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  Annecy, France
Friday, November 24, 2006

I'm not fully aware that it's really Thanksgiving...partly because there was still blue skies and sunshine today and partly because I had class. But the cafeteria here is supposoedly cooking us an authentic Thanksgiving dinner tonight, so we'll see how these French cooks do with stuffing and pumpkin pie :)

This afternoon my art history class took a field trip to Nice to go the Marc Chagall museum. Chagall is considered a Fauvist and Cubist, movements which also include Picasso and Matisse. We had just studied him last class, so it was interesting to see some of his work up close and in its real size. You don't realize how big these paintings can actually get until you see them taking up an entire wall of a museum! There was a group of school children there too, maybe kindergarten or first grade, and they were running around on a sort of scavenger hunt of Chagall's artwork

01 one of the canals running through town

. His paintings have a lot of partially hidden Biblical symbolism in them and he was really into bright colors, so I guess it's a good place for kids to visit. They were so cute, shouting to each other in French if they found something, and scurrying around our big group.

Speaking of museums reminds me of going to Paris, which was a group trip this past weekend. We crammed a lot of experiences into our four days à Paris! That is going to have to be another entry though, because I wanted to talk about the weekend before Paris, when I went to Annecy.

Annecy is a little town at the foot of the French Alps, about an hour's train ride from Chamonix and Mont Blanc if you've heard of those. For me, it was about a five hour train ride from Cannes on the TGV, which is France's fastest train. TGV stands for tres grande vitesse, which means very big speed, and man does it ever move! The countryside was just flying by. In Annecy, the youth hostel I stayed in had a great view of Lac Annecy, which is at the edge of town, and the Alps right across the lake. There was fog in the morning, then the sun would come out and shine on the snowy peaks. It really felt like fall there--the trees has changed color and it was quite cold. Since it's practically on the border, there is a pretty big Swiss influence in terms of cuisine (like fondue and raclette, a cheese and potato dish) and architecture. Stone arches and wood decorations made it feel like a kind of medieval town. There is a river from the lake that flows right through town, forming canals to keep it in place. I went to the local market in the middle of old town each morning to get food for the day...cheese, bread, tomatoes, and lots of clementines which are in season

02 the lake and colorful trees

. I tried some of the local cheeses--Tomme de Savoie (Savoie being the name of the region) and Reblochon, which was very strong but soft and easy to spread on bread, always a plus!

One of the days I met up with Katie, a friend from the Collège in Cannes who was visiting some family friends in Annecy. We wanted to rent bikes and ride around the lake, but the rental places were closed because it was a holiday--November 11th. Instead we walked around and did a little shopping when it started to rain. A good chunk of the afternoon was spent in Fnac, which is France's version of Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, and Ticketmaster combined. Traveling to Annecy was fun--I liked seeing a part of France that has a very different feel than Provence.

French word du jour: une rengaine, which is a song that everyone knows and is really tired of, like a song that's played too often on the radio. Another one of those things that doesn't really have a direct translation! It has a little bit of a negative sense, like oh no not this annoying rengaine again...

preview from my Paris trip: the hunt for a Starbucks, racing to the Musée d'Orsay, and getting stuck in a Metro station.

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03 Katie and I taking a cafe break	04 another canal with flowers	05 a plane tree with the lake and mountains	06 where I bought really good apricot bread
07 where I bought cheese	08 clementines	09 still more market produce	10 lunchtime!
11 leaves at the edge of the lake	12 that used to be a prison in the middle	13 out for a walk	14 I miss my dog Roy!

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