Burgundy: France's Cozy Nook
After a music filled daze of a drive through the picturesque French countryside, complete with modern windmills and milky white cows lazily sunning themselves, we arrived in Burgundy.
A welcome respite from the throngs of tourists in Paris, I loved the seclusion and space of empty tracts of land on the outskirts of town as people kept to themselves in the sweltering heat.
Burgundy is known all across the world as a mecca of wine and food, and it certainly lives up to its hallowed reputation. Walking through vineyards, I felt the sun bake my skin while my eyes darted up green hillsides only broken by chateaus. Every uninterrupted moment felt timeless.
Winemakers with ancestry dating bake to Napolean stored their barrels in 17th-century caves and held art worthy of the Louvre in their chateaus. As they conducted their craft with an amalgamation of modern wine making techniques and those passed down through centuries, I felt as though I was drinking history through slim-stemmed glasses.
The town of Beaune itself, with small cobbled streets, local stores, and a carousel filled with youthful laughter in the middle of the town square felt almost like a small town from an episode of The Twilight Zone, sans the dystopian undertones - people genuinely seemed to be enjoying themselves. Abundant with isolated clock towers, abandoned churches with broken windows, students sitting in garden nooks smoking cigarettes, elderly couples lost in each other’s eyes, fountains, trellises, and flowers galore, Beaune truly was a nook in France - cozy and comfortable, allowing for the indulgence of forgetting the outside world.
