France Trip – Day 14
September 21, 2019
Our last full day in Bretagne, and France for that matter. We have a family friend who lives in Rennes so we headed there to have lunch with her. Chris and I had visited her last year and really enjoyed ourselves. To anyone planning a trip to Bretagne, or even if you are not, make it a point to check out Rennes. It is easily one of my favorite French cities. It has a great balance of preserving the old and embracing the modern, both in architecture as in culturally speaking. The city has a lot of young energy, with lots of college students and young families. It has a great shopping and plenty of restaurants, cafes, and boutiques to check out. And it’s one of the smallest French towns to have a metro line, which has been so successful, they are building a second metro line.
We parked our car in a lot in the center of town. Let me take a moment to speak about underground parking lots, they are small, narrow, and short. It’s a tight fit for a car like the 8 person van we are driving. We’ve had many a moment where we all become back seat drivers, audibly holding our breath and making noises, much to the chagrin of our driver, Chris. But we have survived without a scratch!
Anyway, we came up from the garage and met up with our family friend who showed us around the Rennes Saturday market – what a treat!! It is the second largest market in all of France. I can’t imagine what the largest looks like, this was easily the size of two football fields, with fresh fruits and veggies, cured meats, fresh meats and seafood, cheeses, breads, prepared foods, and much more! One could easily spend all day wandering the various aisles. Since we leave tomorrow we had to show restraint, so we only bought some chouquettes (little pastries), a salami, and a saussice fromage (a sausage and cheese wrapped in a galette).
At this point we separated from the group and walked around Rennes. Last year when we were in Rennes we checked out a local tap house, Maloan, so we went back to check it out. We had spent several hours speaking with the owner who had been planning a trip to California to check out west coast breweries, so naturally we had many suggestions for her. This time around there was someone else working, friendly guy who spoke some English. They had about 16 beers on tap from two breweries, one from Barcelona and another from the UK. We sat on their patio enjoying our drinks and people watching.
This is another recommendation for what to do while on France. The French do this well, people watch for hours from their cafe chairs, jump in and do the same. You can learn and absorb so much about a culture by doing this. It was the perfect way to spend a Saturday morning after walking the market.
Before leaving Rennes, we went to buy some wine from the local caviste to ensure the perfect pairing for our last dinner in France. This is something we learned from our family friend last time we were here. You can go to your local caviste (wine shop owner, a somalier, if you will) and tell them what you are preparing for dinner and they will recommend a wine for you. We went in and I explained in my best French what our dinner plans were. They asked what our price range was, we told them under 20€. After much deliberation between the two cavistes, one had a light-bulb moment and pointed us to the perfect wine.
We ended the trip on a high note. We didn’t have the most spectacular meal ever, on the contrary, our last meal together was one of leftovers that would make a foodie cringe (lettuce wraps, salami, cheese, baguette and butter, ravioli in a tomato sauce, pan cooked potatoes, meat stew), but the connections and togetherness we experienced really rounded out and completed the trip perfectly!
Thanks for being Momentary Locals with us in Rennes!
Photo credit: Carina
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