Another weekend, another adventure involving very little study of the income disparities between member states of the EU. Meh, that's what January is for...
I'm fairly lucky at the IEP in that it is quite small and all the French students have to go abroad in their 3rd year. This means that they are nice to foreign students. They have also formed an association called Zephyr which is to help international students get on their feet when they first arrive in Rennes and to have fun once they are settled in. And so I ended up on the weekend excursion to the Chateaux in the Loire valley, kindly organised by Zephyr.
Unfortunately, the trip started with a fairly brutal 6:30am meet-up followed by a 3 hour coach journey. It was all worth it though when we arrived at our first destination: the Chateaux de Chambord. On first approach, the castle seemed vaguely familiar to me. Then I realised that it is because the shape of a Chambord bottle is a copy of the shape of the main tower of the castle and being friends with Emma Stewart, I am well acquainted with what a chambord bottle looks like... In any case, it is very impressive, especially since it has the longest driveway I have ever seen. This is one place you do NOT want on your paper round!
Zephyr had organised for a guide to meet us at the castle so we did a tour of some of the highlights. (On a side note, EU citizens get in free to the castle. My Erasmus experience is making it very very hard to be a Eurosceptic.) A few stats: Chambord has over 400 rooms, 77 staircases and 282 chimneys. The castle was built as a hunting lodge and the walls which surround the estate are roughly the same length as the Paris peripherique (ring road) which means the estate covers about the same amount of land as the centre of Paris. Not bad for a place which was built primarily as a status symbol and which was only lived in for a few weeks of the year. Construction started in 1519 (according to wikipedia) before the French people got sick of royalty and started chopping their heads off.
This is the King's bedroom. I think it was Louis XIV's because the King who it was built for had a bedroom somewhere else in the castle and also I remember the tour guide mentioning the influence of Versailles on this particular room. Anyway, the bed is separated by a barrier from the rest of the room. This was so that the court could watch the King go to bed and get up in the morning. Apparently, this was a great priviledge. Since the rooms in the castle are so huge, it was very difficult to keep them warm, so the King had a secret room with a door hidden behind a tapestry where he would retreat after the going-to-bed ceremony. This room was much smaller and therefore much easier to keep warm. Seriously, they thought of everything (except how ridiculous it is to have a ceremony to watch someone going to bed...).
The central staircase is very impressive. It's a double helix shape, like a strand of DNA, so the two sides never meet although there are windows cut into the rock so you can see people going up the other side. When I build my own castle, it's having one of these staircases.
After a picnic lunch, we headed off to the second chateau of the day, Chenonceau. On the way, the tour guide pointed out some other castles and places of interest. There are over 300 castles in the Loire valley, some of them owned by the French state and others used as private residences or converted into hotels. There are only so many castles and history that you can absorb in one weekend, so we only visited two of the most famous but there is definitely enough to keep you occupied for several weeks.
Chenonceau is very cool. It was originally built on the site of a mill which was right next to the a river. Then, someone royal at some point decided to demolish the mill and build a castle. So that's what they did. But then they realised that all the good hunting forests are on the other side of the river. What to do? Build a bridge of course connecting the two sides. Then later on, someone decided to built on top of the bridge, two massive long galleries which in my opinion would be perfect for a ceilidh. So now it looks like some crazy person just built the castle in the middle of the river.
The same guide did a tour and we saw some of the original tapestries and things as well as this cabinet which was a gift to Mary Queen of Scots for her wedding to Francois II.
We also saw this room, which was decorated like this on purpose for the occupant to mourn her dead husband/lover. I forget the exact details, but to be honest it's not surprising that she never got over it if she had to live in a room like this.
Unlike Chambord, Chenonceau has some pretty impressive landscaped gardens. The best part is the maze. Even though it was really easy it was still fun. The chateau also has postman-unfriendly driveway.
We stayed in a random hostel somewhere in the middle of nowhere on Saturday night. It had a very, very narrow entrance and the bus driver did a 1000 point turn to get in. The french students made tartiflette for everyone for dinner. This is slices of potatoes with bacon lardons, creme fraich (I think) and cheese. Not bad, although I prefer the cheese which is used for raclette which is the same ingredients in a different order. After dinner we basically just partied. :-)
Sunday morning, the bus driver did a gazillion point turn to get the coach out of the driveway and earned himself a round of applause when he finally succeeded. We headed off to Tours. Since it's France and it was a Sunday there was basically nothing to do so we just wandered around and looked at the town. It has an incredible station and the old town is typically cutey McCuterson.
Next up, the highlight of the weekend: visit to a wine cave :-).
The particular cave we went to was for Veuve Amiot but the town it's in is full of different caves. Wine central. Obviously my kind of place. Veuve Amiot is a sparkling wine which is basically champagne but because it is not produced in the Champagne region it is not allowed to be called that. This also means that it is roughly a third of the price of real champers. The company has over 5km of caves where it stores its wine. These are not natural caves but are old stone mines. And what did they need stone for? Building castles of course! We did a little tour through a small section of the caves, then we saw the bottling and labelling machines, then we had "degustation". I tried everything which came my way and I thought they were all great except the sparkling red wine. I think that is an acquired taste but apparently it goes great with chocolate so maybe I will have to acquire it.
So, another great weekend seeing a part of France I have never seen before and I know have a cupboard full of sparkling wines in a variety of different forms: rose, dry, sweet. Aaahh France.
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