiting. They even brought around snacks and bottled water to everyone on the buses.

I had to wait about four hours (5:30-9:30am) before I was summoned to go back into my apartment with a fireman to verify that it was safe, and we opened all of the windows to ensure that any carbon monoxide dissipated and to start airing out the rooms. Other than a very strong smoke smell throughout the apartment, everything is fine here. The store where the fire wasn't so lucky though - it was completely destroyed. I don't think there was a single thing left that was salvageable. They sold some really creative, interesting prints that I'll miss walking past every day, and I think did some art restoration work as well. So sad :(

My door is on the far right of the picture with the buzzer box, and the store that burned is three windows to the left.

The back of the store on the other side of the building

I'm currently in the process of washing all of my clothes and all of the linens in the apartment because they all reek of smoke. I'll also have to clean the closets, furniture, and pretty much everything else I can think of to get rid of the smell. I've sprinkled baking soda on the mattress and the couch to vacuum up tomorrow, and I'm planning to wipe down surfaces with a white vinegar mixture. If you have any any tips or ideas, please, please let me know!

One of my landlord's friends living around the corner emailed me as soon as she saw the damage and offered to let me stay at her apartment for as long as I need, which was so incredibly kind. I'm SO grateful! The sugar on top is that she has a dryer at her place, so hopefully it will make washing everything a little easier. My landlord is also checking with her insurance to see whether they will cover the cost of sending all of her clothes to the dry cleaner. I really hope that's possible because although I have very little with me here, she has a lot of clothes!

It's been kind of a crazy day, but I'm just focusing on getting everything back to as normal as possible before Tuesday.

Why Tuesday, you ask? Because that's the day I'm heading to the airport to pick up the most wonderful, sweetest guy in the world!!

Montpellier

Back when I was still deciding whether or not to go to France, I had coffee with a friend of a friend whose family is from Togo but who lived in Paris for several years before moving to the United States. She had some great advice and was incredibly encouraging, giving me the extra motivation I needed to take a chance on moving here. She also put me in touch with a family friend of hers (SB) living in Montpellier.

A few weeks after I arrived in Lyon, SB and I made plans to get together the 29-30 of November. From the first moment, she was incredibly warm and friendly. We spent a few hours at her cozy apartment, talking and eating a delicious homemade lunch of butternut squash and quinoa. I learned that she loves food as much as I do and is a talented jack(ette)-of-all-trades. She has taught herself how to sculpt and paint (her home is a reflection of her creativity and inspiration), and she also makes jewelry and sells it on the French equivalent of Etsy. We had a quick little craft session after lunch - check out my new earrings!

Later that afternoon, we took a walk in the old, scenic part of Montpellier, crossing our fingers that the weather would hold out despite the forecast for rain all weekend. We strolled by the cathedral, the arc de triomphe (Paris doesn't have a monopoly on triumphal arches, it seems), the main square (Place de la Comédie), a lovely park, and several cute shops and restaurants. It didn't take us long to see the center city. I knew Lyon was much bigger than Montpellier, but I didn't realize just how small Montpellier is!

 

After our sightseeing tour, we ducked into a little tea salon to warm up for a bit before heading back. On the way, we walked through the Christmas market, admiring the lights strung across the narrow streets and enjoying the lively atmosphere. There were a ton of people out despite the drizzle that had finally started (and later turned into a steady rain).

 

 

Later that evening, we ate dinner at a delicious Thai restaurant called "Les Petits Siamois" and then went out to an eclectic bar/music venue where SB's friends were performing that night. It was a blast dancing to the music all night!

The next morning, SB and I walked over to the Montpellier Sunday market, where we picked up some potatoes and onions to make a Spanish tortilla, as well as some cheese (Tomme = my new favorite) and some prepared savory dishes to round out lunch.

Market produce - so fresh, the snails are still on it!

Since the weather was crummy, we ended up spending the afternoon relaxing at SB's apartment until it was time for me to leave to catch my ride back to Lyon. We watched a movie (The Young Victoria), drank tea, and chatted with a friend of her's who stopped by. Perfect for a rainy Sunday. 

Overall, it was a lovely weekend with a really lovely person, and I'm looking forward to getting back to Montpellier at some point. I'll definitely pick a weekend with better weather for next time - the beach awaits!

Castles, Cathedrals, and (Wine) Caves - Part 2!

