I am in Besancon at the moment, and have been for the last two days. Lupita, Pamela, and I stayed with Louis, an assistant from Cuba, in his apartment at the Lycee du Duc for the last two nights, and I will be staying with Julia tonight and have a medical visit and some administrative stuff to do tomorrow in Besancon....
We arrived in Besancon at around noon on Saturday and one of my high school's English teachers met us at the train station and took us, with our baggage, in her car to Louis's place and then to see a bit of the town. Unfortunately, as some of you are all-too well aware, I have a tendency towards carsickness, particularly in small cars, and particularly with manual cars and most particularly on uber-narrow medieval one-way streets.
Now that I have explored a bit on foot and regained my sense of equilibrium, I know that Besançon is a lovely town, with cobbled pedestrian-only streets and shops, shops, shops, boulangeries (bakeries), chocolateries, etc. etc. Here is a photo of one of the main squares while a market was going on. The Doubs river runs in a horse-shoe loop around centre ville, the old town, and there are five or six bridges that cross it at intervals. There are ramparts and gaurd towers from the 16th century all over the place, the brainchild(ren) of the architect Vauban. This photo of me is in front of the ramparts of the Citadelle, built by him. One of Vauban's towers, the Pelote, now houses a restaurant where the waitstaff are dressed in medieval garb and there is no electricity. I totally want to check this out, but am told it is pretty expensive, so I'll have to wait a bit. I envision a cross between Medieval Times and Monty Python & the Holy Grail...On Sunday, Louis, Lupita, and I went to the Musée du Temps, housed in a giant old building built by the Granvelle's a powerful family in Besançon's history. The museum was a combination of very very old architecture--thick wooden beams and sloping stone stairwells, and very new architecture-- glass walkways flung through the upper stories, and beautiful, very modern science exhibits on nanotechnology and quartz crystals that could have passed for art installations. The older exhibits told of the evolution of Besançon as a watch and clock-making town, as well as the advancements in timepieces that led to modern clocks. Basically, there were long glass cases filled with clocks and pocket watches from the middle ages, all beautifully ornate, and made from all sorts of materials--gold, silver, shark's skin... my favorite pieces looked like the Golden Compass, with all sorts of tiny dials showing not only the hours, days, and minutes, but also the movements of the planets, seasons, phases of the moon....
By the time we got to the Musée de Beaux-Arts we were a tad musée-ed out. I was still able to get excited about seeing works by Courbet, Matisse, Picasso, and Rodin. And then suddenly as we were wandering down the labyrinthine, sloping rooms, there were mummies! Two of them, to be precise, and some displays of Roman artifacts found in the Besançon area.
On Monday I met up with Julia, my friend from Colorado, and we made some tasty tasty vegetarian fajitas in the gorgeous apartment she shares with a French girl called Estelle, who is Lovely and Amazing. Estelle is an artist and the apartment has these very elegant, shabby-chic furnishings...one of those people and one of those places you would like to be/have yourself someday, but probably never will.
Julia let me come with her to her gym in Besançon and I went to a French weightlifting class, that was sort of like aerobics and barbells combined...I had never done anything remotely like this before, and so felt rather silly rather a lot. But I was entertained by the way the instructor gave directions and encouragement ('un, deux, encore, toujours!') and by looking around at the other participants, who seemed to be very very different, and ranged from Super Buff Older Fellow to Puny Anorexic Lady-HowIsSheLiftingThat?!, to overweight lady with world's Least Attractive Mullet... then I ran for a while and tried really hard not to make eye contact with the other gym-folk, since I wasn't sure what comprises a culturally appropriate way to behave in french gym...
This morning, Tuesday, I had my medical visit and visa validation, which means that I am now officially allowed to reside in France! YAY! And then Julia and I went to a giant shoe store and I found two pairs of boots....More Yay. And now I have returned to Vesoul, to have a little R&R for a couple days, sleep in my own bed, do some laundry.
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