June 5th: Champagne-Ardenne Region Tour

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Today was our highly anticipated tour of the Champagne-Ardenne region of France, complete with a tour of a stained-glass making workshop, lunch in a real French restauraunt, time in a champagne vineyard and tasting, and a tour of a castle.

The morning started at a time we've become accustomed to waking up around here, 9:30am, so that wasn't bad. Everyone woke up and got on a big tour bus to first go to the tour of the stained-glass making workshop located on the other side of Troyes. The day would not consist of any serious traveling, especially in this first leg of the trip which was only 10 minutes. I would like to (although he will never see it) give a huge internet round-of-applause to our bus driver who could handle that bus in tight spaces and going in reverse like no one I've ever seen before. To make things even more interesting, the buses here are manual transmissions, so more power to him. Moving on. When we got there, we were greeted by an old French man who did not speak a word of English. He was to be our guide throughout the workshop tour, and he would be aided by a UTT student as a translator. That made things...well, mediocre. The workshop was small. It was a two-story complex, but each story was just one room. We went immediately up to the second floor where they did the glass working since there didn't seem to be too much on the first floor. He proceeded to speak in French about the stained-glass pieces on the table, but I zoned out pretty quickly because I was tired. For that reason, I cannot tell you much about what he said except that it looked like he was duplicating pieces ranging from the 13th century until around the 17th century. A bunch of other people took pictures that are on Facebook, but I didn't since my camera's battery was pretty near dead. Anyways, we stood around there for close to an hour, and then took off for real French food in the countryside.

It was about an hour ride to the restaurant, so Luis and I listened to his iPod. On a totally unrelated note, I have become a big fan of Spanish music due to Luis. He has very little English music on his iPod and mine's been dead, so I have listened to (and grown fond of) much of his music. It is quite upbeat and makes you want to dance, so it's fun. Also, the two of us are planning for me to visit him in his home country, El Salvador, next summer, so I am trying to refresh my Spanish from wayyyy back in high school. Should be fun! Back to the restaurant. When we got there, we waited 15 minutes as they prepared tables for 30 of us, and then sat down. One of the kids on this trip has photos of each course, which struck me as a little odd but could prove useful if anyone reading this wants to see what we ate. I'll just use words for my purposes. We started with a delicious appetizer consisting of salad with an amazing dressing and 4 pieces of bread with melted cheese on top. It was absolutely fantastic! Then, we had our main course which was chicken, rice, and cooked tomatoes with a wonderful seasoning. To be honest, the tomatoes may have been my favorite part. Amanda doesn't like tomatoes, so I ate hers, too. After that, they brought us a decently-sized wedge of cheese that may have been brie, but we were out of bread so I couldn't eat it. Finally, they brought us a slice of raspberry cake for dessert which was amazing as well. They also gave us a good red wine without the old-tree taste and the best wine I've had to date, a rose. We asked the name so we can look for it, but only Luis can pronounce (and therefore attempt to spell) it, so I couldn't tell you the name if I wanted to. After this exquisite meal, easily the best yet in France, we left for the champagne vineyard.

The ride there was fun, but slightly painful. Luis and I were dancing for a long time to his music, which someone apparently caught on video, so I'm still waiting to see that. I've heard it's quite amusing and that we got the "Night at the Roxsbury" head-nod down perfectly, so hopefully it will go on Facebook. The slightly painful part comes in because the wine went right through me and hit me hard about halfway through, so I was holding in something awful for about 30 minutes. Finally, we got there. After everyone used the toilette, we went on a tour of the cellar. There were vast expanses of champagne down there, but once again I didn't get too many pictures because of my camera battery. Again, people have pictures on Facebook, but the few I posted here might give you an idea of what I'm talking about. It was really awesome to see how much champagne they had. They also had some HUGE bottles, with the biggest being 30L maybe? Either way, enormous. At the end of the tour, we got to try some champagne, which was delicious. Best champagne I've ever had, but crazy expensive (26 euro a bottle) so sadly, I did the economically-friendly thing and didn't buy any. We hung around for a little while, and then went back to the bus to head to the castle.

I slept on the way to the castle, so it went by quickly. When we got there, it looked a lot nicer than the tour ended up being. We walked through a gate that led us over an emptied moat and went to the chapel. It was pretty impressive. Then we went to the castle itself. Apparently, the castle is currently owned by some Greek people, so we weren't allowed to see more than the bottom floor, which took away from the experience. There were like 4 rooms plus an old basement on the bottom floor, and they were nice. The basement was old and made of stone, so it was kind of cool. While we were down there, a big spider was hanging from the ceiling that scared one of the French UTT students so bad she starting crying and ran away, so we cut our tour short. We all went outside and got back on the bus to return to the dorms.

Once back, a bunch of people went out on the town, but a few of us stayed back and hung out. Turns out, we were really bored and the people that went out had a blast, so we really regretted laying low that night. This would begin the theme of the next few evenings: a lack of things to do. But, overall, it was a fun day that had a tour of some of the calmer and prettier parts of the region around Troyes. It was quite lovely, actually. Next: lots of free time.

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