Chenonceau and Tours

The weekend after we returned from the UK, we decided to take an overnight trip to Tours, in the Centre région of France. Tours is situated on the south bank of the Loire River ("the Mississippi River of France"), the longest river in the country (draining more than 20% of France's land area) and the traditional dividing line between northern and southern France, although it's not an even division. It's more of a 1/3 (northern France), 2/3 (southern France) division. Still, the Loire has served as a convenient dividing line since Roman times, when it (roughly) formed the boundary between two of the provinces of Gaul.

Chenonceau.

In more modern times, the Loire valley is famous for its numerous chateaux. While this is usually translated as "castles," they're not castles in the sense that most Americans think of castles: big stone buildings from fairy tales full of knights in shining armor and damsels in distress and jousting. Instead, these castles were large aristocratic estates built between the 15th and 17th centuries as a kind of rural retreat from court life in Paris. Many of the estates ended up being acquired (one way or another) by the French royal family. At any rate, after taking the train from Rennes to Tours Saturday morning, we immediately got on another train to Chenonceaux, a tiny town about 25 minutes from Tours which contains one of these chateaux, called Chenonceau (without an "x" on the end).

Some of the gardens.

The castle was built between 1515 and 1521 by a French noble but it was seized by the French king not long afterwards. Its most famous residents were Diane de Poitiers, King Henry II's mistress, and, when Henry died in 1559, his widow, Catherine de' Medici. Catherine was regent for her three young sons (two of whom also died young) and effectively ruled France for 30 years until her death. After that, the castle was inhabited by various members of the royal family, including Catherine's daughter-in-law (who lived in the castle following the assassination of her husband, King Henry III) and another mistress, that of King Henry IV, in the early 17th century. It was sold to various aristocrats and merchants and it's still actually private property today, although open to the public. In fact, other than Versailles, Chenonceau is the most-visited chateau in France.

Lisa-sized chairs in the guard room.

A Renaissance bedroom.

The train dropped us off almost directly in front of the castle grounds. After buying our tickets, we walked down the long tree-lined path to the chateau itself. It was a pretty grand entrance, although it would have been much more impressive in the summer when everything is in bloom. We walked through part of the garden next to the chateau to get a view of the most striking part about the building: it's actually constructed over the River Cher on a series of huge piers. It's pretty amazing architecturally! We spent a couple hours inside the

The Grand Gallery.

chateau, which has been restored to the way it would have looked in the 16th and 17th centuries when Catherine de Medici and her descendants lived there. There are several fancily decorated bedrooms (most with

Part of the kitchen.

original furniture), Catherine's office and library, a guard room, a chapel (which was saved from destruction during the French Revolution because the owner of the house threw all of her fire wood inside so that when the mob showed up to tear out anything religious, it looked like a huge storeroom!), and some impressive kitchens. We also got to walk in the long grand gallery which is the huge room spanning the river - this is where banquets and dances would have been held. It's paved in slate and limestone and limestone, being softer, was worn away more than the slate, meaning the floor is no longer even! Many of the rooms also had old paintings 16th-century Flemish tapestries in them and each room had a different (and very extravagant) display of fresh flowers; all the flowers are grown on the chateau's gardens.

16th-century tapestries.

An upstairs hallway.

Catherine de Medici's
office (that's not Catherine
behind the desk!).

The hedge maze.

After we finished going through every room inside (except the upper floors of the long gallery), we walked around outside for a bit, seeing another garden, the chateau's vegetable garden (obviously bare), four donkeys that had Greek names for some reason, and a hedge maze (we successfully made it to the center and back out - yay!). We then hustled to catch the last reasonable train back to Tours, making it just in time. After we checked into our hotel in Tour (a nice quiet place in a residential neighborhood not far from the train station), we had dinner at a raclette restaurant. We got a small electric contraption into which you put small slices of cheese to melt them and on top of which they put a bowl of boiled potatoes to keep them warm. We poured the cheese over the potatoes and it also came with cold cuts (although not Lisa's), a small salad, mini pickles, and a good bottle of local Touraine wine. The meal was good, but the hostess was awfully rude to us and almost everyone else who came in to eat!

