Lille [11-13 November 2011] - Part II

No fancy image editing this time. The majority of the photos I've got left from our trip to Lille were taken at Le Palais des Beaux Arts (the fine arts museum) or le Tripostal (the contemporary art museum). There are a couple of other photos here and there. You've no idea 1) how difficult it was for me to covince myself to take photos of the artworks, nor 2) how difficult it was for me to not photograph EVERY SINGLE PIECE I SAW. So, here are my favorite pieces, and what I can remember about them, seeing as I've already let 2 weeks go by since I was there...




This one wasn't taken at the Palais de Beaux Art... not at all. It was taken at a metro stop. Yup, France is epic enough to just... install a Rodin statue in the subway. This is a reproduction of one of the figures from Les Bourgeois de Calais I think Rodin may be my favorite sculptor, probably thanks to Minus the Bear, or the day I spend at Rodin and Musée d'Orsay with my folks a couple years ago.




O, hai, Joan of Arc. How u doin'? Oh, gettin' burned at the stake. Hrmmm.




More Rodin, because I quite like his art, and also because this piece is so unusual. It's called Pallas au Parthénon.




Good-bye sculpture, hello paintings! Les Temps dit Les Vieilles by Francisco Goya. The woman in black is holding a sign that says "Que tal!", which is Spanish for "what's up", more or less. I just really enjoyed the colors, the realization of all the fabrics of their dresses, and the overall concept of the piece.




The lighting was so unfortunate, and I couldn't get a picture of the whole of this piece, L'Orchestre dans l'œuf by Jérôme Bosch. It was probably my favorite piece, from both of the museums we visited in Lille. It reminds me a lot of my friend Kent's art. The playfulness and imaginative aspects drew me in. In the gift shop they had some figurines from this painting for sale, but no postcards of it, which would have been oh-so-ideal.




This is from the temporary collection at the fine arts museum. La mer, by Robert Lambert-Loubère. This picture doesn't do it justice. It just doesn't.




Last, but not least, from the Palais de Beaux Arts. Almost an entire floor of the museum was dedicated to "relief maps" of various towns in Nord Pas de Calais, the region that Lille is in. Unfortunately, the lighting there, too, was crap, and they were all behind glass, so flash rendered the photos even more useless. This is Lille, the relief map gives an idea of the structure of the Citadelle.


AND NOW, ON TO THE TRIPOSTAL! Hello, modern art!




But, first, as we were walking to the Tripostal, we came across this little garden-esque thing. It's SO FRENCH. TOO FRENCH. Hello, we are the French, and we are OBSESSED with mastering nature, and forcing it to conform to our collective will. (No, this is not me talking, it's more or less a direct quote from Naomi Zack, talking about Nausea, by Sartre, in a philosophy class I took my sophomore year.)




Remember how I said I was going to limit myself and my picturetaking? Yup, that resulted in only TWO photos being taken at the contemporary art museum. This one is called I like America (tribute to Jacques Derrida) by Mounir Fatmi. The bars, painted to represent the American flag, are from horse jumping shows. The deconstructed flag represents a highly complex America, and it begins to feel even more mind-boggling and unsurmountable as you start to walk around the piece and interact with it.
[Honestly, I thought the boutique would be more comprehensive, but it was full of modern/post-modern hipster crap, and overpriced books about Dadaism.]




These old, rejected refrigerators, recycled by an artist named Kader Attia, are Untitled (Skyline). Rejected household items covered in shiny mirrors, etc, I think you get the metaphor.




Saturday night we went to a show, and outside there were artists putting on a performance with this enormous puppet. I remember their show being incredibly funny, and also quite French (kissing, needing a cigarette for the monster/puppet, mime face paint, etc...). The part I remember most, though, was how soaked with sweat the performer was when he finally got out of the massive puppet costume.

After the show, Marta and I found ourselves playing rounds of ping-pong and drinking beer with some other folks who were there. Sometimes I feel cranky about how excited I get when I interact with other people who are between the ages of 20 and 30. It's just so... rare.




On Sunday we went to the market, which was beautiful and wonderful and smelled of a million things. And, best of all, we found gaufres fourrés, or stuffed waffles.




A kind monsieur made the gaufres, which were then stuffed by his wife/booth partner, and sold WARM!




And, to end with, a picture of the outside of L'ancienne bourse, which is now the house of that lovely bookstore I wrote about in my previous post.


