Field trips and Fairy Tales: Day one

Since I am in Europe I get to see a lot of beautiful locals here, all of which have buildings that date back thousands of years. I love seeing these places that transport my imagination back in time to  a time of kings and their kingdoms. I recently went on  a trip with  a few of my friends here in france.  We went on a french country  side road trip that was one of the most beutiful  road trips that I have ever gone on in my life.

We managed to  rent a car for the trip for about eighty  Euros a day, and with  five people there with us it made the trip  insanely cheap to go on the original idea was for us to  just go to  a town called rocamadour, but it turned into so much more than that. It was an escape into the great unknown and new insight into the beauty of France.

I went with  Rodolfo, Hayley, Alex and Nora who are all friends of mine from the study  abroad program that I am currently on. Rodolfo was the one who came up with the idea, he had discovered Rocamadour some years ago and it has been one of his dreams for years now to  visit that ancient city built into the side of a mountain. 

It is something out of a fairy  tale that you would never expect to actually be built in real life.

Rocamadour is a good distance away from us about four hours by  car that making it a reasonable weekend trip for all of us. We set out friday afternoon to get where we were going. We had rented a room in the French countryside off of a website called Airbnb.com. On a side note if you have not had a chance to use this site yet and you are a traveller I would highly recommend it. The people that we ended up staying with were a fantastic with there accomedations and even gave us breakfast even though it was not part of the deal. They went above and beyond the call of duty  when we were at their place. It was a beautiful  little country home, with two dogs a cat and tow horses running around in the  yard. They had built the house on the land over the last three years and had placed it on Airbnb so to  get some income from the house itself. I even woke up early one morning so that I could go out there and take pictures of the sun rising out of the sea of mist.

Before getting to  our weekend home we stopped by  another town called Tolousse, a larger french city  not to  far out from  Montpellier. It is a is know as the red city  because most of the buildings there were all constructed with  bricks instead of the normal stones that are common place in France. We only spent a couple hours there though but the time we spent there was enough to give us a feel for what the  city was like. I have never seen anything like it, each building was read but it stood out against the others because of it's architecture that let it's personality  pop out from  the crowd of structures around it. the insides of the buildings were also amazing as well, we were fortunate enough to experience the wonders of the art that were inside of the buildings. 

We were able to  explore the open area of the town hall while were were there. As we walked through the high ceilings with art work that lined the wall all the way  to  the top. Even some of the ceilings were painted. They  were beautiful, the way that they  told stories and the the fact that there were mirrors on lining some of the rooms brings you into the artwork as well. It was really stunning.