Is this real life?

Wow.. I haven't updated in almost 2 months. Jesus. A LOT has happened. Lots of traveling, class things, midterms, crazy amounts of homework, and lots of hanging out with friends :)

So September 17th and 18th was Journée du Patrimoine, which is a weekend where all museums are open to the public completely free. They do this all over France, which is pretty cool. My friends and I went to the Musée de Beaux Arts de Nantes which is a pretty cool art gallery in Nantes. this was the first time in almost a year it had been opened, and closed again after the weekend. There was mostly modern art, which isn't really my thing, but it was okay. Some of the paintings looked like paintings my nephew made when he was like 6 years old, but if some people want to call it art, so be it. We also went to the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle de Nantes which was pretty freaking cool. They had so much stuff in that museum, including a giant sequoia and a bunch of cross sections of tree trunks. They also had a giant whale skeleton, tons of shells and stuffed animals (pretty creepy, not gonna lie) and rocks and gems and that kind of thing. It was huge. We were there for a really long time because there was just so much to see. The same weekend we visited the Château des ducs de Bretagne, which is also in Nantes. It's from the 15th century and HUGE. There's a museum inside and there are artifacts with plaques all over the place, so you know what's what. Nantes was a big slave trade city because of how close it is to the ocean, so they had a lot of history about slavery. It was pretty interesting. A lot of the museum was dedicated to Nantes' history as well, so they had a ton of statues of Anne de Bretagne (the saint of Nantes) and information about her, as well as old advertisements and other cultural history. It was really interesting.

My birthday weekend was pretty laid-back. My friends made dinner for me on the Saturday before my birthday (it was super cute) and then we went to a bar and to the largest discothèque in Nantes. Girls get in free, so that was pretty awesome. It was super fun and really a great way to spend a birthday weekend. The day of my birthday we went back to the fair that was in town and rode the ferris wheel (again) so that we could get pictures of Nantes from above the city. The photos turned out great. I also had a delicious ice cream cone that was my present from my friends. It was very chill. I appreciate chill so much now... everything here is so hectic all the time.

Between then and the next major chunk of the blog post, there were a lot of crepes, a lot of ham sandwiches (what I eat for lunch literally every day) and a lot of Nutella and Speculoos. Speculoos is this amazing spread that tastes like crushed up Cinnamon Teddy Grahams. It's so phenomenal. Like ridiculously good. I'm bringing a jar back with me and will probably cry when it's gone.

The next blog post will start the 15th of October. I'm breaking my blogs up so it's not a 10 page blog entry :)

Til next time!
Sam