loire valley day one

This past weekend my program had a little weekend excursion to the loire valley. The loire valley is a little town west of paris, two and a half hours away by bus. It's famous for its castles and "sprawling countryside" or something like that. We had to meet everyone at the bus at 7:30am, which was even harder than it sounds but luckily we all managed to fall asleep on the ride there.

The first castle we went to was called the chateau de chambord. We had a tour guide take us around the castle telling us some fun and some not so fun facts. 

(A normal picture for all those who hate on the parisian pose. )

One fun fact I remember was her showing us the first "microwave." She said that the kitchen was far from the kings's bedroom, which was where he ate his meals, so they had this room next to his bedroom where they could reheat plates of food. They would build a fire in this cabinet looking thing and put the plates on top of the holes so that the food would warm up from the heat of the fire. 

The castle is famous for its double spiraling staircase which was designed by leonardo da vinci. Horrible picture I know, forgive me. 

Here's what the staircase looks like looking up from the middle of the first floor.

We saw the queen and king's rooms. The furniture and wallpaper in the queen's room was changed every spring and winter. In the winter time the walls were covered in velvet!! Sounds like pure hell to me. It was freezing inside the all stone castle so me and my california weak skin had to bundle up. Apparently the king couldn't handle the cold either because we found out that the king would actually go into this little closet like looking room to sleep because it was warmer. I realize that was probably a run on sentence but I'm writing this blog post while sleep deprived on the bus ride back. Go me and being efficient.

After we went through the castle we had lunch and then went for a little boat ride on the moat/river next to the castle. Even though we had the worlds slowest motorized boat it was a lot of fun and really pretty. I'm glad we were lazy and opted out of taking a row boat because knowing me I would have given up halfway through.

I just looked over at dorene on the bus and she's sleeping with her mouth wide open. She must eat 20 spiders while asleep over her lifetime as opposed to the average 8 everyone else eats. Thank you snapple top facts.

Anyway back to the chambord castle visit. Since we took awhile eating lunch and going around in our "speed"boat we basically had to meet back at the bus when we got off the boat but me and dorene had bigger plans. We had decided that we needed to buy these super cute mini chambord liquor bottles we had seen back at the castle's giftshop. (Don't worry I had already bought my 5 euro keychain from there the first time we went through.) We figured our friends could stall the bus from leaving without us and the little bottles were worth even the slight chance that they couldn't. Long story short, mission accomplished, even though I'm sure we looked like fools attempting to run towards the bus sweating and running out of breath.

On our agenda for after the chateau visit we had a "surpris' (the french don't write the e) and we all had guessed/heard that it would be wine tasting and it was! We visited this small wine factory in what seemed like the middle of no where on a really narrow street. We didn't actually see the vineyard but saw the caves where they let the grapes ferment over time.

These caves are holes leftover from all the places where they carved out stone/rock to build all the nearby castles. They said that the temperature in these caves never change despite the weather outside which is perfect for making wine. I would hate to be grape juice, it was really cold in there.

We saw also where they labeled the wines and then we had a fun wine tasting party! We started off with a rose wine, then a white then we had two reds. The rose and the second red were the best. After that we tried the champagne (even though technically it's not called champagne since the grapes weren't grown in champagne so I think its just called brut?) we tried our last wine of the day, a white dessert wine which was my favorite because I love sweet wines.

In between all the sampling we also had some goat cheese and pork pate with baguette. Gabriel said that loire valley is famous for their goat cheese and pates. He said that there are over 360 different kinds of goat cheese made there. Of course the cheese tasted amazing, I really liked it even though I'm not usually the biggest goat cheese fan. I even made goat cheese pate sandwiches which bothered dorene but I'm always up for trying weird combinations.

Four glasses of wine later I decided to buy three bottles of wine to take back home with me. How I'm actually going to manage that I have no clue but it seemed like a great idea at the time. I also got a bottle of the rose for me and dorene to enjoy at some point while we're here. It was very good and cheap since we were buying it from the factory so I thought why not! A big good luck to dorene who has to carry my four bottles back to our apartment using the metro. I would carry them but I have the world's weakest arm muscles. Yes I know, I'm the girl in our relationship.

"Meet me at the hotel, motel, holiday inn" because that's where we stayed the night! We didn't do anything exciting at night time because we were super tired from waking up early, being on our feet all day and drinking wine. I must say, it's a hard life. We all just walked a few blocks, found a hippopotamus (a chain restaurant in france) and had dinner. I got the grossest creme brulee for dessert. Who knew the french could make a bad brulee. 

We went to bed around 11:30 after watching some french fear factor. Some of the shows these people choose to translate into french is beyond me.