Fall 2019 Day 6

Today was just one of those days that make traveling so rewarding!  We woke up a little late, around 9:30 and got ourselves together quicker than usual. We had something to hurry for!  Today is....wait for it...MARKET DAY!!!!  Our favorite days!!  The Farmers Market here in Beaune takes up almost all the streets of the old town!  It was sprawling!  So many vendors and all the locals out shopping. It’s such a social occasion these smaller town markets!  It really is a highlight of any town. Find out these things before you travel and plan your stops around market days if possible.  It really is a sight! The fruits and vegetables look like they’ve been painted they’re so bright and colorful. There are food vendors, cheese vendors, olive and tapenade vendors, butchers, bakers and some candlestick makers! No joke!  Antiques, clothes, mattresses!?!  Lawn mowers!?! Everything!  It was crowded, crazy, exciting and beautiful. In Beaune most restaurants are closed on Sunday, so we decided to piece together a picnic for Sunday. We got rotisserie chicken, not just any chicken though, Bresse chicken. It’s supposed to be the best chicken in the world!  It’s quality controlled in the same way wine is. It has to meet certain standards and be fed certain things. We are excited!  We got roasted potatoes that are cooked in the drippings from the chicken, under the rotisserie. They are amazing, we have had them prepared this way before and these look at least as good as what we have had before. We also got some cheese, some garlic tapenade, and some Haricot Vert or green beans to make a delicious meal in house for tomorrow. Yum! The market was amazing and we really enjoyed it but after it was done, it was time to take our purchases home and venture out to see the tourist highlight of Beaune. The Hotel Dieu des Hospices. A hospital built in 1443 paid for by the most wealthy man in the town and had its last patient in 1971!  It was one of the traveling highlights of our lives!  It doesn’t get much better. It’s such a beautiful building with a roof that’s so stunning pictures don’t do it justice. We just stood in the courtyard and looked around us in awe!  The outside looks very black and austere, but then you walk through a simple door into a courtyard and WOW! The roof is what they call Burgundian style. I’m not sure if it was the first example of it and everyone else around here followed or what, but I’ll tell you, the way it still shimmers in the sunlight with those beautiful colors is awesome. It was a fascinating place too. It was basically a place for poor people to die with dignity, as they didn’t do a lot of real medicine and medical procedures at first. It was mostly making the people comfortable and see how compassionate god is at the end of your life so you aren’t so scared. Later, it became more of a real hospital. Many of the more wealthy people who were healed were so thankful they donated parts of their land, so now Hospices des Beaune is one of the biggest landowners in the area and has many of the best vineyards around. Their wine auctions have helped pay for the upkeep of the building and care for the patients until it stopped, now they still auction their wines and the money goes to the new hospital in Beaune. It was a remarkable sight. Check out the detail of the cross beams in the main area and see the monsters mouths that each beam is attached to!  The color and detail on the inside was amazing. The man who paid for it to be built also commissioned one of the greatest Flemish artists of the time Rogier van der Weyden to paint a last judgement altarpiece that is every bit a masterpiece!  Flemish artists are amazing in their fine detail and this painting was intense!  The robes, the wounds, the scary faces, the solemn faces of Jesus and the Archangel Michael made it a painting that you wanted to stare at for hours!  We use Rick Steves for a lot of our tours and information and he had one tip, he pointed out a magnifying panel on a mechanical system off to the side, he said, if it’s not too crowded, ask the security guard if he would let you see parts of the painting with the magnifying panel. We did and the security guard asked us in French, what do you want to see. So I just blurted our Michel, the Archangel. He smiled and grabbed a remote control he had and he started moving the panel over Michael letting us see fine details of his robe and his body. Everyone in the room started huddling around to watch what it was highlighting so he just kept going, moving it around to his favorite parts to show everyone what he liked about it. It was pretty much silent in the room, because it’s a very solemn painting but everyone was just so into what the guard was showing us. It made a great experience even more memorable!  We then went to the gift shop. We have been collecting tiles from the places we go. Not of sights, just of cool patterns that remind us of our travels. Well we found two beauties!  One of the roof pattern and one of the the floor pattern in the hospital. Great souvenirs that are easy to take home!!  After that we went to a local wine cave for a tour and a serious self-guided tasting. It was in a cave with 3,000,000 bottles of wine in it!  I asked the guy we got to talk to, if I wanted to buy a 1957 bottle of burgundy, could I do it here?  He said sure, he showed us a catalog with what they had and how much it would be. He assured us it would still be delicious. We didn’t feel like spending 800 euro today on a bottle of wine, but it was fascinating to know. They have wines from every year since 1946 after the Nazis left. It was awe inspiring to see how serious they are about wine. Here we are in a cave built 600 years ago in parts, that is the perfect environment, humidity, temperature for storing wine forever!  Some of it said open these in 2094. It makes you appreciate the craft of wine making so much more. We got to taste 10 different wines, 3 white and 7 reds down in the caves and had row after row of different bottles to choose from to make a case if we wanted to. They would pack it up and ship it right to our door no problem. We didn’t, but we did learn what appellation of wine we like the most, so far. Just so you know, it’s Pommard.  So if you wanna buy us bottles as gifts, Pommard rouge would be great thanks! LOL. We bought one bottle of Pommard to share with our tour guests when they arrive and walked the long way out of the cave into the light. We were both a bit tipsy!!  But, we were very excited and want to bring experiences like that to our little shop. We made it home and had to nap that wine off!!  We woke up and just needed FOOD!  We didn’t do research we just went to a place close by and had a burger and fish and chips and it was perfect!  Sometimes that’s all you need. We drank a lot of wine these past two days, I guess that’s what you do in Burgundy!  Tomorrow is our last day here and we don’t have a ton to do but enjoy a really beautiful cool city!  We will have more stories and take lots of pictures and we hope you will still be enjoying our journey along with us!  You know, all of these experiences are things we will bring you along to experience with us. But, either way, if you choose to experience them with us or through us, we love that you care enough to read.