Discovering Amiens - Maison Jules Verne

Bucket List for the last days

Back to Amiens my last days were mainly reserved for my boyfriend. But as he had more and more work to do in order to finish his doctor thesis, he had to work for a large part of the day. Furthermore he wasn’t too interested in visiting the “tourist” things in Amiens – something which was still on my bucket list. So I met my other German friend for a coffee in the city centre in the afternoon when I got back from my friend in Moers and we planned a bit what we wanted to do until I would have to leave about one week later. I definitely wanted to go to the top of the large cathedral and have that amazing view, and maybe I wanted to visit the Maison Jules Verne – a famous author who was from Amiens. As she also wanted to do those two things we agreed to do them this week when she had finished her project for university. I was happy that I didn’t have to do those things all alone, and went back by bus to go to the grocery store. I didn’t have anything to eat at my room, and eating out in France was expensive (and lonely).

Boyfriend Time

After having bought the most important things, I got back to the student’s residency and relaxed a bit. Driving the car for 5 hours, getting to the city centre by bus, having a coffee, getting back, going to the supermarket – it had been quite an exhausting day and I was happy to have some hours to relax. I hoped that I would see my boyfriend in the evening, but as usual I didn’t know that already. So I just watched my series and didn’t expect anything (well, I more pretended to not expect anything, but at least that) – I couldn’t do anything anyway. A bit later, at about 9pm, he wrote me a message if I was hungry and wanted to come to pick him up from work. I know, it sounds a bit weird that I’m sitting there in my room, just waiting for him to ask me to pick him up from work, but that’s how it was, and I didn’t have a problem with it. I loved the evenings we were passing together, and recently he wanted to spend some weekends with me, too, so I really couldn’t complain. I knew that he had a lot to do around his thesis, so for me it was a sign of love when he would spend the night with me, in my much too small bed, where nobody of us would get enough sleep because there was not enough space for two people.

So I changed my clothes quickly and got to my car in order to get into the city centre and pick him up from work. He was working in an institute not far away from my economics faculty, but his place looked innovative, large and a bit like an UFO right next to the river, in the part of the city that was called “Saint-Leu”. Every time I went to pick him up I was much too excited regarding the fact that I already knew him for about 4 or 5 months now and that we were together for 2 months already. Well, “together” is maybe not the right word, because I still didn’t know exactly what relationship we had to each other. But for the moment it was good as it was and I definitely knew that I liked him a lot, and I hoped more than I knew that he liked me, too. So I went to his laboratory and as usual I had to wait for him to come. But when he was there, I was incredibly happy, worse than a 13 years old girl that is on love for the first time. We talked shortly about our day and then we discussed about what to eat. Sometimes when he asked me if I would come to pick him up from work I had already eaten, but I was afraid that he would eat alone and go home then. So I ate two times from time to time, but it wasn’t such a big issue as I was eating at about 5 or 6 while with him I ate at nine or ten usually. I was just too afraid that we would not have time together that I also stopped eating in the evening for most of the time, just because it was possible that he sent me a message at nine or ten and ask me if I wanted to eat with him.

It was the same thing with running – we were doing sports together sometimes, but I never knew when, so from time to time I just told him that it was boring, or that I really had to do sports, and hoped that he asked me to do sports together. I know, it sounds very strange, but in that moment it was exactly how I wanted to spend my time in France. So everything was allright for me and I was happy. The only thing that was distracting this happiness a bit was the fact that I would have to leave that place the next week already, and that I didn’t know how to continue without him and without the French lifestyle. Before my Erasmus semester, I would have never expected that I would fall in love with a place and with a person so quickly and that it would hurt so much to leave that place and return to Germany again. But it happened like that and I was happy about every single minute of my stay in that country that had already become my second home.

But back to topic – we bought a kebab for takeaway and went home to my student room to pass the evening there. Even if I had only been away for 3 days, I had missed my boyfriend a lot and I was really looking forward to spending that evening with him. As so often he had brought his English homework with him and asked me to help him (a friendly synonym for “please, can you do it? I don’t want to”). I really liked languages, and even more those small and (if you have started to learn English in 3rdgrade) very easy exercises, so I enjoyed helping him. After a while he always lost his patience and I finished them alone while he was watching something at his laptop. The evening passed by as almost all the other evenings we had already spent together – we were eating, I was doing his English homework and then we were watching TV or some movie where I hardly understood anything. After that we tried to sleep next to each other in that tiny bed. But I enjoyed being so close to him, even if I knew that I would wake up as tired as I had gone to bed the night before. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I was going to miss him and I tried to burn every second with him into my mind – I didn’t want to forget anything about the time with my boyfriend. Never ever.

The next day he had to work, so after ignoring his alarm a while, he got up, had a shower and I got ready to bring him back to the city centre. He didn’t like to take the bus and I didn’t have to do anything, so I didn’t mind. Before we arrived his apartment, we stopped at a bakery to have a short breakfast. That’s another thing I love so much about him: he never has a real plan, he says he has to work, but after 5 minutes he decides that he wants to have breakfast first and passes 30 minutes with eating croissants and pain au chocolat.

Daily Routine - Sleep, eat, meet, repeat.

