Lille France

So on Saturday I took a bus day trip to Lille, France. It seems that the bus company here in Brighton does interesting day trips to different places around the country and to other countries. There's a trip to Sluis in Holland and one to Bruge Belgium. There is also a trip through southern England on a canal boat. All of these seemed really cool, but this France trip was the only one that was available on a weekend. Almost only one on a weekend for the whole summer. Although my boss said it might be okay if I take a vacation day or two. So we'll have to see what happens.

Well, of course to get from England to France we have to cross the English Channel. We didn't take the chunnel, but instead got to go across on a ferry. Hooray for ferries. Not only did I get to take a ferry, but we left from Dover. I wanted to go see the famous white cliffs of Dover, but many people have told that Dover was really not worth visiting. Now I get a visit to Dover incorporated into my visit to France.













Unlike the ferries in Vancouver, the harbor here is kept safe from the sea by a large break water wall (I don't know what it's really called). Here are some pictures of the break water wall as we went by.






The ferry was very similar to those ferries we took back in Vancouver. There were multiple levels for cars, buses, and trucks. Along with multiple passenger levels. They had a crowded restaurant just like the old ferries, but they also had duty free shops and gambling, which I don't remember on any of the Canadian ferries.



But completely unlike the ferries in BC there is absolutely nothing to look at once you get out to sea. It's just water, endless water. As far as the eye can see.



There was nothing to look at until we got to Calais. Unfortunately, it was pretty cloudy and misty in Calais so most of my pictures didn't come out.



After another few hours on the bus we got to Lille. The train station we stopped at seemed to have a very weirdly shaped building next to it.



But once I walked into town I found many more pleasant looking buildings.



The main problem I had is that, after I had a very tasty French baguette sandwich, I had no idea what there was I should see in Lille. So, I used a little ingenuity. I found a bookstore and found a travel guide book. Of course it was in French, but I managed to get something out of it. It turned out that the Palais-de-Beaux-Arts was given 3 stars vs. the citadel (an old fortress) so I bought a map and headed to the museum.

Unfortunately, even with a map you need to know which direction you're facing and in France, with all it's tiny little streets with no street signs that's no easy feat. Luckily I stopped a woman and asked her, in French, in which direction I could find the museum. She pointed me along a street and told me to keep going until I found the guy on a horse.



So this was the statue of the guy on the horse. I don't know who exactly he was, but I love how Europe, or at least France, has huge statues in the middle of the street.



It turns out that we ended up in Lille on a very interesting day. It was the day of their gay and lesbian pride parade. There were lots of interesting people from a guy dressed in all black leather with 7 inch platform shoes, to almost naked men dancing on a float going through town, to a guy dressed as a jester with a sex blow-up doll attached to him. This is apparently the headquarters of the parade.



But behind the parade was the Palais-de-Beaux-Arts. I wandered around the entire building looking for an entrance. I skipped all these small entrances I thought were back doors that had accidentally been left open. But it turns out that the big door in the center of the back side of the building was actually the door that was accidentally left open and all the ones I had skipped were ticket taking doors. Well, after I figured that all out I went in to see the Finoglio exhibit.



I don't know exactly who Finoglio is and his pictures were fairly nice, but I didn't spend enough time looking because my feet were hurting. Not only that, but they only had these dozen paintings by him, and I'm sure he had more paintings than that.

I think paintings are usually wasted on me. Instead of having an art history class in high school I'm thinking that all patrons to a museum should take have to take a class first about the art they're about to see. Of course, given how much other people like classes, and how few patrons most museums have, I can understand why this hasn't been implemented.




Like the Louvre, the part I liked was the rooms full of statues. Although this room was blocked by a wrought iron door I was still able to look at it through the bars.




Although they do have some statues you can look at.



They even put some of their statuary into their stairwells.



But they did have some famous sculptors too, these two marbles are by Rodin.



The rest of the museum was full of paintings, who knew? It was setup like the painting rooms in the Louvre. Lots of big rectangular rooms with many huge canvases stuck to the walls.









Some of the art was simply amusing images of people carousing.




But there were famous paintings too like these images by Monet.



After finishing up at the museum I went down the high street and had a nice French lunch. Well, my idea was to have a French lunch but I had a Flemish lunch of rabbit in beer sauce with fries. Unfortunately, the Flemish don't seem to be as good at food as the French are. But I guess I still got to experience something new which was good.

There was also an exhibition on the high street of magician pianists! I took some pictures but they went off at the wrong time and are just confusing. There were two guys. One was playing the piano for a while when the second game barreling through the crowd and said that since he had a number 2 on his chest, and the guy currently playing had a number 3, that number 2 should play.

While number 2 was playing number 3 started doing magic tricks. Some were just acting in time to the music. He took #2's sheet music and ripped it up. Each time #3 ripped #2 stopped playing. #3 also did a bunch of traditional magic tricks with doves.

