Vive la France! Part 2: Reims

I don't think I mentioned it in the last post, but France was about a month closer to spring than Copenhagen. It was warm and sunny and green, and it basically felt like we were on a tropical vacation. I love Copenhagen, but I think I got more sun in a week in France than I had in two months in Denmark. And the sky was blue! Every day! Incroyable...
    After a few hours in the bus, driving through the sunny, green French landscape, we arrived in Reims. It's a small city, but much bigger and more populated than Verdun. It's also very old. It dates back to the time of the Roman occupation of Gaul two thousand years ago. It's most famous landmark is the massive, gothic-style cathedral Notre-Dame de Reims, which was our first stop after we arrived.

I try to be artsy.

See the part where the stone is actually white? They're in the process of cleaning the cathedral. Apparently it took them several years just to do that bit.

One of the better-known (or at least commonly photographed) aspects of the cathedral is this rather creepy smiling angel. I don't think I want to know why she's smiling.

See if you can spot the restoration work in this picture.

Reims was bombed during World War II, and the cathedral was heavily damaged. Over the years work has been done to fix the damage and replace all of the bits that were destroyed during the war. As you can see, they're not always very subtle about it.

This is a statue of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc, in French) that is outside the cathedral. This is because Notre-Dame de Reims is where Joan of Arc brought Charles VII to be crowned king.

In fact, this is the cathedral where most of the French kings (plus Napoleon I) had their coronations.





Once we had finished gawking at the outside, we went in to drool over the inside.

For some reason, the height of the building was what particularly struck me. I'm not sure if it's actually taller than most of the other cathedrals that I have been in, but it certainly seemed like it was.

My camera wasn't awesome enough to capture all of the colors in this rose window. You'll just have to try to imagine it.

... And then we had lunch. I'm not entirely sure what this thing was. All I can say is that vegetables were involved and that it tasted really, really  good.

Reims is in the Champagne region of France, so after lunch we took a tour of a complex of champagne caves. I had imagined that they would be out in the country somewhere, but they're right in the middle of Reims. They were filled with racks of bottles of champagne, all in the various stages of the arduous champagne-making process explained to us by the tour guide. It was very impressive, but not something that I found particularly interesting.

I was far more interested to learn that the caves had originated in Roman times, and were built into chalk, which was cool because I had been under the impression that the only place where you could go to see wild, untamed chalk was somewhere in the UK. The Romans had built the tunnel to get chalk to build the town that would become Reims, because apparently chalk is a very good building material.

The caves later became part of an abbey called the Abbey of Saint Nicaise, and began to be used to make champagne. The abbey no longer exists, but things from it have been preserved there because they're cool and historical.

The champagne cellars gained various ownership down the years, and are now owned by a group called the Taittinger Champagne company.

And finally I saw this plaque, which made up for all of the boring talk about champagne. It says:
"On April 27, 1717 Peter I the Great, Tsar of All the Russias*, during his travels in France, came to visit the Abbey of Saint Nicaise and these renowned champagne caves, now owned by Taittinger Champagne."

I've been somewhere Peter the Great visited... heehee... Of course one of European history's biggest party animals would pay a visit to the champagne caves. No surprise there.

*In case you didn't know, that's the tsar's official title. And yes, there's more than one Russia. I'll explain some other time. 

Afterward we paid a quick visit to the Basilica of Saint Remi, which is another of Reims's impressive churches.

This door looked to me like it belonged in "Lord of the Rings".

As I mentioned, Reims started out as a Roman settlement, and this is one of the few remnants of that period still standing. It is called the Mars Gate, and it is a section of the ancient Roman city wall.

You can still see the designs on the insides of the arches. It was so cool! I think the people I was with were a little perturbed by how excited I got about this.










And that's about it for my time in Reims. Next time... Paris!

Salut!

Vive la France! Part 1: Verdun

    Salut toute le monde! Je suis finis avec mon voyage a la France et maintenant je parlerai de toutes les choses que...

   Sorry. As you probably guessed, I'm back from France (actually, I've been back for almost two weeks at this point but had a whole pile of work dumped on me which I am just recovering from now- sorry), and I had far too much fun speaking French in its natural habitat. Despite the fact that I kept saying "undskylde" (Danish for "excuse me") instead of "pardon". Oh well...

