The Europe Trip: Dijon

As Jules mentioned, Dijon was a nice break from busy Parisian life. The train ride there was particularly beautiful - fields of mustard seed abound! Dijon is the captial of the Burgundy region (Bourgogne), as well as the historic capital of the Province of Burgundy. From the 11th-15th centuries this province (located in what is now France and Switzerland) was home the Dukes of Burgundy and was a very wealthy and influential place.

Fun fact: 90% of mustard seeds used in dijon mustard are imported, mainly from Canada.

The shops were crazy-cute and chock full of mustard and herb-flavoured goodies.

So... If you like decorative owls, you should probably check out Dijon. After walking around for about 10 minutes on the first day it was clear that they had a thing for the wise bird of the night. I busted out my francais and asked a shop owner,"Le owl c'est le animaux du Dijon?" and miraculously he understood me. It turns out that after the construction of the city's Notre Dame church, a small owl carved in the side of the church gained the ol' European rub-for-goodluck reputation, and ensures you will return to the city one day. There's the rub:

On my second day in Dijon, I took the Owl's Trail (Le Parcours de la Chouette) which guides tourists though the city's highlights.

Get ready for more owls.

Anis and cassis are also grown around Dijon, and make tasty candies. Check out the candy-making machine. Still in use since 1850!

A foreign, yet oddly familiar landscape near our Hotel. I guess a stripmall's a stripmall. It took 20 minutes to get to the city centre by bus.

Just a sample of the dijon selection at an average grocery store.

Part of the Owl's Trail went through the city's Museum, the Musee des Beaux-Arts. Some portraits of Burgundy nobility.

Wicked painting.

Portrait of Hugues de Rabutin and Jeanne de Montagu.

The museum also holds the stunning tombs of Dukes Philip the Bold and John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria. The tombs took decades to complete and were sculpted by Flemish masters Jean de Marville, Claus Sluter, and Clause de Werve.

Tomb of Phillip the Bold.

Tomb of John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria.

The definition of detail.

Notre Dame church.

Polar bear in a park.

Leaving Dijon, the only train we could catch to Munich left at about 5:30am so we had to leave at an unforgivable hour from a hotel in the middle of nowhere that had Do-It-Yourself night staffing - that is to say, a pitch dark reception area and a keypad lock on the front door between the hours of 10-6am. The cab we ordered the night before didn't show up in the morning so we got a bit freaked out that we wouldn't be able to get to the station since payphones in europe don't seem to like us. However, we thankfully stumbled into HotelF1, where a delightful receptionist made us coffee and called us a cab. Love you HotelF1!

Much needed coffee and the beam of cabbie-promise.

I decided to lump Dijon and Munich into one post, because although they were lovely and fun, I had an odd feeling of not quite being "somewhere" in these two cities.
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."