La Rochelle et Courjon (Part1 Places we went)

(Main Railway Station at La Rochelle)

So last weekend we went down to the South West of France, on the TGV initially to a place called La Rochelle as a base for going to our friend Aurelie's parents house. About an hour inland, in a tiny ville out in the countryside called Courjon.

I am going to split this post into two pieces. Firstly on all of the places that we went and what we saw. Secondly, on all of the food and drink we consumed throughout the weekend. First of all, I will begin with the places we went.

We started out hopping off the TGV in La Rochelle, a beautiful and historic town on the east coast of France. Aparently the town was founded in the 10th century and became a major town by the 12th century because of its harbour. Infact according to wikipedia "The main activities of the city were in the areas of maritime commerce and trade, especially with England, the Netherlands and Spain. Until the 15th century, La Rochelle was the largest French harbour on the Atlantic coast, dealing mainly in wine, salt and cheese."

Indeed you can see the old entrance to the harbour and the fortifications which still stand today (and are still the entrance to the harbour) A little bit of more recent history about La Rochelle courtesy of wikipedia "During the Second World War, Germany established a submarine naval base at La Pallice (the main port of La Rochelle). A German stronghold, La Rochelle was the last French city to be freed at the end of the War. A siege took place between 12 September 1944, and 7 May 1945, in which the stronghold, including the islands of Ré and Oléron, was held by 20,000 German troops under a German vice-admiral Ernst Schirlitz. Following negotiations by the French Navy frigate captain Meyer, and the general German capitulation on May 7, French troops entered La Rochelle on May 8."

Finally I could not go past this little tidbit of information for all of you movie buffs "The main port of La Rochelle became the setting for the movie Das Boot. The U-Boat scenes in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark were also shot in La Rochelle."

Anyway I ate some pretty nice food and drank some pretty good alcohol here, but I will detail this in the next part.

Late in the evening on Friday we headed to Courjon a small little town where Aurelie is from and where we spent the weekend with her family. It is small and out in the country side. I was awoken on Saturday morning to the sounds of hunting dogs, and gunfire off in the distance, and the hunters were out in force looking for some sanglier, (wild boars) that roam around these parts

Saturday afternoon we headed off in the car around the local area, our first stop was an old roman town, now called Saintes but back in the day went by the Roman name of Mediolanum Santonum. Now I am going to once again dig into wikipedia for a bit about the history of of this place as well. "It was founded in about 20 BC. Some estimations show that Saintes had about 15,000 inhabitants in those days, and that its borders were almost the same as today.

Saintes was the capital of the former province of Saintonge." Hence the name. These days it is a big functional regional centre, with about 30,000 inhabitants. There are quite a few relics from its former days as a large roman town and we visited a couple of these. Firstly we headed to the

Basilique Saint-Eutrope de Saintes, a large church in town that was built in 1081. Sadly during the religious wars in the 1700's the 'top' roman style part of the church was

effectively demolished and a more neo-roman style church was built on the same spot.

However, the underground crypt from roman times still survived and is open to the public to wander in and have a look around. (Which you can see here on the right)

After we left the church we headed on over to the old Roman

Amphitheater that still stands giving an insight to the Roman heritage of the town. So we wandered up, paid our 2 euro entry and headed inside. This was pretty cool, and so far I am pretty

certain that this was the oldest thing I have ever seen in my life. This dates from the formation of the city around 20 BC.

On Sunday we headed out to another Roman Style Church, this time in (a town whose name I forget, oh the shame!) The interesting thing about this church is that architecturally it is a Roman style church and it still stands and has done so since the 13th century. There are not many Roman style churches left in France as most of them were torn down and replaced with Gothic style churches in the 17th & 18th centuries.

On the way back to La Rochelle to catch the train home to Paris, we came across fields full of wind powered electricity generators, such as this one.