After visiting Brussels we stayed overnight in Ghent again and then left for France next morning. We stopped briefly in a small town called Arras, which has a fair (it was Saturday morning), where people were selling everything from t-shirts to live geese. (We have some pictures of fair in the password-protected section.) On the way out of Arras we managed to get really lost. At some point we had to stop in a small village and ask someone for the road to Paris. They seemed unsure: “Paris?” I jumped in and said “Amiens” – a city half way towards Paris that we wanted to stop at. “Ah, Amiens,” they said and pointed in one of the directions. We are still not sure if we were saying “Paris” that wrong or if we really did manage to find a place in France where people don’t know which way Paris is.

After driving for a while on a one-lane road we did get to Amiens, which was on our itinerary for its cathedral, one of the oldest in France. This was the first truly gothic cathedral (as opposed to “late gothic”), with flying buttresses, gargoyles, etc. In front of a cathedral we were approached by a group of kids dressed up as vikings who asked me to take a picture of them with my camera. Because of the language barrier (we were now in France, rather than English-speaking Flanders), I didn’t quite understand what was the reason, but I figured they probably wanted to be blogged.