The overnight sleeper train was an unusual experience. When I was six, my grandmother and aunt took me to Quebec City as a weekend trip and we got to go on a VIA Rail sleeper. I thought the idea of sleeping in a bed on a train was so cool at the time, that maybe people had entire houses on trains! Unfortunately your idea of cool at age six and as an adult are a differ just a little bit. For one, there are only two toilets on the car, and you share the room with strangers, of which you may need to be on the top bunk with. Despite all of that, the train motion has an incredible way of making you fall asleep, so if you ever have dozed off while riding the subway, you’ll instantly feel at home. Also, the compartments are almost lightproof, making visual distractions almost completely nil.
We pulled into Paris Austerlitz around 7AM, the station still asleep. I found myself up an hour before, charging my World Blackberry on the shaver plug in the wash basin compartment at the end of a car. Today’s agenda was blank: We were to look at the station departure board, pick a random place to visit, and head there. Thought Versailles was a possibility, it ended up being the town of Tours, about two hours away.
We had a moment for lunch in Tours where we ate at a local bistro. Packed with locals, the restaurant had a daily menu which today included a seafood salad, roasted leg of duck with vegetables, and strawberries in light syrup for dessert. It was fantastic. One of the things I love about Europe is that you can have great food for reasonable cost without any of the pretentiousness that comes with fine dining in Canada. You don’t need to dress up to have stuff plated with ring molds. That’s awesome. There’s also not an emphasis on dialing something up, just for. The strawberries for dessert, they don’t need to be drenched in glaze, they were just lightly sweet, almost bordering on natural.
Tours has several chateaus spread across the Loire Valley. We picked a bus tour which first took us past the town of Amboise, then onto Cheverny. The chateau at Cheverny was started in 1624 and has remained with the same family for 400 years. Apparently they actually still live there. The grounds and interiors of this chateau were pretty, but it wasn’t really that inspiring.
The castle at Chambord on the other hand, was amazing. A masterpiece of French Renaissance architecture (I’m reading this off the brochure, I couldn’t tell Renaissance Architecture from 4G Packet Switching Architecture) the castle took two hundred years to fully complete, including a war, the abduction of a king, and numerous other delays. If the Airbus assembly complex was impressive in size, Chambord is impressive in size and difficulty, because this was all done in a time when people had to cut blocks out of raw stone with hand tools. The castle has 440 rooms spread over four levels and an outside keep.
Leonardo da Vinci supposedly inspired the key feature in the castle, a double helix staircase designed such that one path may never see the other. In the centre, a shaft illuminates the staircase through cutouts. Its complexity and novel design are really beautiful. The castle has a huge room dedicated to showing a video of the construction in CGI. The layout is unusually symmetrical and modular, with sections cut and pasted. For example, the king’s apartment is on the right side wing of the castle, but the left side is balanced with a similar layout for the chapel. The terrace on the roof is also really impressive as its elaborate layout of turrets, towers and peaks aims to suggest a busy medieval landscape.
Inside the castle today was a number of Chambord inspired products. Ford apparently made a Chambord car, Air France had a plane named after the castle, and of course there is Chambord liquor–aka, the Purple Holy Hand Grenade. This insanely sweet concoction was said to be the creation and favourite of King Louis XIV. The exhibit cleverly referenced the old Warhol Brillo pad piece by making all the displays out of stenciled plywood.
Driving along in the bus through the small rural villages; churches and houses dotting the landscape, was serene. Along the roadside you would see scenes of country life, colourful fields of flowers and unusual trees with clumps of leaves, always in neat rows framing side roads. Eventually we picked up the train in Amboise, a small town in the valley, and made our return by train to Paris. Dinner tonight included a poached salmon in dill sauce, a classic.
Calum Tsang's Journal 