À la plage de Pornic

Oh, Mondays.  I have an entire 4 more days of classes until it's the weekend again.  BUT, at least I have this coming weekend to look forward to! 

This past Saturday, I took my first trip outside of Nantes!  Nick, John, and I headed to the costal town of Pornic which is located on the Atlantic about 1 hour from Nantes by bus.  Bright and early Saturday morning, we headed to centreville to catch the bus at 9:30.  Unfortunately, right as we arrived at the bus stop (10 minutes early), the bus was already full and pulling out of the station.  There was a huge crowd of people that got left behind.  We knew at this point that getting on the next bus at 11:45 would not be easy.  After riding around on the tram for about an hour,  we returned to the bus and started making our game plan. haha.  Basically, the only shot we had was if the bus stopped right in front of us.  The crowd was full of mostly college aged folks, but there were also quite a few French families with all their beach gear in tow. 

So, 11:45 finally came around, and we could already tell that there was absolutely no way that all these people waiting were going to be able to get on this bus.  To our surprise, TWO buses actually pulled up, but it still wasn't near enough.  The first bus stopped directly in front of us, and the madness began.  People were pushing, shoving, and doing whatever they could to get on that bus.  I literally could not move an inch.  Even though I was one of the closest people to the bus when it arrived, I was probably the 15th person on the bus.  Nick and John successfully got on the bus also, but we didn't think John was going to make it.   He was one of the last few to get on.

Boats stranded during low tide!

The bus ride was just about an hour, and then we were at the beach!  It was an absolutely gorgeous day...  80 and sunny!  There wasn't a cloud in the sky.  It was such a great feeling to be out of Nantes if only for the day.  Don't get me wrong, I like this city, but I get restless when I'm in the same place for so long.  The city of Pornic is really very cute.  It's a port city, so there were boats all over the place....The funny thing is that when we arrived, the tide was so low that the boats all looked as though they had been stranded in the sand! 

I love this picture of two little boys.  They were running up and down this walkway and were super adorable.

Moules!

 We actually ran into a few ERASMUS (exchange students from within the European Union) who watched our stuff for us while we went to explore!  Since it was such a low tide, there was so much to see!  There were starfish all over the place and lots of coral and algae.  Everything was so green and beautiful!  There were also quite a few mussel beds.  We saw quite a few restaurants serving "moules frites" which was basically a plate of mussels with a side of fries.  Verrrry popular in this part of France, apparently. 

We actually spent about two hours climbing all over the rocks and coral and looking at all the marine life.  Nick, one of my traveling buddies, is a marine biology major, so John and I asked him a lot of "What is this?" type questions. haha. 

After exploring, it was time to actually get in the water!  It was FREEZING!  That was my reminder that it actually is October. I stayed in until my legs were numb and then went to bask in the sun.  Overall, a pretty normal day at the beach.  :) 

The voyage back is where things got interesting.  The bus back to Nantes left at 5:10pm, so we made sure that we were back at the bus stop by that time.  Remember how I said that there were 3 bus fulls of people to get to Pornic that morning?  Welllll, somehow the bus company thought it would be ok to just send have two buses pick all these people up.  Unfortunately, we were in the group of about 25 people that didn't make it on a bus.  We fought valiantly, but just didn't make it in the end. haha.  One of our ERASMUS friends, Alexis from Finland, was also unlucky.  All his other friends, however, got on the bus, so he joined our group for the rest of the day.

Le train

So, Plan B.... We knew that there was a train at 6:45, so we walked to the other side of town where the train station is located and bought our tickets for 7€.  We found it a little bit strange that we were not assigned seats, but thought little of it until we saw the train.  It was TINY!   The train ride was an hour long, and completely cramped.  I found a seat by the doors, but the guys in the group were standing the entire way.  There was no room to move at all, and we were all a little bit irritated with French transportation by this point. BUT, we made it back, and that's all that matters.  We learned quite a bit for our next attempt at conquering the bus system.  :)



Thankfully, we made it back to our dorms by around 9pm, and I still had time to go to the kebob restaurant to skype with ma famille.  Andrew was home for fall break, so he was there too.  I don't know how people ever survived without the internet.  Skype is just too amazing.


 Well, here's some photos of my day at the beach!  I hope you've enjoyed reading my blog...Shout out to mom's French class. haha.  À la prochain!

The boats after the tide began to come in. 

Pornic

Traveling buddies, John & Nick

Starfish!