Since Braden arrived I’ve been mostly computer-less and travel oriented. Our mini tour of western France has included Angers, Rennes, northern coastal towns of Brittany, Nantes, and Paris. The quick hits are listed below.
Packing into Louise’s mom’s car and munching down Kinder Country treats and Carambars on the way to Rennes
Rennes is a heavy drinking student city, and you could definitely feel the presence of grimy in-the-know students. We ate our picnic in a flower packed park before walking through the slanted, age crippled buildings. Many of the buildings in Rennes wear their wooden frames on their exterior which gives the city an interesting aesthetic. After a brief visit to the planetarium (Saturn has an ice moon?) we checked into our AirBnb outside the city. At night, we ate pizza and drank beers in the “thirsty street”. Anne-Laure and Louise drank a concoction of beer and sherry which tasted girly and admittedly delicious.
We caught 20 minutes of an outdoor concert by Coco Passion
The following day we ditched our camping plans due to booked out campgrounds and thunderstorm forecasts. We spent the day hopping between coastal towns, enjoying a long walk along clay filled sand at low tide. We ate Kouign-amann, a butter filled local delicacy, and Louise explained that historically painters flocked to Brittany to the many shades of blue visible in the sky & sea. For dinner we ate crepes and drink cider, a typically Brittanic combo.
This has been the song of the week
Friday we drove from Rennes to Nantes and on the way we bought a baguette from a baguette vending machine. Nantes is similar to Montreal in that there’s a real emphasis on public art installations. Crooked plaster trees, wonky soccer fields, and a simulated moon trampoline installment delighted us while we toured. The highlights of the city were Entrez Libre, a former prison converted into a mural space for local artists, and the chimay beer I slurped down at the end of the night.
Braden and I took a tightly packed rideshare via BlaBlaCar to Paris and spent the afternoon meandering through the central parts of the city. Rivoli 59, a former artistic squat thats been converted into a gallery, was stimulating and well worth the $0 entrance fee. After a shower, a nap, a Lebanese meal, and a bottle of gin, we parked along the Saint Martin canal. There, a strung out Jamaican lectured us on selfish americans before asking us if we had any cigarettes for him. The guy was entertaining, and taught us the Jamaican word “bomboklat”, a swiss-army-word that can be positive or negative. A jungle/techno show at La Machine du Moulin Rouge kept us occupied until 6 am when we rented city biked and KO’d back at the apartment.
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