Bastille Day fun

Yesterday kept alternating between sunshine and short but quite heavy showers, so I was a bit concerned about whether or not the fireworks would be on and whether or not we would all get drenched and miserable watching them. Still, I had a rendezvous across town at 9, so I waited for a particularly heavy shower to pass and headed out to the pub to meet up with Laura and Philippa. Luckily, it rained again quite heavily while we were in the pub and we got fine weather for the fireworks at 11, which lasted for about 25 minutes. That's really bang for your buck!

After the fireworks, Laura went home and Philippa and I went into town to meet up with a girl who does Sh'bam and Zumba with me at the gym and her friends. Exciting, new French friend! She comes across as very timid at the gym (and said as much herself several times in the evening), so I'm a) impressed that she had the courage to suggest we met up after we got chatting about Bastille Day plans on Friday and b) found it hilarious how drunk and extrovert she got. Life ambition fulfilled: going out with a French girl who's way drunker than me. Score! We put our gym classes to good work on the dancefloor - even though Sh'bam and Zumba are as much or more aerobic routines as dance per se, I think they do help you get loosened up and more in tune with how to move on the dancefloor.

Philippa went home just before the bars closed and French Marion, her friend Jessica and Jessica's friend Olivier and I went on to a club where we had to wait in line for like half an hour and then pay to get in, which made me grumpy. The music in the club was pretty crap and, even worse "DJ Jeff" kept interrupting the songs every 30 seconds to shout "DJ Jeffffffffff" at us. FFS, after the third time everyone was well aware that DJ Jeff was in the house, so shut up and stop ruining the rhythm of the songs to tell us about it!

Anyway, Olivier took Marion home not long after we got there, so I basically had to stay with Jessica, which was fine, even if I wasn't having an amazing time, we were dancing, it was okay. She kept going off periodically to do whatever, but still, I was okay dancing by myself, even when some guy came up behind me and rubbed his arse up on me and I pushed him away gently, and then he came back and was all "what did you do that for?" and I had to shout at him, because it's one thing busting the inappropriate dance moves, it's another thing getting mad at ME about it.

I think every time I talk about going out it involves me shouting at French men, but there you go, clearly they deserve it. I didn't even tell you about the last time we went out with one of Charlie's friends and he said we should go downstairs to follow "trois putes" who just headed down to the dancefloor and when I asked him not to use the word "putes" he said, in English, "should I say bitches? whores? sluts?" Is it just me, or is there some sort of nouveau acceptance of misogyny going about these days? Even Charlie, who is normally very feisty, was all "he doesn't mean it in a bad way, he's just joking" but that's one thing that I don't find at all funny. Plus we were sitting by a spiral staircase going up to the bathrooms and he was sitting there trying to look up girls' skirts as they went up and then talking about what putes they were to be wearing short skirts. Excuse me, shouldn't we be talking about what a pervert you are for basically lying down in your chair to get a look at them?

Anyway, Olivier finally came back and I probably should have just left at that stage, but he and Jessica went off to get a drink and she came back by herself and we danced a bit more and then I asked her where Olivier was because I wanted to leave (sorry this story is getting long and boring) and she was all "I don't know, he left, I don't think he's coming back, all my stuff is in the boot of his car", so I was kind of pissed off because I couldn't just leave her, but at the same time I was like, he was just here, why did you let him go off knowing he had all your stuff? And what was your plan for dealing with that before I said I wanted to go home? Eventually I got her to go look for him, so I was stuck in this club by myself, with a headache, tired, waiting for a girl I didn't even know to get her act together, listening to the crap stylings of DJ Jeff, so not very happy. After half an hour, she turned up to say she found Olivier and he wanted to wait till the club closed at 4.30, in about 20 minutes. I said I was leaving straight away and she gave me puppy dog eyes, but I was having none of that, go do puppy dog eyes at irresponsible Olivier, instead of me! I'd been out for nearly 8 hours, that's a full work day (or one and a half work days, here in France), and when you wants to go home, you wants to go home.

So that was my Bastille Day. It probably sounds like I had a worse time than I did, and also that I am an angry, angry young man, but it wasn't that bad, especially the first bar we were at.

