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!