Coucou! Hope all of you are doing well and that you had a great Thanksgiving. Although I was sad to miss my family in New Jersey this year, I had fun hosting some friends at my apartment. I bought roasted chicken (instead of trying to cook a turkey in my tiny oven/microwave!), but I made the stuffing, mashed potatoes, and green beans. I also attempted my first homemade pumpkin pie, baking a fresh pumpkin for the filling and making whipped cream to spoon on top. Everything turned out really well!

Anyway, I already told you about the first half of my four-day trip to northwest and central France a few weeks ago, but there are still two more days to cover! So continuing right along...

Monday at the Château de Chambord

After breakfast at the auberge Monday morning, we packed up and drove south to the Loire Valley to visit the Château de Chambord. I won't lie. I actually wasn't that excited about the day's trip, and not just because we had a five-hour ride to get there. I just wasn't really psyched to see another castle. (Spoiled much?)

Arriving in Chambord and walking through the ticket gate, however, my eyes widened and a familiar sense of wonder washed over me again. The château, the largest of several in the Loire Valley, was breathtaking! And it wasn't even a primary royal residence. It was originally built by Francis I as a hunting lodge. Can you imagine if this was merely your vacation home?

First glimpse of the castle. Disney used it as inspiration for the castle in Beauty and the Beast!*

Walking around...

View from the other side

We didn't arrive in Chambord until pretty late in the afternoon around 3 pm, so we only had about two and a half hours to explore before the site closed. That was plenty of time at some of the other stops, but I really would have loved to have more time to wander through the castle at a slower place and to walk all over the extensive grounds. Instead, my friend and I did a whirlwind tour inside the château, climbing the famous double helix staircase to each floor, taking in the views from the balconies, and scoping out as many nooks and corners as possible. In contrast to Versailles, where I had followed a very structured path jam-packed with tourists through a limited number of rooms, Chambord was more or less wide open and we had free rein to explore. 

Famous double-helix staircase in the center of the castle

Walking around on the top was the most impressive part

Afterwards, we spent our remaining time walking the grounds before it was time to leave. We caught some really nice views of the castle at sunset!

Sunset view from the grounds

I

Saying goodbye to the castle

It really was a very quick visit, but I think this might have been my favorite stop of the weekend. And craning my neck to catch last glimpses of the château as the bus pulled away, I had to admit I was totally wrong. Castles never get old.

Tuesday in Bourges and Reilly

After spending the night in another auberge de jeunesse in Bourges on Monday night, we had several hours free on Tuesday morning to walk around the city. Located more or less in the center of France, Bourges is known throughout France for the "Printemps de Bourges," a HUGE music festival that the city hosts each Spring. It's also known to tourists for its gorgeous, immense cathedral, which was our first stop for the day. There was a special mass in honor of Armistice Day starting just as we arrived, so we wandered (extra) quietly around inside the cathedral, admiring the windows, the architecture, and the massive organ.  

 

Afterwards, we spent the rest of the morning leisurely exploring the city. We walked around the old part of town, stopping to pick up little quiches for lunch at a boulangerie, strolled through some nice parks, and paused to watch a parade and some other ceremonial events for the holiday. It was a quiet morning since most of the town was closed, but it was still very nice to walk around and enjoy the sunshine. We got lucky with the weather on the trip! Other than the rainstorm our first day at Saint Malo, we had blue skies the rest of the weekend.

Watching the parade

Redwood trees spotted in Bourges!

Next, saying goodbye to Bourges around noon, we drove to Domaine Claude LaFond, a winery in the central French town of Reilly, where we took a guided tour of the facilities and did a little wine tasting. During the tour, we learned all about the wine-making process and saw the fermentation tanks, the elaborate bottling apparatus, and the huge warehouse where the winery stores cases of bottles waiting to be shipped out. Afterwards, we did a wine tasting with three whites, a rose, and a red. I liked the first one we tried, a wine named "La Raie." Apparently they ship wine internationally, so if you happen to spot any of their wines in Total Wine or wherever, give it a try!

The equipment and process was really similar to beer brewing

A wine tasting for forty people...our guide was a pro.

Degustation!

