The Election!!!

How could I not blog about this!?!?! Today was the french presidential election!!! It was between Nicolas Sarcozy for re-election, who is pictured here on the right, and Francois Holland, who is pictured on the left. One can place Sarcozy's political views rather close to those of Obama's and in France Sarcozy is considered to be a right winged politician. Francois Holland is a socialist, and considered here in france to be a left winged politician. What this then concludes is that the whole political system of France is moved over about one step to the left compared to that of America. What makes that realization even more interesting, is that the Socialist candidate was elected today! At 8pm today after just having finished dinner my host mom ran to the television to see what the results were. I currently live in the Pays-de-la-Loire Region of France, or more specifically the Maine et Loire Valley. This region is typically known for being right winged, so as you can imagine my host parents were not happy. I then received a pretty interesting explanation for how Holland, their new president, is going to seriously upset the European Union, which I can understand since his political view points are very far from ever being elected in America. But what made it the most interesting for me what simply that I was only an observer. In America I find myself getting frustrated and annoyed with politics and having to decide on who to vote for, but here in France, I just got to sit back and watch the elections unfold, and then how they effected those around me. Another interesting thing about French elections is that the new president takes office almost immediately. When I asked my host mom the date Holland would be moving in she said Um I'm not sure, probably Monday. It was very surprising! But made me think of our program as a little excessive. I then watched both the former and new president give speeches on television, both saying nice things about each other, but both coming down to the same phrase, no matter who one this election one thing still stands true, they are still all French and love their country, which then concludes with Vive La France!!!! But I did hear some Holland supporters saying Vive La President!! Overall it was a very interesting thing to experience. I think I will forever remember being in France when the socialist president was elected. 

                             
These pictures are posted up on signs right on the side walk, I walk past them every morning on the way to the bus!!, they are currently vandalized, I can add that picture on a different day lol

Ahhh the Infamous French Baguette!

I see everyone greatly enjoyed my video about the typical french sandwich, so here I have a video for you about the infamous french baguette, and to be honest, the think I am going to miss more than anything from France, since it is practically impossible to find in America! Unless I find the perfect recipe!!... It might become my life goal... Just a thought... :)

Tours!!!

Hey everyone! Sorry I haven't been blogging in a while, I've been rather busy, or well maybe the better word would be lazy ;) In that time though I did do some traveling. The first city a visited was Tours! A beautiful city only about an hour east of Angers. The train was less than 30 euros round trip so me and my friend Anastasia took a little day trip there.

Not knowing much about the city we just banked on the fact that in practically every city in France you can find a beautiful church, an impressive castle, and most likely a pretty river of some sort. We we're lucky and went 2 out of 3 on our presumption. Tours has one of the most beautiful church's I've seen so far in France, and is another one of the many cities in the Loire River Valley Region, but it's castle was not at all interesting or impressive from the outside, and on the inside we found ourselves looking at very specific french photography about the reconstruction of Tours about 60 years ago. It was interesting, but we we're very distant to it, since we had no idea any reconstruction had occurred. It was kind of similar to looking at pictures from the Great Depression in America, but if you weren't american and had a hard time understanding all the short lacking explanations underneath the photos. If you were american you would understand and appreciate them, but otherwise you lack a little emotion... 

So since the cities castle was nothing worth taking pictures of, I have here some pictures of the beautiful church :)

The sun started to shine literally the instant we got off the train, and this Cathedrale could not look prettier with the blue sky behind it!

I thought this to be a little interesting and definitely surprising. One thing one definitely doesn't see often in France is large, bald, leather wearing men, and here we find four of them leaving the Cathedrale in Tours, I had to document it!

This is the inside of the church, I once again tried to show how amazing tall it is, maybe here we can use Anastasia as a reference point.

This is me in front of the Church, it was hard to get the church in entirely behind me, but look at that amazing detail! C'est Incroyable!!!

La Loire et Un Quais, meaning the Loire and a walkway

We stumbled about this completely by accident. It was pretty funny, it just emerged between two stone walls and I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. This tree was HUGE! For anyone that's every read Le Petit Prince, this is absolutely the Baobab tree he was afraid of!!!!

