Finally the update for our tour of the Saint-Gatien cathedral. I can see the towers from outside my bedroom window, it's only a couple blocks away from where we live. Obviously, it's under a lot of reparations and such, and it was also another rainy day, so the pictures aren't the best.

The front facade. This is a little far away and blurry, but if you look closely you'll see that the two towers are actually quite different in design. Apparently there were two different architects working on the cathedral and they hated each other. So they each designed a tower and refused to do anything like the other one.


In this picture you have more evidence of the mix-n-match town of Tours. Haha. The cathedral was designed and built from an older church. So you can see in this picture the plainer walls and then the decorative columns and such added to it.
The flying buttresses, which were also a later addition after they realized the cathedral was starting to fall down without them. The fact that it was built over several hundred years means it profited from a lot of different research.

Absolutely breathtaking.

The organ

Me looking reallllllllllly tiny! Anyway, like I said the cathedral was built over a time span of a couple hundred years and that is evidenced a lot in the architecture. There were lots of pretty amazing differences of how they started changing styles and techniques as they learned more about the mechanics of how the building stood up. Even the stained glass windows changed in the style and content. I took lots of pictures, however, the lighting was rather poor and few turned out.

More to come soon!

I will update very soon!!! The power cord for my computer stopped working so I'm sentenced to several days of the very slow family computer and school computers until my new one arrives. I have stories and pictures though as soon as it does. No worries, I haven't forgotten!!!

Finally, the promised 2nd half.

Alright, I'm finally getting back to this. Back to our tour on Saturday, I think the last thing I put up were pictures of the new basilica where St. Martin is buried. Well, there are bits and pieces of the old cathedral still standing and signs of it. For example this is part of it (you can see the new basilica behind it.)

There were two huge towers to the cathedral, one of which is still standing.

And various other parts of it that the houses and shops are built against. All the parts of just blended in with the rest of the architecture.

Then all up and down the sidewalks and road there are these cross-shaped sections of different colored pavement. That's where the columns on either side of the nave that separated it from the aisles. It truly was a HUGE cathedral.

Then, he also told us that because of St. Martin and this huge cathedral, Tours was a very religious town (I think I mentioned that already) with around 40 churches. All of the buildings with the pointed fronts, like the one pictured below, were churches at one point.

Back to buildings being built right next to each other and trying to blend together. There are many spots in Tours where you can see very old buildings next to much newer buildings. And it's interesting to see how the architects try to blend them together. You can see a little bit of it in this pictures. The houses further away are the older wooden structure as opposed to the newer houses which look very modern that are closer.

Thus was an old nunnery, and the holes are the tombs of the nuns. (Madame S. this is right behind the restaurant where we ate when we were in Tours a couple years ago!)

The following is a house that was built when France was influenced by the northerners. Hence the brick and such. But I found it really cool because of the portion of the wall at the top. The second picture is a closer view of it, and you'll notice it's full of holes. This style of wall was called a "Mur Chantant" or a "Singing Wall." They put the holes and the pegs there for the birds so that the birds would stay there and the wall would sing.

After all that, Robynne and I were absolutely freezing, so we stopped and got some hot chocolate.
Then we returned home to eat brunch and warm up a little. Later we went for a walk and walked down to the Loire River and watched the sunset (comme Le Petit Prince!). It was beautiful. I took tons of pictures but I'm only posting two.

Sunday we went to a Reformed Church. It was pretty nice, very very small but it had an awesome organ!!! Haha, the hymnals were really confusing, but otherwise we didn't have any problems. And it was very close to home, so that was nice.

The Soldes are also going on in Tours, so did some very brief shopping over the weekend. We plan to do more intense shopping sometime soon though. The Soldes are when ALL of the shops have massive sales all at the same time. It's pretty awesome.

Monday night we went out after dinner to the Cafe du Langue. It's held ever Monday night in a nearby cafe/bar and basically they reserve the whole second floor for people who want to come and practice a language. So there are tables to speak French, English, Spanish, German, etc. It was pretty neat, but very crowded. We had a good time though so we will probably go back following weeks. It was a good way to meet people too!

