Fontevrault Abbey and the restaurant underground.

I’ve begun to settle into a seemingly nice routine here in Angers. I only have class on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. This allows for a lot of free time, which I have been trying to fill with studying French, reading about linguistics and other things to keep myself from freaking out about being so far from home for so long. 

Our film class has been given the task of making a documentary about our semester abroad.  This will be very interesting because (1.) some how I’ve been charged with doing most of the filming and (2.) none of us, myself included, really knows anything about making movies.  The school is offering us free Final Cut Pro certification classes, which I am sure would be valuable but I don’t want to give up every Friday afternoon in March to take the class. This is fine because I don’t have to do any editing of the film.

Yesterday we went on our first day trip. We were picked up in two vans and taken to the town of Saumur to see Fontevrault Abbey. The abbey was built in the twelfth century and once housed an order of both monks and nuns until the French revolution. In addition to vows of chastity, poverty, etc… the nuns took a vow of silence. There is one bench near the courtyard where they were allowed to speak. The architecture of the abbey was pretty cool too. Given my limited lexicon of architectural terminology, I’ll leave it up to you to look up pictures.  

The abbey holds the grave of Richard 1 (the Lion Heart), king of England, and his family. For some reason Richard’s brain and (lion) heart are buried at two other sites, respectfully.

Since I was made videographer I reluctantly spent most of the time at the abbey holding the camera. I’m pretty sure all of the footage is useless because it was so cold that I was shaking profusely. At one point, just to have some stable shots, I set the camera down on a ledge where most of our group was walking around and left it running for 6 or 7 minutes.

After the abbey we drove back through Saumur. Near the river there are many houses that are built into the hillside, like caves. The residents of these caves homes have affectionately named themselves the Troglodytes. Every year they have an annual Troglodyte day on which they all open up their homes for people to tour.

For lunch we went to the Restaurant Troglodytique, which, as you might have guessed, is in a cave. Being the borderline claustrophobe that I am, I was not very excited about being underground for a long period of time. The cave was pretty spacious, though, and there was a lot of wine so I made the most of the situation and tried to put thoughts about the candles burning up all of the oxygen out of my mind.

The food was amazing. Saumur is the mushroom capital of France, and our meal consisted 90% of mushrooms; different varieties prepared in different ways. The wine was from a local winery. They served us five courses, including a peach tart for dessert. Unfortunately the video camera’s battery died at the abbey, so I had to charge it during lunch and did not get the ten-minute, low-angle shot of the table lengthwise that Dr. Flynn wanted. I did, however, manage to shoot some probably unusable, wine saturated, interviews in the van on the ride home.

Today I have to write an explication about Malcolm Cowley's  book Exile's Return.