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~