As a not-born but bred Minnesotan, I'm feeling a little guilty that I made it through a winter without any snow in France. A few times, I've found myself complaining that I was cold, which I don't have the right to do while living here. After twenty-something years of dealing with hell Minnesota Winter, which has provided me with such warm memories as full-out blizzards on Halloween 1991 and my late-April birthday in 2013, I'm contented with the fact that Paris's leaves are now in full-bloom, jackets are optional and my shoes don't have salt stains. It's getting increasingly hard to argue that I'm not on a year-long vacation. Grad school abroad is really, really hard and it only looks like a vacation, I promise.
On Saturday, after months of whining about it, I was finally able to convince my friends Matt and Emma to go along with me out to the little town of Fontainebleau to visit the château and hike in the national forest, which I did once two years ago. The royal château, dating back to the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, is an old, pre-Versailles royal residence that is infinitely more enjoyable to visit when the weather warms up because the crowds aren't so dense and it doesn't quite have that cattle-barn feel that Versailles has with its borderline-insane tourists. (On an unrelated note, Lana Del Rey's "Born to Die" video was filmed in the Trinity Chapel.)
The 110-square-mile Forest of Fontainebleau was once a royal hunting park and now it's a great escape for city folk to experience some true, un-manicured nature within Ile-de-France. The forest is also popular for bouldering (Hear that, Emily?) and hiking. While I definitely love living in Paris, I also desperately need breaks to get out of the city, hear twigs crackling underfoot, get mud on my shoes and be among trees that aren't obsessively pruned into rectangles.
Did you know the Seine isn't always brown, either?
Cheers,
Rachel
 |
| No tigers here! |
 |
| The non-brown Seine |
P.S. Here's my monthly video for March
No comments:
Post a Comment