Next time: La Foire aux Harengs à Dieppe. (The Herring Festival in Dieppe... which was, to say the least, a quite awful experience...)

Lille [11-13 November 2011] - Part I

I've decided to try something new with photos for this post, so bear with me.

The weekend of le 11 Novembre, or Armistice Day, Marta and I decided to go to Lille. She's a lot more camera happy than I am (though that's really not saying much). So I decided to take a photo (almost) every time she one, and sometimes even when she didn't! Result: this post is going to (ideally) be more photos than text, but it's also going to be a lot of pictures.
Additionally, I am trying to stitch photos together, which is something I've never done before. After my disappointingly few photos from Le Gros Horloge, due mostly to how small the rooms were, and thus how difficult it was to capture all of anything, I've decided to play around with trying to line up photos and edit them together with the help of a computer.
So, here we go!



Pictured here: Marta, in a cafe that made me almost feel like I was in Portland. We got to Lille thanks to the train and thanks to covoiturage. We had to catch the train from Eu at 7h45, which meant a very early morning, and not much time for breakfast. That morning I did, however, wake up in tome to make myself two (tiny) cups of coffee. Proof that I am not a morning person: round two of coffee making, I forgot to put the coffee in the coffee maker. Needless to say, it was a rough start leaving Eu.




Here is the Monument aux Morts, outside of the Office de Toursime. The aftermath of the World Wars is so much more evident here in Europe (and especially in France) than it is in the states.
Roughly, the monument says:
"Civil Soldiers. The city has erected this monument to the end that over the course of the centuries we will be reminded of our children who died for peace. 1914-1918, 1938-1945."




Another photo-montage, this time of La Place Général de Gaulle. Although practically every town in France has a Place CDG (and there's an airport named after him!), this one is particularly meaningful because Charles de Gaulle was born in Lille, and thus lillios by birth.




The Théâtre du Nord, which is also on the Place CDG, farther to the right of where I took the photos sewn together above. We didn't have time (or money) to take in a show, but there are plenty of other opportunities to go to the theatre closer to home. (Other than The Sound of Silence, I've seen the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Hungary, and tomorrow am going to Amiens to see Rokia Traoré. December 6 I'm accompanying the school to see Anna Kaernine, a ballet performed by the Eifman Ballet Theatre of Saint Petersbourgh.)




Some bread, just hangin' out, bein' French, waitin' to be eaten...




Occupy Wall Street-ers in Lille. There was a drum circle, shouting, people making signs, and a general aura of solidarity emenating from their occupation.





BOOKS! This open square, l'ancienne Bourse de Lille (the old stock exchange), is now a breat book store. They had all sorts of everything, new, used, history, music, DVDs, comic books, fiction, art, posters, and loads more. It was open on Sunday, too, which is untrue of FNAC, the corporate book store located just a stones throw away from this book market.




Here is Notre Dame de la Treille, the seat of the Catholic Church in Lille. The image on the left shows one of the facades of the church, built according to neo-gothic traditions, while the image on the right shows a facade completed in 1999, which is much more modern and sobering in character.




Then we went for a walk along the perimeter/ramparts the old citadelle. Here is a picture of a birds eye view of the citadelle. It was quite charming. I could absolutely see myself living in Lille and going jogging here.




We came across something that resembled a fair or circus, and these faces had been carved into a fallen tree in the bordering woods.




Last photo for now: Ch'ti is one of the local beers. It's definitely closer to a Belgian beer, which I'm really not that into. Too sweet. BUT the bar/restaurant we went to had live jazz music (OMG how horribly have I been missing live music...), and the vertical rope you see is there because there were SWINGS at the bar.


Next time: the rest of our time in Lille, which includes photos from Le Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille, and Le Tripostal, the contemporary art museum!

Oh, look, some more photos from Rouen

So, when I said that I didn't have any photos from the last 2 days in Rouen, what I really meant was "I am a lazy jerk who doesn't like to upload photos, even when there are only FOUR worth being shown to the world."

However, as it is now Sunday afternoon and I am waiting for my gratin de citrouille (pumpkin gratin) to be readt o come out of the oven, I'll get over myself and show you all Le Gros Horloge de Rouen:



Some of the clock mechanisms. They were beautiful, but difficult to photograph, on account of how small the rooms were.




