Finally, another chocolate almond croissant challenge update!

It has been a while since I had a chocolate almond croissant. This was for two reasons:

1. Nowhere had them! I tried! I don't know if I picked places that don't have them or were just out, but man. They were scarce.

2. I decided it would be embarassing to have a heart attack at my age and that my pastry consumption should decrease.

I'll go ahead and admit that #1 was a larger factor, but #2 is how I made it ok in my head.

But finally, I found not one, but two new contenders in the past week!

The first was from Juan-les-Pins, a beach town near Cannes, where I stayed for a night with my parents when they were here last week (yup, there's a post on that coming up as well). I think the bakery was called something along the lines of "Artisan baker," so not a whole lot of information there. I could tell the instant I picked it up this croissant was too smushy for me--it felt like a wet sponge. It had a pretty good taste for the texture, and Mom, a new initiate to the chocolate-almond croissant, was quite impressed, but I really couldn't get past the texture. Good thing though, since it would be quite unfortunate if the best chocolate-almond croissant was that far from me in Montpellier!

The second recent entrant came from the bakery "up a small alley by the botanical garden, with a yellow sign." Those directions were from a classmate, who got them from someone from Montpellier she met in Sweden. That was the entire extent of the directions, yet my classmate found it, and once she gave me the directions, so did I! I guess they are good enough, despite how laughable they are at first.

The place has good chocolate chip muffins when I need a taste of American goodies (the only not good sweet things I've had here have been cookies and cheesecake, both pretty far from French pastry and I guess out of the comfort zone).  But anyway, I was in there yesterday and spied a chocolate-almond beauty. It was definitely the most covered in powdered sugar so far! It was also an interesting one. On the outside, it was too crispy, but the inside had a good texture. The taste was nothing special though, unfortunately.

As the semester draws to a close, I am beginning to conclude that there is no holy grail of chocolate-almond croissants. There are several types, and I can be in the mood for various ones, but I have not yet found The One. If I'm here next semester, I'll definitely continue the challenge, while maybe thinking of it more as a sample of the variation versus a search for the perfect specimen!

My cute basket of strawberries

Cute and delicious.

The Pyrenees

I'm behind on my traveling posts! A few weekends ago I went to the Pyrenees with a classmate whose dad lives there.  The weather was rainy and cloudy/misty nearly the whole time, which prevented seeing the most spectacular long distance/whole mountain range/highest-mountain-in-the-whole-chain-right-over-there views, but I thought the brooding, mysterious mountains were quite nice as well. We stayed in the town of St. Beat (Bey-AHT), classmate's dad lives in Eup (pronounced like the word "up"), and we went through Luchon and several other small towns I can't remember the names of, just in case you want to orient yourself! St. Beat is marked on the map below. The whole purpose of the weekend was to look around, so the rest of the post is just pictures!

Oh, but we did also go to a painted cave, Grotte de Gargas with lots of paintings of hands with only some fingers held up (great speculation on what that means). No pictures allowed inside, but the link goes to an image search for it.

Cambridge

A few weekends ago I went to Cambridge, England! It was awesome. I hadn't been to England in a few years and haven't ever been outside London, so it was really cool to check out another part of the country. It was also awesome to land and suddenly see and hear English everywhere. And then there was British junk food, which is awesome (hello Cadbury's and shortbread, mmm). And normal-person sized coffee (with milk even!) instead of the thimbles of espresso served in France. I mentioned I was happy right? Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying France, but change is a good thing!

So anyway, yes, I was visiting a friend I met during my semester in the Netherlands. He is on a different type of exchange program and got to head to Cambridge for the semester. Very cool. He has a cute room in a townhouse in a nice neighborhood right by campus. Cambridge is a great walkable town, so we went everywhere. The first night I got in lateish, so by the time we ate and headed into town we couldn't get into The Eagle, a famous pub in town. But we went to another place and observed drunk Brits for a while. Quite an interesting adventure. Something I've heard a few times that I can begin to confirm (from Sweden and Cambridge), is that the further north you go in Europe, the quieter the people are sober and the louder they are drunk.

Anyway, Sunday we checked out the Ely Cathedral, a medieval cathedral which was quite pretty.

Then it was back to town for more wandering and some awesome Indian food. India was an important colony, so Indian is the main ethnic food (like Indonesian in the Netherlands). It was a huge delicious awesome meal, and afterwards my friend headed off for a nap, and I went into town for more wandering (I know I keep using that word, but it's the best description)! I treated myself to a cream tea, which is tea with a scone which you eat with clotted cream and jam. So good!

 

Then I headed around some of the famous colleges of Cambridge University. The colleges are huge residential buildings where classes also take place. The picture below is the back of King's College. That is King's chapel on the left.

The next day I ...wandered... around town again while my friend got some work done (it was Monday--weird flights gave me a Saturday-Tuesday crack of dawn trip). I hit a few more colleges, including Darwin college and got some shopping done (it's impossible to find some things in France, like any kind of face product with SPF in it...). I also ate an English breakfast!

