Day 17- Saturday 12 June

I mentioned that France is hilly, right? Our group went on a tour led by the program director of the small town Amboise today, which is in the Loire Valley, two hours by train south-west-west of Paris; I hadn't been on a train since grandma took Tori and I to Boston, years ago, so the novelty of that combined with going through French countryside PLUS seeing wind turbine-things everywhere made it two hours of awesomeness. I asked the director, Tawna, and she said yep, that France is pretty much like what I saw all the way through- there were spots of woods, but the rest was rural houses, mini-villages and fields and fields and wind turbines, which is crazy different from Florida because there were people EVERYWHERE. France is so old, nevermind its churches.

More relevantly- Amboise has apparently 12 000 residents devoted primarily to the tourist industry; we walked from the gare, train station, to the Chateau in maybe fifteen minutes and saw a bit more Real France, where not every single building has crenelations and wrought iron window grids and stuff like Paris, and then the centreville, the center of the town, which was very narrow-street cutesy-touristy, and where they were having a small craft fair. The Chateau Royal d'Amboise was primarily used in the early sixteenth century, and of what original furniture remained you could see [with the help of the pamphlet] the mixing of Gothic and Renaissance styles in the architecture and especially in some of the furniture. Probably the best bit about it was the view; it's on a cliff that the kings of France sort of sheared and built upon and down into; it wasn't really defensive, but built in a defensible position, which meant that there were great views of the Loire river, the town of Amboise on both sides of the river, the touristy bit with its fair and peoples' backyards. We had lunch together, and most of us got pizza- mine had 'lettuce' in the description and came with a salad on it [seriously], and another kid ended up with a raw egg on top of his. Still have not tried foi gras, going to give it another few days, though I see shelves of it the supermarkets [anything in large quantities is worth noting in Paris].

When de Vinci decided to move to France because he was getting a hard time about dissecting corpses in Italy, Francois I gave him a manor that was very close to the chateau, and they actually dug a tunnel beneath the two; we visited the house and its grounds after eating our weird pizzas. I hung onto a tour of the house, which I later ended up regretting slightly because it meant I didn't explore the gardens really, but still enjoyed the novelty of for once understanding almost everything that the French guide said. Apparently in his day de Vinci was most known as a party planner. In the basement were small models of some of his inventions, and apparently he both invented everything and was clairvoyant enough to predict cars, submarine warfare and various other contemporary miscellanea. A fairly biased presentation that managed to say almost nothing about his personal life, but it was still neat to see the models of a bridge designed to swing and let ships pass and another that was self-suspending and only supported by flat rolling platforms on opposite sides of a riverbank. These were mini- others were large and scattered through the grounds, but again I didn't leave myself time to explore, sigh. Instead we went to the river for a bit, where I and another group member really wanted to go down to the bank; today was the first time I've run anywhere since the fifty six gates in the Detroit airport, and I've actually missed it and playing frisbee a lot. No wonder Parisians don't like people; they've got all of this pent-up energy converting itself into emotional rage driving them nuts. Also, today, for whatever reason [good weather, sort-of impending rain with a cool breeze, fantastic], I had an insane amount of energy and probably drove the other students crazy [and I'd had two pieces of bread for breakfast, no chocolate at all]. Anyways, went wading in the Loire with all of the fab scenery, rolling hills, chateau on a cliff and petit village hugging the banks and spreading itself out under the sort of sky God uses in paintings to damn the masses, and I really enjoyed myself.

Our train back was considerably less crowded and we shared a compartment that had me very excited because it was a lot like the one in Harry Potter [except it was plastic and had synthetic cloth and was a sort of aqua green with curtains that looked like an old comforter of mine, but whatever], and we watched scenery again, with more of those great wind turbines all of the way.

Unexpected things about France: I've always, always heard that you get smaller portions in France, and so far in my experience this is not so, not even vaguely. I think it was my second or third day I ordered a sandwich and it was a foot long, and whenever you get a pizza off the streets you get a whole pizza, equivalent to a small at Domino's, easily ten inches in diameter, though it's not like I had a ruler on me, and they're described as serving one person. The individual salads served before the pizza were also at least equivalent to American standards, too. Maybe I'm going to the wrong kind of restaurants ....

Also, I mentioned the chateau d'Amboise was built on a cliff- the cliff continues a bit as a sort of shear hill, hard to describe, but there are houses carved into it, with windows with shutters and flower boxes that you could see through the narrow alleys separating the houses.