France Day 1 - Auxerre

We arrived at the small town of Auxerre just in time to have lunch at a restaurant in the town square. Since it was Sunday, most stores in the town were closed for Sabbath, but a few restaurants were open and filled with locals. The one we went to was really nicely decorated, with coloured Plexiglas panels everywhere to make the interior quite vibrant. We had some pizza, salad and soup that tasted lovely, and our waiter did try really hard with his English.

Salad with some kind of meatstuff

coffeee

"Soup of the Season"...looked like green
mush but tasted good.

Thin crust pizza with meat and an egg

cute little European cars...

After lunch we took a walk through the old city to have a look around. A bunch of little kids passed by us, gawking at the rare Asian specimens. There were some whimsical little statues here and there, engraved with lines from poems, and then a huge sundial/clock mounted on an archway in the middle of town.

We stopped in a local cathedral called St. Etienne, pushing open a small but heavy wooden door and stepping into the musty silence. There were two other tourists wandering around in there, but the rest of it was a suffocating sort of emptiness in which I could hear my footsteps echoing. I even managed to creep into this old, dark crypt thing with a sarcophagus and an inscription on the wall putting the year of death in the 1400s. It was honestly the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen in any of the old churches I’ve visited, because it was a dark little niche I had to stoop to get into and there were remnants of old candle wax dripped everywhere with dead leaves and petals on the ground.

We emerged from there and went back down to the riverside where our car was parked. There was a delicately narrow little bridge from which we were able to take some pictures of the “skyline” of the city. After that, we started our drive to Dijon and I fell asleep immediately once I was back in the car.