Excursions, excursions

Elyse, the other American assistant, and I decided it was obligatory to visit Nantes before the start of classes.  Nantes is the closest large city and the center of our académie (the equivalent of a school district, but it covers much more territory than districts in the U.S.).

Nantes on the Loire

Nantes is a lively city on the Loire river with a variety of things to do.  Since we know we'll be coming back several times throughout the year, Elyse and I weren't pressées (pressed) to see everything at once; we spent a lot of time walking and getting the gist of the city's layout.  One of the popular and more modern attractions in Nantes are their mechanical animals - la Roche-sur-Yon apparently stole the idea from them - which can be found on a carousel and a mechanical elephant that you can ride near the river.

Château des ducs de Bretagne

Shrubbery in les Jardins des Plantes

While we decided to wait for another time to ride the mechanical animals, we went to several other important monuments.  The Château des ducs de Bretagne is free and open to the public; you can roam the ramparts and picnic on the lawn just outside by the river.  Not far are the Jardins des Plantes, one of my favorite parts of Nantes.  The gardens are large, serene, and well-kept, with ponds, paths, birds (freely-roaming ducks and parakeets in a large cage), and elaborate shrubbery clipped in the shapes of animals.  I could move to Nantes just for the gardens.

Le Bouffay

Nantes also has a stunning cathedral...which, no surprise, was destroyed during the world wars, rebuilt, and then set on fire at some point during the mid- to late-1900s...and then rebuilt.  When looking at the outside, you can see the white stone used to rebuild the new sections and the grey stone from the old cathedral.

Our favorite area in Nantes is called the Bouffay, where the cobblestone streets narrow and fill with restaurants and outdoor cafés.  It's a great place for perusing menus and relaxing, and is especially lively in the evening.  Elyse and I found a perfect hole-in-the-wall restaurant for a Roquefort salad and moules frites (mussels and fries) before heading back to la Roche.

For the record: the best chocolate in Nantes can be found not far from le Bouffay at a shop called Castelanne.  It was so delicious, it made both of us cry.

A few days later, once we had met more assistants, we decided to travel to a town called les Sables d'Olonne.  Elyse, Henry, Laura, and I went together early in the morning.  About thirty minutes away, right on the Atlantic coast, les Sables is the Florida of France: a retirement town with a beach.  The town itself isn't much; there's a touristy cluster of shops, a church, and a seashell museum.  There's a nice port with lots of boats and a poissonnerie with very fresh fish.  The beach itself is wonderful, with soft, fine white sand...and the scariest, largest meduse (jellyfish) I've ever seen washed up on shore - I had terrible flashbacks of my jellyfish sting in Cannes.  After a lunch picnic, we walked north to one of two lighthouses.  A placard nearby told me that it's known as the little Tower of Pisa (apparently it leans just a bit, but I couldn't see anything). 

  

 

In the afternoon, we were joined by Jack and Kate, two English assistants from la Roche, and Christopher, an English assistant who lives in les Sables.  We spent most of the afternoon eating ice cream and dipping our feet into the ocean, and of course waving to America across the Atlantic.

After a day of beach and sun, everyone was tired and we decided to head back early to see if we could take an earlier train back to la Roche.  We all have cartes jeunes, or youth cards, which discount every train ticket we buy within France (by 25-60% each trip, so it's a fantastic deal); the problem is that we don't get the full discount if we travel during morning and evening rush hour.  In order two save a grand total of two Euros each, Laura and Elyse and I decided to keep our original tickets, which happened to be for a regional bus that functions like a train for ticket purchase purposes.  It was also the final bus of the day.

You can probably already see where this is going.  While I understood when the woman at the ticket counter told us to wait for the bus devant la gare (in front of the train station), we took it a little liberally and followed a sign to the bus station on the side of the train station, where we saw other regional buses and assumed we were in the right place.

6:30 came and went with no bus.  I started to get uneasy, and sprinted back to the ticket counter in the train station.  The look on the woman's face was a mix of horror, pity, and how-could-you-be-this-stupid-I-said-in-FRONT-of-the-train-station.  It seemed we were stranded in les Sables overnight...on the eve of our first day of work in la Roche.  Mortified, we scrambled to think of people to call - luckily, Elyse has a working phone - but none of us particularly wanted to phone our cooperating teachers to ask to be rescued before school had even started.  Finally, Elyse remembered our friend, Gwendolyne, a French university student who lives at the same foyer de jeunesse as Elyse and who has a car; Gwen was kind enough to drive down to les Sables after class and rescue us.  Un grand merci to Gwen!  We provided a picnic for her in la Roche last weekend as a thank-you.