   We took a tour bus, and it still sounds cool to me when I tell people that I took a bus to France. It was approximately a 15 hour trip and we left at 8:30 PM so we had to sleep on the bus, with a 45 minute break around midnight to get off the bus for the ferry ride from Denmark to Germany. I slept surprisingly well, and at around 7:00 the next morning I woke up in time to watch the sun rise as we drove across Germany and into Luxembourg.

Yes, I've been to Luxembourg.

It looks something like this.












We had breakfast at a rest stop in Luxembourg, then continued on to France, arriving in Verdun around noon. The first thing we did was have lunch at a local restaurant, where I got some of idea of what my meals were going to be like for the next week.

This is not the only picture of food that you're going to see, because the food we got in France was awesome. See the bread? That's French bread, that is.










   I also was psyched to be in a country where I could actually speak the language, so I immediately started taking every opportunity I got to speak French. After nearly two months of being in Denmark and struggling with trying to learn Danish and feeling like a dumb foreigner, it was incredibly refreshing to be in France. I am nowhere near to being fluent in French, but at least I could say most of what I needed to say in what was probably almost correct grammar, which was an improvement on Danish.

     So. Verdun. Verdun is a small, quiet town that is pretty much only known for the battle that took place there during World War I, which was one of the most brutal battles of the war and a big source of French pride. It was the battle where the French, after immense struggle and bloodshed, managed to push the Germans back and keep them from getting to Paris.
    Of course, they then proceeded to come back and take Paris in World War II, but that's beside the point.

The first place we went was the museum, where they had all kinds of cool stuff from the battle.

Trumpets and grenades.

A snazzy French uniform from the beginning of the war. Partway through they realized that red and blue, while very spiffy and impressive, was a good way to stand out against the scenery and get blown up, so they altered the design a bit.

Of course, the landscape of Verdun has recovered from the battle, at least as far as trees and grass goes, so in the museum they had this depiction of what the area might have looked like during the battle, just to get a sense of the immense destruction.

After visiting the museum we went to this fort, which is called Fort Douaumont. It is one of several French forts at Verdun. During the war it was captured by the Germans, who used it for a while until the French managed to take it back.

The view from on top of the fort. These round turrets have guns along the sides, and could be raised and lowered using a mechanism inside the fort.

I mentioned that the greenery has recovered from the battle. The landscape itself, however, has not. Millions of artillery shells fell on Verdun over the course of the war, which left the area riddled with craters that, as you can see, are still there today.

And these are the remains of two shells. They are very big and heavy
(we were allowed to hold a piece of one) and not something you want to have exploding all around you.

It was very creepy inside the fort. The corridors were dim and dripping with water, and reminded me of the kind of place where people would get trapped in a horror movie. I can't imagine having to live there. During the battle there was the constant sound of exploding shells, which were very loud even in the fort, and that coupled with the general unpleasantness of the place caused many of the soldiers to go insane.

Now picture this at night, without the electric lighting...

There were several fatal accidents in the fort during the war. This is a memorial that commemorates a cave-in that killed quite a few German soldiers (this was while the Germans were using the fort). Instead of digging out the bodies, they just built this wall to block off the area.

Then we went to the big war memorial at Verdun, which features this cemetery that I'm sure you've seen plenty of times before in pictures. It's extremely impressive to actually be there and see it in real life. Just to give you a sense of the sheer number of graves, this picture only shows one section of the cemetery.

In the memorial itself they had the bones of all of the unidentified soldiers, organized by place of birth.










The town of Verdun itself is very small, quiet and pleasant. The streets were practically empty. Looking back, of the three cities we visited on the trip Verdun was definitely my favorite. The fewer crowds and nasty city smells, in my opinion, the better.

Of course, war memorials abound. This was a particularly cool one.

The next morning, before we left, we paid a quick visit to the local cathedral. It was a surprisingly big, fancy cathedral for such a small town.

After visiting the cathedral we got on the bus and left Verdun.
Next time: Reims! Stay tuned!

A tout a l'heure!