Fritz the Elephant.

The next morning we started with a good breakfast in the hotel dining room. It was all organic and mostly locally grown or made. We then headed to the tourist office and, after learning that the city's art museum was free because it was the first Sunday of the month, we decided to head there. It's located in what used to be the archbishop's palace, so it's a nice architectural space. There's also a huge cedar of Lebanon in the courtyard, which was pretty cool, as well as a stuffed elephant, Fritz, who escaped from the Barnum and Bailey circus in Tours in 1902, went on a rampage, and had to be shot and killed. The art collection itself was good, but not spectacular, but, hey, who can complain when it's free? When the museum closed for lunch at 12:45, we walked next door to the Cathedral of Saint Gatien. It hard started to rain at this point, so we were happy to get inside again! The exterior of the cathedral is decorated in the late 15th century "flamboyent" Gothic style with lots of intricate carvings. The interior was more sedate, but it didn't seem that different from many other Gothic cathedrals we've been in.

St. Gatien, exterior.

St. Gatien, interior.

The Loire, "the Mississippi of France."

We then walked up to the River Loire and along its embankment for a bit. It's very wide, seemed pretty shallow, but had a very fast current. After that, we walked back to the cathedral to visit the Psaltry cloisters, which were now open. The cloisters used to be part of the medieval choir school that was attached to the cathedral, then during the Renaissance, they were turned into a scriptorium for

The scriptorium of the Psaltery cloisters.

copying books. The cloisters were very small, but pleasant and they had a second story, which is something we haven't seen in other cloisters so far. There were also some reproductions of the manuscripts that were made there (the originals are in the city library). Entrance here was free, too, since it was the first Sunday of the month - another bonus visit
for us! After the cloisters, we returned to the art museum to finish our visit since it had reopened after the lunch hour (and was now MUCH more crowded, probably because people had come after church!).

Waterspout in the Psaltery cloisters.

When we finished, we walked west through the rain across town to the Basilica of Saint Martin of Tours (a fifth-century bishop who was much-revered in the Middle Ages). The original basilica was destroyed in the religious wars of the 17th century (two of the massive towers are still standing outside the modern basilica) and what's there now was
completed in 1902. It was very different from any other church we've
seen in France: it had a dome, for one thing, and lots of marble columns inside. It looked much more like one of the churches we saw in Rome. We went down the crypt to see the tomb of Saint Martin, but there were people there praying, so we

Basilica of St. Martin of Tours.

couldn't really move around the space too much. It's clearly still a place of pilgrimage because on the way out, we noticed a small metal roundel in the sidewalk with the shell of St. James of Compostela, just like we saw in Chartres.

We then walked into the old town, had a late afternoon snack at an Irish pub, walked back through the center of town on the Rue Nationale, past the very cool art deco city hall, to the train station to catch our train home. Tours was nice, but it really seemed a lot like Rennes, and therefore not terribly spectacular because it didn't seem very new to us, apart, of course, from the chateau at Chenonceau!

UK Trip: Edinburgh, Day Two

The Frederick House.

Our second day in Edinburgh began early with a breakfast at the cafe across the street from our hotel (the cost was included in our room charge). Ironically, it was a French-style cafe, meaning we started our last full day in the UK by transitioning back to France. But not transitioning too much, as I ordered a full English breakfast and Lisa ordered the vegetarian version.

Scottish formal wear: dresses
for women and men!

Goal: Climb this.

Our goal for the morning was simple: climb Arthur's Seat, the 822-foot-high peak at the end of the Royal Mile that's all that's left of a 350-million-year-old volcano (long since extinct) that was ground away by glaciers. However, this goal was easier said than done, largely because of the weather. It was raining when we woke up and while it stopped during the walk from our hotel to the park where Arthur's Seat is located, it was extremely windy, "near gale force" the weather on the TV said. This made the climb more difficult than it would normally have been. We followed the path up the north side of the hill (although near the top, the path gave way to just rocks to climb around on). Parts of the climb were a bit

The beginning: an easy paved path.

