Bastille Day and Beautiful Bèze

As usual, things have been pretty busy with the excavation and all, and I have yet to say anything about France!

The flights were good, and the rendezvous point with my student even worked out (I brought another American student to the excavation with me this year – it’s nice having another one of us around)! We took the train down to Montbard where one of my excavation friends picked us up; it’s always nice to see a friendly face upon arrival!

The past few years I have been in Dijon for Bastille Day (it is like the American Fourth of July), and this was my first time experiencing the holiday in Châtillon. I could not have asked for a better introduction to France for my student. There were crowds of people of all ages that evening, many holding brightly-colored paper lanterns. There was a procession of people around the city holding open torches (very Frankenstein-esque) accompanied by music, and they stopped at the football/soccer field where the mayor gave some speeches. Upon completion, new music began as did the fireworks. We had a front row view of it all and the show lasted for about twenty minutes or so. The fireworks were really impressive for a place I consider to be a small town, and I laughed at how French they were – really coordinated and artistic explosions, the music, setting a proper mood… I commented to one of my other friends that in America, we do not care if it is artistic; we just like to see shiny things blowing up.

We had our first week of work, then the weekend. I suggested to some friends we could visit Mireabeau-sur-Beze, because it had a really interesting late La Tene – early Roman period sanctuary that I had read about and it was listed in one of the local travel journals. Well, the site now sits under a collection of houses (it was a rescue excavation), and there was no museum, just a display of objects housed in the tourism office. Bust.

No photos of the cave, but the water exits.

Luckily, we had another plan, and that was to visit 

Bèze,a village we passed on our way to Mireabeau. This was a really beautiful medieval town with some really charming old architecture. It also boasted Grottes de Bèze, a fantastic cave you could tour, which we did. I always like cave tours, but this one was particularly unique because within the cave is a source or spring where water bubbles up as it travels out to the river nearby. For this reason, part of the tour is walking on foot, but the other part is in a non-motorized boat to limit pollution. The guides pull the boat along by grabbing ropes which are anchored into the cave ceiling. The water inside was beautiful and crystal clear. I was really surprised that no prehistoric activity took place here because it was rather magical (there is a lot of cave art from the Paleolithic period found in many of the caves in France).

After the tour, we walked around for a while just enjoying the beautiful architecture and had some ice cream and a coffee next to city hall. We found another beautiful spot with a family of swans floating around in the little pond. Sometimes certain parts of France just seem too perfect and charming to be real. 

Baby swan stretching his wings.

The excavations are going well. Last week there was an article about our excavations in the Dijon paper. The best part is there was a photo of my student hard at work, and I was mentioned by name for my dissertation research. And the best of the best part was I went to buy a copy for me and my student, and the guy at the shop realized I was one of the excavators (we are really dirty most of the time). He asked if I was one of the Germans, and after he learned I was American, he got so excited because he knew I was mentioned in the article; he even told some of the other people on the excavations later how exciting it was to have an American there! Local celebrity? Not quite, but I felt pretty awesome regardless. Time to rest up for week number three!