Last Day in Paris and First in Rennes

Tuesday was our last day in Paris. We spent most of the day in Montmartre where we went to a restaurant recommended by our trusty Let's Go book for lunch. It was called The Sancerre and it was ok except that the waiter tried to speak to us in English. After lunch we climbed up to the Sacré-Coeur and watched a street performance featuring some pretty sweet soccer moves including spinning the ball on the tip of a hat and balancing it on his lips. The performance was set to rap/pop music which was fortunate because it helped drown out the off-key rendition of New York, New York being sung on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur. After walking around among the street artists for a while we decided to have a goûter of some crêpes au chocolat. After our crêpes, we were thinking of walking down for happy hour near the Métro stop and on the way down we apparently walked too close to one of the portrait artists. He said (in very poor English), "ooooh 2 chicks on my back." Don't ask me where he picked up that expression. We had never heard it before; I'm pretty sure he made it up. Sophia told him, in French, that we weren't on his back. He then told her not to try to speak French. I thought that was pretty audacious considering his butchering of our language. He also told Sophia she was too belligerent and that's why she wasn't married. I guess he thinks 22 year olds want to be married because he said it like he thought he was really insulting us. After that bizarre encounter we were even more ready for our happy hour.

After a couple of drinks, we decided to buy some pastries to bring home for dessert as a present to the family for letting us stay. On the subway ride home Sophia was having trouble because the car was so crowded and she was slowly falling forward. As she slid further and further, she started laughing and this crazy man in a hat thought she was laughing at him. He got all worked up and that of course just made us both laugh harder. He told us we were laughing at nothing and that we didn't make any sense. He went on yelling about it for about 10 minutes which just made us laugh more, except when he tried to touch our box of pastries; that's no joke.


The day after that (Wednesday) we traveled to Rennes. (With our 8 months worth of luggage that was quite a feat.) Luckily, we met a nice older couple in the Paris train station who were interested in my crocheting. It turned out that they lived near Rennes and their son owned a little restaurant right outside the gare in Rennes. When our train arrived in Rennes they were waiting for us. They took us across the street for a coca and got their son to drive us to the hostel. It was really nice of them because with all of our luggage it would have been really expensive and annoying to take taxis.


When we got to the hostel it seemed nice enough and we left pretty quickly to explore the city and find something to eat. Rennes is really precious as you can see from the photo. We found an awesome crêperie. I had a galette (a certain kind of savory crêpe) with chèvre and honey and Sophia got a really good pizza with tomatos, apple, mozzarella, and oregano. We also had a really good endive salad with raisons, blue cheese, and pear and a dessert crêpe with caramel and butter. It was all wonderful, especially with the cidre. After dinner we went out for a little more cidre and then starting walking home around 11:15 for what we thought would be an early night. (No one is allowed to be in the hostel between 10 and 3:30 so we knew we had to get up early-ish). Little did know that the jeunes français think it's cool to scream all night and pound on doors at 7am. If it had been in the US I would have put the fear of God in them but I don't know the right kind of French to get that job done yet over here.



Today, Sophia and I had a leisurely morning café before a wonderful lunch at an organic, vegetarian place. We stopped by an internet café to check email and update our blogs and now we're off to Jardin du Thabor which has a rose garden with 1700 varieties and built-in ping pong and fooseball tables! That's all for now!