Some Notes on French Trains

Train station in Carcassonne.

Note: this is a bonus entry for my dad because he loves trains.

Power cars for a TGV train.

TGV station in Avignon.

All trains in France are managed by the national rail company, SNCF. There are basically three types of passenger trains. First are the electric long-distance high-speed TGVs. They usually run at between 180 and 200 miles per hour, although in some parts of France, these trains use tracks that haven't been upgraded to handle those kinds of speeds. For instance, the last part of the journey between Paris and Rennes is on conventional tracks and so the train has to slow down to about 100 or 120 miles per hour. However, the French government is currently upgrading those tracks (and many others throughout France) so that by 2014, the roughly 200-mile long trip from central Paris to Rennes will take one hour and twenty-four minutes. The TGV network is quite extensive, but almost all of it runs through Paris. It's very difficult to take a TGV train cross-country without either passing through or changing stations in Paris. Many of our journety this year were on TGVs. In general, the TGV trains are the fanciest cars with first- and second-class options and a bar car. Some of them even provide WiFi service.

Train station in Bordeaux. A TER train is on the left;
an Intercites train on the right.

Second, there are the Intercites trains. These trains serve medium- and long-distance routes not served by the TGVs. They use older, pre-TGV cars (mostly from the 80s) and while comfortable, they're generally not as nice as the TGVs - there's no bar car, for instance, just a guy who comes down the aisle with a snack cart with things for you to purchase. They also aren't high-speed (although they still can go pretty fast - over 100 miles an hour). We only took two of this kind of train, both at the very end of our time in France: from Nantes to Toulouse (about a six hour ride) and from Paris to Bayeux (about an hour and a half ride).

Inside of a TER train.

Finally, there are the regional TER trains. These are smaller, less fancy trains that don't require a reservation (unlike the first two kinds) and mainly serve the small towns of one region (although some run from region to another). They're more like US commuter trains, although probably a bit nicer - no assigned seats, no snack car of any kind, and (in our experience) used by a lot of high-school and college kids to get from home to school. Because they stop in many towns, they can't go as fast as the other types of trains and journeys can be a bit long. We also took many of these trains on our various trips this year and Lisa took TER trains almost every week when she went to Vitre to tutor/babysit the Romanian girls.

Another TER train, in Normandy.

TER train.

Exterior of a TER train.

Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris.

Main hall of the Gare de l'Est, Paris.

Normandy in the Spring

Chez la famille Fleury.

From Strasbourg, it was off to Normandy to visit Brice and Michele, Lisa's host parents, one more time before we left France. We took a train back west to Paris, took the Metro across town to change stations, and then took another train to Bayeux. We arrived on June 6, the 68th anniversary of the arrival of thousands of other Americans in Normandy under very different (and much more important) circumstances.

"The Ireland of France."

We spent a couple days at Brice and Michele's house and it was nice to relax, catch up, eat some good homemade meals (a welcome change after all the eating-out we'd done over the past week!), and enjoy some time in the country. On our second day there, Michele drove us to La Hague, a little peninsula past Cherbourg at the tip of the Cotentin Penninsula on the English Channel.

She said it was like a French version of Ireland, and she wasn't wrong (at least based on the pictures I've seen of Ireland - I've never been!). It was a lot of beautiful rocky coastline covered in greenery. Unfortunately, it was a cold, windy, rainy morning which it made walking around a bit unpleasant. We started at the house of the 19th-century painter Jean-Francois Millet, who painted a lot of rural scenes of this area of Normandy. We didn't actually go into the house (just the gift store and the restroom!) but we saw a couple places he painted nearby, including a little village lane and some dramatic rocks along the coast.

Jean-Francois Millet painted this scene, near his house.

Norman-Gothic church.

We also drove to another little village and saw a little 13th-century Norman-Gothic church and then an old estate farm that's been turned into a community center. We had lunch at a surprising Asian restaurant. When we walked in, it looked like a typical small-town French tabac/bar, with the rows of cigarettes for sale behind the counter where you sit and drink your coffee. But there was a side room with the Asian restaurant that served very good food. It wasn't quite what I expected when we entered!

Michele in Jacques Prevert's studio.

