Eurotrip #1: Nantes (France)

Hi everyone!

Today I'm starting the second section of my blog, titled "Eurotrip", where I will be telling you all about my travels during my Erasmus year and giving advice and opinions on the cities that I am visiting. For this, I am going to start with the trips I did during the month of November, the one month of my life where I have travelled the most. Out of 30 days, I spent 17 of them travelling.

The first of these travels was a "road trip" for a week to France, where I visited Nantes, Chartres and Paris with 2 Italians, a Polish girl and a Brazilian girl as my travel companions. You're probably wondering why we chose Nantes seeing as it's not really a very well known tourist destination, especially when you have to get there by travelling 1160 km in a car.

It's because the 5 of us are studying architecture at Hochschule Bremen as Erasmus students and we are completing an assignment about town planning where we have to make drawings and urban plans of an area in the city of Nantes. The assignment included a visit to the "École Nationale Supérieure d'Architechture de Nantes", with participation in a workshop (including some studio work, debates, presentations, talks, studies and site visits on the same subject) which lasted 5 days with architecture students from Antwerp (Belgium). As we were in Germany, a country whose educative system has one over on the Spanish system as far as what's economic, Hochschule gave us some financial aid (180€) to go on the trip.

So with this, and paying attention to our German classmates, we decided to rent a car and we crossed over half of Europe because the flight and bus connections between Bremen and Nantes weren't very good and were kind of expensive. However, enduring a 2300 km journey in a car, we decided to spend a weekend in Paris on our way back. The company with whom we rented the car is called Enterprise Rent-A-Car and they have a HQ in Bremen airport. The car was a Seat León in very good condition, with sat nav on board which saved our lives so many times. The rent for 7 days cost us 75€ each, taking into account that the driver was older than 25 (which made it cheaper) and that we were taking the car out of Germany (which made it more expensive).

Despite the experience of travelling in a car being good (the laughing fits due to us being lost in the most hidden French roads, the international mix of music and enjoying the landscapes of 4 different countries... ) it wasn't at all the cheapest option as we had first thought, due to the expensive French toll booths, the cost of petrol and the need to find somewhere to park, which made the amount we were spending shoot right up.

With Nantes as our destination and Ska-P as our soundtrack (it's strange that this Spanish group is famous in Italy), we started our journey on Sunday 1st November at 6:30 in the morning. 3 borders, various service stations and lots of songs later, we arrived in Nantes at 9pm, wanting to get to the apartment that our German classmates had rented out. The problem was that when the Germans told us that they had found cheap apartments which were close to the university, we trusted the supposed German efficiency and told them to count us in for the accommodation without even checking where we were going.

Some advice, never trust the German efficiency. The apartments were on the outskirts of Nantes, an area which didn't even reach the standards of a residential neighbourhood, without street lights and without public transport to the city centre or the university (lucky for us we had a car). Although the apartment wasn't bad, we soon found out that the WiFi that we were supposed to have was non-existent and that the Germans had decided to put only us 5 Erasmus students in this apartment. As I said, never trust the Germans. It's not that they didn't like us or like they had a problem with us, it's just that in their heads, it was the most logical thing to do, without the southern friendly touch that we have in the Mediterranean.

The fact is that it was probably the worst option of accommodation in the city and we had to spend 5 nights there. Great. If you ever visit Nantes, the Belgian students with whom we were working on the workshop, recommended the place where they were staying - the Aparthotel Adaigo Nantes Centre which is just in the city centre. It turns out that they were paying the same amount that we were (100€ for 5 nights).

Once the accommodation and transport was resolved, we found ourselves in a medium sized French city that none of us had heard anything about before. I have to say that my expectations were fairly low, because I thought that it would be a simple city without much to show. Nevertheless, the city surprised me a lot, ending up being a beautiful and nice city to live in, with a big cultural, artistic and student atmosphere. The school of architecture is totally incredible (if the Lacaton&Vassal project interests anyone, you can have a look at it here) and the workshop which we were taking part in was so enriching due to the exchange of ideas and ways of understanding city planning with people from so many different nationalities in the same place was a good starting point for the project that we were completing during the semester.

Despite spending 5 days in Nantes, we were actually working for the majority of the time on the workshop, so we couldn't really get to know the city. Nevertheless, one of the days that we were there, we rented some bicycles and went around the historical centre. To everyone that is visiting Nantes, I totally recommend renting bicycles with the public bike rental company Bicloo. For only 1€ a day you can take a bike to any of the many places that there are in the old part of the city, which you can really enjoy from a bicycle. The only bad thing is that you only have 30 free minutes on the bike, each additional half hour that you're using the bike will cost you another 50 cents. So, if you use the bike for an hour and 20 minutes and then return it, you will be spending another euro which will be taken out of your bank account. However, this isn't really a problem since it's as easy to avoid as it is to leave the bike at any of the bike stations before the first half hour is up and then coming back to get the bike again.

