Lille?

Thursday afternoon I ended up feeling really sick. I napped from 5-8pm, big mistake. I couldn't sleep till 1, and then I ended up getting like 4 or 5 hours of sleep the night before Lille. In the morning, I felt better, but not 100%, and we had to get up so early.

NYU had organized a trip for about 40 or 50 of us to Lille, in northern France, near the Belgian border. It is the 4th biggest city in France, and used to be a major industrial center. Now it's just got a lot of culture and students.

We took a bus to Arras, a small town nearby. We went on a tour of these mines that soliders in WWI had used to hide from the Germans. It was interesting for about 10 minutes, but after that I was definitely over it. We were 20m underground, so it was pretty freezing too.

After the tour, we had free time in Arras, but only like an hour and a half. The town seemed pretty dead and quiet, but Anne, Maya, and I found a cute place for lunch. I erred on the side of caution with food though, because my stomach still felt like shit. It kind of ruined my whole day, actually.

After lunch, we toured a candy factory in Cambrai. They make the "Betises de Cambrai", a regional candy that's pretty famous. The name means mistake, and the story goes that some poor guy burned the sugar, but it turned out okay. Only 7 people work at the factory, which makes the original candies. They're like hard squares of mint, with a strip of caramel so the mint flavor isn't that strong. They expanded to other flavors, like strawberry and chocolate and stuff too. 

After tasting a lot of candies, we drove to the city center of Cambrai, where we had some more free time. It was definitely bigger than Arras, but still seemed pretty quiet. We saw some cool churches and other old buildings that looked important, and then sat down for a drink, because really, what else are you going to do?

Then we got back on the bus....this trip had a lot of driving. We drove to the Chateau where NYU was putting us up for the night. We were worried they were going to be cheap, but it actually was quite nice. After getting settled, we had a very, very rich dinner. That did not sit well with my stomach. After dinner, we went straight to bed. I tried to fall asleep, but couldn't for a while. The chateau was also scarily deserted at night.

There was also a creepy cat that kept following us around:

The next morning I felt 100 times better, thank god. After breakfast, we drove to the Ch'ti beer factory, a famous local beer. It was actually pretty interesting, and the beer we tasted was great. Although I don't know why they had weird wax figures throughout. I ended up buying some to take home. I'm pretty sure NYU did the tour at 10:30am on purpose though, so that we wouldn't get too drunk.

FINALLY we drove the Lille, the real destination of our trip. At this point it was like 12:30 on Saturday. The bus driver drove us around town for half an hour, awkwardly describing a bunch of historic buildings he didn't know anything about. Then he dropped and us in the town center for free time. Maya, Anne and I wandered around for a while, because we didn't know where to eat lunch. We finally decided on a cafe that was pretty busy, and it worked out quite well for us. I had a delicious tagliatelle with hot goat cheese, and for dessert a tarte tatin...mmmm...

We sat at lunch for a while because we were so cold and tired. At 4pm, we met up with NYU for a walking tour of Vieux Lille and EuraLille. Of course, our tour guide was half an hour late, so we sat outside freezing. She explained how Lille and been controlled by a number of countries, including Belgium, Borgogne, Spain, and France, which was why it's architecture was so weird. She walked us through the town, and then through these really cute old streets. We realized that's where we should have gone for lunch. They had so many cool bars, stores, and restaurants, we kept wanting to stop and go in them. At that point, we all wished that we had stayed overnight in Lille, had the tour before our free time, and had more free time to go to all these cool places. Ugh. But again, we were cold and tired, so we barely even cared anymore. We ran out of time too see EuraLille, but I was okay with that...didn't seem that interesting.

Then we went back to the train station to board our bullet train home. Except, it was the wrong TGV train station. Anne and Maya and I got separated from the group, but we were trying to find the train. We ask an information woman, and she tells us it's at the other station! They're only a 5 minute walk apart, but still. We dash over, while trying to call the NYU people to see if they know. No one answers/they're all wrong numbers, so we decided to just get on the right train, because we were so ready to go back to Paris. Who cares about the rest of the group. Turns out, they figured it out too, and got there 5 minutes after us. So ridiculous. At last, we arrived back in rainy, cold Paris.

Today I slept so much, and barely did anything but yoga. I was so tired from being sick and not sleeping and touring the Lille area. I'm looking forward to a normal week -- no major assignments, no trips, no weird scheduling. Just Cyrus and the rest of the NYU in London crew visiting on Thursday!