chartres

The next morning, we woke up bright and early and had breakfast from the hotel's buffet.

Cheese with cherry jam, ham, pain au chocolat (croissant w/chocolat) and crepes with nutella.

To drink, a cup of Dammann Freres Breakfast tea.

Groggily we set out to see Chartres.

Chartres is a quaint town about an hour from Paris.

What I noticed while we rode the bus was that there were many farm fields, then towns with clusters of homes around a church, then many farm fields.

Actually the scenery, minus the big churches, kind of reminded me of Hokkaido.

Just before entering the town, the bus stopped at Jardin de Sakurai, a park located on a hillside with a sakura (cherry) tree from Japan. It was actually a good place to get a picture of most of the church.

On the day that we visited the cathedral, they were having meditation.

All the chairs are moved and a maze or labyrinth is located on the floor of the church, you walk the maze and pray, to be cleansed for your sins.

It was amazing to see so many people participating in this and apparently they only allow this on Fridays.

Another thing that was amazing were the stained glass windows.

Many of them date back to the 12th century and during the war, were removed from the church and protected in the surrounding countrysides.

Our local guide mentioned that it cost more to clean these windows than to make a new stained glass window.

I can see why it is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Lunch was at L'Écume a little restaurant in Chartres.

We started off with escargot. This wasn't my first time to eat escargot but I thought these tasted kind of grassy.

Satoshi loved this because he could use french bread to soak up the sauce.

Next course was veal with a tarragon tomato sauce, very tender and the sauce delicious.

Another dish for Satoshi to mop up the sauce with more french bread.

We loved the fact that a glass of wine was only 2 euros and bread was unlimited.

Dessert was a huge scoop of cassis sorbet and a huge scoop of vanilla ice cream.

I would've liked smaller scoops and didn't need the huge dollop of whipped cream, but really enjoyed the cassis sorbet.

After lunch, we didn't have any time to explore the town, instead we had a long drive to Mont Saint Michel...about 4 hours to be exact.

I'll continue our adventure tomorrow...

L'Écume
28 rue du Grand Faubourg
28000 Chartres
Phone: 02.37.21.90.71