Paris, Bruges, Moulins

Dear friends,

Bonne Année! Happy 2010! The rest of my Christmas break in England was very enjoyable, and I got to see lots of family and do quite a few fun things. As I said briefly in my last post, I went into London with 3 of my cousins on the Monday before Christmas. It was absolutely freezing, and while we were in Camden Lock it started snowing SO hard – it was really pretty though! That night we went to see Avenue Q, a really funny musical with puppets – it’s kind of like a rude, inappropriate version of Sesame Street. We ended up spending the night in a hostel in London (not the nicest place I’ve ever stayed, but I guess you can’t expect too much for £7 per night…), so we also spent Tuesday in the city, shopping on Oxford Street, walking through Hyde Park, and checking out the Christmas displays at Harrod’s.

On the Wednesday before Christmas I went to Harpenden, another city near where my aunt lives, to see another one of my cousins and her darling 3-year old son, Ben. The last time I saw him he was very young (it was almost 3 years ago), and he’s gotten so big and adorable! We went to St. Albans (one town over from Harpenden) to walk around and have a coffee – it was so pretty in the snow, even if it was super cold.

On the day before I left England, Kathryn and I went to Bletchley (a town about 40 minutes from Bedford, where I was staying) to visit Bletchley Park, where British intelligence was able to crack the Germans’ Enigma code during WWII. My dad is a big history buff and told me I had to go visit it – even though I still don’t really understand how the actual code-breaking machine worked (it seemed really technical and confusing), it was actually a really interesting visit. Bletchley Park is a mansion with big, pretty grounds, and they had a good permanent exhibition about life during the war and, of course, the codebreakers. The work done at Bletchley Park during the war was kept a secret until the 1970s, so it was pretty cool to see something that was so top secret for so many years!

I flew back to Paris from London VERY early on the morning of New Year’s Eve and conveniently met Hilary at the airport (our flights landed shortly after each other). Of course it was very cold and grey in Paris, but we managed to walk from our hotel near the Centre Pompidou to the Louvre, so we visited the Louvre before it was time to get ready for dinner and New Year’s Eve festivities. Our original plan had been to watch the Eiffel Tower (which sparkles for about 10 minutes starting at midnight) and fireworks from Montmartre, the big hill in Paris where Sacré Coeur is situated, but it was too foggy and cloudy to be able to see anything from up there, so we had to change our plan of attack. We ended up just eating dinner at Montmartre and then walking to the Champs Elysées with a couple bottles of champagne to ring in 2010 (France doesn’t have open container laws, so no worries there!). We found a side street with a good view of the Eiffel Tower, and it was so pretty when it started sparkling! Overall, it was a great (and pretty laid-back) way to spend New Year’s!

On Sunday we headed off to Bruges, Belgium, which is definitely now high on my list of favorite places – it was ADORABLE! We got there in the afternoon and spent a few hours just wandering around – it kept getting cuter and cuter, and I didn’t see even one thing that wasn’t completely charming. It has lots of canals and bridges, and the architecture is gorgeous as well. On Saturday we got up and went on a great tour of De Halve Maan Brewery – we had a hilarious tour guide, we got to climb up on the roof for a great view of Bruges, and it ended with a beer in the brewery’s café – not too shabby! We then visited Bruges’ Church of Our Lady, which was a Madonna and Child sculpture by Michelangelo, which obviously was pretty cool. I also really enjoyed the Gruuthuse Museum, which is essentially a collection of mostly-secular objects from daily life in Bruges in centuries past. It’s in an old private residence of someone who was very rich, so it was great to get to go into one of those beautiful homes that are so common in Europe! I REALLY enjoyed Bruges, and I also found all the Belgians I encountered to be very friendly, so I highly recommend it!

Hilary and I got back to Nevers on Sunday night, and I had classes Monday and yesterday. They’ve gone pretty well, although it’s definitely hard to get back into the routine of work after so much time off! Luckily my next vacation starts on February 5, so I have something to get me through all this tough work… I don’t work on Wednesdays, so today Hilary, my friend/fellow assistant Mari, and I went on a day trip to Moulins sur Allier, a pretty little town about a 30-minute train ride away. We saw 2 lovely cathedrals and got a private presentation on a beautifully-painted triptych at the Cathédrale Notre Dame. Moulins also has a pretty cool museum dedicated solely to stage costumes from theatrical productions, so we saw an exposition on costumes from early 20th century Russian operas. Kind of random, but still very cool – we spent quite a bit of time playing in the “children’s museum” portion of it – they had lots of fun things to try on, like furry Russian hats! We also had a much-needed coffee at Moulins’ Grand Café, a beautiful Belle Epoque café that hasn’t changed its interior décor since 1899 – it was beautiful!

Sorry for the monstrously long post, I hope all is well with you all – Happy New Year!