If possible, this week was even better than the last! The worlds best park, moving castles, and knights performing flips on horses! If you can imagine it, it was there at the park of “Puy du Fou”.

We arrived bright and early at the famous park “Puy du fou”  in order to get Louis a wheel chair for is leg as the park was quite large. The wheel chair turned out to be our saving grace – we got to the skip large lines and have front row seats at all the shows! The Puy Du Fou is apparently the world’s best park. It has 26 shows, each half an hour long and more jaw dropping than the next, as well as many other activities. Each show recounts a major part of Frances history, so by the end I felt pretty well educated.

We started off at the “Le Bal des Oiseaux Fantômes” , the phantom bird dance. It was a show about a girl who woke up in an old palace after year’s of sleeping. She remembered her life before and how she had power over birds and could play with them and make them do as she pleased. It was amazing and arguably my favourite. 400 or so birds were a part of the show, swooping over us, the performers would pick up huge eagles and place them on people’s heads, by the end of the show there were more than 200 birds of prey flying over us, it was truly something else! Throughout the whole thing my jaw was hanging wide open, and afterwards I couldn’t talk because I was still processing. Trust me, a speechless Sophia is not a normal thing. I won’t do this park justice by writing about it, no one can. You won’t believe it until you go and see it for yourself (put it on your bucket list everyone)!

We rushed from show to show desperate to see them all. From then on all the shows blurred into one and I was in a constant state of shock. Here’s a quick list of just a teensy portion of the thing’s I saw, this blog would take years if I described each one!

1. Huge 10 story castles full on burst into flames and moved, giant life size fortresses just rose out of the ground.
2. Enchanted lakes revealed a whole world underneath them and horses walked out of the water.
3. Half a million realistic fight scenes took place with fire, bombs, explosions and people falling 20 meters onto the ground. The explosions were so huge I could feel the heat from the audience – 30 meter’s away! Imagine your favourite Marvel fight scene and times it by 10!
4. A huge Colosseum with real charriet races. One of the rider’s charriet’s broke and he was being dragged on the ground by his four horses – it was a part of the act but I was freaking out!
5. Lions were put into the same cages as human’s in the Colosseum!
6. Huge old villages were built just for souvenir shopping and eating after each spectacle.
7. Riders performing flips on galloping horses.
8. One show was in a massive 17th century theatre house. The set was a huge castle and they flooded the whole stage and turned the lights off and had a glow in the dark performance where horses ran around and flamenco dancers danced in the water with an epic sword fight behind them and huge fountains splirted out water from all directions. (Good luck understanding that sentence!)
9. There were so many more mind blowing things, here’s the website if you want to have a look. http://www.puydufou.com/en/spectacles

Somehow we managed to see all the shows in one day, which is pretty amazing because normally it takes 2 days to see them all. People come and stay at Puy du Fou for days to see everything! As you can imagine it was pretty hectic, and by the end of the day we were totally wrecked from all the excitement, so we decided not to stay for the light show and turn in.

The following days were spent swimming at the beach and tasting Marie-jean’s amazing cakes and eclairs. We chilled, played settlers of Catan and biked around the shore line, occasionally stopping and looking at rockpools. We spent the afternoons at the beach with Louis’s friends and Coline took me to see the sunset over the sea. On my final night with everyone, lot’s of the families friend’s came for dinner, and we had a very competitive game of Settler’s of Catan (which I lost again).

Saying goodbye was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I hadn’t known Pierrot, Coline and Louis for a long time, but they had been so welcoming and made sure to give me the full Les Sables D’olonne experience. They burrowed their way into my heart and I hope one day they will come to NZ and we can return the favour because my time with them has been one of the biggest highlights of my exchange.

During my train ride back home, I had my first experience with the danger’s of travelling alone. I was seated alone in one of those little cubicles where you face the people sitting opposite you. 2 men (about 30) came and sat next to me, 1 opposite me and the other beside me. They started talking to me straight away, and I found out pretty quickly they barely spoke any English or French, just a tiny bit. I talked along with them, they seemed pretty nice, except occasionally they would give me creepy glances, full on staring at me for ages. They explained they were from Syria and having a holiday in France. All was well and good until they started asking about me, it was literally 200 questions. What’s your age? What’s your number? Are you travelling alone? What’s your age? Where are you getting off? Age? Number? Do you want to get off at our stop with us? Now of course, I’m not an idiot so I didn’t answer after that and put in my earphones and pointedly looked out the window, I couldn’t leave my seat because my heavy suitcase was stored above me. Despite my obvious ignorance they kept asking and started guessing my age, the looks they gave me got scarier and scarier, and when the guy next to me put his hand on my shoulder and asked if I wanted to go partying with him tonight, I had had enough so I grabbed my suitcase and waited by the door with some other people until it was my stop. I looked back and the 2 men had moved seats to girl just a bit older than me and started talking to her. As soon as I got of the train I ran to the nearest guard and stood next to him like a leech until my next train arrived. TO FUTURE EXCHANGE STUDENTS: Be aware of the dangers of travelling alone and think of a game plan if you find yourself in an uncomfortable or dangerous situation.