A visit with the past...

This past weekend, I went to the lovely Tours and had a visit with Kevin Kane, the onsite director of BGSU’s study abroad program. We went to two lovely jardins (gardens) at the Chateau de Villandry and Chatonièrre. We had an marvelous time and day for this. Fall is setting in here, which means a mixture of nebulous clouds, and sunshine and a fresh fall breeze to brustle the leaves about. Wonderfully charming.

Each garden was a bit different. Villandry is well known, and large with a heavy influence from the Italien Rennisance, it was built around 15th century. Now, the Chateau’s garden has not been kept the same for centuries, in fact a couple discovered the chateau, and had plans to use it for lab experiments. However, they fell in love with the chateau and decided to revamp it and it’s gardens, and eliminate all the extra junk that had been added over time.

As for the second, we were fortunate enough to have a guide, the Duke of the chateau (actually Spanish) with a tweed coat, and longish black locks, gave of us the low-down on who had lived at the chateau and why the gardens were redone. These gardens are nowhere near as old as the others maybe only a couple of decades, but its charm is not hindered by its youth.

The close of the day brought me back to Angers. Seeing the new undergraduates was an interesting experience, because that had been me not two years ago. Rather curious, but still fairly unaware of what awaited me. Many of them are struggling with their first bouts of culture shock, and watching them struggled I remembered how awful the first month had been. But as they complained, I promised they would feel differently in a month, and that as long as they keep on learning French, they will survive.

Now we are to the present, and I am getting ready for Allie Molnar, the friend from Toulouse, to come and visit me. If my sentences have become longwinded, it’s because I am reading Bronte’s Jane Eyre, I can’t help it!