Day 3

The next day in Nantes, everyone got to experience how shower's are in the Bos household. We needed to have a schedule bc there was only about 10 minutes or less of warm water. I took my normal place at the back of the line.
After showers, we had breakfast and orientation (they explained our plans for the day) in the other house. For breakfast, we had pretty much the same thing every day. Fruit, yogurt, juice, and croissants. A lot of people (including me), liked to put Nutella on our croissants.




We took off, via Tram, to downtown Nantes. We took a roundabout way to get to our first main stop, the Cathedral Saint-Pierre of Nantes. Pictured is the tallest building in Nantes.











The stop we got off at was called 50 Hostages. I think it was from WW2, when 50 french resistant soldiers were taken hostage. They had an Obelisk to remember this.

They also had a wall that had names of all of the people that died in WW2.

We then walked down a large open area to get to the Cathedral. I'm not sure what the significance of this area was.

I don't really have any intro for the Cathedral...so here it is. (again some of the pictures might be dark, sorry)

This painting is a little dark, but it show the Cathedral on fire. Apparently the top half of the Cathedral burned away in the early 1900's. I couldn't read the caption, so i don't really know why.

There were a couple people buried here. I'm not sure about their significance, but I did take a picture of the sign underneath them so you can translate it if you want. I think they might be the Dukes/Dutchess' of Brittany/Nantes.

These chandeliers were all over the place. They had modern lights (obviously)

This is a big organ up on the second floor.

A nativity scene.

This is the sign I was talking about. I don't know what it says

After seeing the Cathedral, we walked a little further downtown and were let loose for lunch. I think i probably had another panini (i don't really remember). I did take some pictures of the streets of Nantes. None are of any significance.

After lunch and shopping, we headed over to the Chateau of the Duke of Brittany. This was the headquarters for the kingdom of Brittany, and that didn't sit well with the Kings of France. This castle was assaulted by some king (maybe a Louis), and it held up pretty well. They finally agreed on a settlement. I think the head of Castle/Brittany was Anne of Brittany. She agreed to be married to the King of France (again, i think it was a Louis), but then he died (i think this was after she was married though, which made her the queen of france). She came back to the castle and lived there for a while, and then they had the same conflict with France. She then married the current king again (i'm pretty sure it was another Louis). This made her the only woman to be the queen of france twice. The people in Nantes were very proud of this fact.

Anyway, the castle was really huge, and had a really interesting tour. It had about 20-30 rooms that we got to go through, and it was kind of a museum too. I didn't take pictures of all of the rooms, but I did take some of stuff i thought was interesting. They also had some stuff on WW2, and i think the castle was used by the Germans to hold hostages (that might be where those '50 hostages' thing came from)



We got to use these audio guides throughout the museum/castle. This became the norm wherever we went. Every room had a number, and we would punch that number in to get an overview of the room (you would hold it up to your ear like a phone, or use headphones). Then there were sub-numbers that would give us specific info on different areas of the room (i didn't figure out this second part until about room 12).





So first we went on the inside tour.





A model of the Castle.

These keys reminded me of the Kappa keys. I don't know their real life significance.

This is a model of the city of Nantes in the older days.

After the inside tour, we got to walk around the outside of the castle (no guides).

After lapping the Castle a couple of times, we went back home for dinner. The rest of night we were given free time. It was really cold though, so everyone just stayed in and hung out.