Last weekend, we went to visit the Castles in the Loire Valley. Castles are weird. In one awkward place, the Chateau de Rigny-'Ussé, they had set up reenactment of the Sleeping Beauty story because evidently this was the castle that inspired Perrault to write the story. It was terrifying. I used to be really afraid of this episode of Are you afraid of the Dark? where the girl get sucked into a large dollhouse. I remember having nightmare about that and so being in this castles you felt like you were in a bad dream, I would almost go as far out to say nightmare ... but it was just so damn amusing.
Most of the castles even had current photos of the families that own them, I think the pictures are meant to put you are ease, but honestly they sort of made me feel weird, like I was peeking into a window I wasn't supposed to look in. At the end of the day you have walked into these peoples homes and granted my house doesn't have 50 bedrooms, or ornate ballrooms... but still sometimes people still live in them.
We had taken a car for the weekend to easily bump from castle to castle. We went to Chambord which has 365 fireplaces in it. It was really enormous. I think there are 400 rooms all in all. Can you imagine that! And it was designed to be a mere hunting lodge. We took loads of selftimer photos. Which was pretty great.
We also got to use my Polaroid Land Camera and the results were pretty good. But try to be awkward and ask foreigners to take a picture using my camera, and you get curious stares and raised eyebrows. No matter what I said people would not get close enough to us. I would try to coax them along, but nothing seemed to be able to entice them to get a little closer. I was like NO,REALLY C'MON PLEASE... etc but to no avail. And then the viewfinder is a little off and so it was an awkward photo taken when the "volunteer" photographers tried to center the photo. There are numerous photos with only one arm seemingly deattached from a missing body.
