Day Trips, Cousins, and Various Excuses
Hello internet! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Travel blogging is really not my thing, huh? More on that later. Today I am going to talk about what I’ve been doing for about the last month or so, including things that I have not yet written a blog post about (which I will not be going over in detail in this post because that’s just too much – they’ll get their own post in hopefully not too long).
So, first of all, last month was Shona and Tristan’s final school break, and we took that opportunity, as we are wont to do, to go travelling! This is the part I’m not covering in detail right now – we went to Paris for a few days, then Edinburgh, and then London for a whole week, and that is just a lot of stuff and I still haven’t even sorted through my pictures yet, so it’ll be covered later. Suffice to say it was very exciting and very lovely, I really want to visit Edinburgh again, and I took over 1,200 photos, which is more than I have ever taken in the span of two weeks, ever. Some of those will be up on Facebook when I can finally force myself to sort through them.
So! There was a two week vacation. But there have been two weeks since then! So what have I been doing?
Well, first of all, my lovely cousin Emily is here. She’s been visiting for the past week, and will remain until next Sunday. We haven’t been doing a lot of intense stuff, and she’s been going out with Shona more often than she has with me, but it has been good! I’ve shown her around the city a bit, and we went to visit the big parks (twice, in fact, because she wanted to come back) and we saw lots of strange and hilarious birds and ate delicious pizza and wandered around markets and various other cousinly things.
Speaking of cousins, my mom’s cousin Kara and her husband, Steve, are currently in town as well! They’re only here for a few days, and they’re staying in a hotel, but we’ve been seeing them and they’ve already been over for dinner twice. Yesterday, Kara, Steve, mom, me, Shona, Tristan, and Emily all piled into a rented van (and European vans are smaller than the typical North American minivan – sure, it had seven seats, but damn was it crowded) and went off on an adventure to visit Albi, which is more or less the next decent-sized town to the north. In typical organized fashion we managed to time our arrival for exactly when both places we wanted to visit were closed for their lunch break, so we tracked down a decently-priced restaurant and ate pasta (except for Kara, who decided to be adventurous and order cassoulet off the menu du jour). Dessert was spectacular as well.
Once we’d finished up at the restaurant – and stalled enough that the places we wanted to visit were open again – we went to visit the Cathedral of St. Cecilia, which is the most massive, fortress-like church I have ever seen in my life. It was built up partly as a defensive fortification by various bishops who were unpopular/threatened/paranoid, but also as a reminder after the Cathar crusades that the Catholic church was all powerful, damn it, and that these Catholics weren’t gonna take any of your heretic shit. They were clamping the fuck down, and St. Cecilia’s is there to prove it. It is very beautiful on the inside, though, despite the almost military look of the exterior – and there are a good deal of interesting murals and walls decorated with various 3D designs and other exercises in perspective. A little odd for a church, but definitely interesting.
It’s also positively cavernous inside. I’m not even kidding, I didn’t think it was possible to build a building that tall and that open inside out of brick and not have it collapse around your ears – especially not in the 1200s.
After the church we went around the corner and down some stairs to another part of what used to be the cathedral complex to visit the Toulouse-Lautrec museum. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a famous French painter, born in Albi, who worked in Paris painting scenes of the decadent theatre culture, most famous for his poster work and paintings of the daily life of the prostitutes and showgirls who worked at the Moulin Rouge – and, aside from anything else, is also the namesake of Toulouse, the orange kitten in Disney’s Aristocats. The museum was very interesting, if small, and I loved looking at the poster work he did, but I was also very tired by this point and ended up falling asleep in the auditorium while watching a film about his life. Unfortunately I missed all the scandalous details.
After the museum, we went to look at a riverside garden and get a nice view of the river and the bridge; then we went back to the car, ate some chocolate, piled in, and were on our way. We took an alternate route home, driving through Cordes Sur Ciel (see July’s blog posts) and a gorge in a mountainous area that is known for having a lot of old castles and such built on hills (I swear, go anywhere in France and if you see a hill chances are some lord or bishop or knight or local minstrel has built something on top of it). I spent most of the drive listening to music and staring out the window; I’d forgotten just how pretty the French countryside is.
All in all, yesterday was a very enjoyable day and I am pleased to have finally seen Albi, and I figured I would write it up now before I forgot and put it off again just like everything else I seem to write about in this blog. The problem, as I stated earlier, is that I’m just not very good at travel blogs. I don’t really enjoy writing reports too much (though I am going to continue updating the Wanderer Chronicles – sporadically – until I get home in July, rest assured). I am most likely going to try to find a slightly more enjoyable format to write in, or, failing that, I’ll just grin and bear it.
However, I do like having a blog to write things in – and to that end I have set up another one, a more general sort of blog, called the Pen and the Sword! This one I intend to keep as my longterm blog for more or less the rest of my time occupying the “blogosphere,” so if you are interested in reading my ramblings I suggest you bookmark it and/or add it to your RSS. For the next couple of months or so I will be updating both the Pen and the Sword and the Wanderer Chronicles, but I expect by the time I return to Canada I will be switched over to the Pen and the Sword pretty much completely.
In the meantime, I will try to make myself go through the twelve hundred photos I took on vacation, and maybe get a blog post up sometime before the end of the decade. Thanks for bearing with me, despite my flaky sort of attitude towards this thing, and I hope you’ll enjoy my new blog. Tchy out!