But the best part is that during the magic tricks #3's number fell off revealing a #1. So #2 and the new #1 started fighting for the piano. #2 was playing with both hands, but had to use his right hand to block the attacks from #1, so #1 started playing the right hand while #2 was playing the left hand. It was quite entertaining.



As I was walking back to the bus I passed a nice gothic cathedral, so I put down my slurpee at the door and wandered about. These things are much less fun without audio tours that tell me all about the building. There was supposed to be a guided tour that started at the time I got there, but it seems they forgot, and I wasn't sure if I had enough time before the bus left to get a guided tour anyway.






Well after the cathedral I walked back to the bus and did the whole trip in reverse. Taking the bus back to Calais, the ferry back across the Channel, and the bus back from Dover to Brighton. I didn't take many pictures of the way back because it was basically the same. The one interesting thing was that instead of the ferry pulling out of the docks, it backed out instead.

All in all it was a long day. Not only due to the fact that it started at 4:00 in the morning and I got home at midnight, but due to the fact that my feet were really hurting. I think it was all the walking. I mean, I'd spent the previous evening trying to find the right bus stop and then walking home to see how long it would take to get to that bus stop so that I could know when to leave in the morning. You see, the bus left so early I couldn't take another normal city bus to get to the stop in time. It turns out that it takes an hour to walk from the bus stop to my house. So after walking around for an hour and a half, I walked the hour home. I then got up the next morning and walked the hour back to the bus stop. Then I spent 4 hours walking around Lille. It hurt way too much to just be fatigure, so I figured it must be a blister or something. By the time I'd finished walking around France I thought maybe it was blisters on blisters on blisters. It turns out I was almost right.



That's one of the half dozen blisters I found on my feet when I came home. Yep, that's taking up two thirds of the bottom of my foot. I didn't know blisters could be that big!

Brad's Moving Out

So, after a long and arduous search I finally found a nice place to live. Let me tell you, it wasn't all that easy. When I first got here I spent a few days sending out email after email after email on Gumtree. It was a website I found in the states and the locals told me it was probably the best site to look at, even while here. I think I sent out 15 or 20 emails in the first few days and got 7 replies in return. The interesting bit was that 6 of those replies were scam artists.

Here's how it works. Once they know you're interested, they take down their add and tell you they figure you're the one who's going to get their apartment. It starts out the same way each time. The proprietor states they live far away and want to make sure that you have money to pay the rent before they come to town to let you see the place (some times from another country). But, they don't want you to pay them, they want you to use Western Union to send money to a friend of mine, any friend, someone I know that they don't. Then, when the friend receives the money order take the receipt and send a copy to the renter. It sounded dodgey, but I wasn't exactly sure how they'd get the money if I only sent a receipt after the transaction had been made. From what I learned later, apparently Western Union is very lax with security and the scam artist would just stop by their local office pretending to be your friend and trying to pick up the money. The other problem is that Western Union says it's your own fault for being dumb and won't pay you back. Luckily I didn't go this route, but it was VERY disheartening that out of seven responses, six were scams.

But there was one person who was an honest seller, so I went to see her. The place was kind of messy (not dirty, just stuff all over) and had a bunch of young Arab kids. None of them seemed all that happy to see me. But perhaps it was just because I was invading their home in the evening. I know I wouldn't have liked to have some random person checking out my house while I was watching TV. The girl was a student who was going home for the summer but couldn't get out of her lease for only 3 months, so me renting for the summer worked perfectly. I wasn't super thrilled about the place, but I said I'd take it. With all the scam emails I was getting I wasn't sure I was going to find anything else before my hotel days ran out. She said she'd get in contact with the landlord and get back to me. I told her that if I hadn't heard from her by Sunday I'd send an email.

So Sunday morning came and I still hadn't heard from this girl, so I sent an e-mail before I went out wandering the town. I came back Sunday night and hadn't received any response. So I waited.

On Saturday, while doing my laundry at a local laundromat, the nice Thai girl working there gave me a copy of the local newspaper. We had been talking about my attempts to find a place to live and she knew that the paper had a bunch of rental classifieds in it. So on Monday night, since I hadn't heard from the Arab girl yet, I started compiling an Excel list of info that I could use to call all the people that were renting places in the newspaper. It took a little while, so it was too late Monday night for me to start calling any of them. But now I had a list. There were also a few email addresses in the newspaper so I sent emails to those people. The two email people responded, but one place was already rented, and the other had a possible renter coming over so they wanted to see how that went before talking to me.

Tuesday I wrote another email to the girl with the apartment telling her that I assumed the reason she hadn't written me was due to the fact that she hadn't heard from her landlord and that I was going to start looking for another place to live. She wrote back and said she thought she had written back on Sunday but noticed that the email had been stuck in her outgoing folder and hadn't been sent. She said that she still hadn't been able to contact her landlord, but he was coming over on Wednesday so she'd talk to him them. I told her that I was going to keep looking for places just in case, but I wouldn't commit to anyone until I heard back from her.