This translates to--- "Seeds of the Baobab" The Little Prince, "All baobabs, before growing big, start by being little"

Now if you translate that phrase word by word it doesn't exactly say that, but I'm starting to realize in order to preserve some of the poetry in French you have to translate the meaning of the sentence, not the individual words, otherwise it sounds silly and awkward :) lol 

Nantes Returns!

So! Yesterday I went back to Nantes! And today I finally found out a way to get a picture of a reasonable map to show everyone where I've been!...

http://www.google.com/maps?ll=48.026672,0.219727&spn=3.989591,10.821533&t=m&z=7


Sorry, you have to copy and paste, but as you can see here it shows you where Paris is so you can have an idea how far I am from Paris. If you look over to the west of Paris you'll eventually find Angers my home :), On this map, you can see Nantes, where I visited yesterday, St. Malo, where I visited about a month ago, Blois and Amboise where I visited last week, and Tours where I'm going to visit in a couple weeks. The other places I've visited can be found if you look at a more zoomed in version but this should give you a general idea of everywhere I've been :) Also if can find la Loire river you can follow that and find the majority of the castles I've visited, since they were all pretty much surrounded around the Loire.

Anyways! Back to Nantes! So the first time I went there I went and saw the chateau and cathedral but this time I went to see a different part of Nantes. I also returned with some different friends that hadn't seen the chateau, so while they were there me and my friend I went with last time visited le Musee de Beaux Arts. That means the museum of beautiful arts. One of these museums exists in basically every big city in France. What it is is a small rather inexpensive museum that shows pieces of art that were made by people that lived in that city and one point, and sometimes they might have pieces of work that were done by other people that were French, like for example this museum showed 2 pastels by Monet and a sketch by Henri Toulouse- Lautrec, and I'm almost positive neither of them lived in Nantes for any significant amount of time, but they're both popular french artists so you appreciate seeing their work anyways, especially since it was only a euro to get in! lol So Maria and I spent a good 2 hours there looking at some amazing sketch work from french artists and afterwards met up with our two friends to have lunch.

Last time I was in Nantes I ate at this amazing restaurant, and since me and maria had expressed how amazing it was to our other two friends they absolutely wanted to eat there as well, and it was just as delicious! The only difference this time was that I took pictures of everything I ate so everyone could see how amazing it was!!!! 

So to start I had a chef salad... Yea It was just a little bit more then a regular chef salad!!!!

In this salad there was romaine lettuce, halved cherry tomatoes which were delicious, semi-cooked green beans, chives, red onions, almond slices, balsamic dressing, and last but not least, some form of smoked meat. Hahah it slightly felt raw in my mouth but to be honest, I really think it was the duck form of Prosciutto. It tasted soo good!!! Every bite was amazing :)

Next course was what they call Le Plat, please note, in france when you're looking at a menu and it says Nos Entrees, and you see their only 6 euros and get excited and go in right away, you're going to be disappointed, an entree in france is the appetizer. My salad is the entree. If you look into the language it becomes obvious to call and appetizer an entree, because entree is the conjugated version of the verb entrer, to Enter, so an entree would be the entrance to the meal, hence why the first thing you eat is an entree and the main course is called a Plat, like a plate. That explanation doesn't have a clear meaning like entree does, but entree works better for the first course so we'll just leave it at that! SO!, my Plat, was called Un Confit de Canard avec des Pomme de Terres Rotis. Which translates to the best meal ever!!!

Yep, you guessed it, Duck!!! With roasted potatoes!! The duck was so savory and delicious, the skin was cooked perfectly, not to much fat and the meat was not chewy or anything, it pretty much melted in my mouth. The potatoes were made with garlic and parsley and were crisped perfectly. The salad at first seemed kind of annoying to have again, since I had just eaten a salad, but in contrast to the meat and potatoes, it was kind of a bite of fresh air in between the, heavy at times, duck. 

After that came the dessert, which gave us a taste of everything all in one! It was called the cafe gourmand. That sounds like its just a fancy coffee, but in pretty much every restaurant I've been in here in france, a cafe gourmand means your getting your typical espresso, disguised with the name cafe, and a little taste of several desserts, so I highly recommend getting it!

