Day out in Dijon

Yesterday morning saw 5 of us get up rather early to head to Dijon, capital of the Côte-d’Or département and the Burgundy region and home of course to the mustard.

After an eventful half an hour in the train station, where the ticket machine refused to print our tickets and the ticket office only opened 5 minutes before our train was due to leave, we ran through the station (“like in an action movie” according to Isaias) and jumped on our train.  Yet again, there were train delays -our second train of the morning had to wait for a broken-down train to be rescued- and I thought UK trains were meant to be bad.

Eventually arriving in Dijon, we followed “La Chouette” aka Owl Trail around the city centre seeing all the important monuments and buildings, such as the “église de Notre Dame”. The Notre Dame church features the original “La Chouette”, a stone carving of an owl, which when touched with your left hand is meant to bring you luck.”We made a pitstop in a market where we discovered the delights of turquoise, green and red cheese which are goudas flavoured with pesto and probably the tastiest cheeses I’ve ever had.

The buildings that we saw were all pretty impressive, a variety of Roman, Gothic, Renaissance etc.

There were also a lot of “trompe l’oeil”, where murals are painted to make the wall/building to look like something else.

A visit to “le Musée Rude” in the Saint-Etienne church, had some of François Rude’s AMAZING sculptures including a plaster-cast of his work on the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris.

We could also see the Roman foundations of the church and what seemed to be a tunnel under the city.

We later visited the “Musée des Beaux-Arts”, an art museum housing a lot of very impressive works mainly from the region.

We also managed to catch some performances by local dance schools which were apparently meant to be encouraging us to give blood. I loved the fact that the tap dancers wore a stereotypical French blue and white stripey top.

Other excitements included some rather tasty ice creams, a statue of a polar bear in a park, bumping into a couple of groups of other students that we know from Besançon and dinner in a little restaurant where the fridges were right behind us, so it was like we were in their kitchen. Unfortunately, by that point we were all too tired to get any pictures.

All in all, another great day out.