Blois, definitely not Blah, or castle hunting in the Loire Valley (1/4)

Last weekend, my friends Elizabeth (IU), Allison (Wisconsin), and I fulfilled our subconsciously suffocated dreams of being a princess during a trip to the Loire Valley. On Friday, we took the TGV (train à grande vitesse, or really fast train) to Paris and then a smaller train west to the city of Blois (pronounced BLWAH--quite possibly the hardest word to say without making a strange facial contortion). We arrived Friday afternoon, checked into our hostel, and started our castle hunt. We took a bus to see Cheverny, but by the time we got there, it had closed approximately one minute prior. Bummer. But we took pictures of the trees that blocked it out of our sight anyway. Saturday morning we frolicked around Blois. Pictures from that morning's adventures:

The church across from the Blois castle. Huge trees.

Blois has lots of nice rooftop views

The straightest road in France or the only straight road in France

Loire Valley (2/4)

At around noon, we catch a bus out to see Chambord, constructed under the reign of François Ier. Supposedly, the central spiral staircase was designed by DaVinci. Chambord goes way beyond my basic mental image of a castle. It is unbelievable. We start our visit off right with a picnic. That morning at the market in Blois, we found a really nice Brie--very mild, not gooey or stinky (don't get me wrong--I LOVE a good stinky cheese), but what was lacking in the strength of the cheese itself was made up for by the integration of cracked pepper in the rind. Yummy.

Loire Valley (3/4)

As we didn't catch the bus back to Blois until 6pm, we spent a good amount of time at Chambord. We got tickets to go inside and saw some pretty sweet living quarters. That François Ier really knew how to live. The architect was obsessed with symmetry, but one of the differences between the two wings of the castle is the chapel, which is marked by a cross that tops one of the spires. By the time we got outside again, the lighting had completely changed, and we once again got out our cameras and went at it. I didn't mess with these pictures at all. It was really this beautiful.

Elizabeth and Allison

Loire Valley (4/4)

On the way to Chaumont

Chaumont

On Sunday, we caught a train from Blois to nearby Onzain and then walked about 40 minutes to Chaumont. The Château de Chaumont is my idea of where Cinderella would live--big fat spires and a drawbridge. But Cinderella did not live here. Catherine de Medicis and Diane de Poitiers did, however. They're way cooler than Cinderella. That night I took the train back to Aix so that I could go to class the next day. Elizabeth and Allison played hooky and saw a couple more castles on Monday.

Picnic view number 1,259?

An update on school:

The university here, or the "fac," has gotten quite extreme with the strike. Students stand outside of every entrance and yell at you if you try to go in. I had one class there on Monday because everyone in that class, including the professor, is foreign, and nobody really understands France's strike culture. I may or may not have another class at the fac today. . . we shall see. Other than my classes at the fac, our program has required us to take at least four classes with the retired professors and doctoral students that they've hired to make sure we get credit for the semester. Through them, I'm taking an art history class, French literature and philosophy of the 18th century, history of religion in France, and social psychology.

We are currently experiencing April showers.

Calanque Attaque!

These pics are from March 22nd, when my neighbor Elina and her friend Virginie took Steven and I to see the calanques in and around Cassis (just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Marseille). A "calanque" (pronounced ka-LONK, fun to say) is a little inlet along the rocky cliffs that meet the Mediterranean around these parts. We spent the day hiking and admiring the view. The trail is rocky and I've still got a couple of bruises from a little stumble. Oops! It's amazing that the calanques are so close to us. The U.S. has got some great geographical diversity, but sometimes I feel like France has just as much but in a much smaller area--not to mention the vast architectural differences. There's a reason why France is the most tourist-visited country in the world.

Short nap in the sun here

Elina admiring the view

In the grand tradition of putting up pictures of good picnic spots

The water is extremely clear and blue.

And now for a story! Anybody remember the fiasco of me missing a final exam? Here is a quick recap and conclusion to the saga:

I had a really nice professor last semester who taught History of Music in the Middle Ages. I was rather quiet in that class, and the professor always made a special effort to ask me if I had any questions or needed any help. I'd usually respond with something along the lines of, "Oh yeah. I'm getting everything," despite the fact that he spoke at lightning speed, and it all went through one ear and out the other without the slightest intention of being retained. Final exam time rolls around. The final exam is the only grade for the entire semester. There is no way I was going to pass it. Naturally, one of the many things I misinterpret during class is the date and time of the exam. The final exam is the only grade, I repeat, and I completely miss it. I frantically e-mail the professor to ask if I could turn in a paper or something make it up, and he replies, saying that he cannot accept outside work to replace the exam and will get back to me about what can be done. I did not hear back from him, and I "tried" my best to just ignore the situation until last week, at which point I reminded my program director about it, and she tells me that she will contact the professor to solve this snafu. She does, and notices that he is coughing a lot.  She asks him if he is sick. He says yes, and on top of that, he just broke his leg, and his fiancée just left him. The poor man! As for my problem, he says that I was a good student; I always came to class, and I seemed serious about my studies. He says it's not worth the trouble of me turning anything in or taking the exam. He'll just give me a 14. Out of 20. For a French grade, that's decent, and IU transfers it as an A. (In all three of my other classes, I received an 11, which transfers as a B+. Eh, could be better, could be worse.) That was seriously the most difficult material I have ever encountered in a class, I turned in absolutely nothing, took no exams, and just because the professor was a thirtysomething year-old softie who was impressed that take music classes at IU, I got an A. I am still celebrating this victory.

