St. Tropez with Sarah!

I was graced this past weekend with the presence of the lovely, Sarah. She is a friend that I know from Iowa State who is studying in Germany this semester. She picked a great weekend to visit the French Riviera.

On Friday after she arrived, we visited a statue in Antibes that many who frequent Des Moines will recognize.         

(Side note: I did some digging and apparently this statue, as well as its Des Moines counterpart are just two in a series of similar sculptures by Jaume Plensa. Apparently, they also exist in Yorkshire, Tokyo, Vancouver, London, to name a few.)                                         

Anyway, we left early on Saturday morning to go to St. Tropez with my study abroad group. St. Tropez was made famous by Brigitte Bardot in the 1960's, as well as a popular French t.v. show about police officers who worked at La Gendarmerie (The Police Station). Today, the city is a destination for wealthy tourists.

Luckily, we visited the city before heavy tourist traffic starts in May. 

St. Tropez was a lot of fun to explore. There was a great outdoor market where they sold everything from antique books to assorted candies.

After the market, we ate a kind of cake that originated from the island of St. Tropez. It was so popular in the area that the vanilla custard filled dessert gained the name "The Tropezian." I do not have a picture of the cake however, Sarah and I ate ours fairly quickly :)

We were able to affectively burn off our cake by walking uphill to the Citadel of St. Tropez. It offered a spectacular view of the city and coastline. 

Also atop the hill was a wild peacock. I've never before seen one outside of a zoo.

I greatly enjoyed Sarah's visit. She has been gracious enough to let me visit her in Germany the first weekend of May. 

For Sarah's blog post please go to: http://sathies.wordpress.com/

Perfume Making

Grasse is a beautiful little hilltop city made famous by its long-standing reputation for exquisite perfume production. Normally, perfume creation is reserved for a very specific occupation aptly named, The Nose. We got the opportunity to create our own scent at a workshop out of Galimard Perfume Factory.

The process was actually quite interesting. We started the process by picking our two favorite scents out of a set of six. Those two scents became the two families of fragrances from which we would choose our "base" and "chest" scents. For both the base and chess scents we were again given six fragrances (three from each family of the two original scents) and again told to pick two out of the six. There was a similar process for the "face" scents but we were also allowed to choose fragrances from all of the scent families.

At the end of it, we produced 100 mL of our own unique perfume. I'm quite happy with the way mine turned out, and I'm excited to wear it.

Visit from Home

A couple of weeks ago I was graced with a visit of a familiar face. The lovely, Janet Gabel made the long flight to come see me and explore the area of France that I have come to adore.
I gave her a small tour of Antibes on Thursday night before rising early on Friday to peruse the Ventimiglia market and then take the train to Tours, France.
While in Tours, we had the opportunity to visit Chateau Chenonceau. The castle went though a series of owners including queens, kings, and kings' mistresses. It was rainy the day that we went but the grounds and castle were beautiful nonetheless.

From Tours we went to Caen, which is fairly close to the D-Day beaches of Normandy. We took a guided tour of Gold, Omaha, and Utah beaches with a stop at the American cemetery. 

 < Taken at Gold beach.

We found seashells buried in the sand of Omaha beach. It's hard to believe that the peaceful landscape was ever disturbed. 

Quite possibly the most sobering part of the trip was walking around the American cemetery located just up the hill from Omaha Beach. There were rows upon rows of white crosses (and the occasional white Star of David) representing 40% of the deaths that happened on or around D-Day. The other 60% had their bodies returned to the United States. 

None of the crosses show the soldier's age. Our tour guide said that this was intended to not reserve greater sympathy for the younger soldiers. Everyone's sacrifice was the same. 

The picture represents only a small portion of the graves overlooking the beach. Walking among the crosses was heart-wrenching. For every white grave mark also represented the void left in the lives of the people that loved that soldier. 

The cemetery was beautiful, but the apparent sorrow and sacrifice was haunting. 

This is a statue fashioned to embody the spirit of American youth. I thought it was very appropriate. 

We spent our last night together in Nice. I enjoyed my weekend of sleeping in hotels (I usually stay in dorm-style hostels when I travel), eating in restaurants (I've been eating discount pasta for months), and above all, seeing a familiar face. 

Thanks again for a great trip, Mom :)

Brussels with a side of Bruges

This trip was not part of my epic spring break week but instead happened only a weekend after. It was tough to pack up again so quickly but the trip was well worth it.
We ate some great Belgian cuisine including mussels with fries and, of course, Belgian waffles.


I have never tried the combination of mussels and french fries but I must say the meal was excellent!

We visited the famous Brussels Atomium. Like the Eiffel Tower, The Atomium was also built for a World Fair. We went inside and got a great view of Brussels. 

We also saw the strangely famous Peeing Boy Statue. Its fame is apparently not proportional to its actual size. The statue is two feet tall and urinates into the fountain basin. There are many stories circulating why such a statue would be made; in some stories the boy is a hero, in others he is blissfully unaware of his surroundings, but  all of the accounts agree that at some point a small boy urinated in public. 

The next day we took a trip to Bruges, a smaller Belgian city located only a short train ride away from Brussels. This quiet little village was absolutely beautiful. We arrived too late to see Michael Angelo's Madonna or the church where a vial of Jesus' blood is stored but we enjoyed our self guided tour.

We ended our time in Belgium with more chocolate, waffles, and fries. What a great trip!

Amsterdam (Spring Break City 4 of 4)

Amsterdam is generally well known for pot being as common as coffee and for their shocking red light district. Although I found both of those claims to fame to be true and prevalent, the city was still a joy to explore.

Amsterdam is actually a series of 80 small islands, each divided by grid-like man-made canals. It is a little confusing to get around at first if you don't have a detailed map but we managed to find where we needed to go. 

We didn't visit many museums while we were there but we did spend a little bit of time at the Anne Frank House. If you ever have just a short time to spend in Amsterdam, I would highly recommend paying this museum a visit. The house where the Frank family hid from Nazi capture is still standing and, although furniture is gone, the walls and conditions have been left the same. 

Another must do-while in Amsterdam is to rent a bike. Every street, canal, and fence had bike upon bike piled up, only leaving room for intersections. I swear Amsterdam could do their census by counting the number of bikes lining the streets. 

Amsterdam was great fun but I'm glad we only spent two days there. I enjoyed sightseeing but was quite glad to return to Antibes after a long week of traveling. 

London (Spring Break City 3 of 4)

Our time in London was simply marvelous.
We arrived in the late afternoon on Wednesday the 29th of February. We had enough time to settle into our hostel and grab dinner before going to see Wicked at the Apollo-Victoria Theater. I had seen Wicked before but the London cast did a great job. It was also cool to hear the familiar songs sung in British accents.

The next day we did a three hour guided walking tour of the city. Our guide took us around to many of the famous London sights like Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace. 

After the guided tour, we took it upon ourselves to find Tower Bridge. We walked across, took pictures and then rode the Underground to go back home. 

The Underground happened to stop beneath Kings Cross Station before reaching the stop by our hostel. So, we investigated, and were delighted to find that Platform 9 3/4  is real! (It's technically between tracks 8 and 9 but I was thrilled nonetheless). 

The next day we had time to live out the Beatles Abbey Road cover before packing up and heading to Amsterdam.