Finally, it was time to board the bus one last time for the ride home. We didn't make it back nearly as early as we anticipated, though, because our bus broke down on the highway about an hour away from Lyon. I still don't know what the problem was, but we ended up standing on the side of the auto route in the dark (and eventually in the rain) for a few hours waiting for a new bus to pick us up. It was actually a little funny because I think this is the third time I've been on a group bus trip with bus troubles. I only vaguely remember something happening to our bus on the way back from a high school band trip to Florida, but I distinctly remember stopping on the side of the road in the middle-of-nowhere Poland when the back of our bus started to fill with smoke during a youth group trip. Isn't there something about curses coming in threes?

Despite the bus troubles, I had a terrific weekend, and I'm feeling very thankful to have had the chance to see so many incredible sites in such a short period. Even though I've already been here for two months (crazy, right?) I still can't believe this is my life right now!



*Side note - I didn't realize it until I started writing this post, but we were watching the French (that is, not Disney) version of Beauty and the Beast on the way to and from the castle. I'm not sure if that was intentional since Chambord was apparently the inspiration for the Disney version or just a coincidence!

Castles, Cathedrals, and (Wine) Caves - Part 1!

(This was originally a monster of a post, so I'm breaking it into two parts. The next one should be up in the next few days!)

I was off from class on Tuesday, November 11th, in honor of Armistice Day, a national holiday in France, so I decided to (gasp!) skip class the Monday before to take advantage of a four-day weekend. The ever-nerdy student in me cringed at the thought of missing a three and a half hour lecture, but a friend had invited me on an organized trip that weekend and the itinerary sounded too great to pass up:

Saturday: Saint Malo
Sunday: Dinan and Mont Saint Michel

Monday: Chambord Castle (Château)

Tuesday: Bourges and a wine tasting in central France

The registration fee covered all of the transportation and lodging costs, the entrance fees to the major sites, and most of the meals for the four days. I usually prefer traveling on my own or with a couple friends to large, organized trips on a coach bus, but I figured that it would have been a lot of work and much more expensive to pull together a similar trip on my own. Also, since the trip was put together by a group called iStudent Lyon, which caters to Erasmus and international students, I thought it would be a fun group of people. So, I bit the bullet and signed up!


Saturday in Saint Malo
After an overnight bus ride on Friday (never would have guessed from the map that you could drive ten hours and still be in France!), we arrived in Saint Malo bright and early around 8am, eager to start the weekend. Everyone was ravenous, so we dropped off our bags at the place we'd be staying the first two nights and started walking towards the old city to get breakfast.

One of the first things I noticed about Saint Malo was that it has a totally different vibe from Lyon and the other towns and cities I've visited so far. Located on the northwest coast of France, it has an undeniably beach-y feel, with seagulls cawing overhead and the smell of the ocean lingering in the air. I imagine that the beaches are packed in the summer when all of France goes on vacation in August. My professor said that Saint Malo is where the French go because Southern France along the riviera (Monaco, Nice, Marseilles, etc) is too expensive!

Just outside the old city walls

Cute-bordering-on-creepy doll-themed cafe where we ate breakfast

After breakfast with the group, we had the rest of the day to explore Saint Malo at our own pace. The weather in the morning was fairly clear, so a few friends and I strolled on top of the wall around the city to take in the views of the water and the forts. When a huge rainstorm rolled in during the afternoon, we decided to stop for lunch and then ducked into the museum at the Saint Malo Castle for a few hours to learn more about the town's history. The city is really interesting and dates way back, but what was perhaps most fascinating is that after the town was largely destroyed in WWII, it was rebuilt to look exactly as it had before. If you didn't know it, you would think that the buildings and roads had been there for hundreds of years!

Beautiful Saint Malo architecture

I couldn't get enough of the yellow moss on all of the buildings...it was so pretty!

View of Fort National from the city wall

Me and Laura!

Saint Malo Castle

View from the castle during the rainstorm

After a full day, we headed back to our home base for Saturday and Sunday nights, an auberge de jeuness (like a youth hostel, but one step up) in Saint Malo not far from the main part of town, to relax before dinner. Before the trip, I had been prepared for bunk rooms for 8-10 people in each, but I was pleasantly surprised. My friend and I had a room with a private bathroom to ourselves! It was as basic as it could get (white walls, simple, etc), but it was clean, comfortable, and exactly what we needed. As a side note, I took great joy in the fact that our room number was 722, aka my birthday. My roommate and good friend here in Lyon, though, seemed totally uninterested. I realized later that she just thought I was being nonsensical because she thought I was saying that my birthday was the 7th day of the 22nd month. I forgot that in Europe dates are written day/month/year!
 
