After a lovely weekend at the beach, I had a day of no classes to shop around Angers (found some sweet sandals--SO european), do some laundry, get packed, and make my host parents a good ol' fashioned american meal. I made pancakes. They put cheese on them.... haha go figure right?! (It was actually very good though!). Then on tuesday everyone met in front of ESA (the school) to say goodbye to their host parents and Angers and jump on a bus for a week traveling across France. So after loading too many bags and lots of sad goodbyes we pulled away from the school with all our host parents waving goodbye to us (it was so cute). First stop: Botanical Gardens.
Because we left so late we only had about an hour or so at the gardens to both tour and eat lunch. The place was huge and (big surprise here) it had a castle. --->(Side note: I'm beginning to see that pretty much every town here has either a castle or old cathedral, and sometimes both. I think I could get used to this :). So we ate our lunches on a hill by the chateau overlooking the river and afterwards wandered around the gardens (which I'm pretty sure had every possible type of flower, plant, tree, shrub, bush, etc. that you could possibly imagine.) Unfortunately dumb me forgot to charge my camera battery and couldn't take any pictures. The unique thing about the gardens though, was that it was split up into mini exhibits, each one having a theme. For example one was all recycled stuff, the next was a water exhibit, the next plastic, mirrors, wood, metal, etc.
Next we left for Chartres to see the Cathedral there. Again, no camera, but here's a pic I stole from one of my friends:
And the stained glass:
Ooooooh, ahhhhhhhh.
Chartres was very cool, not so much because we had a horrible tour guide, whom we luckily could very easily tune out, but more because there was a choir singing while we were touring. The way the music echoed around the chapel was chilling. Between the ornate carvings in the walls of the chapel, to the immense stained glass windows, to the echoing arched ceilings, and the dimmed lighting along with the singing, I found myself completely transfixed. This place was truly amazing.
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