Hey ho, away we go! I'm back again, this time to tell you about my trip to the Chateau de Chantilly last Saturday, and this week in Paris. There's a lot to cover, so this blog will once again be a million years long. But whatever, I'm just going to assume you guys like reading long blog posts. Anyway, this is me right now:
I hope you all appreciate the effort I go to to write these posts. I've devolved into a cat in a jumper from typing so much.
Okay! Starting for real now.
So after moving into my new home on Friday night (oh, btw, the reason I didn't do much on Wednesday and Thursday was because I was packing on those days,) I remembered that on Saturday Professor Call and his family were going to be visiting the Chateau de Chantilly and watching the horse races that go on there. I was like, sign me up! So I got all the info on how to get there, and planned my route. It's important to mention here that I had to be in town by a certain time in order to meet up with everybody to get out to the Chateau.
The next morning, I wake up on time and get ready to leave, and then I head down the stairs with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately, I had not anticipated the Attack of the Host Mom that came next.
The instant I walked downstairs, my cute new host mom went, "Oh! There you are! Let me explain to you everything about breakfast and how we do it here, do you want cereal and toast or just cereal, also we have orange juice, is that okay with you? And here's where you put the dishes when you're done, and here's a bunch of spots where you can put food if you need to . . . " on and on and on. Which was great, and I really appreciated how willing she was to give me all this information--the only problem was, I didn't really know how to tell her that I really needed to leave, so I just let her give me a tour until she was done and it was only then that I realized I was now fifteen or so minutes behind schedule, which could mess everything up.
So I booked it to the RER and headed toward the meeting spot, which involved changing trains twice, and ended up getting to the train station from which we were all supposed to head to Chantilly together about twenty minutes after the train left. Not to worry, there was another one coming along, but my French phone had died and so I couldn't figure out how to contact the Calls or the other people who'd decided to go to Chantilly too.
Never fear, though--this story does have a happy ending! I successfully navigated the Gare du Nord, which is this really cool train station:
Found my train:
Accidentally took this magical selfie where my eyes are all sparkly and I look like a fairy:
And I was on my way to Chantilly, about an hour behind everyone else!
I was a little worried about how I was going to meet up with the Calls, but it turned out to not be that big of a deal. I was able to get wifi at the train station and coordinate a meeting spot at the Chateau. And interesting tidbit: I didn't know it at the time, but apparently the original train they'd been planning to take to Chantilly was cancelled--they were actually on the same train as me and I had no idea! It was nice because it meant I only ended up being a little bit behind them. After a little while of walking, I found myself at this humongous building:
And I was like, oh, cool! I found the Chateau!
But then I read the signs on the side of the building. This was not, in fact, the Chateau. This was just the stables for the Chateau.
It honestly blew my mind. Why on earth were the stables so big??? How many horses lived in there?? What????
To be honest, I kind of wonder how pampered and spoiled those horses must be, living in a house that's bigger than any place I will ever live in my life. Never thought I'd be this jealous of a bunch of horses.
Anyway, that was not the Chateau. This was the Chateau:
I've begun to ask myself, at what point will I start to look at humongous, beautiful buildings like this and see it as commonplace, or "meh," or just another big building? I don't know. I hope the answer is never. In any case, the Chateau de Chantilly is absolutely breathtaking, even more so than in pictures. It was just a tiny bit chilly outside, and the weather alternated between misty rain and sunny skies, which was actually really cool.
I was able to meet up with the Calls, as well as Larissa, Lauren, and Jacob, and we went on our merry way to explore the area!
Seriously. This place was so cool. The gardens were amazing, too, and in the French fashion, they were very well-ordered and went on forever:
And swans that did that cool dive thing to get food from the bottom of the moat:
There were also cool animals just roaming about the gardens, including a couple of horses on the other bank of the moat:
And swans that did that cool dive thing to get food from the bottom of the moat:
And a lot of worryingly big geese(bonus--Sister Call's story of being attacked by a group of geese as a tiny kid):
After a while of wandering around these main gardens, we took a right and headed down a pathway where the greenery became more and more wild until we reached this interesting little area that was full of Pastoral-looking stuff.
According to Professor Call, French nobility was obsessed with the pastoral aesthetic in the 17th and 18th century, and they would commission places like this with little quaint cottages and big open fields to be built on their property so that they could hold parties and dress up like sheep herders. Yeah . . . I guess that just goes to show that, in any and every era, very wealthy people are just a bit weird.
This cool hedgerow maze was lots of fun to run in and out of:
And there were some of those big dress-up cardboard pictures with the faces cut out, so of course we had to try those. Lauren's face is an A+ face, that is all:
After playing around in this area for a little while longer, we decided to head back towards the Chateau. But Larissa and I really really wanted a taste of Creme Chantilly--which is literally whipped cream. It was invented here. So we headed to this little restaurant place on the grounds and got a bowl.
Holy cow. You do not know what whipped cream can be until you've tried actual Creme Chantilly. It was about the consistency of ice cream, and had some kind of lemony flavor infused into it, and it was thick and delicious and incredible. Also, it was super fun to talk to Larissa one on one for a little while! Real talk: Larissa is a cool gal, like ultra-cool.
In between talking about qualities we wanted in our future husbands, and qualities in ourselves which we wanted our future husbands to love about us, we took epic heroic pictures of each other on top of things:
It was great, and she is great and really smart and cool.That's all I have to say about that.
