Grenoble

The haphazard series of day-trips continues! Last Saturday I went with my friend Vanessa to Grenoble. I'd heard from friends who'd gone before that it's a beautiful town and makes for a good day trip, both of which were proven true. Vanessa had heard about a great Marc Chagall exhibit at the fine arts Musée de Grenoble, so we wanted to make it there while the exhibit was still in town (on loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris).

I think it would have helped to have done a bit more research on Chagall and Russian avant-garde art since the museum assumed its patrons had a certain frame of reference, but the exhibit was still interesting and very informative. In addition to many works by Chagall, it also featured paintings by Vassily Kandinsky, Natalia Gontcharova, and Mikhail Larionov, among others (never heard of any of them? Never fear; I hadn't either).

After the museum, we walked back to an Indian restaurant, Taj Mahal, that our friends Kathleen and Marryn had recommended to us from their day trip a while back. 9 € got us a fried veggie appetizer, chicken curry, and semolina cake for dessert, though we also opted to pay a bit extra for garlic naan bread and mango lassi. The food was delicious and a great value, so it was surprising that we were the only ones in there at lunch time, but consequently we got to chat a lot with the waiter about Indian desserts, language, and traveling in North America.

After imbibing so much delicious Indian food it took a while for us to muster up the energy to move. We did eventually make our way over to the base of the Téléphérique, those bubble things you can see in a picture above, that take you up to the Fort de la Bastille. Unfortunately the line was too long and the day too pretty for waiting, so we decided to try and walk up. A sign at the bottom informed us it'd be an hour-long walk, though we just wound up going part of the way up in order to get a nice view of the city. I'd actually really like to go back to Grenoble eventually and walk or hike up the trail and see the Bastille, the fort that guarded over Grenoble in more bellicose times.

We decided to stroll through downtown on the way back to the train station and got caught up in a flash mob, though we managed to stay on the outside of it. Between that and the beautiful day, the streets of Grenoble were absolutely pulsating with people, and even the Jardin de Ville (town garden, bottom left in the collage above) had multitudes of people out soaking in the sun.

Between a desire to hike up to the Bastille and knowing that I didn't get to try the region's signature dish (gratin dauphinois, a casserole composed of sliced potatoes, whole cream, grated emmental, garlic and herbs), I do hope to find myself back in Grenoble one day.