Champagne-Burgundy Trip

Thursday (October 1st) morning I awoke super early and walked the 40 minutes to the bus station to catch a bus to Poitiers and then a train from Poitiers to Reims, France (I hadn't even been in France for a week before I was off on a new adventure). Reims is located southeast of Paris and is in the Champagne Region of France (where they are famous for making guess what...CHAMPAGNE). My friend Tina from New York was visiting France in order to write an article for Wine Spectacular magazine. The company had flown her to France to go around visiting different wineries and trying wines and champagnes and staying in 4 and 5 star hotels and eating at 4 and 5 star restaurants. And she'd invited me to join her! Of course I couldn't refuse. I hadn't seen her in years and she was offering a free place to stay in 5 star hotels. It was an offer I couldn't resist.

I arrived in Reims around 10am. Tina and I weren't meeting up until around 5pm when she got back from a winery tour in the country. I'd never been to Reims (or in Northeast France) so I spent the morning wandering around exploring the city. There wasn't really that much to it. It was a large city, but had a small city center. It definitely wasn't one of the most impressive cities I'd visited in France. By mid-afternoon, I'd visited and seen everything so I jumped into a movie theater and watched "District 9" in french. I was shocked when I left the theater, because even though the movie wasn't that great I'd understood everything. Which was rare. Usually when I watch a new movie in french I only understand about 80-85% of what is said (I, of course, can always follow the plot and understand what's going on, but usually not word-for-word). Tina and I met up at her hotel shortly after my movie got out and we went for a beer and some fresh gossip before she had to rejoin her tour group for dinner.

When Tina returned from dinner, me, her and Andy (another journalist from the tour group) went out to have a few drinks. We began our night at a place Andy had passed earlier in the day and seemed to be a happenin' place. Unfortunately for us it was near closing time for that bar, so we had a drink and then continued to the next bar called "L'havana", where we were chatted up by some french guys. We soon discovered that the guys chatting us up are musicians in a rock band and they invited us to join them at another bar. We went along and found ourselves in a bar that had sand covering the entire floor, which I thought was pretty cool and there was a dance floor. By the time we left that bar all the bars were closing down for the night (it was around 3am), but fortunately for us we were partying with a band, so they got us into a bar that was closing called the "Blackface". The lead singer of the band bought us a bottle of expensive champagne and we sat in the closed bar drinking until it was all gone. Then we called it a night and stumbled back to our hotel (which was thankfully right around the corner).

We'd gone to bed around 4am and unfortunately for us it was necessary to be ready to go on a walking tour of Reims at 8:50am. We'd only had 4.5 hours of sleep and we were tired and hungover (champagne always gives the worst hangovers). In french they use the expression "j'ai gueulle de bios" which means 'I have a mouth of wood'. Well my mouth tasted like wood all morning as I listened to some lady drone along in french about the history of the Cathedral in Reims (which was stupid for the group to have paid for because the same information she was giving them, was the same thing that I'd read the day before on all the signs hung around the church). The Cathedral in Reims is actually has an amazing history. It's where all the kings of France were crowned and it was bombed like crazy during WWII, only because of the symbol it stood for. After the tour finished I took Tina on a shopping trip and helped her pick out a 'french fashion' outfit (at one of my favorite french boutiques 'Promod'), before jumping on a 12:30 train to Troyes.

I arrived in Troyes around 4pm and had to rush to the Cathedral from the train station in order to meet up with Tina and the group for a 2 hour walking tour of Troyes. Troyes is an absolutely beautiful city (I'll post some pics, because it'd be hard to describe) and has a rich history mainly surrounding Joan of Arc. Its definitely a city I could have spent a lot more time in and will probably visit again later on to explore it more thoroughly. But I wasn't there to explore, I was there to spend time with Tina who I hadn't seen in years, so after the tour we wandered back to the hotel. We stayed up chatting until 1am (even though we hadn't slept much the night before). Tina's tour group departed bright and early the next morning so I headed to the train station and headed back to Montmorillon. I'd debated staying longer and visiting the town more, but I didn't have my trusted lonely planet guide book with me so I figured it'd be a waste of time. I had a great time, staying in nice hotels and hanging out with Tina. I'd have liked to visit longer, but unfortunately I don't have the funds for it this year. Oh well, c'est la vie.