steep, especially near the top, but it was also quite lovely. We walked along the ridge of a valley (the descent to the valley was quite steep, but not a sheer cliff - still, I wouldn't have wanted to fall over the side and roll down the hill!) and past the ruins of a monastic chapel. There were also some lovely views to the north of the Firth of Forth and of Fife on the other side of the Firth. At the summit, it was unbelievably

The middle: less easy, less paved.

windy and we had to crouch on all fours to avoid being blown off our feet! I'm not entirely sure we made it to the official summit (there's supposed to some sort of marker there that shows you the various identifiable points of Edinburgh, a marker we didn't see), but we came awfully close. It was so windy that we didn't want to try to keep walking looking for the

The end: What path?

actual summit; in fact, we spent all of about two minutes at the top before we decided to make the trek back down! On the way down, we saw a lot more people going up than we had on our ascent - we may have been among the first people at the top that day. In the end, it took us about an hour to get from base to summit and back, although at times it felt longer than that! It was quite an invigorating way to start the day.

View from the summit (more or less).

The Firth of Forth.

The monastic chapel.

Can you believe this is Edinburgh?

"Ah, Scotland, land of my forefathers."

"Uh, it's a bit windy!"

St. Giles' Cathedral.

We walked back up the Royal Mile in order to actually visit Edinburgh Castle. Along the way, we stopped in St. Giles' Cathedral, the center of the Scottish Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. We learned that we had to pay two pounds to take pictures inside, something no other church we've visited has done. I'm not really sure it was worth it, but the exterior architecture was very nice. We had lunch along the

St. Giles' Cathedral.

way, too, although not on the Royal Mile itself but on a small side-street, Cockburn Street. The prices of food just off the Royal Mile were much lower - I guess it goes to show what merchants can get away with when they're located on a known tourist street! We had soup and sandwiches, both of which were good, continuing the theme of "good food in Edinburgh." After lunch, we popped into an antique store just down the street because Lisa was looking for a charm for her charm bracelet to commemorate our visit to Scotland. She found a very cool one - a miniature book with "Scotland" printed on the front that opened up to show a series of tiny black-and-white pictures of various sights around the country.

David Hume, a great Scot.

Once we got to the castle, we waited for the next guided tour and I'm glad we did that; we learned much more about the history of the castle's development than we would have if we wandered around on our own. Most of the castle

Inside Edinburgh Castle.

dates from after the 16th century, so it's more recent than many of the castles we've seen so far in France. After the tour, we went into the Great Hall (mostly Victorian, but the roof is still the original one from the 1500s), saw the Scottish Crown Jewels, and the room where James VI of Scotland / I of England was born (he was the first king of both Scotland and England). We couldn't go into the oldest part of the castle, St. Margaret's Chapel (from the 11th century) because it was undergoing restoration and many parts of the castle are off-limits because it's still a

Checking the cannon.

The Scottish War Memorial.

functioning military post. In fact, they even have a big artillery piece they fire everyday except Sunday at exactly 1 pm. We did, however, visit the Scottish War Memorial (a very lovely building with dedications to the various Scottish military units that have suffered casualties since World War I and containing books listing all the deaths) and two small regimental museums. One of them included a French standard taking by a Scottish dragoon (at great peril to his own life) during the Battle of Waterloo. The castle was very interesting, but the best part might just be its location: on another volcanic rock that's part of the same structure as Arthur's Seat.

The Great Hall.

The birthplace of James VI/I.

A French standard from Waterloo.

Edinburgh from the Castle.

After the castle, we walked back to the Scottish National Museum because I wanted to have  more time to look at some of the early archaeological material, although we got there at 4 meaning we (again) only had about an hour before closing. They had some nice Roman remains, although nothing too spectacular, and some nice Viking and Pictish stuff, too - mostly grave markers, coins, weapons, and jewelry. Once the museum closed, we headed back to New Town to get our bags from the hotel (we checked out in the morning and left our bags in their baggage storage room). On the way, we stopped at the little store attached to Henderson's Bistro to buy some tea for ourselves as a souvenir of our time in Scotland. We also went to a tea shop just across the street from our hotel for a late afternoon cream tea. (Incidentally, there was a French family in the tea shop, too, continuing our transition back to France, I guess!) The tea and scones were very good, but the best part of the tea was the plate the scone came on - a china plate with a Bavarian design that read "Frankenmuth, Michigan" on it! (For those of you who don't know, Frankenmuth is

Frankenmuth, Michigan?! In Scotland?!

a town about 60 miles from where my mom and grandparents live designed in a German theme to celebrate its immigrant heritage.) Based on the rest of the china in the shop, it looked like someone had just gone to an antique and bought a bunch of cheap, mismatched pieces. So I guess at some point, someone from Edinburgh visited Frankenmuth, brought a plate home, then it ended up at an antique store before coming to the tea shop. It was pretty amazing to see!

