In Dijon's case, I think it was a matter of having just left a massive cultural epicentre for one of these quiet quaint towns with an impressive historical skeleton intact but not a lot of internally-based activity. In fact, we kind of appreciated its tiny-tourist-core-surrounded-by suburbs structure because the strip mall motel we stayed in reminded us of our native Pickering. We ate junk food and struggled through some french tv. Aaaah yeah, that's the stuff (it's amazing what you can miss after a while). It actually managed to out-genericize Pickering in the chip department, as you'll see below.
Dijon was... nice. Nice flowers, nice shops, nice parks. 
Funny story about this bug: I grabbed it up in some little packet for mom (because doesn't it SO look dead in this pic?), and then when I took it out a day or two later to take stock of my souvenir stash, it started crawling! I'm fairly glad I discovered it that way, as it was a big 'un.
Beautiful last views of France from the train...
on the way to...
Munich. This town was large, had an impressive infrastructure, wild night life, and a thriving economy that outpaces a lot of the other cities in Germany, so when I first arrived and started exploring I didn't know understand why it all felt so oddly anonymous. In a later walking tour I learned that after it was mostly destroyed by WWII bombing, Munich was rebuilt as faithfully as possible like its former self. To me this explains its feeling of facelessness. I understand the desire to restore and retain historical roots, but one would think that to reproduce most of a place in a shape of the past could dampen its ability to grow into the future the way a city like Berlin has. Knowing that the city had had most of its previous architectural and economic character wiped clean in a war that doesn't bring it pride made all the fresh clean new faces of the old buildings seem a little ghostly and artificial (to me, the totally ignorant tourist).
But despite its architectural character, there is of course lots of real and happenin' stuff going on in in Munich. There is the famous beer scene... literally every person we met in Munich told us to go to the Hofbrauhaus, the famous pub where it's Oktoberfest all year round! ...we didn't go. But we did try the seasonal beer the monks brew in the Black Forest, which you can only get during lent. Holy yum! Also exciting was the Museum of Science and Technology, in which I discovered some ridiculously precise miniatures, posted for your enjoyment below. It's funny to me that they went to so much trouble when the exhibits weren't even about displaying miniatures... they were just using the miniatures to demonstrate agriculture techniques! This was another fulfilled stereotype-German designers do seem to think anything worth making is worth making very well.
Weird sculpture in the station
Almost poetic, eh?
That's totally how I felt that one time I forgot to wear pants.
Think this is a miniature? You haven't seen miniature yet.
This church has one of my favourite (or at least only) church-related stories ever.
Ok, so it was said that it only took 20 years to build this church, which seems preposterous. BUT, as the story goes, the devil saw said church from the angle shown in the picture just below. You can't see any windows, right? So he thought it was windowless, and thus appropriate for his devilish deeds. The devil told the builder he'd help him if he would just agree not to add in any windows, and the builder agreed- knowing that really there would be plenty of windows and natural light already. 
When the devil realized this deception, he stamped his foot where you see imprint below and left Munich forever, which is why the city only has 20 murders a year! Maybe our city council should adopt a more devil-pact-oriented policy.
Lins in the hydroponic mall.
Baroque and Rococo garishness usually isn't my style, but when this church combined the ornate thing with an almost entirely pure white colour scheme, it changed everything. It was one of the more hauntingly beautiful churches I think I've ever seen.
A mysterious batch of chaps. One of them had a genuine mink- with face and all- wrapped around his bike handles.
What the?! Notice that members of Fairport Convention and the Pentangle are involved. Did I mention my birthday's coming up??
The museum of Science and Tech
And the wonderful miniatures. I have sooo many more of these amazing pics to show you when I come home. And in high-res too (sorry but sometimes upload speed has to take priority over quality when you're on the fly). Sometimes I'm flicking back on my camera pics and I'm like, " Hey, when was I in that cheese factory- Ohhhh, yeah."
We're still looking at miniatures. Just in case you were wondering.
The instrument science wing reminded me a bit of a Conconquidore Truidore stage.
7 comments:
Ha, that scene of chaps on bicycles seems remarkably reminiscent of the chaps bicycle rides spoken of on the website of the Chap magazine:
http://thechap.net/content/section_news/?p=45
Maybe it was really a meeting of chaps?
Hofbrau-nooo.
After all that talk of dijon i kind of want a sandwich.
that's kind of what i thought alex, which is why i started calling them chaps... worth looking into!
ants come back to life too, jules! when my class went to brazil last month, we had to make up little research projects to do in the jungle and then present to the class. some people did ant stuff, and they collected all kinds of different ants and drowned them in soapy water overnight, then glued them to a big piece of paper to serve as their key to all the different species. so when they were showing us the key during their presentation, one of the ants started moving after it spent the whole night in soap water... for some reason somebody acted in what they thought was the most humane way possible and covered the poor alive ant in glue...
but yeah, it came back to life. and my supervisor says that when he was a kid, he used to do "experiements" where he'd catch an ant, take it to the bottom of his family's swimming pool and wait until it seemed quite dead, collected it with some pool water in a little glass vial, kept it in there overnight, then the next day he'd empty the vial on the sidewalk and the ant would come back to life again. apparently they have seven lives, though, because after that i guess they get bored of the game...
people are strange, in conclusion.
that's one sexy hog statue!
Yeah, I think bugs have a different breathing system that makes drowning less of a problem for them. I've seen ants just stroll under water for a couple minutes to get places (in failed attempts at building a moat to contain an ant farm). Also I used to fish dragonflies out of the river and put them on the rocks- it was neat. They'd slowly start to breathe and decrumple their wings and take off. People ARE weird... if I were that poor ant I'd be cursing my resilience by the second round of soaping and gluing.
I just realized that in the pic where I commented, " You can't see any windows, right?" there's actually a really prominent window. So.. the devil wanted a church with just one window? Everyone appreciates a little mood lighting, I guess.
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