(no subject)
I'm having a snack and posting before I eat ALL THE THINGS have supper and launch into what is threatening to be either a busy or a slackertastic evening, because once again, I have things to post about.
Most importantly, I heard back from the archivists in Nantes on Friday, and yesterday I got my act together to go and investigate weekly regional rail passes for commuters. Because Nantes and Rennes (the two capitals of medieval/early modern Brittany) are now actually in two separate administrative regions, neither region's TER website had any actual information about commuting between them, although they indicated that commuter passes existed. Fortunately, the nice ticket agents at the train station knew what they were doing, and now I have seven days of unlimited rail access between Rennes and Nantes for the low low price of approximately 1 1/2 regular-price round-trips. Yay! I'm going to celebrate by taking the 7:10 am train to Nantes tomorrow morning (and then probably celebrate more by having some sort of amazing pastry for breakfast once I get to Nantes, which should still be before the archives open).
I'm hoping that I'll be able to look at everything I need in Nantes in the next week or at most, two, because while exciting, it's kind of a strenuous commute (bus to metro to train for 75 minutes to bus and the reverse coming back). If I manage productive instead of slackertastic tonight, I'll spend the evening getting the côtes of the documents I need to look at, thanks to Loire-Atlantique having its archive catalogues online. That should save me a lot of time at the archives!
Anyway, given that this is going to be (hopefully) a busy and productive week, I didn't do any work this weekend. I spent some time yesterday afternoon serendipitously exploring Rennes (I was looking for a store, which I never found), and discovered the main surviving part of the old city, which has been lurking behind the Galleries Lafayette and downhill from Les Lices and Place Sainte-Anne all this time. Who knew? I thought Place Sainte-Anne and the streets leading off it were it! But no! There's a glorious maze of tiny streets around the cathedral, and there are awesome late-medieval city gates (and also an awesome-looking organic crèperie right inside them, which I'll have to visit at some point)! Of course, I wasn't prepared to accidentally discover a section of medieval city, so I didn't have my camera. But now that I know it's there, I can go back!
Then last night, I made quinoa-corn chowder and guacamole, because I didn't want to test the possibility of dying of Mexican food withdrawal any further. Leftovers of the same tonight...
Today, I decided to go and do some wandering around in the countryside around Rennes, following the guidebook to walking and hiking paths in the pays de Rennes that I got last weekend when I decided it was too cold to go to Dol. I took the useful but infrequent Sunday suburban bus to Gévezé, one of the suburban villages a ways out, and, in consultation with my guidebook, went for a short and somewhat muddy hike to see the twelfth-century motte of Motte-Marcillé. So, as it turns out, rural France is actually full of carefully-marked, public-access walking trails, if you know what to look for. I wasn't sure they'd really be there, or that they wouldn't involve somehow trespassing, but they are, and they don't, and people use them, even in January. It's awesome! Motte-Marcillé, in any case, turned out to be in the middle of a cow pasture, with a farmstead at its foot. Mottes, back in the day, were small fortresses built on mounds of earth from which, depending on which medievalists you talk to, lords either cruelly oppressed their peasants, or they showed off their power to their peasants and lordly neighbours just by the fact of having one (they weren't necessarily very militarily useful). Motte-Marcillé is about a storey high and probably about the same in diameter, eroded on one side, with really big trees growing on it. I put my medievalist skills to work by identifying it and taking my first pictures before I got to the identifying sign. I took many pictures, and then I had to hurry back to Gévezé to get the bus, or risk having to wait another hour and twenty minutes for one.
I also passed the motte of Montgermont both coming and going on the bus. Not-Rennes! It's the first time I've been back since the great 2010 Not-Rennes adventure with Marek, despite the fact that I've spent the past four months practically living on the road to Montgermont, and taking the bus from the bus stop we mostly had to walk to in order to get anywhere.
Anyway, that pretty much brings things up to date, which means... time for supper!