I may have gotten a bit carried away taking photos of myself with my tricolour nails. I'm awfully vain for someone who looks like crap most of the time

Fireworks (I messed around with the colour on this one)

Me and Philippa at the first bar

Marion and me, doing a bad job of being "gangsta"

Fireworks

Bonne Fête Nationale!

So far, we have blue skies and I'm crossing my tricolour fingers that it stays like this for the fireworks tonight!

Blastier from the pastier: Chora Church, Istanbul

I was inspired by my last post featuring old photos from Christmas 2009 to dig up some more old holiday snaps that I never got around to posting on the blog. My trip to Istanbul in January 2008 was my last shebang before returning to New Zealand to do my MLIS degree. I met up with Andy, an English friend I met in Moscow, for a long weekend exploring the sights of Istanbul. You can see photos from our trip to the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque and read about my trip, but I gave up blogging when I got back to NZ, so I never posted the rest of my photos.

Andy had an earlier flight back home than I did, so on my last day I took a trip out to the Chora church, also known as the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora. This is definitely one of my favourite places of all the sights I've seen on my travels. I had never heard of it before planning my trip to Istanbul, and I don't think I had much idea of what to expect there, except that it was an old church with well-preserved mosaics. The building mostly dates from the 11th century, with interior mosaics and frescoes from the early 14th century.

It was a bit off the beaten track, out of the centre, and when I got into the surrounding neighbourhood (on foot) I got pretty lost. I didn't put this on the blog at the time, because I thought my mum would kill me, but I ended up asking a Turkish couple I came across for directions, and even though they couldn't speak any English and they were clearly coming back from a shopping trip and unloading their car, they went out of their way to drive me the rest of the way to the church. So nice! I found that, when I was with Andy, who sticks out as English from a mile off, we would get hassled on the streets by people trying to sell us stuff, but as soon as I was on my own I had people coming up speaking Turkish to me, so I must blend in!

It was well worth the effort to find the place, as I was just blown away. It was really, really beautiful. Not super big, but covered with amazing mosaics and frescoes. Now that I've been to St. Mark's in Venice, I can see the similarities, but while Chora is obviously not on the same scale, you get a more intimate experience, up-close-and-personal, and at least in January, there are obviously not as many tourists.

Photos never really do these things justice, but here are some of mine anyway! This really makes me want to go back and visit Chora again.

And... back to the present. A certain Queen of all that's Coquine keeps encouraging me with my Sultry Kitchen Photos™, so here's another new dress from the sales.

Behind me, you may be able to see that I was baking cakes yesterday for dinner with Liz and Charlie. I had a glut of courgette innards from making stuffed courgettes earlier in the week, and I had heard that you could make a really moist chocolate cake with them, so I decided to suppress my doubts and give it a whirl. I actually wasn't very happy with the result, it was not very chocolatey at all and the texture was a bit dense and claggy but, as you can see from the photo below, you can't actually tell it has courgettes in it - I was quite surprised at how thoroughly they disappeared into the cake. So an (un)healthy way to sneak some extra vege into your life at least! I may try tinkering around with the recipe if I find myself with lots of courgette flesh lying around again. One good thing about being unemployed and it RAINING ALL THE TIME means I can run about domestic goddess-ing it up all day :)

Blast from the past

I wanted to look up a picture of the Castlerigg stone circle, which I visited with my Dad and my brother around Christmas 2009, on my blog, only to find that I had never uploaded the photos. So let me take you back to the very snowy winter of 2009-2010, when I was just a slip of a 27 year-old, in the north of England. (I did briefly blog about it here, without photos.)

My brother and I opening our Christmas presents at my Granddad's house

As mentioned, we visited the Castlerigg stone circle near Keswick, Cumbria (home of the famous pencil museum). It was a spectacular sight - the prehistoric stone circle is on a flat piece of land and echoes the form of the circle of mountains which surrounds it. Seeing the stones and the peaks covered in snow really gave you an appreciation of why the ancient Britons would have been drawn to the site.

Paul peeping out from behind a stone - no ropes, unlike Stonehenge

Me at Castlerigg


Another ancient site on the list was Hadrian's Wall. I had visited Hadrian's Wall before in Northumbria, near Newcastle, but I think this was my first time visiting it in the North-West.

