I can’t say I wish I was at home…

…but I’m thinking about home way more than about Europe right now. The pictures of hurricane Sandy are crazy (I definitely had some of my awful recurring nightmares involving tsunamis/high tides as a result), and I hope everyone doesn’t lose power. At least if you do lose power, it won’t be 100 degrees like it was after the derecho this summer. But regardless, stay safe, well, everyone, because I know very few people who don’t live on the east coast!

I’m writing this blog post offline to hopefully post from the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. My train leaves (left, at this point) Périgueux at 4:51 tomorrow morning; if I’ve already mentioned this, I’m sorry, but I still haven’t gotten over quite how early that is. It will still be dark when we switch trains in Limoges. We get to Paris around 9, and then have to take the Metro and a commuter train out to the airport to wait for our flight to Prague. Since all I’ve been doing this evening (and today) is reading the Post articles about Sandy, I have this strange paranoia in the back of my mind that flights are going to be canceled/turbulent tomorrow because of weather. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m 3000 miles away. Geography is hard. And apparently, so are weather forecasts.

The point of writing this post, however, is not to summarize my oh-so-interesting travel itinerary for tomorrow, but to recount what I did this past weekend. I spent Saturday in Brantôme:

and Bourdeilles:

Both towns, besides having incredibly French names, were very cool. I went out with Daniela, Catherina, and Beate (Mexican, German, Austrian assistants, respectively) in Catherina’s car. She’s lucky enough to have one here since she drove over from Germany, so we can go out on weekend excursions with her. Brantôme is a very small town about 40 minutes from Périgueux (don’t ask me how many miles because I still don’t have a good grip on miles versus kilometers – or pounds versus kilograms – or Celsius versus Fahrenheit) and home to the oldest clock tower in France, one that was built in the 1100s on a shelf of rock behind the abbey.

Look at that old thing!

We didn’t go up the tower because you have to go up on a guided tour and there was only one tour late in the afternoon, but we did pay to go into the caves behind the abbey. Basically part of the town has been built into these cliffs. The caves have been used as dwellings since the Stone Age (no surprise there, that’s a gimme), but the monks started using them in the 10^th/11^th century as dwellings, chapels, wine cellars, and, apparently, a place to raise pigeons.

Dwellings.

Chapels.

Deluxe pigeon apartments.

It was fascinating to see these ancient-looking cave dwellings carved into the cliff right up against a “modern” abbey (cause “modern” in Europe can mean 1400) and manmade structures. The caves were both interesting and creepy, both pagan and Christian (cause there were crosses periodically carved into the walls of the caves – those monks needed to remind everyone they weren’t cavemen, of course). It was really cool – and unexpected. The town looks like just a pretty medieval French town with a pretty river, garden, church – and then it has these crazy caves behind the abbey and town hall.

Bourdeilles is an itty bitty town in the hills of the Dordogne region not far from Brantôme. We went cause it has a few castles right in the center. Europe just loves castles. And churches.

One castle was built at the end of the 13^th century as some sort of stronghold for a baron. We climbed to the top of the tower and had a great view of the surrounding area!

See? Great view!

The other castle was built during the Renaissance. It was full of elaborate/gaudy furniture. No one who lived in these castles was particularly important (well, they were important enough to get the town named after them, but that’s it), so it was just a self-guided tour around the castles and their grounds.

I also wish that I could talk to my 2011 self who was living in Lyon and complained about her shower situation and tell her she doesn’t know how lucky she had it. My showering situation for the last month has done the impossible and actually made me look forward to using hostel showers. In Lyon I at least had a wall mount for the shower head so I could take an actual shower (even if I had no curtain). Since being in Périgueux, I’ve dealt with the aforementioned school shower (drain in the floor, hit the button to turn the water on for 20 seconds), a little cube of a shower in Bordeaux that had no wall mount and ice-cold water (seriously, it was like a little pod you had to stand in but still had to hold the shower head and there wasn’t a drop of warm water), and now Marina’s shower – a typical French shower in that it’s a bath tub, there’s no shower curtain, and there’s no wall mount for the shower head, so you just sit and spray yourself with the shower head and pretty much freeze. I stayed at Katie’s apartment last night since she lives close to the train station and was so grateful to take a shower since she somehow picked a long straw and has an actual shower. The last two times I went to France, the showers drove me craziest. Looks like it won’t be any different this time…