My past revisited

Last weekend, we went to Lourdes (Pyrenees) and to Biarritz (Cote Basque). These areas are near the Spanish border. The Spanish influence was evident on the structure of the houses in that area. The houses were simple but what's so Spanish about them are their window shutters. I have not seen these in the other places we went to in France. These places are so near Spain that the prices of items were in French Francs and in Spanish Peseta. Lourdes is a pilgrimage area. When we entered the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, the first thing we noticed was the chapels. There were a lot of chapels there. In fact in one building, there was the chapel for St. Jean D'Arc and another one for St. Anne. We were at the upper part of the basilica. We looked below and was amazed by the number of people in there. There was a mass going on and at one part of the place, we saw a lot of people taking water. As we were walking down towards the inner part of the Sanctuary, we heard Engli

We went to Cote D'Azur during the weekend. We took an overnight train from Paris to Nice. There were five in our group : Darwin, Maridol, Jack, Dran and myself. The cabin we were in have couchettes or beds but each cabin has 6 each. Thus, we were forced to sleep early because our companion wanted to sleep early. Ah well. Originally, our companion was a young American guy (cute!) but when he learned that we were all together, he requested someone else to stay with us. This time, we got a middle-aged French guy who was so snobbish. He didn't even say good evening to us. After spending an hour to get a car (Avis in Nice was so slow!), we went to Mc Donalds for breakfast. Now, I don't know where they get their idea of fast food but they definitely suck at it. It took us about more than 30 minutes to get our meal and the food was worse than expected. I guess the French are just not used to the idea of fast food. Well, I guess that's typical since from my observat

Last Friday was a holiday here. Thus, we had a long weekend. For this week, we decided to rent a car (at the project's expense of course) and drive through the French countryside. We went to the Normandy area. It was fun. We went to Vernon where we had a chance to feed swans in the Seine river. Then, we went to Giverny where Claude Monet was born. His garden is amazing. It has a collection of almost every flower you can imagine. It was wonderful. His water lily pond, where he based his famous "water lily" paintings was exactly as it was depicted in his paintings. Amazing. I loved it there. We got lost on our way to Deauville and we asked some natives how to get there. We were advised to go through Lisieux to get to Deauville. When we arrived at Deauville, we learned that there's no more hotel room available. The place is good but were not able to explore it more. We ate dinner there and then left to go back to Lisieux. As it turned out, Lisieux is the