The visitors 1/3

Because vacations are fun, the French like to have a week-long break in February. This was a great opportunity for Mom and Pops to come visit France (at least, Aix and Paris) and me. We spent some time exploring Aix and Marseille before taking the TGV to Paris for four days. We saw it all: Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Notre Dame, Ste Chapelle, Arc de Triomphe, Musée Rodin, Eiffel Tower. . . AND I had really good duck a restaurant. Couldn't ask for anything more out of a vacation.

Blurry or artistic? You decide. As for me. . . well, I didn't want it to turn out this way. (Does that make it art automatically?) At the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

Mt. Ste Victoire at the Musée d'Orsay. Apparently, Cézanne painted it at least 72 times. We visited his last studio (in Aix) before our trip to Paris, and Mom even got to touch his chapeau!

Oh Musée d'Orsay, how I love thee.

Be jealous--I got to see the one and only Georgia Kuss. In Paris. For those of you who don't know her, Georgia is a dear friend of mine from high school. She's studying in Paris this semester.

The visitors 2/3

Musée Rodin. La femme accroupie (I think).

Musée Rodin.

Miraculously, not a photoshopped picture.

The visitors 3/3

Caption contest. What have you got? (Again, my camera is pretty terrible when it comes to no-flash, museum photography.)

"Honestly, you've got to switch to the new cat-gut strings!"

"One more wrong page turn and I swear I'm getting a real music stand."

Ste Chapelle

Notre Dame before Ash Wednesday mass.

Back in Aix, Dad and I take a little hike around the base of Mt. Ste Victoire.

Moussanes et les Baux

A few weekends back, Elizabeth, Carmen, and I went on a little day trip to les Baux. It was lovely.

Moussanes, or the smallest village in France. Ever. Both the lady who sold us bread and the lady who sold us soup were thoroughly confused as to why would end up there. Truth be told, we were there because the bus doesn't stop in les Baux, and this is the closest we could get.

Elizabeth and Carmen in their natural states.

We found a nice vantage point during our 3km walk from Moussanes to les Baux. And we almost got knocked over by a gust of wind into a rocky ravine. About fifteen times.

Les Baux.

Les Baux. Ten points to anyone who thinks, "Hey, didn't Christin already write a post about going to les Baux?" Yeah, this picture's about the same.

Today.

Today I woke up early for my 8am class. It was canceled. Then I went home, ate breakfast, drank tea, read, and fell asleep until it was time for my next class. Then I played frisbee with Frank and Allison. That is all.

Elizabeth and I get a taste of Italy 1/4

Alrighty--so this is going to be a long post. If you just want to look at pics, scroll down.

There's so much to be said (all good!) about our (first?) trip to Italy. I'm going to preface it all by saying that Elizabeth and I were only there for 29 hours, and only saw two cities. Actually, we spent just about the same number of hours on an overnight bus to get there and back. The bus ride was as nice as an overnight bus ride could have been. Finding a good position to sleep on a bus is an art. My favorite involved having my left foot posed on my right knee, with my left elbow resting on my left knee, and my curled up left wrist holding up my head. Easier done than said. You should try it. But not for a fourteen-hour bus ride. We rode through Marseille, Toulon, Nice, Turin, Milan, all to get to the lovely Bologna. At times the bus felt more like the Polar Express because in the middle of the night I'd wake up, look out the window, and find that we were surrounded by snow-covered peaks. There were two bus drivers who switched about every 2-3 hours all the way from Barcelona to Bologna and back. But enough about the bus.

You might be wondering how Elizabeth and I came to choose Bologna and Ravenna to visit out of all the lovely Italian cities. This is going to make us seem like huge dorks (debateable if we really are or not), but honestly, we chose these cities because we had learned about them in classes we had taken freshman year. Ravenna was the star of a Byzantine art history class that Elizabeth had taken, and Bologna often came up in my favorite class of my college career thus far, Botany and Anatomy in the Renaissance. This worked out to our extreme advantage, as Elizabeth could relive everything she had learned by telling me about the gorgeous mosaics we saw in Ravenna, and I could do the same by telling her more than she ever wanted to know about the anatomical theater in Bologna. We decided that for future trips (Loire valley, mayhaps), each of us would study up on one landmark so that we could play tour guide for the other. (Alright, so it's not debateable--we are huge dorks.)

