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 :)
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