a small day trip

bonjour!  i have bronchitis and can’t speak, but at least i can post something to the blog.  i’ve been working very hard on learning french, and now have two of my certificates in the european language course i’ve been taking.  last week, i was bored so i asked guigui to take me to a bigger town to walk around for a bit.  we decided on amiens, which is about two hours to the south of us.  we are really into taking little back roads these days, so that’s what we did.  you really get the feeling of being in europe once you get off the highway.  amiens is a very big town or small city with about four major churches and one cathedral.  we went inside the amiens cathedral to look at the architecture.  i had put my scarf around my head a bit before to shield myself from the cold, and the old man holding the door looked at me like i was a devout catholic.  it took me a minute to remember that many women wear veils when they go into a church.  the statues in the church are amazing.  there are many grottos with statues of saints where you can light candles.  the altar is huge and the ceilings go up really high.  there is huge organ up on the balcony and i’m sure you can fit a thousand people in there for mass.  i did stop in front of the saint christopher statue because he is the patron saint of travelers.  my mom has made me carry his medal around since i was fifteen years old.  after we left the cathedral, we walked around town.  the sun finally came out, and it did a lot to brighten both of our moods.  in the north of france in the winter, it is pretty gray and cold.  amiens was one of the towns that was saved by allied forces during world war II, and like many towns in france, it has a beautiful hotel de ville, or city hall.  that weekend we went back to paris for his sister’s birthday, but i will not write about that because we pretty much acted like fools by dancing and drinking all night.  we are back in berck for the time being but we will go to lille next week so guigui can take a test for his work.  it will give me three days of roaming around solo in a pretty sizable city, and i’ll get to practice my french.  i’m a bit worn out, so bonne journee, and i’ll write soon.