After tea, we got our bags, walked back to the train station, got the express bus to the airport, and made our 8:30 flight to Southampton. We spent the night at the airport hotel there, then flew back to Rennes the next morning.

We really enjoyed our time in the UK - not least because it was nice to spend some time in an English-

Edinburgh Castle at our departure.

speaking country and take a break from French for a while! We'd love to go back to Wales, since there's so much more to explore there, and we'd also like to return to Scotland. There's obviously much more to Scotland than Edinburgh (I'd particularly like to visit the Highlands), but returning to Edinburgh would be fun, too. It's a very friendly city, easily manageable, and very picturesque. Also, Lisa said it's one of the first big cities she's been in on this side of the Atlantic where she's felt safe and comfortable the whole time. I don't know if we'll make back to the UK before we leave France for good, but I'm sure we'll be back someday.

UK Trip: Edinburgh, Day One

The last stop on our whirlwind tour of the UK was Edinburgh, Scotland. We woke up early at our airport hotel in Cardiff to catch our morning to flight to Scotland, another turboprop plane. (It was in the Cardiff airport where we realized that, in the UK at least, they don't announce the gate for your departing flight until 20 minutes in advance. We think this is because they want to keep people in the main concourse with the duty-free shops where they can blow more money, rather than sitting quietly at the gate to wait for their flight!) Once in Edinburgh, we took the very convenient bus from the airport to central Edinburgh for a half-hour ride.

The Old Town of Edinburgh.

We got off at the train station in order to visit the tourist office for our free map and advice on what to do and see in our two days in the city. We then walked to our hotel, the Frederick House, to drop off our bags (since our room wasn't ready yet). Just walking to the hotel, we both quickly decided that Edinburgh felt like a fantastic city. It's very different from almost anywhere else I've been. The Old Town (the medieval and early modern city) is situated along and south of a ridge between Edinburgh Castle and Arthur's Seat (all that's left of an ancient volcano). On the north side of the ridge is the train station and the New Town, built in the 18th century on a nice grid pattern and full of neoclassical business buildings. Our hotel was in New Town and it was amazing to see how many people were out on the streets, shopping, going to work, etc. The city had a very energetic feel to it and the landscape was also very beautiful.

Lunch in a church basement.

For lunch, we chose something called the Undercroft Cafe, located in the basement of the parish church of St. Andrew and St. George in New Town.It was quite an experience! Basically, it was a dressed-up fellowship hall with food coming out of the small church kitchen and the clientele was mostly elderly Scottish women and a few middle-aged businessmen who must have worked in the area. The food was about what you'd expect from a church basement kitchen - good, but not great. Also, it was Shrove Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday) and the tradition in the British Isles is to eat pancakes on this day. So after we finished lunch, I went back to the counter to order a pancake for dessert (it was more like a crepe than a pancake).

It was while waiting in line for the pancake that I had an experience that confirmed for me that Edinburgh is a great city. Behind me, a middle-aged Scottish man asked the guy behind the counter about the soup on offer that day, something called "crofters' broth." Here's what happened:

Worker: Well, it's a broth....
Man in Line (laughing, to me): Well, I guess I asked for that one, didn't I? (While we both laugh, he points to the sign reading "crofters' broth) It says "crofters'" - it looks like there's more than one crofter in the broth, doesn't it? (Again, we both laugh.) I'm a pompous ass, I'm sorry! (To the worker.) What's in the quiche today?
Worker: Cheese and onions.
Man in Line and me, almost simultaneously, while laughing: No crofters in that!

Eating a homemade pancake on Shrove Tuesday.

