A Tour of Tours

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Today I amazingly woke up at 8 am feeling fully rested! I went downstairs to start my day with the standard homemade bread with honey and a small yogurt and found my host mom in the kitchen in the middle of making a new batch of bread for the week. We chatted for a bit, and then I went back to my room to attempt to write my paper on the French environmental policies. After being less than productive, I met Allison for lunch at our favorite pasta place—Francesca’s—in Place Plume.

We mapped out today to see Tours a little better—we went to the Museum of Natural History, the Wine Museum, and the Chateau in Tours—all of which were hilarious in their own way.

The first floor of the Museum of Natural History seemed like a pretty standard children’s museum—it was on small room with displays of bones and posters about the animals we eat now vs cave men times. Fairly normal. Then we went to the second floor where we were greeted by sea-green painted walls and oddly taxidermed birds hanging from the ceiling. We walked around the room a bit, looking at random taxidermed animal displays. I was checking out a beaver when all of a sudden I heard Allison scream! She came running back to me saying something was looking at her!

Who knew that Museums of Natural History also doubled as reptile houses? All the cages in the center of the rooms had strange lizards, iguanas, chameleons, fish, and spiders in them. It was so strange!

After getting over the shock of realizing we were actually in a zoo, we went to the next floor where they had a pathetic display of rocks which we quickly looked through, and then we found a children’s library on the 4th floor with a librarian and all. Interesting.

Next we went to the Wine Museum which I walk by every morning on my way to class. It was an old wine cellar type place—just one big open room made out of stone. The perimeter of the room was lined with cases containing different things in them—like tools that they use to harvest grapes, tools they use to make wine barrels, costumes that people wear when the drink wine (?). After about 10 minutes we were done and moved on to the Tours Chateau, which we’ve heard isn’t that great, but we figured since we were here we should check it out.

It actually situated really close to my house. We took a picture from the outside, saw that it only had a room you could go into that has changing exhibits each month, which didn’t look interesting, so we decided to pass, head back home, and procrastinate writing our papers for International Relations a little longer.

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