So I started calling through my list of roughly 30 people. About 12 or 13 of them answered the phone but the only person who had a place available that was willing to rent for 3 months lived in a city that was 20 or 30 miles away. So I had whittled down my list, but I was getting no where fast. I only had another 5 days before my time at the hotel was up. I was a little worried to say the least.

So I went back to my desk and checked my email. It turned out that the landlord who was having people coming over to look at their place wasn't very thrilled about the people who had shown up. The possible renters seemed a little bit too odd for this guy because they were a couple trying to rent a small room with a single bed and they were covered in tattoos and didn't seem like very nice people. So, he was wondering if I could call him to set up an appointment to come see his place. I called him right away and tried to set up an appointment with him for later in the week, but he wanted to meet me and asked if I could come over that evening (it was already 9 pm). I said okay and got on a bus and headed over.

The guy's name was Cesar and he was a Brazilian/Italian man living here with his wife and son. They had a double room and a single room, but they had rented the double room to their friend Francesca from Brazil, so they only had the single room left to let.

They were such nice people! The thought of living in a nice family home with friendly flatmates was much much more appealing than living in a messy small house with 4 other college students. They were so nice that I said I'd move in with them on Sunday and they were ecstatic to have me move in. So I emailed the Arab girl back and told her I wasn't going to rent the room from her. She emailed me back on Thursday saying that she hoped I was still coming, but she hadn't been able to talk to her landlord yet. I sent another email back explaining what had happened, and I haven't heard from her since. So I think I probably avoided a big set of problems not moving in there.

The family here is so nice. My room is clean and neat. I did have to buy sheets, pillows, and a quilt cover, and there's no dryer here so I have to hang things up. But the environment seems much nicer. Isabella, the wife, was even nice enough to bake me a cake for my birthday. The day after my birthday I added them all as Facebook friends (because they asked to be) and they found out I had moved in on my birthday but hadn't said anything. She felt that they should really do something, so she baked me a nice chocolate cake with coconut which was very tasty.



So here's a picture of the house I live in. My room is the top left window. It's small but I have a lock so I can leave my stuff in there without having to worry too much.



These are just a few pictures of the area around the place I'm living now. It's really quite a nice little valley with lots of greenery all around. And there's a double decker bus that stops right at our front door that takes me all the way to work. So it seems that everything turned out all right in the end.



A little elementary school down the hill from my place.



A picture of the street I live on.



A picture of the park down the hill from my house.

Arundel: Castle of the Duke of Norfolk

So today I went to see a right and proper castle. I took a bus ride from Brighton to Arundel Castle. This is an image of the castle as we drove up through the mist. Unfortunately it was raining pretty hard when I got there, but at least the first part of the tour was inside. This will mostly be a picture filled post with few words. But I'm sure no one will mind.



This is the river that goes around the castle who's name I don't know.



And here's a picture of one of the roads in the city in front of the castle.



But this is what we came to see, the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk, Arundel castle. Unfortunately, like some other British places, I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside the state rooms themselves due to the security system that was in place. Apparently the flash in certain cameras can mess up the security cameras. Since they don't which models use them, they just ban all photos inside the house at all.

It kind of makes sense though, because this is the first castle I've EVER been in that actually has modern inhabitants. The last Duke of Norfolk died in 2002 and the new one is currently using the castle as his main place of residence. They have a few kids who are mostly university age from what I heard. It's a very nice and warm place to live. I almost thought I wouldn't mind living there, but then wondered about my choice when I saw the wooden toilet platform. But I bet they have normal toilets that they just didn't show us.



But once we were out of the state rooms we could take pictures outside. And so we went up to the original Normal keep from William the Conqueror's invasion (1066).









But I now I feel a little more sympathy for Geoff and his fear of mideval stairs. I could barely get down these things with my backpack on. And more than once I thought I was going fall down. They couldn't have been more than 2 feet wide and each step was probably a foot tall and maybe an average of 6 inches wide.



But getting up the stairs allowed me to get some really cool vistas of the surrounding area like this view of the chapel on the castle grounds with the cathedral of Arundel (which I didn't go see) behind it.



And here are some pictures of the vistas from the top of the castle





Then I went outside and took a bunch of pictures of the really cool castle.


















Then there was a separate entrance to the grounds of the castle which were really cool.



And there were roads all over that could take you from one part of the castle to another. Very rural England.




Besides the castle, there's a nice formal garden that they have too. These are an example of the fountains you see as you come in.



This is a picture over most of the garden from one side.




And this is looking back from the other side.



In that little house on the end had a tall fountain holding up a replica of a crown. I don't totally understand it's significance, but it looked interesting.



They also have a few paths with things growing over them. I also think I saw a patch that had lettuce growing in it.



Although it is a castle that the public can wander around in, there are a bunch of places we can't go. It's nice how they can be hidden in among the foliage so that you almost miss the fact that they're here.



This is a picture from inside the chapel on the castle grounds.



A picture of the resting place of one of the previous dukes, I suppose. I didn't have much time left as the last bus was going to leave for Brighton fairly soon.



And a nice picture of the stained glass at one end of the chapel, over looking the burial casket of another Duke and Duchess.