After I'd finished my pancake, on the way out, the man came up to me again and said, "The broth was pretty thick, so there must have been a lot of crofters in it!" Then, in honor of it being Shrove Tuesday, he offered me one of the small homemade pancakes that his wife had made that morning and which he had in a little plastic baggie. It was very kind of him and the pancake was pretty good, much closer to American pancakes than a crepe.

The National Gallery of Scotland with Edinburgh Castle in the background.

Following lunch, we walked to the Scottish National Gallery, situated near the train station, and spent most of the afternoon there enjoying their very extensive art collection. We next decided to climb up the hill to Edinburgh Castle. It was quite a climb, but at the top, there were some fantastic views over the city of Edinburgh and the hills beyond. At the ticket office to the castle, they told us they would be closing in about an hour and that we really needed two hours to see the castle, so we bought tickets for the next day.

Lisa on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle.

The birthplace of Harry Potter.

 We then walked from the Castle down the Royal Mile (the street running along the top of the ridge from Edinburgh Castle to Holyroodhouse, the Queen's residence in Scotland) and into Old Town. We passed the Elephant House, where J.K. Rowling first started to write the Harry Potter books, and we ended up at the National Museum of Scotland. It seems very much like the Scottish version of the Smithsonian so there were plenty of generic exhibits on evolution, the history of technology, basic forces of physics, etc - in other words, exhibits we could see at plenty of museums in the US. We were interested in the parts dealing with the history of Scotland and, while the museum closed about 45 minutes after we got there and we had to leave, we were able to see some Viking remains and some artifacts from the 15th and 16th centuries. Plus, we saw Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.

Dolly the Sheep.

Since she was born in Scotland, on her death, she was stuffed and put in the museum.

The Lewis Chessmen, National Museum of Scotland.

The Frederick House Hotel.

After that, we walked back to the hotel stopping in a Charles Tyrwhitt store on the way, a company I'vebought many shirts from on-line. The store was a bit disappointing, though; they didn't have any of the patterns I wanted to try on. The hotel was one of the nicer places we stayed on this trip. It's a four-star hotel in an old building, but we got a great deal on it on-line. The room was big (for some reason we were in a triple room with an extra bed), we got an actual closet for our clothes, and lots of free tea (we took it all with us when we left).
 

Oatcakes.

We then headed out for dinner and found a great place, Henderson's Bistro, that was entirely vegetarian and organic and mostly local. I had an onion and pepper quiche with a chutney sauce and salad, plus an organic Scottish beer that was quite good. We also ordered oatcakes (a traditional Scottish food, of course) but the kicker was they had a vegetarian haggis which Lisa, of course, tried. It was lentils, beans, oatmeal, mushrooms, carrot, onion, and garlic, served with the traditional clapshot sauce (I honestly don't know what this is!) and red wine gravy.

Vegetarian haggis.

(You can find the recipe for this delicious treat on the Henderson's website.) Speaking of vegetarian haggis, we were both surprised at how vegetarian-friendly the UK is, especially compared to France. We had no difficulty finding vegetarian dishes for Lisa and they were usually pretty good. Anyway, for dessert, we split a very yummy cherry pie with an oat crust. Henderson's was an extremely tasty restaurant and if you're ever in Edinburgh, we highly recommend a visit.

Scottish 5-pound note.

When we paid for dinner, we got a Scottish 5-pound note in change, which said "Clydesdale Bank" on it and had a picture of Alexander Fleming (the discoverer of penicillin), not the Queen on it (as the English pound notes do). Upon asking, we learned that Scotland retains the right to print its own money independently of the central bank of England (although Scottish notes can be refused in England at the discretion of the merchant). Along these same lines, I should note that the couple days we were in Edinburgh came right after David Cameron had met with the prime minister of Scotland, who is demanding a referendum on full Scottish independence. So many of the newspaper headlines were about various promises and threats made to the Scottish pm to get him to not go through with his intention to hold the referendum.

This first day in Scotland was amazing. Edinburgh is beautiful, the weather was good, and the people were very friendly and nice. Our second day, though, was even better and confirmed that Edinburgh is my second favorite non-US city (after Rome, of course).