Month: May 2015

The Chartreuse

Chambéry is ideally located, at the foot of the prealps. It is surrounded by mountains. They are not very high, but they are an ideal playground for whoever likes the outdoors. My favorite place is the Chartreuse, a mountain range which spreads itself between Chambéry and Grenoble. It is associated with the Carthusian monks who have their original monastery in the heart of those mountains.

The Chartreuse used to be one of my favorite playgrounds when I was younger. It is not very high, but there are difficult walks and impressive sceneries. It is not too far from the city, but still very wild and remote. The best places demand a bit of effort, and an adventurous mind.

I have started exploring it again and intend to get to know it better over the next few months. Here are a few pictures.

  
      

Travelling back and forth to Aix-En-Provence

I love travelling by train. Each time I need to get to Aix-en-Provence I take the train. It’s easy. I hop on the bus in Cognin, walk to the train station, jump on a first train to Lyon. I change trains in Lyon to catch a TGV to the south. Sometimes, I’ll go as far as Marseille and back to Aix. Other times, I’ll stop in Aix-En-Provence TGV station. From there, I get to the town centre and walk to the seminary. Easy.

Today, the SNCF took me on a different route. Rather than going all the way back to Lyon town centre, the train dropped me at Lyon Airport TGV station. It is a spacious, open, modern building. It was purpose built for the TGVs. It avoids trains to go to the town centre, which would waste time.

I am now waiting for another train that will take me back to Chambéry. It is the 16:41 train from Paris to Milan. If I wanted I could go all teh way to Italy under the alps. I love travelling by train.

Nietzsche, its relevance for the 21st Century

I was in Aix-En-Provence for two seminars in John Calvin Seminary. On Friday afternoon, we had four hours lectures on Nietzsche. It was heavy, but not too bad. The most difficult was to do it without coffee. The person who is usually in charge of preparing coffee for the break was away.

I won’t give you more details about what we heard. There’s too much to digest. But it was an encouragement to read Nietzshe and consider his impact on the 21st century, especially in the West.

Burned cars

I was up early on Friday morning, making the most of the quietness of the night. But I heard a series of loud noises in the darkness : “Bang, Bang”. I initially thought : “Gunshots ?” But we are in France, not in the US. You hear gunshots in the  autumn, during the hunting season, but not in May. I didn’t worry too much and went back to my reading.

This morning I saw this in the local paper: http://www.ledauphine.com/savoie/2015/05/08/deux-voitures-brulees. Two cars had been burned on a car park the other side from the main road, maybe 500 meters from where we live. I had walked that way in the afternoon. It is not the first time I see a burned car in Cognin since we arrived last September. It seems to happen quite regularly.

Is anyone still in doubt that this place need the gospel ?