A great day in Nantes!

To wrap up our little tour of Western France, we headed to Nantes, from where we were flying back to Nice the next day. We decided to go to Nantes by BlaBla car, a new experience for me (it all went rather smoothly, and one of our co-passangers had just come back from spending two months in Lapland, Finland, which was pretty cool!).

Naturally, as we were in Nantes, we were going to hang out with our dear friends Aude, Magaye and little Olympe see Aude I got her name right in the end, if you ever read this ;-) ). Aude was kind enough to pick us up and drive us back to their lovely designer house (Magaye is an architect, and it shows!). We had a great lunch, and played with Olympe and Oishii (an interestingly named rabbit).

We then headed into Nantes, to enjoy the excellent whether (not a given in the West of France). After some contemplation, we decided to head over to Les Machines de l'Ile. It's a really cool place near the city centre, a kind of touristic/artistic project/ensemble visualized around the old shipyards of Nantes. The vision presented here is something one could imagine springing from the cooperation between Lenoardo da Vinci and Julies Verne, a collection of fantastic machines, merry-go-around and the like. Inlcuding a really cool elephant.

We had a nice walk along the pierside, a really nice place to have a stroll around. And to have a beer as well, come to think of it, which is exactly what we decided to do. Magaye then took us on a bit of a private tour around the area, there's actually plenty of quirky buildings and artworks to see around there. Seems like it's a bit of an architect's playground. In fact, Magaye works around there, too. We spent a rather lovely afternoon checking out the place.

For the evening, we decided to go Japanese (great preparation for us, as our next holiday segment for the summer is actully Japan!). We went to a place called Joyi. Pretty nice place, with proper authentic Japanese cuisine. Recommended, should you fancy a bit of Japanese in the West of France!

To finish off a really nice day in Nantes, we went for a couple of beers to a cool river boat boor. A pity the place was closing when we arrived, so we only had time for one beer. Or maybe we are old enough to have felt happy to have an excuse to hit the sack early ? ;-)

So, the perfect way to round up a great little excursion in the West of France, then!