Annecy

After our Spain trip, I had a whole week of classes to look forward to (well, up until Thursday anyway) so Ali spent her time around town.  There was some gorgeous weather during those days.  We also took a mountain hike and helped a lost, lonely dog find its way home.  I don't have any pictures from any of that stuff so you'll have to check out Ali's blog, once she has some spare time to post anything, for her pictures.  We had planned to do day-trips to some of the cities nearby on Friday and Saturday.  Thursday night we got all our stuff together to head to Geneva (and we had to go really early because there weren't that many trains to Geneva).  On Friday morning, we got to the train station around 6:45am and we couldn't figure out our tickets in time to actually get onto the Geneva train so we went for plan B: Annecy.
Annecy is supposedly one of the most picturesque alpine towns.  It's also supposed to be considered a "little Venice" because of the canals that run through town, although the architecture seemed very French to me.

Unfortunately, Friday turned out to be a cold, rainy day.  And not just a rainy day, a day of pouring rain. You can see the rain draining off the market cover in the picture below.

Despite the pouring rain, you can see that the market still went on.  Ali and I probably would have spent more time looking through it (some of the pastries looked delicious) but we were cold and wet and it wasn't in the covered part of town for the most part.  By covered part of town, I'm referring to the arcaded nature of many of the sidewalks in town which is somewhat visible in the first picture.
The market:

More canal pictures:

Although the town was beautiful, we really were frozen to the bone.

Ali looking cold and miserable like we felt...

We first took refuge in a Monoprix (a grocery store chain) and then went to a Quick (the French version of McDonalds) where Ali got a hot chocolate.
The Quick was close to Lake Annecy for which the town is named, I believe.  The canals from town all led into the lake:

The lake had a nice park around it where I could imagine myself enjoying spending time on a day where the weather was nice.

The lake was beautiful and had nice mountains around it, which, unfortunately, were mostly covered by clouds while we were there.

After the lake, Ali and I headed towards the chateau to see what that was all about.

Once we were there though, we decided that neither of us held any particular interest in going in.  We decided that we had been cold for long enough and went to the train station to head home.  After I slipped and fell down the marble stairs, creating a very embarrassing spectacle, we found our tickets and sat in the waiting room waiting to head home.  As is our luck, on the way home the weather started to get nice and the rest of the day was beautiful and sunny.  We were hoping that this lovely weather was only in Chambéry and that in Annecy, it was still miserable (in order to justify our leaving so early). 

Something interesting that I didn't notice until this trip is that when it rains in town at this time of year, the mountains around it get snow.

Annecy was beautiful and I can't wait to go back sometime, but I will definitely be waiting for a beautiful, sunny day before I do.