France: Day 5, Chartres

Various styles of croque-monsieur, a grilled ham sand­wich with cheese melted on top of but­tered pain de mie, a pack­aged French bread that’s per­fect for toast­ing. Every bak­ery and fam­ily has their own ver­sion of this.

In the back is shred­ded guyère (a medium-bodied cheese), being sliced is mont d’or (very creamy and salty, and stuck to my teeth), and already halved is Camembert (which was super rich with a smell rem­i­nis­cent of a garbage, but cer­tainly didn’t taste like it…still, I had a hard time get­ting over the smell).

Rue Collin D’Harleville.

You can tell how old this house is by the arch­way garage on the right, not meant for cars, but horses.

Trees are very well-kept, their leaves trimmed into cubes, form­ing pleas­antly straight lines.

I lit­er­ally walked off both my maps and got lost. These back roads made it more con­fus­ing, because a lot of them look the same.

A baguette with lar­don baked into it, which is a strip of pork fat, sim­i­lar to bacon but thicker. I’m pretty sure lar­don is French for OMGMOUTHFEELSGOOD.

The cafés here fre­quently have patios, even when it’s a high of 8°C. They almost always face out, so you can do some peo­ple watch­ing, unlike the ones in North America where you’re seated around a round table, more suit­able for talking.

Fééric and Misun have two chick­ens in the back yard. Each one makes an egg a day, and one is char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally more nar­row or more wide. They’re try­ing to fig­ure out which chicken pro­duces which.

Egg on toasted pain de cam­pagne (a round, slightly sour bread), sea­soned with Viandox (an umami flavoured liq­uid based on meat extract).

A very handy sign, mark­ing the direc­tion of var­i­ous essen­tials (includ­ing bar­bers and flower shops).

On one side of the street was this open garage door, and when I passed by, it turned out that there was noth­ing in the garage. Only a path that lead some­where even more beau­ti­ful and mysterious.

François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers was a gen­eral of Napoleon dur­ing the French Revolutionary Wars. He joined the army at 16, got pro­moted to brigadier-general at 24, and died at 27. The peo­ple of Chartres like to hon­our him because he was born here, the statue being one of the few in the town centre.

This area is in the heart of down­town, and branches off in sev­eral direc­tions. It can be pretty con­fus­ing, because the roads all look pretty sim­i­lar, and don’t fol­low a grid system.

Apparently, Patton lib­er­ated Chartres in 1944, but I can’t find any more infor­ma­tion about it. This road is only two blocks long, then turns into another street.

Pay toi­lets. Probably why it’s adver­tised with such a big sign.

People wait­ing in line, baguettes in hand, for cheese from Ste. Suzanne Farm.

No license needed.