This entry was originally posted at http://monksandbones.dreamwidth.org/662790.html. Talk to me here or there, whichever you prefer.
Most importantly, I heard back from the archivists in Nantes on Friday, and yesterday I got my act together to go and investigate weekly regional rail passes for commuters. Because Nantes and Rennes (the two capitals of medieval/early modern Brittany) are now actually in two separate administrative regions, neither region's TER website had any actual information about commuting between them, although they indicated that commuter passes existed. Fortunately, the nice ticket agents at the train station knew what they were doing, and now I have seven days of unlimited rail access between Rennes and Nantes for the low low price of approximately 1 1/2 regular-price round-trips. Yay! I'm going to celebrate by taking the 7:10 am train to Nantes tomorrow morning (and then probably celebrate more by having some sort of amazing pastry for breakfast once I get to Nantes, which should still be before the archives open).
I'm hoping that I'll be able to look at everything I need in Nantes in the next week or at most, two, because while exciting, it's kind of a strenuous commute (bus to metro to train for 75 minutes to bus and the reverse coming back). If I manage productive instead of slackertastic tonight, I'll spend the evening getting the côtes of the documents I need to look at, thanks to Loire-Atlantique having its archive catalogues online. That should save me a lot of time at the archives!
Anyway, given that this is going to be (hopefully) a busy and productive week, I didn't do any work this weekend. I spent some time yesterday afternoon serendipitously exploring Rennes (I was looking for a store, which I never found), and discovered the main surviving part of the old city, which has been lurking behind the Galleries Lafayette and downhill from Les Lices and Place Sainte-Anne all this time. Who knew? I thought Place Sainte-Anne and the streets leading off it were it! But no! There's a glorious maze of tiny streets around the cathedral, and there are awesome late-medieval city gates (and also an awesome-looking organic crèperie right inside them, which I'll have to visit at some point)! Of course, I wasn't prepared to accidentally discover a section of medieval city, so I didn't have my camera. But now that I know it's there, I can go back!
Then last night, I made quinoa-corn chowder and guacamole, because I didn't want to test the possibility of dying of Mexican food withdrawal any further. Leftovers of the same tonight...
Today, I decided to go and do some wandering around in the countryside around Rennes, following the guidebook to walking and hiking paths in the pays de Rennes that I got last weekend when I decided it was too cold to go to Dol. I took the useful but infrequent Sunday suburban bus to Gévezé, one of the suburban villages a ways out, and, in consultation with my guidebook, went for a short and somewhat muddy hike to see the twelfth-century motte of Motte-Marcillé. So, as it turns out, rural France is actually full of carefully-marked, public-access walking trails, if you know what to look for. I wasn't sure they'd really be there, or that they wouldn't involve somehow trespassing, but they are, and they don't, and people use them, even in January. It's awesome! Motte-Marcillé, in any case, turned out to be in the middle of a cow pasture, with a farmstead at its foot. Mottes, back in the day, were small fortresses built on mounds of earth from which, depending on which medievalists you talk to, lords either cruelly oppressed their peasants, or they showed off their power to their peasants and lordly neighbours just by the fact of having one (they weren't necessarily very militarily useful). Motte-Marcillé is about a storey high and probably about the same in diameter, eroded on one side, with really big trees growing on it. I put my medievalist skills to work by identifying it and taking my first pictures before I got to the identifying sign. I took many pictures, and then I had to hurry back to Gévezé to get the bus, or risk having to wait another hour and twenty minutes for one.
I also passed the motte of Montgermont both coming and going on the bus. Not-Rennes! It's the first time I've been back since the great 2010 Not-Rennes adventure with Marek, despite the fact that I've spent the past four months practically living on the road to Montgermont, and taking the bus from the bus stop we mostly had to walk to in order to get anywhere.
Anyway, that pretty much brings things up to date, which means... time for supper!
This entry was originally posted at http://monksandbones.dreamwidth.org/662790.html. Talk to me here or there, whichever you prefer.