Thinking back on it now, I’m not exactly sure why I elected to go to Tours in the first place. I guess I figured, hey, fancy houses, that sounds good. I spent my first three alone days there and was pretty much ready to leave when it was time to leave. Tours was fine, though, don’t get me wrong. It was a good place for me to practice traveling alone, though…I could walk to the train station and the tourist office from the weird hostel, there was a square nearby where I could sit and drink fizzy water and write in my journal, there was a river nearby where I could eat my lunch and write in my journal. And plus I did get to see a lot of very fancy houses. However, I’m done with fancy houses for the time being, thanks very much. But here are some more badly taken pictures, just in case you haven’t had enough.
Chateau de Chenonceau, I think. I went on a chateau tour with a girl from Quebec who wanted to practice her English as I wanted to practice my French, so we got along very nicely. This chateau has two gardens, one built by the French king’s mistress and the other by his wife. Sadly, this was the day that my camera began to act up, so I didn’t get to take as many garden pictures as I’d have liked. Or maybe that’s a good thing? You decide.
Well, here’s an attempt, anyway. Standing on the bridge on which part of the chateau is built, looking over into the Queen’s Garden, I think. Sorry you can’t actually see anything there.
This one is a little better. It was in this garden that a couple of college students (who were all very cute boys, I’m happy to report) approached me and Valerie From Quebec and asked us if they could film us for a school project. They looooooved her Quebec accent, they were all over her. Me, they just sort of stared at. They asked us what we thought of the chateau and of Loire Valley tourism in general and she was all telling them how great the gardens were and about the perspectives and the proportions and wasn’t the history fascinating and so on and so forth. I said this, in French: “Sure is pretty! I don’t know much about art though!” My camera crapped out again so I couldn’t get a picture of them filming us, but maybe it’s best that you can’t see their expressions of distaste when presented with my critique, yes?
I also tried to take a bunch of interior shots as well, as I find it most interesting to imagine what the people who lived in these crazy chateaux were really like and how they really lived. To that end, I give you…this picture of…a fireplace with a pot in it. Yes. Very evocative of the cultural context, wouldn’t you say?
Proving that copper pots have always been in style among those with discerning tastes. Yeah. “So, how was your trip, Chiara?” “Oh, man, the cookware was amazing” Ridiculous.
Later we went to the Clos Luce, which is where Leonardo da Vinci spent the last three years of his life. I took a bunch of pictures of reproductions of his various designs because of course the camera didn’t work in the gardens or anything.
This is the Chateau D’Amboise. You can’t see it in the picture, but right next to me is a vat of boiling oil which I am planning to pour over the wall there onto whatever enemies may lay in wait beneath.
Hey, look, a blurry out-of-focus far away shot of me! In a castle! All right!
So you can imagine that after a full day of chateaux I was more inclined toward other, non-chateaux-oriented activities the next day. I’d read something about the Aquarium du Val de Loire at the tourist office, and I figured, hey, I like aquariums, so why not. I was reasonably sure there would be no formal gardens and no gilded ceilings there, so I set off to Amboise and tried to make a go of it.
First of all. First of all I’d asked at about four different places if there was any direct way to get from Tours to the aquarium. Nope, everyone said, the French equivalent thereof. So I took a train to Amboise and asked at the tourist office there how to get to the Aquarium and they were all, (in French), “Aquarium? What aquarium?” I finally figured out that I could take a bus there but that I might have to walk to the nearest town to catch a bus back…and thereby found out, in the process, that there’s a direct bus from Tours to the aquarium and I was pretty unhappy with that.
I went to get lunch before the bus came and was sitting by the river to eat it when I happened to look at the very ugly watch I’d bought at the station that morning and which I’d managed to set by pressing the various buttons on it randomly. Oh my goodness! Two o’clock! The bus left at noon! Oh nooooooo! I ran back to the tourist office, asked them how I could walk there (“Mais c’est au moins cinq ou six kilometres!” cried the girl at the desk in unfeigned horror). I was striding purposefully away, determined to see this aquarium, when I looked at the watch again and realized I’d had it in a different mode, or something, and that it was in fact only fifteen minutes until the next bus for the aquarium. Seething with rage in my heart, I booked it back to the bus station, shooting glares of hatred at the tourist office, and made it on to the bus, which was, interestingly, filled completely with high school students. And there I was, finally, at the long-sought aquarium.
Here are some gigantic sturgeon type things, which I would not particularly like to come across were I swimming in the Loire at night. Or even during the day.
Some crazy lungfish. I don’t understand taxonomy very well, obviously, because if one has lungs doesn’t that preclude one’s being a fish?
The Loire version of a touch tank full of bat rays or something. The sign transliterates to “Plunge delicately your hand in the water finally to caress carp and sturgeon.” I did just that, and would you believe that one of those carp tried to bite my hand off? I was menaced by a goldfish, y’all. That says nothing good about me.
This aquarium also had a lovely Amazon River exhibit as well as some very nice horseshoe crabs, but even though I really tried to get my euro’s worth by lingering for multiple minutes at each tank, I was still done with the whole thing within an hour. Also, creepily, I was the only person there the entire time. Me, the lungfish, and the homicidal carp. I mean, it was a Wednesday afternoon during the school year, but still.
So I drifted outside and was going to see about walking into the nearest town to catch the bus when! All of a sudden! The very bus I needed! Came by! Yay! And that was the end of the non-chateaux aquarium for me, as well as possibly the most frustrating day I had on the entire trip. It was, on the whole, a very non-frustrating couple of weeks, so I shouldn’t complain.
Not pictured in this entry:
–The very dark and lonely hostel in which I stayed in a room by myself.
–Me sitting by the river next to a bunch of French Goths.
–Me trying to get up the guts to have dinner by myself.
–Me freaking out about money but then deciding everything was going to be all right after all (it was).
–Me breaking my alarm clock and thereby missing a rendezvous with Valerie From Quebec.
–Me telling some guys in the breakfast room about my difficulty with clocks and with telling time and their saying to me, in French, “You know, there’s a time difference between here and the U.S.,” like, oh, THANKS FOR LETTING ME KNOW.
–Me in the world’s tiniest natural history museum, which was about the size of someone’s living room, explaining to a curator that I really love lizards.
–Me enjoying the freedom of traveling alone and doing just what I want, when I want, except when the tourist office lies to me about the state of public transportation.
Tomorrow I’ll write about my weekend in Switzerland with Dave and Joey. Until then, if you happen to be going on the train anytime soon, remember to turn your cell phone off. Your cell phone is tired. It wants to sleep.
