Le Vegetarian Cooking series

I have been cooking Thursday nights with two girls who are vegetarian and we are on a quest to learn to make French dishes! 

We bought pre-made dough. I couldn't believe that they just sell it like this in grocery stores. 

 The insides.. creme cheese, creme fraiche, some grated cheese, a million eggs, and spices. We cooked the broccoli separate.  

 This is Coco. 

The dough in the mold. What's even more cool about this dough is that it comes in parchment paper and you can just slip it in place. 

 All the ingredients.. mmm :)

 Me and my awkward smile about to slide the pan in the little oven.

 The finished product (no flash)

The finished product.. flash

The Gardens of Villandry

During the quick one day castle excursion, our second stop was Villandry. Villandry is also a castle from the renaissance with gorgeous gardens that are still kept today. By the time we got there, the castle was closing for tours, but we visited the gardens which were some of the most beautifully kept organic gardens that I have ever seen. What is even more cool about this place is that people go there to buy their groceries. My favorite part was the walkway that encircled the gardens which was lined with grape vines. I am in love with French/Italian grapes, I have never eaten a fruit this good, I wish I could save that taste and bring it back home for everyone to taste. 

The garden area was huge and it has various ornamental gardens, vegetable gardens, a large pond, play area, and some mazes. Enjoy the pictures! 

  A small collage of some of the vegetables and a spider that looked like a bee

 All the vegetable gardens were very nicely arranged. 

 A grass tennis court! 

One of the ornamental gardens with a view of the castle from behind. 

Castles

Last weekend Samantha's host family invited me to go to the Loire Valley with them. The Loire is known for its wine, food, and castles. There are literally hundreds of castles in this area. This was my first time inside a castle and the first one I walked through is the largest castle in France.

This is Château de Chambord, the biggest of them all in France. My pictures of the actual castle didn't turn out that great that I might just post the postcards I bought on here. 

The King's pointing stick and crown.  

 One of the cool doors. The whole castle was really cold, I think the rocks make very poor insulators. I tried not to walk around with an engineering eye.. 

 The queen's bed.. separate from the king's bed.

 A stove like thing, it was next to the queen's bedroom, which I guess was used to keep her food warm when they brought it in. 

 On the roof! This is a closer look at the architecture. 

 A heating stove, I am not sure how effective it was during the winter, but there are fireplaces everywhere. There is at least one fireplace in each room, two in each hall way, and some random ones also. 

The king's bedroom. All the bedrooms had cloth on the walls which were used as insulators.. 

Many people lived in this castle, I couldn't keep track of the history because it took a few years to build.. like hundreds... 

I want to apologize for my poor memory of facts. It also doesn't helped that much that everything I read/hear is in French, so I retain very little of it... and I'm not that interested in the history of the wealthy.. I'm sorry :'(

Journées du Patrimoine

Last weekend was an awesome little holiday weekend in France, and in all of Europe actually. They have a holiday called Journées du Patrimoine, in which all the historical monuments and government buildings are opened for the public. I thought it was pretty awesome because most people go out and visit places they have not been inside of, and learn a little bit more about their government. This event is of course free, with the exception of a few places that have a low entrance fee. Today more than just government buildings are opened, for example in the region of Vienne (where I live) the nuclear power plant was opened for visits also. On Saturday I visited some of the places in Poitiers with some Oregon students. Here are some pictures!

To start off the picture section.. BREAD! Mmm, I can not describe how good bread is in France, and the neat thing is that you have it at every meal. I love love love it.

 We visited the Baptistère that I mentioned in an earlier post since it was free that weekend. Here is a picture of the little "pool", I don't know what it is called, but this is where the holy water was. This building, the Baptistère Saint-Jean dates back to the V century! This is the oldest Christian building in France, and according to wikipedia.fr, the central part was built in the years 360's.

One of the images on the ceilings. It was was very difficult to take pictures because you are not allowed to use flash.

After visiting the Baptistère, we headed to the museum, but unfortunately they were closing for lunch in 15 minutes when we arrived. French take a really long lunch break and everyone respects it. For example, the museum was closed from noon to 2, so during this time we visited the cathedral and grabbed lunch. This picture, above, is the door to the cathedral. 

The images imprinted/carved on the rim of the arch. 

After having a long lunch ourselves, our last stop was at the Palais de Justice. This was a palace in which many royal people lived in. I didn't pay very close attention during the tour, so I don't remember much, and it's been really hard to keep up with the names of all these kings, dukes and their timelines. Today the building is used as a court, with the rooms used as offices, and different little hearing areas.

 This is a picture of one of the wives of Jean I, duke of Berry.. She was in her teens when she married.. 

Charles VI, king of France 

Jean, Duc de Berry

School

Today marks the last day of my second week in school, and though I am here to study, this is the topic I least look forward to writing about, hence the procrastination on the posts. But here it goes.

