Massangis, France - Burgundy July, 2

 

Today we drove through the countryside stopping in small villages. We basically just walked around, went into churches and enjoyed the drive. It is interesting that very small villages have beautiful churches.

Our village, Massangis, has a population of 87 according to our host. We also stopped in one that was 4,500 today. Each village has a monument with names of villagers who lost their lives in WWI and WWII.

Here is Massangis

Another great start!

This is one of our favorite villages, Noyers sur Serein. They had a market going on today.

It was more crowded than when we were here in 2011 and at first we thought it was over run with tourist, but actually it was French people going to the market.

Next we drove to Semur en Auxois... Loved it!

Next, we headed for Flavigny sur Ozerain where the movie Chocolat was filmed. It is an awesome village, too. It amazes us how all the villages are so old, cute and are not set up for tourism, they are just being themselves!

This is where the chocolate shop was filmed.

It might be hard to tell from the picture, but this village is up on a hill.

Lastly, we drove through the village where our cheese was made that we had with our dinner the last two nights, Eposses. All our food and wine is always very local wherever we eat.

Today we noticed that even young girls greet each other with kissing each cheek, at least about age 9.

Monte had an interesting experience today when he went to the public bathroom and was using a urinal and found women walking by on their way to stalls. Often men and women share the same bathroom.

This morning Monte went for a run and in our village a bakery truck stopped to sell bread. A big rig (they are building an overpass nearby) stopped in the middle of the street and walked to the bread truck to buy bread. A few cars were lined up waiting for him, but everyone seemed fine with it!

Here are our rooms...

One thing we love about this place is having dinner with people from other counties, we have really enjoyed our time Guleon, he lives in Southern France.

We have spent hours talking with Guleon and Patrick, our host, about French culture. It is really interesting to get a better understanding about the differences. We found it odd that the French think we Americans all have guns! 

They say they can be "grumpy " toward Americans because they are jealous of all we have. We haven't seen this "grumpiness".  

We had a good laugh to find that French call Hawaii "awaii" and hockey "ockey". Guleon though it was hilarious that we didn't say them the way he thought we did. It was funny to see him laugh so hard over that.

Ah, we will miss staying with Patrick and Eric here in Massangis. We love the burgundy area of France.  The area is so beautiful and the food so good!!