Tours!

(Blog Post for May 28, 2011)

I don't want to go back to Paris. Today, we arrived in Tours and I never want to leave! Mme Clay studied in Tours on six different occasions while she was in college so she (naturally) showed us all of her old haunts. It's quite possible that her love for the city was contagious. It's also quite possible that Tours is simply that wonderful!

The best way to describe it is that, similar to how Paris is the French equivalent of New York City, Tours is the French counterpart to Greenville, SC. It's a big enough city to have a real "city" feel, but it doesn't have the major hustle & bustle (or the traffic) of un grand-ville.

We hit the ground running this morning once we got to Tours. We dropped our things off at the hotel, and then set off to find lunch and visit a wine-tasting festival that just happened to be today! Talk about good luck!

Mme, Elizabeth, and I walked around for a bit in a cute inside circular strip mall, and we finally found lunch at a patessérie. I ended up getting three-cheese pizza, complete with French cheese (not sure which one) on top. It was absolutely delightful!

In addition to the wine festival that day, there was also a HUGE flower market that spanned about 5 city blocks! Mary Poppins would be very jealous :) Needless to say, Tours was packed. We had a difficult time finding a place to eat our lunch because all of the benches were taken! Eventually, we had no choice but to sit on someone's front steps. Even though the location wasn't exactly as we'd imagined, it was SO much fun sitting there on the steps sitting there with (almost) everyone, joking and having fun. Mme Clay surprised us with one of her favorite French desserts. (Mme, what were they called again?) They were like little puffs of doughnut with brown sugar on top, and then large regular sugar clusters on top of that. Très bon? You betcha! I'm still waiting to try a macaroon and a bignet, though. (Sorry, Michael. Even though the Monoprix bignet was good, I still have yet to try un vrai bignet.)

On the way back to the wine festival, we walked through the flower market. It was absolutely TO DIE FOR! I've never seen such beautiful (or such fragrant) flowers in my life! I wanted to gather them all & bring them home. I so badly wanted to stay in the market all afternoon, but I also wanted to visit the wine festival, and I knew that there would be flower markets in Paris. So, alas, I left the flowers to appreciate another fruit of the earth, but I was luckily able to grab quite a few shots of les fleurs in passing.

The wine festival was fun, but it was a little overwhelming. I'm not yet a wine connoisseur, so I didn't know really what I was looking at and what to look for, much less in French. Nevertheless, it was still fun to go from tent to tent trying different wines and comparing them, even with my novice taste buds. I ended up running into an a cappella choral group from College Park Maryland! They're on tour, and their final performance is in Paris on June 5th! I'm going to definitely try to go!

After the wine festival, Mme Clay cave us the "Susan Tour of Tours," highlighting her favorite spots from her college days. It was really neat having her show us around because she knew all of these fun little spots, and it was more personal than the average tour. We stopped at one of the churches in Tours, and while we were walking around at the back of the nave (there was a service in session), we realized that it was a French wedding! Isn't that cool? To say that we attended (however briefly) a wedding in France! 

She also took us through a tunnel where the buildings were so old and so close together that they were touching! The tunnel was also where they would escort prisoners to the gallows before execution. It was pretty creepy knowing that the tunnel was one of the last things they saw before they were hanged. 

Mme Clay also showed us the building where Joan of Arc bought her armor! It was only a few months before she died, and it was really cool knowing that she'd been there. We're planning to take a weekend trip to Normandy, but on the way, we're going to stop in Rouen to see the spot where she was burned at the stake. I need to remember to watch Lee Lee Sobiesky's Joan of Arc movie when I get home...

After the tour, we stopped to get ice cream. Not having the opportunity to try it at home, I ordered Nutella ice cream. While it was good, it didn't really taste like Nutella like I'd hoped. They also had violet-flavored ice cream, but I was too scared to try it. 

Yes, Mommy. Be very jealous.

For dinner, we all went to Monoprix (a Target-like supermarket) and bought bread, cheese, and wine. ( I bought a salad.) We ate on the 2nd floor hotel deck and chatted all evening. It was nice to get to know everyone in such a casual environment, where we could just relax and enjoy being in France together.

It was such a wonderful day. I'm not sure Paris can live up to my experience in Tours. Tomorrow, we tour Châteaux Chenonceau, Ambroise, and Chambord!