You Know You Are in France When...

Students start blockading their schools in protest of rising the retirement age. No, really: kids all over France kept teachers, administrators and other students from entering schools this past week (in addition to transportation strikes), all in protest of raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 years old. Buses weren’t running for three days in Rennes, making getting to school difficult for some students and forcing me to get in an early morning 30-miunte power walk. Compared with other cities such as Paris and Marseille Rennes has a fairly mild interpretation of striking (as seen below by myself).

Sorry about not getting around to the Morbihan and Finistère trip... things happened and I have decided to just start my trip recounting with the current trip so as not to get really far behind.

Moving on to more joyous things than strikes and forgetting to post, we are currently on our second school trip—this time to the Loire Valley. We left Rennes on Sunday morning and stopped first at le Château médiéval d’Angers where we put to use our art history knowledge of “le château-forts médiéval” and the connected vocabulary and history we had been studying in class beforehand.

In the same setting was la Tenture de l’Apocalypse—more than 100 meters of tapestries in 75 scenes that depict the Revelation of Saint John. I can only imagine how many hours those took to complete….

Next we visited L’Hôpital Saint-Jean that also had some very cool tapestries, though from the 20^th century, titled “Le chant du monde” (or “The song of theworld”). The subjects were almost psychedelic with bright and rich colors on black backgrounds. As the name hints, “L’Hôpital” was a medieval hospital originally and has beautiful vaulted ceilings and a gorgeous courtyard.

For our final tour of the day, we went to Château de Brissac where the family de Brissac currently lives. The château is ornate and quite original to it’s building dates of the 16^th to 17^th century. In addition to the family currently living there, the château also operates as a “bed-and-breakfast.”

After that long day of Journée “Tapisseries et Mobilier,” all of SYA was tired and we went to our hotel to rest for the next day: Journée “Curiosités D’Autrefois.”