Bike in hand, we went off to see what Nantes had in store for us. I recommend going to one of the tourism offices and asking for a map of "Le voyage à Nantes", and then following the green line which runs through the city (on the map and in real life) which will take you to the main points of interest. I also recommend finding a map called Use-It Nantes; A map for young travellers, which is a project made by young artists in the city, in which they tell you what it's like to live in this city from the point of view of a young visitor (at the same time as recommending the best restaurants, telling you where you should go to find a cheap pint, where to go dancing until sunrise or the best bars with WiFi in the city). This project also exists in other cities all over Europe, so I would recommend checking if any of the cities that you're planning on visiting take part in this project.

Once we had all the information we needed, we started to follow the green line to the Château des Ducs de Bretagne (the castle of British Dukes), an enormous medieval castle with Renaissance buildings on its inside. You're able to go in for free and follow a walk that goes all around the perimeter of the castle from the top of the wall. From there, we continued on the green line going through the train station until we got to the Jardin des Plantes, a beautiful park full of strange and artistic sculptures and installations.

After that, we went to the Église Saint-Clément and to the Cathédrale Saint Pierre et Saint Paul, 2 good examples of French Gothic churches. I really liked the cathedral because, despite it not being the best cathedral I have ever seen, it seemed to me like there was something special in its simplicity. It could be because it was a sunny day and the light was entering the cathedral in a beautiful way, illuminating the walls in a warm light.

From there we went right into the Old Town, going up to a kind of hill where the Tour Bretagne is found, a huge skyscraper that stands out like a sore thumb in the middle of the city, totally isolated from other similarly sized buildings and without binging anything special to the sight of the city, in fact, it did the opposite. The morphology of this area of the city caught my attention because the streets where organised into two levels; crossing the ones that were going in one direction on top of the ones that ran perpendicular to the bridges.

The following and last stop on our route was the area of the Place Royale, the Passage Pommeraye and the Opéra Graslin, a combination of pedestrian streets filled with shops, covered galleries and huge squares full of people giving off the air that the city was full of street-life, some that I personally love.

Although we could have continued on our bikes, seeing as we had the day ahead, but we had to return to the university to carry on with our work. On the street from the school, we crossed the Loire to the Île de Nantes and we passed the Palais de Justice, an impressive and modern courthouse that has a massive entrance opposite the Loire. The school of architecture is found a dew metres from here, also on the banks of the Loire. All of this section of the Île de Nantes is called the Quartier de la Création and is part of the Urban Project which is modernising the island. It's full of new buildings, housing a number of artistic and cultural spaces, as well as companies and institutions related to the cultural sector, being the epicentre of the avant-garde movement in the city. A good example of this is the theatre company, Les Machines de L'Île, installation; an itinerant show, but based in Nantes, which works with giant mobile sculptures of animals. We could only see the installations at night, but during the day, I have been told that going to see them is worth it.

As for the nightlife, we found the fact that we were so far from the city centre a bit of a problem and the fact that we had to get there and come back in the car and try to find parking. One of the nights, we attended a dinner with the rest of the students and professors from the workshop in the restaurant, Le Lieu Unique, an enormous complex installed in an old biscuit factory that now hosts concert halls and artistic exhibitions. Although the place was really cool, it was very expensive, something that didn't seem to bother anyone else other than us, since our mentality of being an Erasmus student is to save money and our budget didn't really fit the costs of the dishes as the cheapest one was 13€. In the end, we felt obliged to stay there as we didn't want to seem rude by leaving the official workshop dinner, and we had to reluctantly order the cheapest dish, whilst the others didn't stop ordering French dishes and bottles of wine. Once that bad experience was over, we went to Rue Beauregard, a street in the city centre with bars filled with students. Despite the atmosphere being fairly good, the prices were so expensive (5€ for a pint of beer), so the night didn't really last long and we went straight back home.

Despite the bad taste in our mouths thanks to our "Erasmus poverty", we decided to go out the following night. We went to a bar close to the school of architecture, which was called Le Louis Blanc (Rue Louis Blanc, 2), where, on Thursdays, they were selling pints of beer for 3. 50€, which, in the eyes of a Murcian like me, is still pretty expensive, but it seems to be a bargain in Nantes. Thanks to the bar being full of students and us having a good time, we finally had a good memory of the nightlife in Nantes.

Finally, on the Friday, we had the exhibition of all the projects that people had been working on in the workshop, after which, we took the car and went on our way to Paris where we spent the weekend before getting back to Bremen, but I will tell you about my time in Paris in another post later on. Also, I'll leave this here for you - it's the Flickr of Ida Giulia Presta and there you can see more photos of my Italian travel companion that were taken on our trip.

My conclusion of our days in Nantes is that it's a very nice city, ideal for students (minus the prices) and it's full of things to do. The truth is that sometimes it's better to have low expectations before travelling, so then you end up enjoying the good things about the trip a lot more.

I hope that you have found my experience in Nantes interesting (and that it hasn't bored you too much).

Until next time!

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