Ten months in Tours: Chenonceau

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, I didn't do anything very exciting last week and quite a lot of last week was taken up with stressing/catching up on sleep before and after my first presentation of the year. Luckily Lucy and I were allowed to work together which meant we only had to speak for about 10 minutes each (in my contemporary history class it'll be 20-25 minutes by myself!). We met up and worked out a plan and it was all going quite well until we emailed it to our lecturer to ask his opinion, only for him to reply basically telling us to change all of it. So that added extra stress, on top of our nerves about having to speak for 20 minutes in front of all these native speakers.

It's difficult to tell how it went, I stumbled over my words a bit but I think he liked our revised plan, and I was mainly just glad it was over. French lecturers give instant feedback in front of the whole class, which is completely alien to British students, particularly as they are often very harsh with their criticism of people's work. However luckily he went easy on us and wasn't too mean. So overall it was a hideous experience, but I guess also a successful one, as we learnt about french presentation structure, managed not to humiliate ourselves, and I noticed some people taking notes while we were talking so we obviously made some sense.

On Sunday my marraine Pauline invited me and Rhianna to go to Chenonceau with her roommate and her friend. It was absolutely beautiful and perfect weather for it! The castle is very striking, it cuts across the River Cher and has enormous and very well maintained gardens. The castle has an interesting history, it was largely built up and expanded by various influential women, including Diane de Poitiers who was renowned for her beauty but also made a lot of significant architectural changes and increased the yield to three times more than it had been before. During the first world war a military hospital was set up at the castle and in the second world war the castle grounds were used to smuggle people across the demarcation line.

After we looked around the castle we had lunch in the gardens and then looked around the horticultural section of the gardens where they were growing all sorts! Because it was a Sunday there weren't any trains back until a bit later so we went for a wander around Chenonceau itself, which is tiny but very picturesque and idyllic. It was a lovely day and it was nice to speak some french in a more relaxed setting.