Here it is!!! Haha this is a funny picture, because everything appears bigger then it actually it because I have nothing regular sized in the picture to compare all the tiny things too. All of those probably share the same circumference as a golf ball, meaning they are small, but still the perfect amount of everything! The coffee, was an espresso, which I downed pretty quick because a) I don't actually like coffee, so I didn't savor it for that reason, and b) because I know coffee helps you digest, and after consuming a duck leg I think it might be necessary :) But the butter cookie went perfectly with the coffee flavor :) Then to the left I had a vanilla mousse in between apple slices on the bottom, and what was pretty much teddy gram crumbs on top, it was delicious!!! Then in the middle back I had a little mini creme brulee!! It was amazing!! I have to be honest, this is the only place at which I've ever eaten creme brulee, and I have to admit I love it!, this size is perfect, and the crunchy burnt sugar on top goes perfectly with the creme anglaise underneath :)

So! Overall it was an amazinggggggg meal and me and my friends had a great time!! One positive reaction to speaking english in a restaurant is that if you have a nice waiter, they'll offer to take your picture!....

After this meal we started walking around and ran into one of the craziest markets of my life! Unlike the amazing markets I went to in Paris, these markets were all clothes based, rather then food based, which after a little while started to remind me of the erie county fair... Hahah I say that because it started with really amazing products from little boutiques where at I bought a wonderful new scarf! And then became this over crowded market of foreigners selling extremely cheap, bad quality clothes, they even had French carnival food there! Which consists of fried weird strips of dough with sugar on top, cotton candy!, and ice cream!! So we decided to only participate in two of those, cotton candy because we couldn't believe they actually had it!!! And ice cream because it got soooo warm out :) Funny story about the cotton candy, just like everything in the french language, of course it has a gender!!!! Hahah in french every noun has a gender, like un Ipod and une television. The e at the end of the un makes it feminine, and it has a completely different pronunciation, so when Maria went to order a cotton candy like Un Cotton Candy s'il vous plait, and  the man looked at her and said UNE cotton candy we couldn't helping but die laughing hahaha. After finally getting out of the market and getting our bearings back, since entering in a market takes any sense of direction right out from under your feet, we got some ice cream :) I got what is called "After Eight", which made absolutely no sense to me because it was really just mint chocolate chip...But either way it was the best mint chocolate chip ice cream I've ever had!!! The mint was so real! It even stayed in my mouth after I was done eating it like a mint would! Heres some pictures :) 

                          

And there's my new scarf!!!!! 

Our Nantes day continued with visiting THE weirdest museum of our ENTIRE lives, and to be honest I'd almost rather not give an explanation of it, and just show you the pictures. Or well how about I'll tell you what we were expecting, and then show you the pictures, and keep in mind, this was 5.50 euros, just another reason we were just honestly so confused!!!! 

Almost all of our host parents and friends who had been to Nantes had all told us we needed to go see the Machines! We were told there was an elephant machine and other animals all over the place! Soo naturally our minds thought it was going to be a pretty French garden randomly filled with animals in machine form. After walking for about 35 minutes following confusing signs to get there, we came upon a building that looks very similar to a warehouse. When we entered we saw it was a museum we needed to go in and they were talking something about elephant rides? So we bought the tickets and entered in.... 

Looks interesting! Lets go inside!...

Um.... weird creepy ant bug thing that walks?

weird caterpillar?

It moves back and forth with hydraulics? 

Another creepy bug that moves...

His face...

Um yeaa another creepy bug that moves?

And THE elephant everyone was talking about.

Hahah overall it just was NOT what we were expecting, and it surprised us, so we probably didn't appreciate it as we would've if we had known we were going to see wooden bugs, and a wooden elephant. 

Overall the Nantes trip was an EXPERIENCE like no other! Hahaha later that night I ate at an amazing French restaurant in Angers, I'll have a post up about that soon :)

Amazing Castles Continued!!!

The 3rd castle we visited was called Blois.

This is the front view of it.

This castle is known for having several types of architecture, 

This is the inside of the castle, the stair case looks just like the one in Chambord!

This is another angle inside the castle..

And this is another part of the castle!

Here are two pictures of cool/weird architecture in the castle..

Coolest gutter ever! Its a fish head!!!

And these are super creepy gargoyles, theyre the orginals, there are replacements on the actual castle.

The most amazing thing about this castle was absolutely the interior decoration! It was my favorite castle for that very reason!!!

Fireplace

Fireplace

Bedroom

Piano!

Another amazing fireplace!!!

After this castle we headed towards Cheverny, which is known for its hunting hound dogs.

