August 4, 2011

Getting down to the end of this vacation in France, and we are all beginning to turn our thoughts toward the U.S. and Milton, Mass.

Yesterday, we took our long-overdue trip to Dijon, by far the largest town we’ve visited on this trip. Dijon has a big-town feel, with a thoroughly modern urban sprawl on the outskirts (KFC anyone?) and an old section in the center of town that attracts all the tourists (like us).

Pictured above is a room in a palace that belonged to the Dukes of Burgundy. Pretty swanky! But the old section of Dijon also offered a dazzling array of pastry shops (pictured here), bread shops, etc. I swear I’ve gained 10 pounds in two weeks!

Also interesting to us were all the medieval carvings that adorned the buildings in the old part of town. These faces were everywhere on wood-framed buildings. And what I also find fascinating is that these monuments to antiquity — each at least two hundred years older than the oldest structures we have in the United States — are not assigned museum status, but rather are used for every kind of commercial enterprise you can think of, every day, with folks living on the top floors.