Visiting Marmande

Oct 11, 20212 min read

This past Saturday I visited Marmande, which is a town just 15 minutes away from Aiguillon. Marmande is a lot bigger than Aiguillon as it has more restaurants, shops, churches, museums and parks. Marmande has 17,949 residents, while Aiguillon has a population of 4,346 residents. So yeah, a lot bigger.

As soon as I got to the Marmande train station, I met up with three other teaching assistants that I knew. Two were English teaching assistants (Anna and Brenna) and one was a German teaching assistant (Sophie). We all went to a restaurant called Les Neuf Fontaines for lunch, where we ate nutella crêpes. After eating, we continued our stroll and went to a thrift store and a bookstore. The bookstore had a huge selection of comic books, les bandes dessinées, which are widely read throughout France and Belgium. After shopping we went to the notable church in Marmande, the church of Notre-Dame, which dates from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. In front of the church, there are these sprawling gardens and a park, where Sophie let her dog, Juno, run free.

Something that was interesting that we saw near the church and gardens was a section of grass that had these goats roaming on it. This grass was on a hill, which is too steep and too expensive to mow, so the town has goats there instead to act as nature's own lawnmower!

After walking around the church gardens and the park, Anna and I made our way to an Italian restaurant where we ate some yummy pasta. We ended our night with a jazz festival, which consisted of two groups: the first group (Célia Kameni & Alfio Origlio) had a pianist, a drummer, a singer, a saxophonist and a double base. The second group (Juan Carmona Quintet) consisted of a drummer, 2 guitarists and a tap dancer! The first group's songs were similar to pop and soul music and the second group's songs were flamenco style, which is an art form based on the various folkloric music traditions of southern Spain. The two groups were fantastic and played both modern and traditional arrangements throughout the night.