a run around St-Etienne

It's a beautiful sunny day in Saint-Etienne after a week of frozen haziness, so yesterday I was inspired to take my camera with me on a jog around town and take some shots of Sainté's finer points, such as they are.

My run starts out down la Grande Rue, the mostly pedestrian main street of Saint Etienne where the tram lines run. The first landmark of note is the Place Jean Jaurès, dominated by the Cathédrale Saint Charles. To the right of the cathedral is the cinema Gaumont, though I'm more likely to go to Le Méliès on the opposite side of the square since they usually show movies in their original language rather than dubbing them. Once the weather warms back up, the many cafés and restaurants that line the square will put out tables and awnings, but for the cold winter months it's been rather barren.

Off the side of the Place Jean Jaurès is a painfully long staircase that provides this nice if slightly hazy view of the city once you're halfway up. At the top is a gorgeous old cemetery that also provides some lovely vistas of the other side of Saint Etienne (more photos on facebook), though I usually just run back downhill down the street beside it.

Also, I only noticed after getting home and looking at my pictures that the lamps on the lampposts are empty.

Not too far away is the Parc des Expositions, which clumps together all sorts of public interest venues like a bowling alley, public pool, ice skating rink, a huge music venue, and several exhibition halls.

Le Zénith among weeds

An abandoned factory just outside the Parc des Expos that I'm sure would be creepy by night, but is very cool to run through on a sunny day.

No tour of Saint-Etienne would be complete without spotting some dog poop, especially when the presence of the offending item is so charmingly prohibited.

A work at the Cité du Design that's apparently a diving board into concrete, though I bet it has an amazing view of the city.

The Cité du Design is an organization aimed at converting Saint-Etienne into a more welcoming city rather than its current smoggy Industrial Revolution/mining town incarnation. Fittingly, this area used to be a national weapons manufacturing plant.

Florence: Mercato Centrale

One of my favorite places in Florence was the Mercato Centrale, which comprised of an indoor food market and an outdoor leather market. I spent waaaay too much money there, but who can resist colorful pastas, flavorful risottos, tasty chocolates and truffle-infused anything? Not to mention inexpensive genuine leather... I picked up a wallet and bag for myself (my old wallet was ripping at the seam, and my old purse was held together by tape--for some reason I feel the need to justify my leather purchases) as well as a good number of presents to bring home, which has now made me wonder how I'm going to get all this stuff I've acquired back to the US.

CHEESE PARADISE. Hell yes I tasted every one. Not to slap my dear France and its soft cheeses in the face, but Italian cheeses might have taken the edge after this trip...

Real mature, Italy. Real mature. Actually there were quite a lot of, uh... similarly inspired souvenirs, which I guess are in great part thanks to the David's popularity.

Florence: Duomo

Alright, it's no French Gothic cathedral, but I'd still put Florence's Duomo (official name: Santa Maria del Fiore) high on my list of favorite cathedrals. From any point around Florence, it dominates the skyline and is much more colorful than its marble gray French counterparts. To the left is a picture taken from the Biboli Gardens, but on the day we actually went it was nearing sunset -- perfect timing to climb the dome.

Some pictures from in and around the Duomo:

The front façade of the Duomo

Ahh, a nice dose of situational irony on the climb up the dome.

The view from the top of the dome - Basilica di Santa Maria Novella is near the center.

Florence's museums

After realizing a little while ago I'd never done an entry about Florence, I've finally found a nice lazy Sunday to play catch-up and at least post some pictures of and thoughts about the city (even though it's now over a month after...). I'm going to try and break up my long-winded approach to blogging by posting multiple shorter entries rather than one huge novel, and this one's dedicated to the museums we saw in Florence.

So, with no further delay:

Having only three days in the city, we wanted to make the most of our time and hit the ground running as soon as we arrived. First up was the Galleria degli Uffizi, said to house one of the best collections of Renaissance art in the world, including Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, da Vinci's Annunciation, and a bunch of other works that made me ever so grateful I'd taken that Art History course my first year of college.

The U-shaped gallery backs up to the Arno River, and even on an overcast day it made for a pretty view of the Ponte Vecchio -- all of those colorful protrusions from the bridge are tiny jewelery shops.

I got separated from the others in the 50-room museum, and without a functional cell phone or a planned rendez-vous time, I decided to head across town to check out the David's exquisite marble physique in the Galleria dell'Accademia, since they hadn't expressed much interest in seeing the statue.

