It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Passage Pommeraye all dec'd out in Christmas decor

This past weekend, Nantes fully lived up to its rainy reputation.  Apparently, we've been lucky up to this point in having sunny days through most of November.   Oh well... the rain didn't stop us from exploring the Christmas market and going out to see all the lit up decorations in centreville on Saturday.

 Our first stop was the Passage Pommeraye, the first mall in Nantes, which was completely decorated with lights, trees, and tons of beautiful window displays.  There, we found a cute little sweets shop where there were tons of chocolate Santas and also a Christmas tree made of Macarons.

Macaron tree!

The marché de noël in Nantes began on December 3rd, and remains open up until Christmas.  There are all kinds of chocolates, cheeses, wines, and artisan type goods for sale.  It was fun to just walk around and look at all the stuff there is to buy. I'm sure I'll be back several times before I leave Nantes in just over a week!  

The Place Royale...where part of the marché is.

Fromages!

Vin chaud

Just an example of the street decorations throughout centreville

 This is completely unrelated to the Christmas season, but we also found Nantes version of the Occupy Wall St. movement ...It's basically a silent protest of the high unemployment rate.

Nantes' version of Occupy Wall St.

Sunday, we went to church at the Bossière as usual.  Every single time I go, I'm reminded of how many incredible people I've met here, and how much I'm going to miss them when I go back home.  At least I'll still be able to communicate via facebook and hopefully not lose touch.

After church, Andrew and Heather invited John, Nick, and I over for lunch chez eux.  As always, Heather fixed an amazing meal, and it was great to have real home cooked food.  I get way more excited about eating warm, cooked vegetables than is probably normal.  haha.   Our next stop was to the Jules Verne museum. In case you're not familiar with him, Jules Verne was the author who wrote 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Around the World in 80 days, and Journey to the Center of the Earth.  AND, he was born and raised in Nantes!  Unfortunately, I was not too entirely impressed by the museum as a whole, and I think they could have done so much more with it.  All the same, I'm glad I went, as Jules Verne is probably the most famous Nantais.

Our last stop of the day was kind of impromptu...we left the museum at around 5:30, and we knew the mass at the Basilique Saint-Nicolas started at 6pm.  Since we'd never been to a mass service, we decided to go just to see what it was like.  It was a pretty cool feeling to be in the huge Basilique with the amazing acoustics...it was also decorated for Christmas. :)

Classes are officially finished!   Now, all I have standing between me and my Munich/ Paris excursion with Brook are these pesky exams.  Ah well... it will all be over on Friday!  I hope that all my UT friends aren't suffering too terribly during exam week.  I'm quite content not having to deal with that stress this year.

By the way, my mom made sure to Skype me tonight to make sure I would blog so that she could include it in her lesson plan for tomorrow. haha.  Silly mother.

À la prochaine!