Vannes

I've had four days to look around the town and have done so to such an extent that my shoes are feeling a little worn down by cobbles and I could perhaps draw you a rough map of the place on a napkin leftover from various crêpe places. I say perhaps, because in reality despite having got to grips with Oxford's higgledy-piggledy layout and all its shortcuts and alleyways, Vannes seems to be a different kettle of fish (more to come on fish). In Oxford (and Edinburgh for that matter) small alleyways are logically shortcuts, like St Helen's Passage to The Turf, or cutting down right from the castle-terrace to Grassmarket. Here the arrangement of the old town has somehow meant that the smaller streets are still important ones with lots of shops on that you have to try and squeeze through. In places it's like diagon-alley, but a bit too kitsch. 

Meaning that my brain hasn't quite worked out how things join up. It's all very loopy. But the buildings jumble together so that you find something new every now and again by surprise. Just now I walked down the other side of the cathedral, the side without shops, and found that side to be far more jumbled than the other, it sort of looks like people had been adding bits year after year when new things came into fashion, but even more than happened to Winchester cathedral for example. 

There's a newer part of Vannes-centre as well, when I went to Monoprix after the pouring rain today I subsequently found somewhere to have a cup of Verveine tea that was more like Café Nero on the 'working whilst you have coffee' front, and less like the little tea-shops that are probably more like Madam Puddifoots and might've shoo'd me out for being soggy.

They nicely join up too. After I couldn't find a crêpe that wasn't Nutella by the port, I ended up walking quite a way in the opposite direction to the hostel and back to the newer part of town where I had seen other 'à emporter' signs. This had two bonuses, firstly because I found a crêpe Poirier/Belle Hélène (chocolate, pear and chantilly) but also that I walked back a route I hadn't done before, crossing underneath the city walls and walking the whole length of the Jardin des Remparts on the opposite side of the old town and thus being able to see it all from a distance. The fact there is a sort of terraced park, full of enormous chestnut trees over this side of the stream meant that the view was also from a bit of a hight, making all the layers of the jumbly buildings visible right up to the cathedral. The rain had turned into slight evening sunshine and nice fresh park, but alas did not have my camera. Neither did I earlier when there was a bright-yellow market stall of sunflowers this morning, oops.  

Anyway, digression! I like this about towns on hills. Oxford does not have this. Being ridiculously flat makes it quite claustrophobic and not quite as interesting as it could be. You can only ever see more than a few towers at once if you are miles away in Port Meadow. This is where Edinburgh gets a lot of points, because it couldn't have more hills if it tried. You can see other parts of town as you are walking around. You know where you are going and you don't feel squashed, because sometimes you see a hill or  snow capped mountain (if you are lucky enough to have wandered off the street into the botanic garden). Suddenly you are walking along a road and you realise that it is after all a bridge. Or you look out the back of a café to find you are actually quite a few floors up and almost level with the castle. But in a way that doesn't make your brain melt. Vannes currently feels a bit like an Escher picture when your inside, but pleasant when you can see it from a distance,like when I went for a bike-ride yesterday out towards the Gulf, or in Place Valencia because it leaves a little bubble of space. 

Edit: I managed go back today which was a lot more grey, but have the same view.