Only after snapping a few pictures did I learn that you aren't supposed to take photos in the museum (even without flash, like I was), but as a result I have pictures to post, mwahaha. I wonder how taking pictures harms marble statues? A brief Google query doesn't provide any answers... maybe Italy just like to assert itself in silly arbitrary ways like France does. At any rate, there's not a whole lot more to this museum than David and the four unfinished Slaves also sort of shown in this picture, though it was very cool to see such a famous statue in the (marble) flesh. Even though this gallery was built specifically for the David about a century ago, there's recently been a debate about whether he should be moved again due to the vibration created by the volume of tourist traffic in central Florence, though it seems to me any move would just be a stop-gap measure, since tourists are still going to flock to David no matter where he goes.

On the last day, we took advantage of the reasonably nice weather to visit the Biboli Gardens in the Palazzo Pitti, the 15th century residence of the Medicis. The Palazzo is actually composed of six different museums, but we were running short on time, energy, and museum enthusiasm and limited ourselves to the gardens. I'm sure at some point in the future I'll kick myself for that, but even a month later the feeling of museum saturation is still fresh enough that I don't yet regret it.

mega update: London & moving to Saint Etienne

merde, it's been a while since I updated! While it's been excellent in every other aspect, Saint Etienne has obviously not been good for blogging (or running, for that matter). All of a sudden I have people to talk to, wonderfully horrible French TV to watch, and interwebs to consult in the evenings instead of withering away in communication-less Feurs. For all that I may have been hesitant about it earlier, in retrospect moving here was definitely the right choice.

The process of moving here was actually a truly miserable experience, but now that I'm here with all my worldly possessions lugged across two towns (in the rain) and up four flights of stairs, I couldn't be happier to be where I am. I'm living with a bunch of really cool people in the very center of town, so anywhere I need to go is at most a 20 minute walk away. My morning commute is somewhat painful, but with only two days a week of waking up at 5:00 and one day of a slightly more reasonable 6:00, it's worth sleeping in the other days and living in civilization, even if it is a civilization with indubitably the highest amount of dog poop on the street in all of France :)

Backing up a bit... last weekend I went to London with some French friends, who were all about hitting the sales. Being more than slightly appalled by the euro to pound (and especially dollar to pound) conversion rate, I was more enthusiastic about the free museums and just exploring the city. Two days out of three were sunny if chilly, which for London I'll take as exceptionally good weather! A brief visual tour of where I went:

Tower Bridge

Trafalgar Square

Piccadilly Circus

I spent more time walking around and deliberately getting lost than anything else, but I did duck into the National Gallery one day, which was conveniently timed to get me out of a sudden rain shower. Apparently I wasn't the only one who had this idea, as the gallery quickly filled up with waterlogged tourists (and Londerners as well, perhaps, unless they know of a better escape from the rain). It had been a long day of walking around the shopping streets, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, and Buckingham Palace, so I only took a swing through the Impressionists section before heading back to our giant monster of a hostel.

Boasting 800 beds and hot showers (the last part most definitely not being entirely accurate), the hostel was indeed a monster, if a pretty well-run one. Our room wasn't dirty, though it also had nowhere to sit down, since the bunk beds were so low you couldn't sit on the lower bunk without banging your head. You can't really ask for more than that for £20 a night, though. All the more reason to get out of the hostel and drink in the city, I suppose! And I do mean that literally as well as figuratively, since I tasted a couple very tasty ciders and learned that scrumpy is a type of cider -- not a brand -- with no water, sugar, or preservatives added (Brooke, I guess that's the reason JK's Scrumpy is so good!). I'll have to remember The Marquis of Cornwallis pub for if I stay in the area next time, since it had such a wonderful selection of ciders as well as really great, reasonably priced food (mushroom, spinach, and chestnut risotto for £7? why yes).

I do really hope there is a next time. A weekend wasn't enough to experience this city. I'd also love to see Scotland and Ireland, but who knows when/if that will happen! As far as future travel plans, there doesn't seem to be much of anything on the horizon, especially thanks to my school's bureaucratic silliness and my own recalcitrance to pay ahead on my rent when I really should have. But in my defense, they didn't give me an invoice for October until the end of November, and the one for November came in mid-December. I'd heard that two years ago the school didn't bother charging the assistants rent, so I guess I was hoping I could get away with it too.

So now I'm paying rent in two places at once, and the school has suddenly switched from not caring when I pay to breathing down my neck about it so they can close out their 2010 finances (why they did not think of this earlier, I couldn't say). That's understandable on their end, but it puts me in a tough spot for the time being! I was hoping to go to Amsterdam over the Winter Break in early March with some friends, but since I'm not able to buy tickets now I think they'll have gone up too much by the end of the month when I get paid again. There's always the chance I can join my friends for the Provence leg of the trip, since domestic train tickets are easier to buy later than an international plane ticket, or I can always venture out on day trips to nearby places.

I guess that's it for now! After the whirlwind of travel through Rome and Florence, moving to Saint Etienne, and then a weekend in London, it's nice to just take it easy for a few days.

à bientôt! (that is, if I'm not such a lazy blogger in the near future :)