One of the bells that sounds on the hour, every hour. And OF COURSE Lucy and I were in the room when the bell tolled. It'd been a while since my heart had been given such a dramtic shock.




A view of the cathedral, from atop the belltower. I also took a video, which will someday be uploaded, once I get the braves to go to MacDo in order to use their free WiFi, or once I remember to bring my camera/cord to Clémences someday.




The face of Le Gros Horloge. There are all sorts of neat details, like that bottom part of the blue circle changes daily, and each day has a different mythological allusion, and there are loads and loads of sheep all over the clock face, because the sheep is the city animal of Rouen. Also, the half black, half silver sphere atop the circle rotates in rhythm with the moon cycles, so you can tell when the moon is waxing and waning.

There you have it! Next time, Lille. I swear. And after that, La Foire aux Harengs.

The Sound of Silence

On Thursday night I went to Le Havre with the lycée to see a play. It was called the Sound of Silence, and because I loved it so much, I've decided to make public a review that I sent to my dear friend Greta:

[Thursday] night I saw the most amazing play, called The Sound of Silence. It was a completely wordless play set to the Simon and Garfunkel album by the same title. And OH MY GOD IT WAS SO GREAT. It was a three-hour piece, set in Russia in 1968, in a block of communal appartments, and was about the search for communal hapiness in the face of an oppressive, pervasive silence (broken only by the sound of Simon and Garfunkel...). The theme has definitely been treated almost too many times, but it was so profoundly well done that I am still kind of in shock. In the end the director seemed to want to show that collective happiness is impossible, or only possible through art.
(Or, this was my interpretation, given how at the end everything seemed to fall apart, due to drugs, babies, people leaving their lovers, and, finally, one of the characters drowning himself in a bucket of water... when they put their heads under the water they could hear music, and this particular character decided to never take his head out of the water/music/collective happiness/art...)
It apparently is supposed to take palce 4 years prior to another play that takes place in 1972, and traveled internationally in 2007, that was also mute, but was more focused on dystopia throughout.

Finishing up Rouen

Alright. I'm going to finish writing about Rouen, but more out of respect for this "blog" project than out of a desire to actually write about Rouen. Also, I have no photos of the rest of our time in Rouen, so this will be concise.
(Really, I want to finish writing about Rouen so that I can post photos from Lille... Marta and I went there this past weekend, 11-13 Nov. It was beautiful and I managed to take SO MANY photos!)

Saturday morning we woke up and "fait de la grosse matinée", or just kinda lazed about for most of the morning. On the train from Caen to Rouen I taught Lucy how to play cribbage (WIN!), so we played a couple of games with Valentin, Ludo's son. I absolutely adore French children, and I think my main project in life may become figuring out how to raise children here...
Then we wandered into town and found a creperie, had lunch, and kept meandering. We stopped and got coffee at a really cute coffee shop that smelled like Portland; I wrote some in my journal, collected myself, and organized my thoughts. Lots of random wandering on Saturday.
Around 17h we made our way back to Ludo's, said our good-bye's, and once again followed my shoddy directions, this time ending up at Hélène's apartment. OH MY GOODNESS IF SHE WASN'T JUST ADORABLE AND FRENCH AS EVER! She gave us some time to get settled in, offered us coffee, and invited us to a bbq at her boyfriends parents house that was happening that evening. It was a bit outside of town, so we took the bus out and planned to stay the night there.
Hélène, like Ludo, introduced us to a number of her friends. We spent the whole evening chatting, eating, drinking, and getting to know some of the local folks. It was really comforting to me to see that French 20-somethings do just about the same things that my friends and I do as American 20-somethings. Around midnight, somehow a dance party erupted. I think it was mostly songs that were popular when all of these French folks were in middle school. After an hour or so of dancing and laughing and just feeling welcomed by everyone in the room, someone decided it was dessert time. Pears and chocolate.
After dessert we cleaned up, then most folks found their bus passes and headed back into Rouen for the night.
On Sunday we woke at 11h30, thanks to the time change (woohhooo! day light savings time!), drank coffee, then headed into town to go to the market. We got cheese and bread and some sausage made with blue cheese. (It was made with bleu d'Auvergne, which I have offocially decided that I do not like, as far as blue cheeses are concerned...)
We meet up with Ludo and a number of other CSers for a picnic on the terras of a cafe on this beautiful little street called "Rue Eau de Robec." Around 13h or 14h we went back to Hélène's. There were a couple of other people there, and we just chatted about nothing and everything. Then around 17h we went for a walk around downtown, which is an incredibly French Sunday afternoon activity. When we got back to Hélène's we made dinner and an apple tart, then went to see Le Couleur des Sentiments, or The Help, which I quite enjoyed. I seem to be going to the cinema very often here. Alas. An appreciation for cinema and the arts, like Sunday afternoon walks, is very French, it would seem.
The next morning Lucy had to leave early to catch her train back to Domfront. We said our goodbyes and promised to visit one another in our respective tiny towns, a promise which I plan to respect to the fullest extent. Hélène and I had breakfast around 10h, and I left around 11h to catch my 11h30ish train.

