Champagne!!

This weekend I took a day trip to the Champagne region of France, which is absolutely spectacular. I went with about 60 students from my program. The day was very overcast and gloomy but the country side was so beautiful. It was a little flat but the little towns that I saw were so cute and nice. We spent the day going to two different champagne galleries or caves, first one being Taittinger Champagne owned by Francois Taittinger. The gallery itself was about 30 meters underground and there were tunnels that connected it to the second place we visited, Notre-Dame De Reims which is where the kings of France used to be crowned. I thought it was funny how a champagne gallery was connected to a church, but hey the French know how to have a good time. This Taittinger gallery was smaller then the other one they have, it housed around 3 million bottles. There were these hallways that went on forever some over 1 km that had bottle after bottle stacked. It was very exciting learning where and how the champagne comes from. Taittinger seemed to put more heart in to their champagne, they aged theirs between 8 and 10 years. The second gallery we went to was that of the famous Monsieur Mercier of Mercier Champagne. Mercier's establishment was way more of a production then that of Taittinger. They seemed to want to get their product out faster without putting as much heart in to it as Taittinger. The establishment as a whole though was a lot larger, in fact we had to take an underground tram for our tour, it was nice to not have to walk but harder to take pictures because it is so dark down there. They had a room down there that housed wines from 1923. I guess it was a good year. The galleries were on the Avenue de Champagne which is considered to be the most expensive street in the world because of the millions of champagne bottles that lie beneath it. Moet & Chandon's galleries are on this street as well. It was a really fun trip but very exhausting, I went to bed right when I got back in to Paris. Today I worked on multiple projects for my classes. Can you believe there is only 9 weeks left? It's gone by so fast. I'm now looking forward to Spring Break which has broken my bank but its going to be amazing. I need beaches! It's been raining here I feel like almost every day. I didn't expect the weather to be like this at all, but life is full of surprises. I'm excited to return to the states.