Saturday May 22, 2004

- Slept in till 9:00
- Got breakfast (Baguette, croissant filled with apricots 
  etc. and fruit)
- Had a big discussion about our expectations for the 
  remainder of the trip, we checked out at noon
- We went to the museum
* Art (European 1700-1800s)
* Ruins (Roman mosaics, weapons, sculptures, helmets etc.)
* Egyptians
* Photo gallery
* Arranged to leave our bags at the museum

We walked all around town. When we had panini with Comte Cheese and smoked salmon for lunch. After lunch, we tried to figure out how to mail our post cards. I'll admit that I made an error here. Sarah had wanted to mail them the day before, I talked her out of it, and all of the post offices were closed. All was not lost, however. We bought stamps at Tabac (cigarette and magazine store.) and dropped post cards in a mailbox. I know that my parents received their fist card, so it worked out in the end. While at the Tabac, I also bought a magazine with 7 CDs of Linux Mandrake 10.0. I guess I just couldn't resist buying the only major distribution from France while visiting the country.

After walking around for a while, we went to an Internet cafe and sent out a new message. Here it is:

Hello, All.

Our vacation is half-over and, fittingly enough, this is our last night in
France.  We'll be taking an overnight train to Turin tonight where we hope
to meet up with some friends who are also travelling in Italy.  It really
is a small world.

Besançon is wonderful; we recommend visiting if you're ever in France. 
The town fortress, La Citadelle, was built in the 1680s and is a marvel,
as were the churches.  The local comté cheese is also fantastic.

We both really want to see the south of Italy, so our current plan is to
visit Naples and Ishcia before we head for Rome.  Internet cafes abound in
France, but may not in Italy, so our next message may take a while.  We'll
do our best to keep you posted.

Cheers,

Ben and Sarah

The machine was running Windows XP, which mean that it was reasonably fast. Unfortunately, we were still stuck with a damned French keyboard. Curse their backwards As and Qs! The Internet access was actually in a PC store. Prices in Euros the same as Canadian dollars. Some nifty brands that we don't get, but mostly the same.

After sending out a mail, we stopped for a coffee. Sarah grabbed a few coasters from the bar. What can I say? Cheap souvenirs! We then made our way to another park where we rested for a bit. We then walked around town until we found a neat African-themed French restaurant. Jamie would have loved id, they played vinyl. The decor was neat, they lined the ceiling with those cheap bamboo window coverings, very exotic looking yet affordable. I tried to say that I liked the decor but instead told the waiter that I loved him. ;-) We took a picture of the restaurant with the staff/chef (chez Momo) It was cool. Then wandered around a bit before heading up to the train station.

The train station was under construction. This meant that there were no chairs, poor bathroom facilities and rather poor lighting. We arrived 2 hours early. It sucked. We went to a scuzzy cafe playing odd remakes of crappy songs from the 80s done to dance music interspersed with gangsta' rap. Bascanson has some... odd characters. (Like there must be a mental hospital near by) Some were in the cafe, so we left. Unfortunately, more were in the train station. We hung around until 11:30, it was excruciating. The train to Dijon finally arrived, it was a little better.

The ride to Dijon was about an hour. Sarah slept, I felt that I should stay awake so that we didn't miss the stop. I'm glad I did, because we would have. Anyway, the seat diagonal to me had this dirtbag musician and his dirtbag squeeze. They were drinking wine from the bottle and obviously getting... into each other... Seriously, they needed to get a room. It was gross, I had no interest whatsoever, but they were the only ones making any noise on the train, so they were quite hard to ignore.

I woke Sarah up a few minutes before we arrived at Dijon. No one announced the stop, really. No one came to get us up, it was strange. We got out the door in time barely. Sarah even had to open the door. Very odd.

So, there we were in Dijon at 12:22. We'd never been there before and our train to Turin was arriving at 1:00AM. We dragged our asses over to the main terminal, found out where we had to go and got there with about 10 minutes to spare. We were standing in the middle of the tracks at Dijon hoping we were in the right place. The only people working were janitors. It was a bit scary, the only encouraging thing was that we were being recorded on camera.

The train to Turin arrived. We got on and were asked to give the train employee our passports. The Canadian documentation said not to do this, but we saw a large pile of passports, so we did. It turns out that they needed it because they were crossing the France/Italy border. Looking back, it wasn't a big deal, but on top of our earlier experiences, this capped off a rather disconcerting evening.

The couchette was very nice and Sarah slept the whole time. I dozed in and out, but mostly stayed awake.

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