Me at Hadrian's Wall. I presume my brother's not peeing on it, despite appearances. Edit: Actually that's not Hadrian's Wall anyway, Hadrian's Wall's in the foreground where I'm standing

Paul and Dad at Hadrian's Wall

 We also visited Liverpool, my mum's home town, and caught a match at Anfield

The Empire Theatre, Liverpool - where I think my mum saw the Beatles back in the day?

Me and a Liverpudlian lion

Paul and a penguin

The Anfield memorial to those who died in the Hillsborough disaster

Stephen Gerrard, captain of Liverpool

Fernando Torres making his second blog appearance in as many posts. He must be proud

Me and my brother at Anfield

Me, Mum and Paul, looking like a hobo

Me at Anfield

And, finally a blast from the, um, present. It's sales time, and I have a new dress! I have lots of dresses, but this is the first ankle-length one (not that you can tell)

A lush in Loches

It's hot hot hot here! As per usual, rain and storms forecast for the rest of the week though, so enjoy it while we can!

Didn't get up to much on the weekend after going out on Weds and Thurs, most notably headed out to a pub on Sunday with Aussie Philippa to watch the final of Euro 2012. I didn't really have a preference between Spain and Italy, so I decided to pick a side based on who had the best-looking players. Neither impressed me too much, but Spain won by a nose and the fact that I knew they had Fernando Torres in reserve.

A girly blond man? Of course I like him! Philippa also evidently approved given that when he came on she woohoo'd loud enough over the general pub noise for people to turn round and stare at us, ha ha!

Spain, of course, was a good pick since they trounced Italy 4-0. Despite coming from football-loving stock, I don't follow it that closely, but it is good fun when there's a major tournament on, especially if you can go watch it in a pub and soak up the atmosphere (almost everyone seemed to be going for Spain, so there was much excitement, plus a near-riot when the TV crapped out temporarily just as they scored their second goal. I felt very sorry for the bartenders).

Moving on to Monday, I decided to take a daytrip to Loches, to take advantage of the nice weather and to get myself out of the house, since I was expecting an email (which still hasn't arrived, grrr) and didn't want to be sitting around pressing refresh on my gmail all day long. The trip took about an hour, by "train" (it's secretly actually a bus, but you book it via the national rail company). Pro tip: you get a discount at the citadel if you show them your ticket. I don't think I've ever been in that direction (south-east of Tours) before, so it was somewhat interesting to look up from my book from time to time and watch the uber-flat fields roll by before they gave way, just before Loches, to gentle, green rolling wooded hills which reminded me a bit of the Waikato (aka The Shire to you furriners).

I had taken a cursory look at the Loches website before setting out, but didn't really know what to expect other than a chateau. Turns out that the old bit is more like a walled citadel than just a chateau. The bit you pay to see is made up of the "royal lodge", the more palacy bit (although definitely not as fancy as somewhere like Chenonceau), which dates from around the 14th century and, at the other end of the citadel, the "keep", which dates back, in the oldest parts, to around the year 1000 and was a fortress followed by a state prison (until 1926!). I know I've been in Europe for quite a long time now, but I still find it pretty exciting stepping into buildings which are a thousand years old! 

Before I went into either, I checked out the Collegiate Church of St Ours, which dates from the 11th-12th centuries. It features a lovely stone doorway decorated with various beasts and monsters and the tomb of Agnès Sorel (of whom, more later).

The doorway of St Ours, which retains vestiges of the original polychromatic painting

Details of the arch

Next to the church, I was taken by the sight of this statue in the garden of a nearby house:

My initial thought was "hmm, that reminds me of the statue of Peter the Great at the Peter and Paul Fortress, St Petersburg." Lo and behold, I went back through my blog archives and found that it is, in fact, exactly the same:

(Bad) photo credit: Me, Jan 2007.

Google wasn't very forthcoming on this, perhaps because I couldn't be bothered googling each of the numerous variant spellings of his name, but I gather that it's the house of the artist himself, Mikhail Shemyakin. Cool!

I then headed into the Royal Lodge.

