Le Chye

Saturday, October 14, 2006

trek a little trek

I was in Fontainebleau today with Yeejia and five other friends from NUS. So much for wanting to tune into my super-focus-study mode.

Fontainebleau is a little town 40 min train ride from central Paris. In my opinion, there are only 2 things interesting to see at Fontainebleau - the chateau and its forest. However, the chateau was pretty much a let down because once you've seen Versailles, every other castle in France becomes just another castle. The only up point abt the castle is that it boasts of the only Throne Room that remains furnished in France. Nothing big about that, but just for photo-sake, here's a picture of the Throne Room.















I didn't quite figure out what is the purpose of a Throne Room. I suppose it houses the chair where the King used to rest his butt to address his ka kias, that's all.

After the castle visit, we splitted ways. Wang Rui, Yangyang and Xiaowei went to book for their hostels as they were staying over in Fontainebleau while Yeejia, Zhenyuan, Yuying and I went to explore the forest, which is, according to the official site of Fontainebleau, the 3rd most visited site in France after Notre Damn and Disneyland. Whoever came up with that had probably forgotten about the existance of the Eiffel.

Anyway, Fontainebleau is renowned because it is a small town surrounded by a big forest and what 4 of us explored today on foot was probably even less than 1% of the total area of its forest.

We did trekking and it was good. It reminded me very much of Dalat and for the rest, it was either like Ubin, Ophir or Bukit Timah Hill. One thing we all agreed on was that the weather was perfect. A sunny 18 degrees, which is equivalent to the temperature in an airconditioned sun-shining through room in Singapore. It is my kind of weather and I was hoping that the earth stops rotating at that moment and temperature stays like that in France forever.

In the forest, we encountered a group of young dutchies doing rock-climbing.























































And we were inspired enough that we decided to do some monkey business too. That's Zhenyuan on the rock...













And then all four of us climbed on.














We concluded our trek with a petite picnic of baguette and cheese, beer and chocolate at the summit of Mont Aigu, or at least, it was what we thought to be the summit. While we sat there enjoying the panaromic view of Fontainebleau, I was thinking it would be nice if someone would magically turn up so that we can ask him to take a photo for us. One ang moh did turned up. Because all ang mohs in France are perceived to be French by me, I told the rest, when the guy was probably not more than 5 metres away from us, in English that 'he was God-sent to take photo for us'. Turned out that the ang moh was a New Zealander whose french was probably as jia lat as ours, and who understands english as good as any english.

In any case - regardless whether he heard I said that he was God sent or not - he snapped the summit photo for us.














I left Fontainebleau with the feeling it wouldn't be the last time I would be here. We'll see.

P.S. We also came across 3 men doing recording of their music in the forest, with their guitars, mics, and a super cute small dog. How cool is that? I didn't managed to take a good photo of the 3 musicians, just a lousy one taken tou1 tou1 mo1 mo1-edly for remembrance sake.





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