I met up with my friend and another guy I knew from Groningen (they're in the same program) and we ate (fish and chips--checking off the classic British foodstuffs). As we were walking around though, we walked past an area where a festival was clearly being set up. We wondered what it might have been until we rounded a corner and saw a poster for the Cambridge Beer Festival!!! Opening that evening!! Needless to say, I was a bit excited. We had to wait quite a while (turns out the opening time we were quoted was only for VIPs, so we just had to chill for an hour and half outside) but it was awesome. A huge tent completely lined with beers from tons of breweries. There was a catalog there were so many :) So happy. It was an awesome way to spend my last evening there.

And I leave you with a picture of the creepiest clock ever, the Corpus Christi clock. The giant grasshopper thing on the top rocks back and forth, "eating time."

I love my research

I come across a lot of random places, diseases, and other things while I'm collecting the data for my project. It's quite interesting. For example:

-Note: Monkeys are not suitable pets. In case you were wondering. The bolding is theirs, not mine.

-The French claim a territory called Scattered Islands in the Indian Ocean. The Scattered Islands are all just scraps of coral, but France wants them. So do Madagascar, the Comoros, Mauritius, and the Seychelles. It seems to be more about claiming the sea around them for fishing rights, but it has to be funny to bring up any official business relating to a place that you can't be bothered to call anything other than "the Scattered Islands."

-South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Not a lot going on here either, just another great territory name (UK this time). 

-Giant kidney worm infection. Enough said. 

-A disease called simply Orf. No, it does not turn you into an ogre or orc, which it sounds like it should.

There have been others I'm forgetting, but just thought I'd share a few for laughs.

Happy weekend!

This bag makes you French

Just in case any of you desperately want to look French, this bag does it. Everyone's got it. Longchamps, Le Pliage.

Avignon

So I was supposed to get to go to a classmate's beach house in Spain this past weekend. Unfortunately, it fell through :( Too bad--it was the driver's spider mites needing attending to on a Saturday (good reason not to work with insects)! That would have been amazing. I tried to find something else to do and discovered that everywhere within reasonable traveling range had a 70-100% chance of thunderstorms.  I don't usually trust weather forecasts, but most of the places I would go are best when you can just wander around, which would not be so much fun in a storm. Or even rain. But I finally saw that while Avignon had 100% chance of rain/storms Saturday, it was 0% on Sunday! So a classmate and I decided to go. I'm trying to see new places, but I have to admit I was in Avignon once before, in 2000. I didn't remember it well, but kept hearing how amazing it was and so decided to check it out again (PS same with Barcelona, only that was in 1997 maybe).

We grabbed an earlyish train so that we'd have a good chunk of the day to explore. The first thing I noticed when we got off the train was that they weren't kidding about Avignon being windy!  The wind blew nearly constantly throughout the day. A serious wind too, in the 20+ mph range. But it was an absolutely gorgeous day with blue sky and white fluffy clouds.

This is the view from a tower of the Palais de Papes, which was our first stop. It was pretty cool-there were remains of a lot of cool frescoes on the walls (no pictures allowed) and the building itself was quite impressive.

My favorite part of the palace was the view tower, for sure. Panorama mode, earn your keep!

After the palace we wandered around for a while. Avignon is in Provence, and what I do remember from the previous trip was confirmed in the touristy shops-lots of the stereotypical but beautiful Provence yellow and blue cloth and tons of lavender products.

 Then it was time for one of those lunch menus I'm so fond of--lamb and mashed potatoes both with garlic sauce, followed by a cooked pear with chocolate sauce, ice cream, and chantilly (a heavy whipped cream). Yes, the pear came with all three of those! Delicious. I'm not a pear fan, but it was cooked well and covered in three types of sweet :)

After lunch we wandered off to see the Pont d'Avignon from the song (pont=bridge, and there's a famous song called "Sur le pont d'Avignon"). It's actually called Pont Saint-Benezet, and it has a history of collapsing. They got sick of fixing it and so just turned the remaining bit into a tourist site. This is the view from another bridge just downstream (that you don't have to pay to walk on).

And back towards the city--told you the palace was big...

My favorite part of the day though, was the Jardin du dom (remember jardin=garden). Beside the palace is a large rock outcrop that used to have I think a castle on it, but is now just a huge garden way up on this massive rock. That's the garden at the top of the picture below! It was beautiful--great views of a lot of the surrounding area, plus just nice in itself. It was at about this point that my camera died... fail. 

After wandering around the park for quite a while, doing as much window shopping as you can in Europe on Sunday and grabbing a beer in one of the main areas, we headed back home, but it was a great day trip. And now you get the rest of the pictures I really liked.

A stained glass window in the palace

Another bit of rock outcrop with a lantern and a house built on top

Soap! Each color is a scent.

At the top of the Jardin-a cool painted ceramic representation of the town and 

distances to various other places