France-tastic

A four-day weekend, which also brought the end of daylight savings, the end of seven o'clock sunsets, the end of getting dressed in the dark, and a ten hour time difference between me and most of you (which would have woken me up earlier than planned on Sunday if I wasn't already walking down the Champs-Elysées at 8 am on Sunday morning, when Alex called me- hello darling!), seems to have marked the end of the lingering summer weather, and brought the rain and cold to us Parisiennes (NB. some of us may be Parisiennes-in-the-making). My mind is starting to turn to thoughts of the softest leather gloves in stock at the Galeries Lafayette... Actually I doubt I could afford their very softest gloves, judging by some of the price tags I saw on a little turn through their gilded gates on Monday. A €9600 furcoat would keep the winter chills out!

But what is this talk of bridges, you may ask, if you had bothered to look up the word "pont"? Well, in France, they have come up with many génial ideas regarding maximising their long weekends, and if a public holiday happens to fall on a Tuesday or a Thursday, then the Monday or the Friday is called a bridge day, and almost everybody font le pont, and takes a four day weekend! Genius I tell you! The trade-off is, if a public holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, you don't get to take the Monday off.

So I took advantage of my sejour of freedom, and did what all real Parisians do on a long weekend- I got out of Paris, in the company of Ruxandra, the Romanian girl in the lab. And headed 65 km south-east to a lovely Chateau called Fontainebleau. After a rocky start, including a spilt coffee, a wrong platform, and a missing ticker validator, we safely made it to the pretty little town named after the former home of Louis (XIII, XIV, and XV; I think XVI preferred Versailles), Napoleon (I and III at least, not sure about the second, but I guess he must have), and their various women.

Corridors of gilded ballrooms, opulent bed chambers, sumptuous dining rooms, lavish sitting rooms were ours to waltz through (staying just this side of the velvet rope of course), and outside the fountains trickled in the sun, the flowers bloomed and the air was sweet!

The weekend brought lots of other charms as well, but I might leave those until tomorrow!

# posted by Jenny @ 13:42