Moi, royal lodge

Doggies look out over Loches from the stairway of the lodge

The Agnès Sorel tower, the oldest part of the loge (c. 1250)

 I wouldn't say that it's the most exciting chateau I've ever been in, but there are nice views of the city, another of the many Joan of Arc-related sites that dot this region (I think she came here to nag the Dauphin into fighting for his crown, although I don't quite know how that fits into the narrative, since I know she first met up with him down the road in Chinon) and an interesting narrative about Agnès Sorel, she of the tomb in the church next door.

Agnès painted as the Madonna by Jehan Fouquet, local boy.

The exhibition focused on recent medical/archaeological investigations into the death of Agnès, the first "official mistress" in France (partner, I think, of the ex-Dauphin bothered by Joan of Arc). She died at only 25 years old, or thereabouts, shortly after giving birth to a fourth daughter of the King's, who died at or shortly after birth. At the time, they basically said she died of an upset tummy, but speculation raged pretty much straight away on whether or not she was murdered. The forensic examination of her remains determined that she had a nasty-sounding but apparently common worm infestation and that she died of mercury poisoning, however the case is still open as to whether it could have been a deliberate poisoning or a side effect of medical treatment. Mercury was used both to treat parasitical infections and during childbirth, however the dose found in her hair was around 10,000 times the therapeutic dose.

The investigation also did a facial reconstruction on her remains, proving that the skull found was indeed hers (it had been knocked about a bit from pillar to post during the Revolution and so forth) and that contemporary likenesses, such as the bust at bottom left, were very accurate.

The tomb of Agnès in the church of St Ours

The last thing that I was interested to learn about Agnès was that, since the King officially recognised the daughters they had together and they were subsequently able to make good marriages, she is sometimes known as the "grandmother of Europe", as almost all the royal and imperial families of Europe are descended from her. Not bad for the mistress! I'd never heard of her before, but now I'd like to learn more. There is actually an up-to-date book on her in English which you can browse online (I plan to take a look).

After the royal lodge, I headed to the other end of the citadel to visit the Keep. As mentioned, the oldest bit, the keep itself, was constructed at the beginning of the 11th century by Foulques Nerra, the scary-sounding Angevin Count whom we last met at Langeais. This keep is much better-preserved than that of Langeais. The ceiling and inner floors are missing, but the shell is still intact and you can go all the way up to the top, a scary 36 metres up.

Looking out from the Louis XI tower, with the keep on the left

The Keep

Inside the Keep. It's scary looking down to the floor (I couldn't get it all in in one photo) with only a waist-high guiderail keeping you from falling


The advantage, of course, is the great views found from the Keep and other bits of the royal citadel: 

As mentioned, this was a dungeon/prison from the 15th century to 1926. Notable prisoners included Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (held from 1504-1508), the Bishops of Puy and Auntun and Cardinal Balue (yeah, I've never heard of him either, but apparently he's notable). You can explore some of the cells, the torture chamber, and the underground passages from which the building stone was quarried.

The best thing about this reconstruction of a wooden and iron cage used to house prisoners for months t a time is that the information pamphlet describes it as "especially comfortable".

 

This may be a little hard to make out - another of the rooms was covered in large, carved graffiti, mostly of men swordfighting. You can see the guy on the right in a hat with both arms held up, and to the left, a bit harder to see, is a guy in the "en garde" position with his sword stretched out.

Lastly, after I left the royal city I went down into the town to see a free exhibit, made up of two recently-authenticated Caravaggio paintings, both of which have better-known versions held elsewhere.

The Supper at Emmaus, the most famous version of which is in the National Gallery, London. I don't particularly care for this work, but I prefer this version to the London painting, in which Christ has quite an unattractive, swollen-looking face (in my opinion).

There was also a triptych by Jehan Fouquet (him again) which I saw recently at the Tours 1500 exhibition, but I didn't have my camera. I like this a lot, very vibrant and visually arresting

And to finish this interminable post with, a cute sign I came across for a pharmacy in the city:

It was great to get out and about to see a bit more of what the Loire Valley has to offer, especially with the perfect sunny-but-not-too-hot weather. I should do it more often!