Well, I've been here for a little over a week now, and things have been going great. I'm going to post my pictures from the first week in a couple of separate posts. It's taken me a few days to get all my pictures loaded and sorted, and I've had a few technical problems with chargers, voltage converters, European outlets, etc!)

This is the hotel where I stayed in Tours before I met my host family on Sunday.

I really don't understand this typical practice in hotels here:
when you leave your hotel room, you're supposed to put your key on the bulletin board... hmmm...

On Wednesday, we arrived in Tours around 5:00 after our bus ride from Paris. We met for dinner at 7:30; we had pre-arranged dinners as a group with a set menu at area restaurants for the first four days. Our first dinner was at Au Singe Vert (“At the Green Monkey!”). We had a beautiful salad, roasted duck, and crème caramel, which was the equivalent of flan. The duck was fabulous!

We visited our first château on Thursday, Château de Chambord, and here I am in front of it -- it's huge!

This is a room in Chambord called “la théâtre.” Our tour guide told us this is the room in which Molière wrote Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. You can see the bust of him in the background of the photo.

We also got to see some really old grafitti inside -- hard to see in the picture, but the first one is 1655, and the other looks like it says 1614.

These photos were taken at the top of Château de Chambord .

We went to the town of Blois for lunch before we visited the Château de Blois. This château is right in the middle of the town of Blois – in fact, you can see it in this picture that I took from the café while having lunch.

This was my first Orangina of the trip during this lunch in Blois – definitely picture-worthy since it’s my favorite drink (next to coffee, of course)!

When I went to the château entrance after eating lunch, I took this photo looking down the hill. You can see the café where I ate lunch at the bottom of the hill with the yellow canopies.

Château de Blois was built in 4 separate periods (ranging from 13^th Century to 17^th century), so the architecture reflects different time periods. This picture is of a staircase that was built from 1515-1524 during the Renaissance.

Here I am in front of another wing of the château, built during 1635-1638, so it’s considered “classical.”

This is an epitaph for the French Renaissance poet Ronsard, which was interesting to me since I've studied his poetry. The inscription says that he met his famous muse, Cassandre, at a ball in this room.

This is the official monogram of the French king Henri II, which was seen in many of the châteaux that we’ve visited. I’ve read 3 different explanations for the monogram:

H for Henri with back-to-back Cs for Catherine de Medici, his wife
H for Henri with back-to-back Ds for Deuxième (Henri le deuxième, “the second”)
H for Henri with back-to-back Ds for Diane de Poitiers, his famous mistress

The pamphlet distributed by the château gave the first two explanations, but the biography of Catherine de Medici that I’m reading right now gives the third explanation throughout the book. It was interesting to hear a French tour guide in the château very insistently telling a group of young French children about the monogram: “Il n’y a pas de D!” (“There is not a D!”)

These pictures were taken in the royal bedchamber of Catherine de Medici; she died in this room in 1589.

This is the city of Blois -- I liked Blois a lot.

This post ends here because there are too many people using the Wifi, so the connection is too S-L-O-W! I hope everything is going great for all of you! I'll try to post more pictures tomorrow.