French school system is a lot different than the U.S. First of all, students pay very little to study in the universities, they only pay a small fee (I think around 300-500 euro) each semester to cover something, I don't know what. Otherwise the government pays for it all, even health insurance for students. Great right? Because the government pays for school, it costs them a lot of money each year to keep students in school (degrees are 3 years long), so I think teachers here are a lot more rough and fail students often because it's cheaper if students just fail out of school. I think they literally fail half of the class.. it's a rumor I have been hearing. There are no office hours, no talking to your professor after class, professors tend to skip classes for reasons that I don't know of, and you only have each class once a week. Lastly, students take about 20-30 credit hours each semester, and there is no homework, just finals and some midterms.

The university in Poitiers has.. um.. probably one of the ugliest campuses I have ever seen, even the citizen's think it is ugly. The university is located on the edge of town and most students commute to school every morning. Unlike college cities in the U.S, in France the university is not the center of town. Students spend minimal time here, and there is not much that actually happens besides classes and some clubs. Every morning I take a bus into the city center, and from there I take a bus to the university. For me, it takes in between 40-60 minutes to get to school, which is quite a drag. I am used to biking onto campus in five minutes (with my strong cyclist leg muscles).

I have been prolonging the arrival of photos, but I know you are all curious.. so here it goes..

 There is a (sorry to be so negative) ugly pyramid thing in the middle of this quad. Behind it is a library, and to the left is the law building.

This is the building in which I take like 90% of my classes, it's the liberal arts building. I am sorry the pictures are not that great, but I was not too motivated to take better pictures.

I thought this image was cute, the little cigarette bud waste (name?) overflows every day. A large percentage of people smoke here. I hope I don't start smoking also, but it would be such a great conversation starter: "Do you smoke?" "Yeaaa, you?" "Yes, sometimes I find myself smoking all the time." ... and instantly, a connection with a stranger...

Sorry for not keeping the blog up to date. Have a great day everyone, don't be shy to leave comments, I love reading them and it shows me that people are actually reading my blog! For those of you in Oregon: enjoy your last days of summer and have a great weekend!!

Bayonne

Before heading back to Poitiers, we spent our day in Bayonne, which is a city north of Biarritz. We took the bus and ended up in the centre ville in less than 15 minutes. Bayonne is a lot smaller, and has more of a French feel to it. Here are a few pictures that I'd like to share; my camera's battery died early in the day so I didn't take many.

That morning I oogled over a surf instructor... and I took a picture from far away.. I don't know if this is legal!

A castle/restaurant in the middle of Bayonne. I think it may be a hotel also.. but I am not very sure.

Please ignore the bright sun in the corner of this picture.. this was the only semi good picture I took of the cathedral. 

Inside the cathedral's courtyard.... a little bit empty, but it's still has a nice courtyard with nice grass. 

The walkway surrounding the courtyard. 

A little peek into one of the streets. This street has Spanish banners draping from building to building. 

After exploring and eating ice cream, we headed towards the train station to wait for our train and parted home. It was nice to feel that "going home" feel, I thought I wasn't going to have it because it's not really home for me. It made me feel like I had began to adapt to the French way of life.

Biarritz Day 2

The next day in Biarritz was a lot of "playing tourists" and we weren't ashamed of doing it. We stayed in a youth hostel which was about 300m from the beach (I think). I've been eating a lot of bread in France, but I don't feel too guilty because it actually is kinda healthy.

Wednesday morning on the beach there was a couple taking wedding pictures. They were a bit ridiculous, and cheesy. Towards the end of their shot they both were in the water, the groom on his surf board and the bride was pretending to care about his hobby. This is one of the many couples that I have seen where the lady was taller than the man. I think that is pretty common here though.

Here is a little collage of the buildings in Biarritz. The architecture from building to building is very diverse. You can see that there is a lot of Spanish influence on the buildings, but we also saw German influence and American (in the casino). 

There were so many pastry shops in the city that we couldn't resist stopping every hour to buy something. This little dessert is a lemon meringue treat. 

 That day we visited some churches and cathedrals, I didn't take many photos of them. They are all very dark and have dramatic architecture. In one of the cathedrals, I was snooping around and I peaked into one of the confession booths, and out of nowhere, someone's head popped out and it freaked me out. In another church, one of the doors randomly opened right in front of me. I know many will think that these encounters are signs that I should go to church...  On the bright side, here are some bright pictures of the ocean. The water was warm, and would be considered very warm by those of you who are from Oregon.

To end this wonderful post, I'll leave you with a delicious picture of a crêpe that I ate.. peaches, raspberries, currants, a slice of kiwi, whipped cream, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream... mmmm :)