Lisa under a gunnera plant in Jacques Prevert's garden.

After lunch, we went to the house of Jacques Prevert, who moved here from Paris in the last few years of his life in the 1960s and 70s. He was a 20th-century poet and screenwriter and many of his poems were set to music. I had not heard of him prior to our visit so it was interesting to learn about his life and his art. His house was hosting an exhibit of some of his collages, too, many of which were quite strange. They were made from magazine clippings, photographs, old advertisements, and old postcards. As a young man, he was friends with Surrealists and Pablo Picasso, so perhaps its no wonder his collages are odd! His house also has a lovely garden and by the time we left, the rain had cleared off and it was sunny (but still cool and windy), making it easier to enjoy the garden. Lisa was particularly enamored of some giant umbrella-like plants called gunnera. She says she wants to live under one and, as you can see from the picture, she probably could.

Look at the size of that gunnera!

Coastline near Vauville.

Michele also took us to Vauville for more sea views as well as a botanical garden there. It has plants from all over the world (including more gunnera) and is really pretty impressive, although being right next to the ocean, it was very windy. We also met a friendly dog there and, in a field next to the parking lot, saw a colt and its mother. The colt was very young since it was walking awkwardly and clearly hadn't quite gotten the hang of it yet! From there, we went back home, had dinner, and played Bananagrams (both in French and English). We stayed up till about 11 then drove into Caen to pick Brice up, who was at some sort of conference that evening.

The friendly dog and the scared colt.

Botanical garden near Vauville.

Pizza!

The next day, we puttered around the house and had home-made pizza. We shared the recipe we use for pizza dough which we learned from my mom. Then it was back to the train station to head back to Rennes. It was a fun couple of days in Normandy and it was a nice, relaxing, and happy way to end our final trip in France. Thanks, Brice and Michele, for another wonderful time!

Michèle and her favorite cat.

Strasbourg

Vosges Mountains.

It took us about seven hours to get from Clermont-Ferrand to Strasbourg, a city Lisa has wanted to visit since we arrived in France. Strasbourg is in the far east-central part of France, pretty much as far east in France as you can get. It's the capital of the Alsace region, the last new region Lisa and I visited, meaning I made it to sixteen of mainland France's twenty-one regions and Lisa has been to seventeen total - not too shabby! Alsace has been fought over by the French and Germans for hundreds of years and so its culture is a fusion of French and German. In the last twenty years, the city of Strasbourg has attempted to portray itself as a symbol of French/German (and pan-European) cooperation and is the home of the European Union Parliament and the European Court of Human Rights. On the train through Alsace, we passed on the east side of the Vosges Mountains, which (until World War I) formed the border between France and Germany. They were very pretty, covered in trees and the occasional ruined castle.

Strasbourg - a bit of old Germany in France.

Amazingly, the old city (built on an island in the Ill River, just upstream from where it flows into the Rhine on the German border) was not heavily damaged in World War II, despite several bombing raids. So it still maintains the look and feel of a medieval German town with lots of cobblestone streets and half-timbered buildings. It's how I imagined Cologne would have looked if it hadn't been almost entirely destroyed by Allied bombs in the war. It's a very picturesque city. Another thing that struck us about the city was the large number of people riding bikes to get around in the pedestrian-only center of the city. It was probably the most people we'd seen on bikes in one place since our eight hours in Copenhagen back in August!

Strasbourg Cathedral.

The main sight in Strasbourg is the Gothic cathedral. It was built from the 12th to 15th centuries and is today the sixth-tallest church in the world, when you factor in its tower. The outside reminds me a lot of the Cologne Cathedral, with stepped stones that pull your eye upward to the single tower (the second tower was never built). It's built from local red sandstone, making it very different in color from other churches we've seen. On the inside, there are some nice stained glass windows showing different French and German rulers of Strasbourg as well as a window from the 1950s of the Virgin Mary with the EU flag behind her. There's also a huge mechanical astronomical clock with figurines that move every fifteen minutes. We saw a couple move while we were there, but apparently the best show is at 12:30 pm, when figures of the twelve apostles move around the clock.

Astronomical clock.

Mary with the EU flag.