One of the best things about Erasmus has to be the excuse it gives you to flit around Europe visiting friends who've also been posted out, evacuee-style to random universties scattered over the continent. Until now I've stuck to within-Italy visits to catch up with fellow Edinburghers, though last week we made a break for the border and hopped over to la belle France for a long weekend. Our destination was Tours, a university city in the Loire valley which I'm sure will be familiar to many of you. The Italy Contingent (myself and Gemma, another Edinburgh erasmuse-ette studying in Verona) were heading over to meet three friends from home who all, by happy coincidence had ended up together at Tours. After spending hours interrogating surly moustachioed men at the train station I thought I'd found a good deal on a eurostar from Milan-Paris, costing us a mere 100euro return. Great, I thought. Bargain! That was until Gemma called and told me that she'd found flights from Milan-Paris for 20euro return, including taxes! Fantastic! We booked straight away, and spent the next week hopping excitedly around our respective cities and measuring out liquids into handy wee bottles and trying to hunt down some freezer bags so we could smuggle our make-up stashes onto French soil. There turned out to be only two drawbacks - 1) Our flights were at obscene times and 2) Both "Milan" and "Paris" airports turned out to be nowhere near said cities, so this incorporated much more travel times/costs than we'd anticipated. Regardless, we were in high spirits when we met at midnight on Thursday at Bergamo airport, armed with a massive picnic each, ready to camp out at check in until our gate opened at 5am. The airport sleep-over was...erm...interesting. Bizarrely departures was full of not only tired travellers but also a busload of local tramps who seem to hitch a free ride to the terminal every night, sleep at check in and then disappear back off into the city to mill around the train station at daybreak. I must say it seemed a quite an ingenious plan, although we didn't appreciate the cloud of flies they brought with them :s Somehow we got through the night, slept on the plane and found ourselves safe and sound (despite the standard bouncy Ryanair landing)at Paris Beauvais airport at the ridiculously early hour of 8am. Ok, I know I ramble at the best of times but I have to digress a second as I have an issue with this - Beauvais airport is 2 HOURS AWAY FROM PARIS...THUS HOW CAN IT BE CALLED "PARIS BEAUVAIS"?!?! Maybe there is some blatantly obvious reason which I'm missing, but seriously!! We do not, for example call Bristol airport "London airport", merely because it is 2 hours away. Ok, maybe that isn't the best example but you get my drift! Hrumph. Anywho, it was simple enough to get the coach from "Paris" Beauvais to Paris itself,so I suppose we can't complain...especially at 20euro return for flights! By 10am we were wandering down the Champs d'Elysee, obscenely tired but still very excited to be in gay Pareee. After a quick coffee stop we navigated the metro and I took Gemma on a whistle-stop city of a few of the main sights (Arc de Triomphe, Louvre, Notre Dame, Left Bank, a wander along the Seine) before we headed to Gare Austerlitz and somehow, despite, rather than thanks to, our mangled French, managed to procure two tickets to Tours. We eventually got to Tours in the afternoon, and were promptly met at the station by the girls and whisked off to the nearest pub to recuperate, in true student fashion. We had a nice chilled evening - a good catch up over a pub dinner and lots of Monacos, then a dvd night back at the girls' halls. Amazingly we managed to stay awake until midnight, at which point we realised we'd been awake for about 36 hours non stop, and immediately collapsed.
On Saturday a wee group of us headed out of Tours and to a wee nearby town, Azay le Rideau, to see the chateau there. Azay was lovely, once we eventually found it. The train station is handily located about half an hour outside of town, and the walk over isn't exactly picturesque...when we did eventually find the town though we had a lovely afternoon being very cultured and touristy skipping around the very pretty chateau...
That evening we headed back to Tours (after having been harrassed by a scary mentalist at the train station) and got ready for our night out. As at home, this involved copious pre-drinking at halls, then at midnight we all piled onto the bus and made our way into town where we met the girls' new Erasmus friends. Thankfully for Gemma and I most of these friends were italians so we didn't have to inflict our truly awful french on them. After a wee bar crawl, far too many Monacos and the obligatory chip-shop refuelling stop (classy, ain't we 
) we found ourselves in a v.entertaining bar called Cafe Chaud, whose downstairs downstairs dancefloor area was designed to look like a metro platform. Genius. And yes, in true girly style we just dumped our bags and coats on the floor in a heap and danced around them like mentalists. Fun times.
Sunday was very much a chill-out day. We headed into town for lunch, had a huuuuge meal and then meandered around, went to the Cathedral etc and attempted to be tourists...but soon the freezing cold got so much so we retreated back to halls where we (I'm ashamed to admit this) watched High School Musical :s Three of us had never seen it before so it was quite an initation, I'd never appreciated quite how overwhelming the whole thing is. Still, definately a good way to spend a sunday evening!
Monday was our last full day in France, so after yet another brilliantly huge lunch (even coming from Italy it seems the French could out-do us in their obsession with food) Gemma and I hopped on the TGV and were soon back in Paris. We'd booked into a hostel not far from the Eiffel Tower so headed there, dumped our stuff and were back on the metro heading for the Trocadero in a flash. This was yet another whistle-stop tour of the city, but this time we did "Paris-by-night" (must be read in a dodgy French accent) which was muchos fun. Even though I'd been to Paris relatively recently I did still turn into a proper tourist and squeal excitedly when the Eiffel Tower flashed by the metro window as we arrived at the Trocadero. At the moment it's trussed up with a huge EU flag and glows blue which is quite pretty, if slightly bizarre. As always we were ridiculously touristy and took far too many photos...
After another wander along the Seine we found ourselve at the Place de la Concorde which has a huge Christmas ferris wheel (sadly not open yet though), and then we made our way back up towards the Champs d'Elysee, absolutely starving by this point. Luckily we found a wee bistrot down a side street and had a very French dinner of steak (barely dead, of course!) and chips, followed by Tarte Tatin and all washed down with lots of vin rouge. As we had yet another ridiculously early flight the next morning we were somewhat at a loss of what to do after food, as we didn't fancy hitting the bars/clubs, but neither did we want to head back to the hostel...we pondered as we wandered up towards the Arc de Triomphe when completely randomly, we decided to go to the cinema. And what did we go see, I hear you cry? Yes, Mamma Mia in French. I know, we are just so cultured. I have to say though, it was hilarious. The cinema was practically empty, we counted 15 other people in the whole place - us,2 other girls and the rest were all gay couples in their 50s. We all sang and danced along and generally had a brilliant time 
In the end we failed to get any sleep at all, having spent all night chatting to randomers at the bar in the hostel, and eventually boarded the bus back to Beauvais at 5am feeling like death. Touching down in Italy was such a relief, cause even though we'd had a fantastic weekend we were so aware that we were getting closer and closer to our beds and being able to sleep again! On the way home I stopped off in Milan to meet some friends, and eventually made it back to Bologna at about 6pm, having almost fallen asleep on the train and missed my stop! Suffice to say the next few days were a bit of a wash out but it was such a fantastic weekend I didn't care...now we're just gearing up for the next weekend away, though I think I've learned my lesson and may stock up on ProPlus beforehand!
Au revoir 
