dijon, france: mustardville

so i spent another weekend traveling, this time visiting tiny french towns. dijon was first on the itinerary.
samina and i took an earlyish train and arrived around 11:30. our host, the daughter of a man i met in morocco (yes, random, i know) met us in front of the station and we made our way to hers and her brother's house. it was really cute and seemed like it had been there far longer than the boring apartments that appeared to have been built around it more recently. after meeting the cats (the most ridiculously friendly cats i have ever met, i might add) and putting our backpacks down, samina and i headed back into town for lunch and some exploring.
seeing as how we were starving at this point, we of course chose one of the first restaurants we saw and sat down to eat there. i got a salad which was really good, though i didn't like the fried cheese things that were on top.

with full stomachs our adventuring began. we soon learned that dijon is a REALLY small town. cute. but really small. in the day and a half we were there, we probably walked on ever road a few times!
we found some old buildings, and owl arrows to point us in touristic directions!

i really liked the roofs on some of the buildings. i thought they were really interesting.

i believe this one is the oldest building:

the owl arrows:

during our wanderings, we even took the time to stop by a mustard shop. i mean, how could i go to dijon and NOT buy mustard (even if it wasn't for me?)

after more exploring, and seeing more cool buildings, we decided to take a break when we found the closest thing to a park we believed we were going to find, some benches and a large fountain:

next up we decided to indulge in some ice cream. we figured it was a beautiful day out, and why not? yummmyyyyy.

unsure of what to do next, we considered heading back to the house for a little bit before dinner. plans changed though when we found a book shop and ended up spending quite a bit of time in there. i even bought a book! some story in french that intrigued me enough to spend a whole two euros on it after reading the first couple pages. plus, theres a chapter called 'ariane'! of course i had to buy it.
after a while of trying to decide what the heck we wanted to eat for dinner, it finally occurred to us to eat in the same area we had eaten lunch. of course this only occurred to us when we were near this square again, because it's not like we necessarily would have known how to make it back there anyways had we come up with the idea sooner.
dinner ended up being delicious, though taking forever. something about only two servers and way too many tables meant that the service wasn't particularly quick. although i had to give our guy props as we saw him speed walking between tables while it appeared the other waiter was taking her sweet time.
we started off with escargot because snails seemed to be part of dijon culture (all over postcards and a couple statues and such). they were delicious.

my bad if you're grossed out by this picture. but seriously, if you can get past the fact that you are eating a snail, they are actually quite good :)

then i had gnocci which was also amazing.

and finally some chocolate mousse. which we waited about an hour for, but i have to say it was worth it.
after dinner we made our way to the busstop so we could head back to our hosts' place where the brother was waiting for us. but first, while we waited, some guy came up to us and asked if we had a lighter. samina obliged and soon this guy was asking her if she was single and if she wanted to get a drink. he was very persistant. it was odd to me since he seemed completely oblivious of my presence. if she had accepted, of course i would have followed, and then what would he have done? haha. he even tried to invite himself when we said we were leaving town tomorrow and going to beaune. yeaaa that wasn't gonna happen either.
anyways, the bus finally showed up and we were on our way. being awesome like we are, we accidentally missed our stop. it wasn't that big a deal though, because being such a small town, you can probably imagine that the bus stops aren't incredibly far apart from each other. we had to walk a little extra, but we made it to the house with no problem.
the brother was already kinda drunk by the time we showed up, so it was probably a good thing his friend was there too so we could make sure we made it to whereever we were going to. which turned out to be one of their friend's apartments (apparently where the brother had lived previously). we hung out there for awhile before following everybody to yet another apartment (at this point though, the brother headed home while we followed the rest of the crowd). first however, we tried a few wrong apartments. eventually though, we found more of their friends and were welcomed in. one spoke english so well that samina and i really couldn't tell where he was from! turns out he was from dijon. not as exciting as i had anticipated lol. as everyone decided to move somewhere else, we started losing the people we had been following, and when we arrived outside some bar and recognized where we were again, we decided to simply head back to our hosts' place and go to sleep. due to a lack of buses, we ended up walking the whole way. thank goodness for small towns and friends with better directional abilities than i have.
the next morning, i ate some breakfast with the sister while samina continued to sleep a bit. eventually samina got up though, the brother came downstairs, and we relaxed in their side yard for a bit. before we headed onto our next destination, we had to stop into town again so i could buy some mustard, take a second try at buying postcards since i managed to misplace the first batch, and check out a park that we hadn't known existed before walking through it on the way to the first group of friends' apartment. we particularly liked the statue we ate lunch next to:

after our lunch in the park we headed back to the house to grab our stuff before going to the train station. we miscalculated our time a little bit, then the bus was late, which led to us missing our train! oops. luckily there are lots of trains in between dijon and beaune and we were able to get on the next train twelve minutes later without even having to buy new tickets, so really no harm done. but we realized we should probably be a little more careful next time.
but on to beaune!