Yesterday was quite a random day in all; in the morning I went for my last supermarket shop to get my dinner for tonight, and in the afternoon I went into town to take some pictures of favourite places like Jardin des Délices and Retroviseur, to buy some more macarons and to meet Sonia and friends for a walk around the Hortillonnages. The Hortillonnages are an area of 300 hectares of wetland, very close to the centre of town, that have been inhabited and cultivated for 2000 years. Today only a few farmers remain and only about 25 hectares are cultivated; the rest has become a sort of park or fishing lakes. There are paths through parts of it, but to see all of it the best way is to take the punt barge from Quai Bélu and be poled through the narrow channels, between the islands of land. Some islands are just wildlife habitat, others are farmed, and others still have sheds or houses on them. Each house has it’s own bridge and some have even built steeply curved driveways over the channels. Each seems to have their own little boat as well.
Shed on one of the Hortillonnage islands
After we’d walked round a small part of the Hortillonnages (we seemed to have picked a path that didn’t go very far before we got cut off by water), we headed back towards town and the Parc St. Pierre, the big park that everyone chills and picnics in. There are also allotments along one side of it, which are all full of produce. Keeping allotments seems to be quite popular here; passing through Longeau on the train to Amiens you see lots of them and I’ve glimpsed a few in a green space between some house on the bus a few times; basically wherever they can be squeezed in, they go. We wandered through town a bit, got some crepes from a street stall, and sat in Place Gambetta until it started to rain, whereupon we dived into Mezzo di Pasta for a couple of hours, taking our time over some drinks and pasta.
At about 8pm we went to meet some others outside Maison de la Culture to start our Nuit des Musées tour. La Nuit des Musées is an annual European event where museums put on special tours or open their doors out of hours, and it’s free. It’s a sort of publicity event to try and encourage people to come to the museums who might not normally come. Two places in Amiens were taking part; la Musée de Picardie and Jules Verne’s house. Unfortunately, the Musée de Picardie is actually closed all this year because they are doing some major repair and improvement works; replacing the roof and putting in a new lift among other things. However, as was explained to us, they still wanted to be a part of la Nuit so they had invited a group of artists to put in a light installation in their courtyard gardens. To be honest it wasn’t all that impressive; partly because it wasn’t actually finished so there was no atmosphere, and partly because it hadn’t gone totally dark so the lights weren’t so bright. I still took a few photos though.
The second part of the tour was to Jules Verne’s house, but that didn’t open until 10pm so we wandered in that direction and stopped in a bar by the Cirque just down the road from it to wait. They had Eurovision on the big screen, so that was a laugh. I didn’t see the UK’s performance but it was fun trying to explain the concept of Eurovision to the Americans! We got to Jules Verne’s house just after 10 and there were so many people there! The house is not that big and the tower part has a limit of 12 people at once, so they only let 20 or so people into the house at once. This meant that we were standing in line to get in for an hour, which we weren’t too impressed with. The line was just as long behind us, and their last admission was going to be at 12.30, so they also asked us not to take our time looking round the house, which I thought was a bit cheeky. Unfortunately, all video and photos are banned inside the house which I was very disappointed about, especially since there were some wonderful old posters! There was a room devoted to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea which had portholes and all sorts of marine memorabilia, and one devoted to Around the World in 80 Days. I particularly liked that room because the floor was a big map with the around the world route marked on it, and the writing desk has the globe on which Jules Verne drew the journeys of his characters. Up in the tower there were stacks of huge old books, but there was nothing to tell us what they are. The house is certainly full of some very old, valuable and totally irreplaceable artifacts. I took some photos in the courtyard outside; the tower of the house has a giant blue globe on the top of it and one wall of the courtyard is covered in a mural depicting features of Jules Verne’s stories.
Jules Verne's house with globe tower
Wall Mural
You can see all the photos I took yesterday here: Album 3.