When I finally returned to the student’s residency I went back to by bed to have at least some sleep. After a while – I couldn’t really sleep in fact, I got up to take a shower and started my laptop to see if there was anything new in Facebook or in my emails. I found some spam mails and a message from my German friend. She asked me if I had time that afternoon to go to the top of the Cathedral. I didn’t have to think a lot, I didn’t have to do anything, the weather was nice and there was not much time left to do the two things we still wanted to do. So we agreed on meeting in the city centre at 14:00. I prepared something to eat quickly – since I was here I was preparing the same things all the time. Mainly pizza and things I could do in my small oven because it was in my room and I didn’t have to go to the kitchen at the end of the floor. But when I didn’t want to have pizza it was pasta with Bolognese sauce or something very similar. I just didn’t want to cut vegetables in that kitchen, because it was always dirty and there was no space you could use without your hands getting sticky. Who wants to prepare his food there? So I just cooked pasta there and washed my dishes. Sometimes I even washed my dishes (small ones like mugs or glasses) in my tiny bathroom, but things like pots or pans didn’t fit into the basin, so I had to go to the kitchen several times.

Cathedral - First Try

When I had prepared my pasta, eaten it, and washed the dishes, it was almost time to go to the bus station, so I looked for some suitable clothes and left the residency. I didn’t take the car to get to the city centre, because parking in France is something almost impossible (or incredibly expensive), and also very dangerous for your car. The only two places I went by car was to my boyfriend, because there was always a free place in front of his residency, and the park where I went running from time to time – it was far away and I didn’t want to go there by bus. So I took the bus to the train station and went the rest of the way to the cathedral (about 15 minutes) by foot – I was always too early, and she was always a bit too late, so I wanted to compensate that a bit. When I arrived in front of that enormous building, I only had to wait about 5 more minutes until I saw my friend coming with her bike and stopping in front of me. She was living in the student’s residency in the north of Amiens and as there was no large hill, it was easier to take the bike than the bus on the long-term. We talked shortly about the last days, my stay in Germany and her projects for university, and went to the shop of the cathedral then. I asked, how we could get to the top of it and the lady told me that it was only possible four times a day, the next time tomorrow afternoon. We were disappointed because our plan had been destroyed after only five minutes, so we decided to go to our favourite café and have a crêpe and a hot chocolate. Rule number 1 (or maybe 2) in France: when you’re sad, chocolate always helps. That’s why the bakeries and cafés there are so important and successful.; -)

Plan B - Maison Jules Verne

During our stay in the café we thought about another plan for the afternoon and had the idea to go to the house of Jules Verne. That was the second thing we wanted to do before I left, and when the cathedral wasn’t possible, we could do this. The only problem about that idea was that the Maison Jules Verne was quite far away from the cathedral by foot. But there wasn’t a suitable bus neither, so we walked the 20 minutes to that place. It was right next to the large Cirque de Jules Verne – a beautiful building with a real circus inside. There were acrobatic shows and everything and the one time I had been there I had just loved it. So we arrived at the house which was a kind of museum, but we saw that it would already close in about one hour. As students under 25 we didn’t have to pay entrance fortunately (8 euros for one hour would have been way too much), and the guard told us to hurry up a bit as they were closing soon. That was something completely impossible – the house/museum had four floors and we didn’t even know which was the most important place. So we started in the ground floor, looked at all the furniture, decoration and pictures in the renovated rooms and were simply fascinated. It really seemed like somebody had been living here until two weeks ago but at the same time it was kind of another world.

There were many original items that you were not allowed to touch, and we found 1000 signs telling us that. After the living room in the ground floor we rushed upstairs to see the bedroom. In the first floor some rooms were closed, so we could just look through the door. That wasn’t too bad, because we would never have had time to walk through all the rooms. We continued until the third and the fourth floor and still had about 20 minutes until we would have to leave the museum again. The style was almost the same in each room, there were just small differences we could discover. In the fourth floor we found a room that was built with example of one of Jules Verne’s famous books – in 80 days around the world. It was beautiful, even if I was sure that it had been added artificially. 10 minutes before the museum closed we finally went down the stairs again and stayed in the little shop for 5 more minutes. My friend bought a beautiful version of a collection of different histories written by Jules Verne. As everything was so expensive I decided not to buy anything. I had already bought many French books and except the Little Prince I hadn’t read anything yet.

Helping an Old Lady

We left the museum (and I could swear that the guard seemed quite released when he finally could close the door) and went back in direction of the train station, because I would take a bus there to get home, and she had to go into this direction anyway because she had left her bike next to the cathedral. While we went there we saw an old lady passing by very slowly with two shopping bags from the grocery store in her hands. She seemed to be quite weak and had to make breaks all 10 metres. My friend went to her and asked her if she could help her and where she was living. She explained that she was living about 10 minutes in the direction where we just came from, and for her that seemed to be a trip around the world. So we decided to help her, grabbed her bags and accompanied her to her house. It took a while because she could only walk very slowly, but finally we arrived and she was more than thankful for our help. Satisfied, because we had helped someone this day, we started our way to the train station again and talked about the problem of missing supermarkets in some parts of Amiens. When we arrived at the Gare de Amiens we agreed that we would meet the next day at the cathedral again and try to get on the top of it a second time. I was happy that I had someone to pass my free time with, because without the university it began to become a bit boring during the days.

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