A Lovely Weekend Avec Mon Amie

Since I've been madly traveling for the past couple weeks, its been nice to spend this weekend just relaxing and hanging around with my friend Katherine in Chambery, the town in France where she's studying abroad. I've also been able to delegate my foreign language speaking duties to her since she's here to study French making her language skills vastly superior to mine. That's not to say I can't make myself understood when needed. At the train station in Lyon it turned out that the ticket agent didn't (or wouldn't) speak English, but I managed to have enough vocab to buy a ticket, and I ended up in the correct town so I guess I was understood!

While a large part of my weekend has been lounging around, Katherine and I have gone out and seen some of the sights in Chambery. There's a big fair going on this week so we went to check it out. A large portion of it seemed to be people selling mattresses or hot tubs, two things we weren't necessarily in the market for, but there was a cool exhibit about King Tut. Going through it, neither of us had enough French to figure out whether it was actually the relics from the tomb since they looked pretty legitimate, but a county fair would be a really bizarre place for them to be exhibited. When it came down to it, we weren't really sure how impressed we were supposed to be. Coming back to Katherine's apartment, we googled it and determined that it was just replicas of everything, so while the exhibition was neat, it definitely was not as cool as it would have been if the relics had been real.

Entry to the (not real) King Tut exhibit

We also went to the local chateau that used to belong to the Dukes of Savoie. The region of Savoie, where Chambery is located, actually has a very interesting history. It was an independent territory for a long time and was swapped back and forth between Italy and France before ending up in France as it is today. At one point the capital of the Savoie region was actually Turin which is presently a city in Italy. It's pretty interesting to think about. The chateau was very nice; there were some older parts that have been preserved in a historic state, but some parts are still used today, like they were in the past, by the governing body of the region. Of course this information is somewhat of a conjecture on my part as the signs and tours were in French and I didn't totally get what was going on. We did get to climb to the top of one of the towers though which had a very nice view of the town and surrounding Alps.

While I've had a lot of fun traveling around, I'm definitely ready to stop living out of my backpack and get into a routine again, so I'm glad to be heading to Spain on Tuesday. I'll get orientated in Madrid and do some sight-seeing there with my group before heading to Salamanca for the remainder of the semester. I'm excited to learn about my class schedule for the fall and start practicing my Spanish, the real reason I'm in Europe in the first place. Next time I update, it will be an hola de España!