Friday: We all woke up from a fun night beforehand at Le Commerce. Our entire student body was visiting Tours, France and the cheateau de Chenonceau. A group of friends and I were planning on staying the night in Tours since we already had our transportation paid for. We all arrived at the Montrichard ( a neighboring town) train station around 9:00 and our 10 minute train ride to Chenonceau was over before we knew it!
Chenonceau is absolutely beautiful! It is a beautiful property and we had a blast taking pictures, walking through the HUGE gardens and we walked to this little town and had some coffee to kill time before our next train arrived at 1:30. It was a beautiful day in general, the sun was shining and the weather was a good 45 degrees or so, so it was all just lovely.
After some lunch, all 50 of us jumped on board to Tours. Tours is FABULOUS. I had no idea that it was so "downtown-ish". The first thing we all did was visit the Musee des Beaux-Arts. It is a 3 story art muesum in downtown Tours. It held a lot of famous paintings that I don't even know who made them.. Should have looked!Next door was this AMAZING cathedral (I don't remember the name!) that is currently being renovated, but still, it was beautiful. We got to walk all around inside and it has this huge organ that was pretty cool too.
We then checked into our little hotel that was last updated in 1970 probably. However, it was right on the main square area so it was a convienent location. By this time, it was close to four and we were all exhausted so we sort of cat napped and got ready to wander the city again. We wanted to see our Professor's art gallery that he had in Tours. Lindsey and I never made it so we people watched and walked around for a bit. We all met up for this Vietnamese cafe that was pretty good.. Or so I thought.
The plan was that night was to go to this American bar where a lot of students and tourists went to. As I was getting ready, however, I started feeling those shrimp dumplings make an encore. And then the migraine started. I'm not even surprised it happened. I didn't have any advil so I tried to make the best of it, so I ended up staying home while the others went out. I didn't mind, I was up all night the night before so I enjoyed getting a good night's sleep for once!!
The next day basically consisted of shopping, lunch and people watching. I found a H&M so I was PRETTY excited. Bought a black cardigan and sunglasses. We walked around the streets and a lot of my friends bought a LOT of stuff. I didnt (which is good!). After lunch, some more walking around Tours, I decided that I wanted to sit at a cafe, open a book and people watch. So I did. And I had a damn good time doing so.
And this is where the weekend turned on us.
We were given a train ticket back on Friday from one of our campus leaders. We all assumed that there was a train Saturday night at the same time from Friday.
Boy were we wrong.
Another group that we went with calls my group (Lindsey, Erik, Ashley and I) and says that the last train to Montrichard was no longer. They had caught the last one.
LONG story short, 130 euro cab ride later, we arrived to Montrichard. After an attempt to walk home (mind you, it was 9:30 pm), we gave up and called a professor to come get us. He found it very funny and did not mind coming to pick us up. We spent the rest of our night nursing our wounds with a little white wine and going to bed!
Sunday was a day of LAZINESS. And it was great. Napped, did homework, planned our weekends, etc. It was great.
It was a good first weekend, learned a lot of lessons that I won't be forgetting anytime soon.
Lessons learnt:
1. Check the train schedules. Don't assume.
2. If you do spend close to 200 dollars on a cab, find the humor in it.
3. French sandwiches are a thousand times better than American ones.
I'll blog later on this week!
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