Our First Crazy Field Trip: Metz, Nancy, and Reims

Centre Pompidou de Metz

This weekend marked the first time that our entire group would be taking an arranged field trip together.  We saw many sights, took tons of notes, and spent a lot of time running around in the rain -- but overall it was a very fun experience.  On Thursday morning everyone got up early to meet at the coach bus, and I mean everyone: all 48 students, the program director, a studio professor, our physics professor, and our history professor all tagged along too.  After about 5 hours of driving we arrived in Metz, which is straight east of Paris, near the German border.  We dove right into the town's architecture by visiting the Centre Pompidou Metz, a brand new museum of modern art.  We sketched the exterior for a while, which is pretty weird but pretty cool, and saw lots of cool artwork and architectural models inside.

Then we headed over to St. Pierre-aux-Nonnains, which is a really old Gallo-Roman church from the 4th century that somehow survived all of Europe's history.  Tricia (our history teacher) told us a lot of good info and we had a lot of time to sketch the area.  It was during those long hours of sketching that I felt like I really started to get to know the people on the program with me.

The time came for us to drive over to the hostel (it was called the Centre Carrefour) where we dropped off our stuff in separate rooms and got some dinner.  I was surprised at how not disgusting the place was, and dinner wasn't even that bad.  We were free after that, so everyone tried to decide what to do for the night.  A couple kids tried convincing our young physics professor to come party with everyone, but he probably felt like he couldn't (poor guy).  Almost everyone headed out at the same time in search of something to do in that tiny town.

Un kir au vin blanc avec mirabelle

We ran across a couple of Irish pubs that seemed popular amongst local kids, so some of us went into one.  I tried a kir au vin blanc (a white wine kir) with mirabelle flavoring (mirabelle is the famous local fruit), which was okay until I realized it tasted like whiskey.  Then we heard about a karaoke bar where one of our friends was going to sing, so everyone went there and basically stormed the place.  In between the really lame French songs being sung by the locals, we all belted out some awesome Lady Gaga and Britney Spears hits.  The bartenders either loved us for bringing them so many customers, or they were just astounded by how much we livened the place up -- but either way, they were all surprisingly friendly towards us.  (That would never happen in Paris!)

The Art Nouveau style

After the karaoke bar, we all ended up migrating over to a really weird discothèque.  It was ridiculous: absolutely no one was there, so for an hour there were 40 Americans dancing around to bad techno music.  I walked home with my friend Christina and fell asleep easily.  The next day we had a tiny breakfast and drove to Nancy, a town about an hour south of Metz.  I can't remember if it was during this drive or the day before, but our program director Alejandro made us watch this bizarre and funny movie called "The Belly of an Architect."  (What??)  Anyway, Nancy turned out to be much prettier than Metz.  It had a lot of Art Nouveau architecture, which I love for how fluid and natural it looks.  We toured the Musée de l'École de Nancy, a house filled with nothing but nature-inspired curvaceous furniture -- beautiful!  (No pictures allowed, sadly, but I did some sketches.)

My sketches of Art Nouveau furniture from the Musée de l'École de Nancy

I had lunch with Jackie, Kelsey K, and Beth at this really adorable restaurant owned by cute old French ladies.  We got several tarts (including quiche lorraine, which comes from this area), a salad, a dessert, and coffee for only 10€!  After a tour of the Musée des Beaux-Arts Nancy, we walked around and sketched some more until it started raining again.  We drove back to Metz that night and some of us ate a nice Italian dinner in a vaulted, really old restaurant.

That night was more relaxed and we mainly hung out at the hostel.  The next day we visited a beautiful medieval fortress in Metz and St. Étienne de Metz (St. Stephen's), which is one of the tallest cathedrals in France.  It was really influential during the Romanesque era when it got an Ottonian makeover.  The inside was beautiful and contained some awesome stained glass windows done by Marc Chagall.  It was freezing, so after sketching we sprinted back to the bus and drove westwards towards Reims.  Anyone who has ever taken a class in architectural history would've been excited for this last leg of our trip: Reims Cathedral, one of the great icons of Gothic architecture, dominates over the town.  It had been the tallest cathedral in Europe for some time in the 13th century (the interior ceiling reaches 125 feet high), and it was also the location where French kings were crowned.  Sadly, bombs from World War I destroyed a lot of it, especially the stained glass windows (which is why Marc Chagall also created some modern windows for it).

Since Reims is in the province of Champagne, a lot of people bought some wine to bring home.  I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" for the first time on the bus ride home, which was interesting, to say the least. Overall, even though the weekend was jam-packed with lots of traveling and lots of information to absorb, I found it very fun and refreshing.  Besides, I felt like I got to know everyone a little better -- I mean, if you're stuck in a bus or a hostel with 47 of your classmates and 4 of your teachers, you're bound to bond with each other!