Delightful Dijon

We arrived in Dijon after driving in from Vezelay. The lady who owned the apartment was busy, so she sent a friend to meet us with the key. Canadian. I started to speak French assuming she was Francophone, but she was English from Ottawa and suggested maybe we should speak our first tongues. :-) Turns out she was a Carleton grad. So there we were - three Carleton alumni standing on the street in DIjon in front of a massive door that led through two courtyard to the stairs (ugh!) to our 2nd storey apartment tucked into the rafters of an old building. The apartment was called Le Eiffel (Eiffel was born in DIjon), and was full of reminders of the tower: the furniture was all metal, including metal lockers for clothes cupboard, metal everything - desk, coffee table, eating bar in the kitchen, lamps - posters of the tower everywhere, even an ironing board cover with the Eiffel tower on it.

We set out down the street to shop for some things for breakfast nearby and ate a wonderful three course prix fixe dinner for the amazing price of 18 euro. 

The next morning we toured as mentioned in the previous post and then wandered through town for dinner in the gorgeous Place de la Liberation in an outdoor cafe facing the Palace des Ducs.

Here's our cafe:

sitting on the beautiful semi-circular Place.

As  luck would have it, there were a bunch of students there undergoing initiation, crawling through the fountains which spurted from the square. That was fun to watch and made us realize how much these things are the same throughout the world.

THe next morning, we set out walking to view the beautiful old area of DIjon, with its stretches of half-timbered houses.

We nipped into the courtyard of one beautiful old home and saw this doorway existing the courtyard:

We walked down a beautiful pedestrian street lined with nice shops to the station, to get my SIM card topped up at teh Relay store at the station. Once again, the RElay staff knew nothing about this service, despite the people at the airport store saying it could be topped up at any Relay in France. So I dropped in to Orange, the service I was on (though resold through China Telecom if you can believe!!). But alas, their customer service training had been outsourced to Bell Canada or Rogers, so that was futile. I decidedd to break down and buy a whole new SIM card at a Tabac. Well, I bought oe but it did not activate after a half hour, so finally I got a refund after waiting a half hour. Very frustrating.