Francophile in the West

I had an absolutely fabulous weekend in Bordeaux with the girls!! N., V., C., and I left Nantes after work on Friday and took a leisurely four-hour train ride south to beautiful Bordeaux. I had visited the city before in 2009 on a weekend road trip, but none of the other girls had ever been. I think the city is just lovely, and there are plenty of great things to see and do. I'm so glad the four of us decided to go! One of my friends who also studied abroad in Nantes in 2009 is now a teaching assistant in Bordeaux, so I gave him a call after the gals and I got all settled into our hotel and we met up with him for a drink! He introduced us to a few other teaching assistants at a house party downtown, and then a group of us wandered over to The Charles Dickens, a local pub. They were selling bottles of the craziest beer- Banana Bread Beer! I decided to give it a try, and HOLY CRAP, it was so good!! I'm pretty sure that's now my favorite beer ever (outside of porters). It

Wow, November has FLOWN by!!! It's hard to believe that I've already been back at work for three weeks since the Toussaints vacation! Here's the latest... On the last Saturday of the vacation, I joined Anne-Marie, Andre, and the UW study abroad group on a day trip to Bretagne! We were driving around all day long, but were able to see some great locations! Our first stop was to see some of the Carnac Stones . This grouping of Neolithic stones has been around since about 4000 BC! There are over 3,000 of them scattered around the village of Carnac, and while we drove by quite a few different sites, we only stopped to poke around at one. It might not be much to look at, but it's still incredible!! To think that people from thousands of years ago dragged around all of these massively huge boulders and placed them upright in formations or made stone huts just blows my mind. Having visited Stonehenge in 2007 and then being able to see these formations was quite a treat!

Two weeks off of work?? I am spoiled with this job. And it was difficult to wake up crazy early on Monday to go back to work... But I had a great vacation! You already read about the first week; now, onto week two- the real adventures! On Friday, N. and I took a train from Nantes to Paris and got all checked into our hostel before wandering over to la Tour Eiffel. On display at the Champs de Mars, there were all these random, painted bear statues. It turns out that they're called "Buddy Bears", and they've been traveling the world to promote unity between nations. There are 140 of them (one for each UN-recognized country), painted individually by artists from that particular nation. It was actually pretty cool! Some of them were really intricate and fun. It was interesting to see how each country decided to represent itself artistically.  Of course the bear for the USA was dressed like the Statue of Liberty! Particularly fitting for the Bears' display in F