During dinner at the auberge (they served a full meal with bread, appetizers, entrees, and dessert - whoah!), I started to pay more attention to the group dynamics on the trip. One thing that was really interesting to me, though not unexpected, was that the group quickly split along language lines. There were the German, Italian, and Commonwealth clans, a multinational group using English as a common denominator, and, lastly, a group of us determined to practice French, even if we spoke one of the other languages fluently. There wasn't a whole lot of cross-pollination across the groups, but the students trying to speak mostly in French slipped in and out of the other conversations from time to time, depending on who we were with.

After dinner, several of us congregated in the common area of one of the buildings, and I found myself perched between the German- and Italian-speaking groups. A mixture of German, Italian, and French swirled in the air, and every once in a while someone would shift languages to speak to somebody on the opposite side of the circle. After most of the Italian students turned in, though, the group shifted to speaking exclusively German. I spent about 10-15 minutes blankly looking around trying to figure out what the conversation was about before deciding to head upstairs too. I wasn't upset -- I was exhausted and secretly grateful for the excuse to go to bed -- but I was still struck by the feeling of being excluded completely from a conversation because I didn't know the language. It's a funny thing...language has immense power to bring people together, but it can easily do the opposite as well.


Sunday in Dinan and Mont Saint Michel
After breakfast at the auberge Sunday morning, we hopped on the bus to go to Dinan, a charming little town not too far from Saint Malo. We had about two hours to walk around, just enough to wander through the narrow streets of the old town, stop in the cathedral, and stroll out to a panorama viewpoint overlooking the river. We also used the time to find something to eat for lunch during the bus ride to our next stop. Not as easy as you might think, since everything in France shuts down on Sundays!

Had to take a picture of the Sherlock Holmes store sign...can't wait for the show to come back!

 

After Dinan, we got back on the bus for the hour or so drive to Mont Saint Michel, a major tourist site and one of the main draws for the trip. It has a long history, but basically Mont Saint Michel is a monastery with a huge abbey on a tiny island. I didn't realize that there is literally nothing nearby. It's actually a little bizarre because you park in a massive parking lot (it must be a zoo during high season!) and then either walk or take the shuttle out to the site.

First views of Mont Saint Michel

When we got to the base of the island, we headed straight up the steps to the abbey so that we could enter with our group tickets, but once we were in we were free to explore on our own. I opted to take a guided tour of the abbey with two or three others in the group, and then afterwards wandered a bit taking pictures. The views were beautiful, but the narrow ramparts and streets were packed with so many people that it was difficult to move around. Admittedly, I joined right in, stopping every few steps to snap photos of the abbey from every possible angle and in every possible light, but sometimes you just want a little space when you do it!

Sunset at Mont Saint Michel

As the sun began to set over Mont Saint Michel, a few friends and I decided to stroll along the boardwalk back to the bus instead of taking the shuttle. Looking back at the abbey, quiet after all of the tourists had left for the day, I was struck with a sense of something I still can't put my finger on. I've played around with all kinds of words to describe it - sad, lonely, melancholy, silent, and imposing - but it wasn't any of those. The closest I can come up with is empty. It was almost as if you could physically feel the island (and all of its 44 residents, according to Wikipedia) getting ready to go to sleep that night, waiting to welcome a fresh horde of tourists in the morning.

Mont Saint Michel closing up for the night.

Back at the bus, we drove to our last stop for the day, a town on the water called Dinard. It was dark by the time we arrived, but we weren't there to go sightseeing. We were there to eat galettes! Before, when I thought of a galette, I thought of a sort of rustic pie à la this recipe from Smitten Kitten, so I was expecting something similar to that. In Bretagne (aka Brittany, France), however, it turns out that a galette is very similar to a crepe but is larger and made with buckwheat flour. We each had a dinner galette served with an egg, meat, and emmental cheese on top, as well as a dessert galette (mine had salted caramel). They were both delicious! And to wash them down, we each had a mug of hard apple cider, which is a traditional drink in Brittany and Normandy.

Full of delicious crepes, we returned to the auberge in Saint Malo for the night, ready for the next adventures in store!

To be continued...