And, that's about the size of it.

Next time: Caroline and Marta conquer Lille!

Vacances de Toussaint - Rouen, part I

And now that I'm over not being in the mood to upload photos, I finally bring you to the second installment in the Adventures of Caroline and Lucy in Normandy...

Our departure from Caen was a bit rushed. My cell phone, at present, suffers from an unparalleled case of narcolepsy. This began about the time I got to Caen, which made planning a lot more difficult than it ought ot have been. Anyways, it likes to turn itself off, so I typically don't get messages or missed call notifications until after the fact. At any rate, Lude, our first CouchSurfing host in Rouen, texted me asking us to arrive closer to 19h, meaning we needed to catch the train that left Caen at 17h15. Of course, I didn't get this mesage until 16h15, leaving us an hour to get back to the gite and then all the way across town to the train station. We made it, thankfully, but naturally, the 15 minutes of rain that we had during our time in Caen occured during the 10 minute walk from the gite to the bus stop and the 5 minute wait for the bus.

Alas. After following my hand-written directions to get to Ludo's from the train station, we were welcomed into Ludo's charming flat for a Couscous CouchSurfing. He invited over a number of his friends and showed us a great time. I love that about CSing. If people are open to it, you can truly get an idea of what someone's life is like. Among his friends there was a man who went to the high school that Lucy works at in Domfront, and someone else who went to school in Portland for a year. Small world, eeh?




The next day was a Friday, so Ludo had to work. Lucy and I set off to explore Rouen. We found breakfast, then visited La Cathédral Notre Dame, which was magnificient, despite the construction. We ended up just walking and wandering. The centre of Rouen is so adorable, it felt a bit like a fairytale town, with endless cafés and crêperies and old, old buildings. The photo on the left is the marble staircase inside the cathédral; the one on the right is a view of one of one of the entrances. I tried, but couldn't quite capture the entire spire from so close, but later I managed to get a couple that show how magnificient it is. After that we walked over to the Église Saint Ouen, which you can't visit, because it's under construction, and also because it serves at part of the Hotel de Ville, though the gardens were quite beautiful.




We ate we ate at this beautifully decorated Indian restaurant called Restaurant Taj Mahal, then, because we were near already, decided to meander down to the embarcadero and stroll along the waterfront. We passed L'espace Corneille, eat your heart out Galtier! (I once had a French professor who was more or less in love with Corneille...) Then we happened upon a bridge that took us out to a (well-inhabited) island in the middle of the river, called L'Île La Croix. We sat and digested and I may or may not have consciously decided to take a picture of the catedral as viewed from the river.




Then we carried on with out wandering, this time to L'Église Saint Maclou, where someone was playing the ORGAN! The picture on the left is just to show the contrast between the old and new-style architecture of Rouen, and to illustrate the start contrast between the two. Rouen wasn't hit too hard by the war, and the rebuilding, at least on the Rive Droite (right bank of the river), is quite tqsteful.
Anyways... Saint Maclou gave his name to the city of Saint-Malo, a port city farther west along the English Channel. He's typically depicted with a bird on his shoulder, because he apparently loved nature so much that once he took off his hat to work in the field, and, upon recollecting it, realized that birds had begun to nest in his hat. He left it there for them to have a nest. The picture on the right is actually of the Aitre Saint Maclou, which is a few hundred meters from the church itself. Not the grotesque skulls. The aitre was originally an ossuary, destined to receive human bones, during the black plague, and dates back to the 16th century. It also served as an all-girls school, and is currently L'école des Beaux Arts in Rouen.




