oh cat...

Salut tout le monde!

Well over the weekend I managed to get in a couple of adventures...

On Friday night I found Nantes suburbia. The host mom of one of my friends here had an art expo out there, so we ventured the tram and buses to go see it. Her art consists of lots of mosaics. Lots of big dishes, mirrors, flower plots...it was all pretty cool. I didn't buy anything though...i'm not sure how well that would have worked trying to go home in May. The night finished off at a creperie in the Bouffey district of Nantes, the oldest part of the city. And like always, the crepes were fabulous.

Saturday afternoon, my family brought me up to Brittany to the city of Vannes. It's about an hour north of Nantes, right along the coast. However, Vannes sits in the heart of a big bay, and within that bay is over 50 little islands. There are tons of hiking and bike trails, and you can take a ferry out to the islands to explore and what not. There are a lot of vacation homes on these islands, the equivalent of a cabin up in Northern Minnesota I would say. We spent the first part of the afternoon walking through Vannes, seeing the Cathedral, gardens, and old architecture. We then proceeded to have lunch at a creperie, where I can't say the crepes were incredibly delicious... I guess I found an exception to the 'crepes are always delicious' rule...

Nantes is just south of here, if you follow that red line jetting off the map to the right

Christophe (Host dad) and Guillaume (brother)

It looks a little slanted to me...


oh cat.

Inside the Vannes Cathedral

The rest of the afternoon we did some hikes around the water. We took a boat out to one of the islands where we met a friend of Christophe's. He's an architect/painter and actually lives on the island year round to paint. He served us the most amazing cup of tea I have had in my entire life and some gateau de bretonne (specialty cake from Brittany), which is basically butter, but was superb with the tea. I'm working on figuring out what kind of tea it was... We then proceeded to do a huge walking tour around the island, which was just so quaint and welcoming. Unfortunately the sun wasn't shining so I didn't get the full effect of the island.

Classic Brittany house with the blue shutters, door...


Oysters! There are lots of oyster farms around the islands that are brought to local markets in the region. I haven't tried them yet...

For the next two hours, we found some more friends of the family, who offered us drinks and some good conversation for a little while. We drank a pico-biere, another Brittany specialty. I'm pretty sure the pico was a flavored syrup? I'm not sure if that was actually a type of alcohol or not, but it was then mixed with beer. It was quite good!

Well this week, my project is researching and writing papers.... hopefully it'll go as planned :) The beautiful weather might get in the way...

Love and miss you all!

Kelsey :)