Field Trip 1

Today (Wednesday) was our first 'field trip'. I have a feeling these 'field trips' we go on for 'class credit' aren't really going to be much related to class material at all.
We saw a 3 story tall mechanical elephant; which is practically useless. Mark (Dr Reuber) explained that the French don't always have reasons for doing the things they do. They like to do things in a grand way just so they can step back and say, "Check it out." Which is why they build crazy things, even though they look cool.
We then went to the Jules Verne museum. He grew up in Nantes and was actually born on the island in the middle of the Loire river.

PICS

First night out

Tonight we went out with Marco. It was much nicer to walk around with a Frenchman so we didn't have to worry about ordering food or anything. We went to a Kebab place with great food. It was across the alley from McDonalds and we definitely picked the better place. Then we went to a cafe across from the cathedral that was pretty sweet. The weather was nice all night.

The kebab

















And we later went to Marco's apartment. You could see the cathedral from his window. Amazing. His building is most definitely older than the USA

Trip to Nantes

We took the tram to downtown Nantes today. Nantes is actually a pretty big city. There's a section of town that has buildings from the1300's and even before. So here are some a few pics of some of the things we saw..

Click the pics to get full resolution...

Building with wood that's... really really old.




















Really nice castle, in Nantes, the city I'm living in, that's right...






















The tallest cathedral in France is also in Nantes. Those are people at the bottom of the picture enjoying a service. The the top is lots of head room.

Trip

So the trip had a lot of waiting. Waiting to find out when our flight leaves, waiting on the plane to take off, and waiting for our next plane. The London-Gatwick Airport pretty much blows. They don't have gates preassigned to your flight so you're supposed to get there at least an hour early so you have time to find out where your gate is. They wait to post the gate until a half hour to 45 min before they close the gate. So every 5 minutes they call out people's names who aren't on the plane yet and tell them to get to a gate in 5 minutes; not to mention the gate is a 15 minute walk away.

It was nice to sleep


Roomie
















My area to the left