Here are a couple of other photos, one of a notice concerning the Aitre, and one of me. Pretty self-explanatory. This is getting to be all sorts of long. I didn't realize we'd done so much in one day... I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have to turn our visit to Rouen into a multi-entry post :/. Sorry, folks, I'm kinda a bum when it comes to blogging.
But I'll carry on for the time being...




It was starting to get late, and we were starting to get hungry, but Ludo wouldn't be off work until 19h, so we had a bit of time to kill still. Here is a photo of l'Église Jeanne d'Arc. I SWEAR she is following me around France. Or, there's nowhere in France that she didn't go. Alas. She was burned at the stake in Rouen, just to the right of where I took this photo. The church was built in her honor. Ludo told us that the "flames" on the left are representative of the flames that burned her, and the top of the church represents her body. The inside of the church looks like a boat turned upside down. It's magnificiently spacious, and of course I don't have any photos of the interior. The space on the left where you can see folks is the market, where we went to find and evening snack, or "le gouter".




Voila, bread and Neuchâtel cheese. At one point a (rather drunk) man walked up and asked what we were having for dinner, and asked if he could have a bite. Naturally, we said yes, which seemed to make his evening. This particular "coeur" was very salty... much saltier than any I'd had before.

We eventually wandered back to Ludo's for dinner. Then we all walked over to his friend Joyce's house (Joyce being the one who studied in Portland). He was also hosting some couch surfers, some Spanish girls who are doing their Erasmus in Rennes. We had some cider, then went to Le Bateau Ivre (literally "the drunk boat"), a bar atop a hill, where there was some live Balkan Folk Music. The group was called Kosia Brada, and I hate the internet here, which refuses to upload videos. Putting that on my to-do list once I finally decide to go to MacDo to catch up on QC and el jay and whatnot.

I'll finish this in the future, I promise. The near future, even!

Vacances de Toussaint - Caen

For Toussaint vacation, I left my tiny, lost town of Eu in order to explore some of the bigger cities in Normandy. I left here at 6h18 on Monday morning to meet my friend Lucy in Caen. Lucy is from Corvallis, OR, and current living and working in Domfront, Lower Normandy, in the Académie de Caen. We spend 3 nights in Caen, then 4 (couch surfing!) in Rouen. I've decided to break up blogging about the break into 2 posts, because otherwise I'd practically have to write a novel of a post.
(NOTE: waking up at 5h45 is something that should be avoided at all costs. I had the idea in my head that I would make 2 cups of coffee and put them both in my to-go coffee up, in order to have some coffee on the train. Unfortunately, Caroline at 5h50 didn't remember to PUT THE COFFEE IN THE COFFEE MAKER. It was a sad, sad moment for coffee drinkers everywhere...)



At any rate, I made it to the train station in time, and made it to Caen with no touble at all.
Voila, the Cathedral in Caen, l'Église St Étienne. Actually, I'm not quite sure if it's a cathedral, or just a church of cathedral-like proportions. At any rate, it's directly across from the Château Ducal, which houses the Musée des Beaux Arts and the Musée de Normandie de Caen.
We met up at the train station in Caen around noon and found where we were staying, then stumbled, famished, into the first restaurant we could find. After eating and catching up we found the Office de Tourisme, grabbed a couple of maps, and were on our way, off to explore the big city.




Here's a vien of the flag of Normandy, flying over the ramparts of the château. It didn't rain on us while we were in Caen, but the weather was super overcast, as is evident in my photos. After visiting the Musée de Normandie de Caen, Lucy and I wandered around the pedestrian zone, where we ran into one of her students, who invited us to have coffee with him. Perhaps an hour later Ashley and Eren, two assistants from the Académie de Caen who actually live in Caen, came and met up with us. We got kebabs for dinner, but then I was super tired, and needed to retire for the evening (it was close to midnight at this point...).


Day 2 in Caen, we woke, had breakfast, then decided to set off to find the Abbaye aux Dames and Abbaye aux Hommes, and the gardens/park that're in the area. Here we are, sitting in a window of some ruins across from the Abbaye aux Dames. I didn't take any photos of the Abbaye aux Hommes, because it was too overcast, and there was construction obstructing the view.



At any rate, here is a photo of the Abbaye aux Dames. After visiting the Abbaye, we wandered back into town, skirting the pedestrian Zone. Lucy and I happened upon a couple of really uniaue bookstores, one of which had French translations of the Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging books. WIN. Man did I LOVE those books when I was younger. I remember laughing so hard, almost in tears when I read them. And now I have them in French! At this point I don't know a lot of the slang vocabulary, but context clues are helping me figure it out, and the first book of the series is just as hilarious as I remember it.