That's about it for now. School is still going excellently. The work itself is VERY easy but I can definitely tell it is improving my language abilites. And that is what I'm here for. Besides, hey, I'm not gonna complain about no homework. Haha.

Life is good! I'll be back soon~

Tours!

Ah, the first post. Now that I have Wifi in my room I really have no excuse not to write it. I've managed to survive my first week with little or no trouble. School seems like it won't be terribly hard. Only French . . . it's like my dream come true! My favorite so far has been my phonetics class because we have this little recording machine and so the teacher says something, we repeat it, and then we play it back and listen. It's pretty amazing how much difference the little things can make. Everything is in French, of course, and it really has to be because there are students from all over the world. Therefore, the only language that everyone has in common is French. There are people in my class from Libya, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Japan, Mexico, Columbia . . . etc. I also take two French culture classes, one historical and one modern. I'm pretty sure that the professor for those classes is my favorite, even just after one week. He's very interesting and quite funny. He also does the local tours that the school has for the students on some Saturdays. Robynne and I went on one yesterday that I will tell you about shortly.


My family and housing situation are wonderful! Their house is absolutely huge for a French house, and they have a lovely garden. We cannot enjoy the garden now though because it's exceedingly cold and there's snow and ice everywhere! Apparently, it *never* snows here . . . that would be my luck. Robynne has been sufficiently cured of ever finding joy in snow again however, I believe. Anyway, I have my own room (with a fireplace!) and it's connected to Robynne's by a little walkway with a W.C. and a closet. So we have our own little wing, awwww. I don't have very many pictures of the house except for one from the outside, and then I have some pictures of my room.

The house is only about a 15 minute walk from the school, and pretty much everything else for that matter, so that's extremely nice. We live with a lady named Genevieve, who is extremely nice and helpful with our french, she is a little older and does not leave her room though. However, her son, along with his wife and son come over every day and make dinner and such. So we have a big family dinner every night, and the food is AMAZING! I'm pretty sure there's no way I can ever go back to eating in a cafeteria now. Anyway, they're all very nice and take good care of us. And little Matthias is a doll. He's six and doesn't speak English at all. We play some interesting games though . . . haha. And earlier today we went to the movies and watched Madagascar 2, all in French of course.

Yesterday, like I said, Robynne and I went on a tour of Old Tours that our school had. I found it extremely interesting. He talked a lot about the architecture and ways to tell what time period or century certain things came from. A lot of it had to do with windows and the shapes of the windows. For example, the oldest windows are the round windows, and then there are the double windows with the pointed tops, such as this,
Then they proceeded on to the square shape with a round stone over them, to a square with a stone cross for support, and then to merely the square shape when they had improved the glass making technique and could make larger pieces of glass. I have pictures of several of the different types of windows but the photos are a little obnoxious to deal with on this blog, and I have more interesting photos to show.

That is the main building of my school. It was built in the 18th century and at the time was a house. However, as the professor kept pointing out to us, it was not just any house. The ordinary house was built right off the road with any gardens in the back (like the house I live in which was built in the same time period. So the really rich people built their houses futher back with a gate right off the road. This gave the impression of a castle, and most importantly, power. That is also why it doesn't have the ordinary square/rectangular shape, but rather the two sides stick out slightly further. This was to give the impression of towers, also like a castle.

After the school, our next stop was the St. Martin Basilica. Apparently, St. Martin was a very important person in Tours, or at least they decided so after his death. He was buried there, and a huge cathedral was built over his tomb. Then, a highly religious community developed around this cathedral (which was a short distance away from the actual town of Tours which was built right off the bridge). Eventually the two communities merged forming one single city. Anyway, the cathedral over the tomb of St. Martin was destroyed, and a new much smaller basilica was built for his tomb.


On the right, the basilica from the back. And above, me in front of the basilica from the front.













Alright, I have lots more but I need to get ready for dinner. I may finish tonight, or it may wait until tomorrow.