This is the front of the castle

A little table with raspberry tarts!!!

And old time SINGER sewing machine!

The interior decoration

me and my friends outside the castle!

(Amelia, Me, Maria, and Kelsi)

While we were at the castle I just had to see all the dogs I kept hearing barking! But when I got over to where they were holding them it was a little disturbing... There were probably about 80 dogs crammed into this little zoo type cage... They were all un-neutered male dogs, so they would fight each other and do other things that male dogs do together.. And on top of that the smell was horrendous, I guess I just really wasn't expecting what I ended up seeing. An interesting point though about these dogs is that they are all descendants from the kings personal hunting dogs, so they're kind of royalty! I know they are taken out, I hope frequently through out the day.. it was just surprising to see dogs like they were in the zoo! Especially when I am missing my dogs soooo much!!!!!

On the other side of the dogs there is ofcourse a beautiful garden!

This garden had little broken up pieces of like mirrors and colored mirrors in it rather then rocks, which was odd.. but looks amazing!!!

This is the view from behind the castle, if you can blow up the picture you can see there is a fountain in the center of the photo :)

And this is me on a bench, to the right of me there is an Orangerie!, Yea! An orange tree field!.. But there wasn't any oranges.... lol

So! That concludes my intense day of cluing everyone into what I've been doing the past couple weeks!! I promise I'll keep up with it more often, and get some more fun food videos up there too! Or maybe even just regular videos! We'll see.. hope you all enjoyed everything :)

French Castles Will Forever Amaze Me!!!!

Yesterday I went on the final excursion with my school to 4 different castles! The first one we visited was called le Chateau d'Amboise. Its located on the top of a hill and you have to walk pretty far to get there, so we were slightly exhausted on arrival but the gardens and architecture woke us up :)

This is the inside view of the Castle.

And this is the view of the city from the top of the hill where the castle is found.

This beautiful little building is separate from the castle but still on the hill, it's a very special building and I didn't know why, and didn't know it was special until I walked in...

Yea.. This building is Leonardo da Vinci's Tomb!!!!

It was really intense and extremely surprising to just walk in on it having no clue it was going to be there!

This is a statue of Leonardo da Vinci in the beautiful gardens of this castle.

This is the part of the castle that faces the city, I love this type of architecture, I've been finding it pretty often in France and it still gets me everytime!! Its just so detailed it amazes me.

This is a picture of me on the roof of the castle looking out on to the garden. 

Here are some fun garden pictures :)

These are the WEIRDEST trees in the world. They are ALL over France and they freak me out every time I see them. They actually grow little branches off of their nubs, but the french trim them so they look like awkward nubby trees. Haha these one's aren't the worst I've seen, but they can get pretty weird... 

If you noticed in the other picture of me with the garden, there were all those geometrically placed little dots, they're perfectly rounded shrubs!!!! I feel bad though for whoever's job it is to walk around with little scissors and keep them so perfect lol

And this is me finally getting to lay down on a nice grassy field in the sun!!! Honestly, that has to be one of my favorite things to do.. The smell of the grass with the warmth of the sun is just so welcoming and comforting I can't turn down an opportunity when it arises. And this being one of the first weather permitting days in France to let me do this, I had to!!!

This trip was one of our longest trips so far. After we were done at Amboise, we walked up to street to go to Da Vinci's house!!!!!

The inside was absolutely like a castle, not to big, but definitely fancy like a castle..

This is his bed, where he died... Please note, There's a cat on it!!! It was alive!!! Definitely mysterious... hahaha

Here he is hahaha

These were the markings all over the ground in his house.. not quite sure what they meant...

This is a creeeeeeeepy smelly staircase that looks like it leads to the underworld... lol

And this is a statue of Da Vinci.

This is his backyard, gorgeous!!!!

And here are a couple pictures of his garden :)

This one looked amazing in person, honestly like her face was being made of out the tree leaves!

Being at Leonardo Da Vinci's house was awesome, it was very relaxing to sit in his garden and ponder things, very influential to think that one of the most intelligent men that ever lived had done the same thing in the same place :) 

But like I said, this was a longgg trip, so we're only half way through the day right now!!! Two more castles to go!... The next two are Blois (Pronounced blwah) and Cheverny 

And I'm going to do that those on a different post... so they're coming!!!...