A Week of Culture

Hey guys!  I suppose I really am overdue for a blog posting at this point.  Things have been pretty crazy the past couple of weeks, my friends and I have been trying to fit in as much culture as possible since the majority of them are leaving before the end of the month.  We spend most of our afternoons in the town center since our classes are usually over between noon and 3pm, and our teachers tend to not give very much homework.  Our absolute favorite place to go is Coffee & Muffin, which is a small café which serves ridiculously addictive chocolate milkshakes.  It’s usually perfect for the afternoon too, since the weather here makes it difficult to dress properly for the day.  It tends to be fairly cold when we have to get up and go to classes, and our classrooms are typically cold, but by the afternoon we find we are sweating.  We took a taste tour of the city the other day which was really fascinating.  Dijon is known for three things: mustard, cassis (aka black currants) and pain d’epices, which roughly translates to spice bread although I wouldn’t describe it as particularly spicy.  My favorite is the orange-flavored one.   The tour was really fascinating.  The guide took us all around the city, and described the history of food in Dijon, as well as showing us where we could get the best foods in the city, and showing us how the local products are made.  We got to sample several foods, however this didn’t go quite as well as Helena, Katie and I would have liked as we made the amateur mistake of going for crepes before the taste tour, and found that we could barely stand the thought of food for the rest of the day.  I also managed to run into someone else from Connecticut in town the other day!  There was an exhibit with an old American Field Services ambulance, and I got excited when I noticed that the license plate on the vehicle was one of the old Connecticut ones.  The man working the exhibit overheard me, and told me that he was from Franklin, and has a friend he works with who lives in Glastonbury!  It always shocks me how small this world can be.  Yesterday was the 2014 Dijon Velotour (basically a bike race, except you aren’t really racing), so a bunch of us decided that we wanted to participate.  Turns out it’s really cheap to rent a bike for the weekend here.  8,000 participants showed up to tour the city on their bikes, and we were taken all over, through various buildings, including a church and a greenhouse, and along the canal.  There was entertainment all along the course, from a stuntman on a unicycle to live musicians at both the halfway point and endpoint.  The whole thing had the feel of a festival which had been stretched out throughout the city. Katie, Helena and I did the main course, as well as the longer of the two detours, for a total of about 25k, or 15 miles.  All of the costumes that people decided to don for the event were hilarious, and all-in-all it was just a really cool way to spend a Sunday.  Definitely a unique part of their culture here.