Going on VA-CAY! Part III...the final chapter

And so, the end of my trip. The train ride to Reims was uneventful; I spent most of it either asleep or staring out the windows at the lovely French countryside. More on that aspect later. Once I got in to Reims, I had some amount of trouble finding my hostel, mostly because the office of tourism, where I assumed I had to go to get a map of Reims (I didn't even bother at the train station because most of them don't have maps of the city) was nowhere near the train station. That wasn't really a problem, considering that Reims is TINY (kid you not...I walked diagonally from one end of the city map to the other in less than an hour. Including a few brief stops for things like ATMs). But it was a bit annoying, and then of course I had to navigate to the hostel, and it took me a while to get oriented on the map, so that was fun. Another weird thing was that they were installing a tram line while I was there. Which meant that several streets had these huge multicolored fences down the middle, making crossing streets occasionally difficult (and I don't envy the drivers).

In any case, I found the hostel and got settled in. Because I was in Reims, the capital of the Champagne region of France, right before the "on season" for the champagne cellars, there was NO ONE there. I'm pretty sure the city was on vacation (aka the students), and the hostel was not very busy (minus a huge group of British students who left the second day I was there). This meant that I had a "shared" room for three people all to myself...including the private bathroom! This was definitely the highlight of the trip.

After putting my stuff down in the hostel, I went out and saw a few of the sights. This mainly means the cathedral, which is HUGE and absolutely gorgeous. They're in the middle of renovating it and so there were some panels up explaining how they were doing the new sculptures, which was interesting. I also went into their Musée de Beaux Arts, which was rather small and seemed to be partly an exhibition of budding modern artists in Reims. Weird. I saw some other things, too, like memorials to the dead (the French are huge on those) and a weird Roman gate. It's really pretty there, even in winter. One thing that really threw me off was that whenever I went into a museum or something, people kept asking me what nationality I was. I never learned to expect the answer, and thus always looked very confused and had to have the question repeated to me multiple times. It was just for their records, but man it was annoying.

The next day I went to another part of the city I hadn't been in the day before. Which meant seeing a really pretty basilica, an old school for kiddies who want to grow up to be Jesuits (I think), and les caves! Les caves are the wine cellars, which most places do guided tours through. Of course, as it was the off season, most places required a reservation beforehand, which I considered too much trouble. One of the larger cellars, Pommery, holds regular tours in a variety of languages, though, so I hit them up and took a tour in French. This was more ego massage for me, because I was capable of understanding what was going on and the women at reception told me that I was better than most of the Americans that come through there. Which made me a little upset about the image of the typical American; this wasn't a stereotype, this was workers who deal with Americans all the time. I can at least pray that even if they aren't able to speak French they're at least polite. In any case, this part of the day came complete with an art exhibition in the tunnels (I walked on the same red carpet from Cannes! And saw a French flag that had waved on the Arc de Triomphe! And the equation that Einstein did to get E=mc^2!) and champagne tasting at the end! It was EXTREMELY interested (and the champagne was delicious), so if you want to get some high quality champagne I recommend Pommery. I also highly recommend doing wine cellar tours...they are immensely interesting.

Later that day I decided to continue my trend of seeing movies that I'd started in Tours and went to see Sherlock Holmes in theaters. Little did I know it was dubbed in French...which made for me not quite getting all of the finer elements of the plot and for some sadness, as I love RDJ and was distressed at not getting to hear his vocal performance. (This experience was somewhat repeated Monday night when I watched Pride and Prejudice in French with my host family. Mr. Darcy's voice = not as cool in French.) But still, I had a good time.

Sunday morning I briefly visited mass in the cathedral, just to spectate. I was a little surprised by how few people were attending, but the fifteen minutes or so of the service that I saw were interesting. I then proceeded over to the train station for a train to back to Lyon, by way of Dijon. Because I got cheap tickets, this leg of the journey lasted about 6 hours. But as promised, I really need to say something about the French countryside...
It's SO PRETTY. Even in winter, with nothing blooming and no crops in the fields, it's straight out of a fairy tale. So many of the houses/towns that we went by look like they're still living in antiquity, which makes for a really picturesque trip. I mean, I'm sure that there's absolutely nothing to do in those little towns, but just looking at them it's easy to imagine Cinderella happening there or something. I also adore train stations, and getting to watch friends and family wave goodbye to people departing on trains made me happy; I feel like I haven't seen that sort of thing in a long, long time. And so I made it home sain et sauf, as they say, and semi wishing I had grown up a small town in the French countryside (but really not cause I'm sure the amenities there are nonexistent and sister needs her showers).

And now I'm back at school, facing the realities of papers and oral presentations and fun things like that. You know, keeping it real.