I'm going to be honest in saying that I had not even heard of Ravenna before Elizabeth saw that it was close to Bologna, and therefore a must-see for our short northern Italy trip. The bus arrived in Bologna at around 11am on Friday, we stopoped by our hotel, and as the room was not ready yet, we wasted no time and set out for Ravenna. One train ride later, we were enjoying the quaint little town that is Ravenna and all that it has to offer. We saw mosaics in Apollinaire nuovo, San Vitale, its adjacent mausoleum, and Apollinaire en classe. Elizabeth taught me all the goodies. In San Vitale, for example, she pointed out to me one of the first instances of Christ represented as a lamb, before the church decided that it was an iconographic no-no. The mosaics were also chock-full of representations of the four evangelists and borders that liken to Muslim geometric designs. As Elizabeth explained, Byzantine art is not often thought of as colorful, and the figures are often seen as rigid and dull. This is not at all the case with the mosaics. The tiny bits of glass have held up their color very well, and many of the people portrayed had billowy robes. The overall effect of the mosaics from far away was a velvety texture, although I held Elizabeth back from touching the roped-off masterpieces to confirm or deny this observation. We did, however, question if any of the artists had seen a real sheep. They are a little wolf-like. Some of the ways they tried to display depth perception and shadows were cute. Better than I could do. Elizabeth also taught me what a squinch is--basically handing me on a silver platter my new favorite word and secret weapon for Scrabble. But I won't bore you with a definition.

Post continued in part two. . .

A square in Ravenna

San Vitale

Unfortunately, this is one of the best pics of the mosaics that I have as it was not permitted to use flash.

Street in Ravenna

Our super sweet hotel room

Italy 2/4

By the time Friday night rolled around, we were very relieved to see the approaching bus that would take us out of the ocld rain in Ravenna to take us to the train that would get us back to Bologna. We finally checked into our hotel, Il Guernico, and to my surprise, it was both the nicest and cheapest hotel I have ever stayed in. "How is this possible?" you ask. We split the bill 50/50, each half being only 17€. The recently re-done hotel has everything to offer: Wifi, a 5€ breakfast buffet, bikes to rent, etc. Our personal room was ridiculous in the best of ways: two comfy twin beds, flat-screen tv, heated towel rack, and the cherry on top--a shower with one of those huge flat showerheads that just dumps water on you and in the middle of that, a light that bea,ed down in changing colors. After the discovery of these features, Il Guernico was deemed The Whimsical Pleasure Palace and priceless works of art all over Bologna were described as having palettes that include Magic Shower Blue or Magic shower intermediary color between red and indigo.

It's amazing how many churches you can explore in a short amount of time. On top of the three churches in Rabenna with mosaics and a mausoleum in Ravenna, Elizabeth and I entered at least three more in Bologna: San Petronius, San Domenico ( seat of the Dominican order; home to some of Michaelangel's works, and where Mozart once gave a concert), and some church nearby our hotel. San Domenico was probably my favorite. When I first stepped in, I was too much in awe to move for about two minutes, and after that, I could only just barely restrain myself from running all around it. As morbid as I am, I spent a lot of time staring down the church's relic, somebody's skull. Beneath it there were three different saints' names written, one of which was St. Cecilia, my confirmation saint. So maybe that was her skull or there was another relic in the skull case that I didn't notice that belonged to her. We would have liked to enter Santo Stefano, whose architecture includes 7 different styles, but it was closed when we got to it and did not open up again until too shortly before we had to be on our way back. We did get a chance to explore the antique market just ouside of Santo Stefano, though, and we were very tempted to buy some beautiful old, Italian and otherly foreign jewelry.

Bologna, in general, left me awestruck. The city is what happens when a medieval metropolis continues to thrive up until contemporary society. Famous for the still-standing two medieval towers, Bologna is believed to have been covered in like structures, aptly named The Forest of Towers. I cannot recommend this place enough. Granted, I have yet to see the more popular traveling destinations of Rome, Venice, Florence, Pisa, etc., our February visit was practically void of other tourists. I think I heard another group of native English speakers only once--but don't let that scare you. Every person we spoke with either recognized our looks of confusion and tried speaking English with Elizabeth and I, or very nicely and slowly told us something that we couldn't aurally understand but, with the aid of Italian hand gestures, was crystal clear.

Keep reading--more in the next post down!

Along the Via dell'Independenzia

The market where we bought canolis, olives, and marzipan. Not sure why there's a French flag there. I think my camera likes to mess with colors. It's probably an Italian flag.

Not a great pic, but it shows a little bit the liveliness of the place.

Neptune!

Typical.