Once again, I’ve been slacking on the blog front. My friends and I have been cramming as much
as possible into the past two weeks so that we would see all of the major sites
in Dijon before they left. We’ve spent a
lot of time at the more historical and educational sites of the city. We’ve toured the majority of the Palace of
the Dukes now. We climbed to the top of
the tower of Philip the Good, where we had an amazing view of the city, and
explored the wing of the palace which has been converted into the Musee des
Beaux Arts (roughly translates to Fine Arts Museum I believe?) The museum was really cool. It has all kinds of art, from ancient
Egyptian pieces, to rooms displaying art from every period of France’s history,
to modern art.
There were severally
pieces from notable artists such as Rude, Manet and Monet. The museum also houses the Tombs of the Dukes
in a room with some of the most exquisite detail I’ve ever seen. We also visited the Jardin des Sciences,
which are gorgeous gardens which also house several sculptures and art exhibits,
a planetarium and a natural history museum.
The planetarium was closed, but we did a quick tour through the natural
history museum. To be honest, that wasn’t
really all that interesting, just a lot of stuffed versions of different
species of animals. There was a huge
market going on in the city center last Saturday. Naturally, with four girls, we spent a lot
more money there than we should have.
They did have some of the best deals I’ve seen since I got to this city
though. I’m going to have to find out if
that market was a one-time occurrence or if it is something that happens
regularly here. 
We found out that the
ice skating rink has really cheap skating and rentals on Sunday mornings, so we
took advantage of that this past weekend.
It was a lot of fun (particularly watching Katie use the penguins meant
to help the children skate in order to get around the ice) and I think that I’m
probably going to make that a regular thing this semester. During the week it got kind of rainy, so we
spent most of our time either at cafes enjoying the local delicacies, or in the
basement of the residence watching movies.
We watched one French movie called Les Intouchables (The Intouchables if
you’re looking for the English version) which I would highly recommend – it was
about a man who started working for a guy in a wheelchair and became friends
with him, and it was absolutely fantastic.
The last of my Anglophone friends left this Saturday I’m afraid, so I’m
alone at the residence now. I'm really going to miss those girls, we all became great friends in the past month. Hopefully we'll all be able to visit each other sometime in the future. We did have
a really good semester, with lots of interesting debates in our classes, and we
learned a lot. It’s going to be interesting
trying to find things to do now though, considering the next semester doesn’t
start until October 6th. I’m
sure I’ll figure something out, and I’ll try to do a better job of keeping you
guys up to date in the future!
^ Lucy, Mareike, Helena and Katie
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