Nantes

After two days in Lyon, I took another cheap flight up to Nantes (Amen EasyJet), a city in the Brittany region of France. Celeste, one of my closest friends from college, is an English teaching assistant there and invited me to spend part of my vacation with her.

Nantes is a pretty, clean, and manageable city - not too big but not too small. It's a perfect fit for Celeste, who's from Philadelphia. We decided that Nantes is definitely the Philadelphia of France. We saw all the sights, like the château in the center of town, the newly restored cathedral, the LU cookie factory (which is a bar at night and, strangely enough, was hosting a hip hop festival while I was there), and - by far the coolest thing - a mechanical, rideable elephant on the Île de Nantes.

We cooked most nights, which was a healthy and affordable departure from the croque monsieurs and magret de canard I'd been consuming in Bordeaux and Lyon, and got our groceries from the awesomely big Saturday market. On our last night we had an 11 euro dinner at a Thai restaurant, which was on an adorable street in centre ville lined with ethnic restaurants and creperies (the local specialty). Our dinner included an appetizer, a main course, a dessert, and two glasses of wine each. And it was so good.

(This bar had lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream stenciled onto the walls!)