After bookstores, we met with Ashley and Eren again and got galettes, or savory crêpes. My favorite. Also, for you gluten-free freaks out there who're convinced they'd never make it in France, galettes are GLUTEN FREE! They're made with "farine de sarrasin", or buckwheat flour. People get really upset when you ask for sweet crêpe trappings on a galette, but they'll do it, which is epic. I think we spent the afternoon wandering around and drinking coffee, then had a baguette/cider/cheese pic-nic for dinner.




On our third day in Caen we went to Le Musée pour la Paix, a WWI and WWII memorial. I went a couple of years ago with my folks, and Lucy went when she was in high school. We didn't have time to get out to the D-Day beaches, but the museum was hallowing enough. I didn't take many photos, but the one thing that did catch my eye was this "BOMB TOKYO" game. (I can dig pohotos out of the archives, if anyone is particularly interested in seeing other parts of the museum...)

After the museum, we wandered to the Jardin des Plantes, where there is a magnificent greenhouse, with things like coffee, papyrus, cotton, and various carniverous plants. Loads of walking, because the sun was out, and it was almost hot. What an indian summer!

On our final night in Caen, Lucy convinced me to go salsa dancing, which I'd never done before. It was great, though the salsa club itself was sort of bizarre. The floor was covered with sand, which resulted in me slipping and sliding a lot, and almost falling down on my way to the bathroom.

After salsa dancing we found frites at a kebab stand. It was the only place we could find that was open at 1:30am on a Wednesday night. The fries themselves were good, and the drunk boys at the table next to us were cute. BUT FOR SOME REASON THEY PUT PAPRIKA AND MINT LEAVES ON THE FRIES! WHAT? It was incredibly bizarre. Frites, a "sauce samurai" that would make even the feebles of warriors perform seppuku, emmental râpé, paprika, and mint leaves.

The next day we wandered around town, said our good-byes, and caught an afternoon train to Rouen. I'll post about that part of our trip in the next few days, I promise.

Bisouxxx!

A Glimpse of Le Tréport

France loves vacations. I don't even hate to generalize about this. It's true. (I started reading Bonjour Tristesse, and in it they've rented a villa on the Mediterranean for two months!) Les Vacances de Toussaint started today, and we don't start back to school or work until 3 November. To celebrate, and just to get out and enjoy the lovely weather, I rode over to Le Tréport this afternoon, and TOOK SOME PHOTOS!


A sign, directing me to Le Tréport. The church, to the right of the sign, is l'Église Saint-Jacques. There was originally a church in the same location during the 14th century, but it was destroyed during a violent storm. Construction to rebuild the church began toward the end of the the 17th century, and if I remember correctly, it was finished during the 18th century. I went inside, but didn't take any photos. I figure I'll save that for its own day.



When the tide goes out, boats that're left in a certain part of the harbor end up on dry land. I was eating my "fesse de bébé" (see later photo) when the tide was coming back in, and watched a couple of fishermen walk out and hop in their boats, then wait for the water to rise and take off!


On my way across the harbor I noticed that there were boats lined up in the locks, waiting to be lowered and released from the harbor, out into the sea:

Notice the moving water in this photo:


No more moving water; it's all been released! The door starts to open:


And out parade the boats!





Here is a photo of some rather scenic, rusty old fishing equipment that I bike past on my way into Le Tréport. Just... yunno... some French stuff, bein' French, in France.



"Il fait souvent de la broum." Or, "it is often foggy. " Thus, "il y a un phare", or "there is a lighthouse." Also, you can sort of see in this photo that the water is a really nice, light blue color. However, it's not at all clear. In fact, when I went swimming I was only up to my knees and I could no longer see my feet! "Beaucoup de calcaire!" The water here is calcareous, or full of calcium.



And, finally, I stopped into a boulangerie/pâtisserie after wandering around for an hour or so, and bought this treat. It's called "une fesse de bébé", or "a baby's bottom." It"s two meringues dipped in hazelnut chocolate on a stick. Yum!



Last, but definitely not least, this is how I spent my mid-morning today, from about 11h30 to 14h. It's probably how I will spend many, many an afternoon while I am here... Coffee, Speculoos cookies (yup, I ate about half the package... they're just too delicious!), and some French literature.