Everyone else had gone on ahead while we ate our super fancy whipped cream concoctions, so we decided to just go to the Chateau and tour around inside. It was not a mistake, as the castle is breathtakingly gorgeous both inside:
And out:
Apparently the dude that originally owned this Chateau was big into reading and collecting books. Check out his library, home to 13,000 books:
I also really liked this cool art gallery that was full of really interesting paintings.
The best painting of the day was definitely this one, which practically begged to be allowed to participate in Incorrect Caption Hour:
That guy's face is throwing an unbelievable amount of shade.
We did a little bit more looking around, but then Larissa had to go home, so I went to join the rest of the group at the horse races.
We were situated right by the finish line, which was awesome. Also, I don't know if any of you have ever been to a horse race before, but these ones are apparently, like, a Really Big Deal. The one that I watched had 300,000 Euros as the final prize; others that day and over the course of the weekend had prizes up to 5 million Euros. Craaazy.
There were also a lot of incredibly fancily dressed people everywhere we looked--like, old money, blueblooded families, on a weekend out before they returned to their autumn mansions and threw/attended a charity gala with champagne and ballgowns, and Alistair, dear, would you remind me to wire 700 grand to the Pembroses for that darling little Italian island they sold us?
. . . yeah, clearly I went too far down that rabbit hole. But that's what these people looked like, okay? And an overwhelming amount of them were British and spoke with very posh accents, which was fabulous.
Anyway, here's a messily made, spliced-together video of the races themselves. You can hear the adorable sounds of one of the Calls' kids squeaky little voices as she sees the 'horsies!'
After the race, the horses and riders all come down through this little track past a bunch of photographers, and we gathered round so that we could see them, too. When the winning rider went by, some dude raised his champagne glass and said in a British accent, "Nice one, George!" Which prompted everyone around him to golf clap and say, "Good race, George!" "Excellent!" "Capital!"
No, I am not making this up. That did actually happen in real life, and yes, it was exactly as funny as it sounds.
At that point in the day, we were all pretty tired, so we decided to hop back on the train and head home. We got to see a couple more horsies getting warmed up to race, though:
A few long train rides later, I was home again. In case anybody's curious, this is what my new room looks like:
It is beautiful, and on the top floor instead of in the basement this time, and the windows open out over my little town so beautifully, and there's a little ledge at the edge of the window that I have totally NOT sat on late at night to look at the stars, nope, not at ALL.
Ahem. Moving on.
Sunday involved a lot of staying inside because General Conference weekend (which was awesome, btw,) and I also wrote a paper for Art History.
On Monday, I did not fall asleep in Brother Euvrard's class! Huzzah! Then we went to the Louvre yet again for Art History. The absolute highlight from that visit was seeing the portrait that inspired a legendary meme in person:
It felt like meeting a celebrity. I'm not even gonna caption him.
After Art History class, Larissa, Maddie, and I all went in search of Angelina's, which is this ultra-famous shop that sells patisseries and is most famous for their hot chocolate.
Before this point, I had never even actually had real, authentic French hot chocolate before, mostly because it's been really warm out and I'm of the mindset that you don't drink hot chocolate when it's hot outside.
But this. Ohhh myyy goooosh. This hot chocolate. It tasted like I was drinking a melted bar of dark chocolate. It was as if the heavens opened up and poured a bunch of chocolate down as angels sang. It was legendary.
After drinking that liquid heaven, Maddie and I split off from Larissa to go get dinner. Maddie had this Chinese food place that she really wanted to go try, and since I am down for Chinese food any and every day, I went with her. It did not disappoint:
It was delicious. I ate with a fork, though, while Maddie effortlessly ate with chopsticks, because she's fabulous and went on a mission to Japan. We talked about languages and how cool they are, since she's a linguistics major. It was super fun!
I went home and worked on homework(also I took this selfie because I was feeling cute with my little braids:)
And then went to bed.
The next day, my new roomie Cassidy was feeling sick and had to stay home from school, so I decided to do something nice for her. She told me that she liked Kinder chocolate a lot, so I went on a Mission to find some after French class. I went to this little convenience store down the street from the Institute building, and while I was looking around for chocolate, I saw these:
*heavenly chorus, angels singing*
Why did I get so excited over a bag of Doritos, you ask? Well, because these are my absolute favorite kind of chips, and I didn't even know I was going through withdrawals of them until I saw them sitting on that shelf. (They're branded differently here, though--like in Canada, in Europe they're called Sweet Chili Pepper instead of Spicy Sweet Chili, as they're called in the US.)
Girl, you know I bought the heck outta those.
I also did manage to find Kinder chocolate for Cassidy, so mission accomplished! :D
That's basically all I have to give you for this blog. I know I only got through Tuesday, but let me tell you why: because on Wednesday I spent my time packing to go to London!!!
Ahhh, it was incredible. But I don't have time to write that whole blog now. Stay tuned for that one to be up tomorrow! Let's close out now with our French song for the day: one that came up on YouTube randomly because I've listened to enough French music that YouTube is starting to recommend new songs to me. This one's called L'Ongle, sung by Presque Oui:
Agghh, just listening to that don't you feel like the people in that picture? I know I sure do.
Anyway, love you all! Stay tuned to see more of my adventures next time. A demain!
No comments:
Post a Comment